Trade Delivers Peace and Bargain Prices
For a fair and authoritative (and did I mention favorable?) assessment of my new Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, you can read William H. Peterson’s review in today’s Washington Times.
Dr. Peterson is an adjunct scholar with the Heritage Foundation and the Ludwig von Mises Institute who holds a Ph.D. in economics from New York City University. In his review he writes:
Daniel Griswold’s tour de force explores, reasons and documents how import competition benefits the American consumer, seeing him move ahead toward greater peace incentives, lower real prices, more choices, better quality. Mr. Griswold also tracks how the big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Best Buy deliver the world’s goods mostly by sea via millions of big, truckload-size containers. …
So Mr. Griswold would have the United States adopt or maintain trade policies best for most Americans, especially the poor and middle class, no matter what other nations do. Says the author: Let’s drop the remaining barriers separating us from ongoing growth and peace policies enhancing the global marketplace. Bully for him.
Information at the beginning of the review should have given the cover price of the book as $21.95. It is available with a nice discount at Amazon.com along with a peek inside at the table of contents and selected pages.
Bagram, Habeas, and the Rule of Law
Andrew C. McCarthy has an article up at National Review criticizing a recent decision by Obama administration officials to improve the detention procedures in Bagram, Afghanistan.
McCarthy calls the decision an example of pandering to a “despotic” judiciary that is imposing its will on a war that should be run by the political branches. McCarthy’s essay is factually misleading, ignores the history of wartime detention in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and encourages the President to ignore national security decisions coming out of the federal courts.
More details after the jump.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Fixing Detention in Afghanistan
The Obama administration is currently revising detainee procedures in Afghanistan. Bagram Airfield, located north of Kabul, is home for roughly 600 detainees. The Department of Defense plans to institute new review boards patterned on the ones at Guantanamo Bay, allowing detainees to challenge the basis of their detention and present evidence supporting their release.
The Bagram Theater Internment Facility has long used Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Boards to determine who should remain in custody. These boards provided minimal process and, consequently, minimal ability to determine if the detainees were militants or intelligence operatives fighting the government. The detainee was not allowed to attend the hearing.
The shift in policy is an improvement, but a better model has been proposed by the Heritage Foundation’s Cully Stimson, Holding Terrorists Accountable: A Lawful Detainment Framework for the Long War. Stimson proposes that detention hearings follow the model used to determine the status of Salim Hamdan, Usama bin Laden’s driver. A military judge heard arguments for and against a finding that he was an unlawful enemy combatant, taking procedures for Hamdan’s appeal straight from Article V of the Geneva Conventions. This clearly meets American obligations under international law and decisions made in this forum are more likely to survive review in a federal court.
The change in policy also comes on the heels of a Marine General’s report that 400 of the 600 detainees in Bagram pose no threat to the Afghan government or to American forces. We did a better job with detention in Iraq, isolating hardcore foreign fighters, providing job training and community support to the local flunkies who took potshots at American forces for a quick buck, and prosecuting as many detainees as possible in the Iraqi Central Criminal Court. We should follow a similar template in Afghanistan.
For related discussion of the merits of the American presence in Afghanistan, watch today’s policy forum at Cato, Should the United States Withdraw from Afghanistan? It streams live at noon today, featuring Malou Innocent, Ted Galen Carpenter, and Christopher Preble.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying
There’s lots of outrage in the blogosphere over revelations that some of the biggest recipients of the federal government’s $700 billion TARP bailout have been spending money on lobbyists. Good point. It’s bad enough to have our tax money taken and given to banks whose mistakes should have caused them to fail. It’s adding insult to injury when they use our money — or some “other” money; money is fungible — to lobby our representatives in Congress, perhaps for even more money.
Get taxpayers’ money, hire lobbyists, get more taxpayers’ money. Nice work if you can get it.
But the outrage about the banks’ lobbying is a bit late. As far back as 1985, Cato published a book, Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics, that exposed how billions of taxpayers’ dollars were used to subsidize organizations with a political agenda, mostly groups that lobbied and organized for bigger government and more spending. The book led off with this quotation from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”
The book noted that the National Council of Senior Citizens had received more than $150 million in taxpayers’ money in four years. A more recent report estimated that AARP had received over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding. Both groups, of course, lobby incessantly for more spending on Social Security and Medicare. The Heritage Foundation reported in 1995, “Each year, the American taxpayers provide more than $39 billion in grants to organizations which may use the money to advance their political agendas.”
In 1999 Peter Samuel and Randal O’Toole found that EPA was a major funder of groups lobbying for “smart growth.” So these groups were pushing a policy agenda on the federal government, but the government itself was paying the groups to lobby it.
Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for the very lobbying that seeks to suck more dollars out of the taxpayers. But then, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize banks, car companies, senior citizen groups, environmentalist lobbies, labor unions, or other private organizations in the first place.
Who’s the Isolationist?
There may be no more vicious epithet from neoconservatives these days than “isolationist.” One would think the term would mean something like xenophobic no-nothings who want to have nothing to do with the rest of the world. No trade or immigration. Little or no cultural exchange and political cooperation. Autarchy all around.
But no. ”Isolationist” apparently means something quite different. Never mind your views of the merits of international engagement. If you don’t want to kill lots of foreigners in lots of foreign wars you are automatically considered to be an isolationist.
President Bill Clinton called Republican legislators “isolationists” for not wanting to insert the U.S. military into the middle of a complex but strategically irrelevant guerrilla conflict in Kosovo. (He made the same criticism against them for not supporting even more money for foreign aid, which presumably meant the Heritage Foundation was filled with isolationists at the time).
But the definition is even broader today. It means not willing to go to war for any country that clamors for a security guarantee irrespective of its relevance to American security. At least, that appears to be the definition applied by Sally McNamara of Heritage.
On Monday in National Interest online I criticized the argument advanced by Ms. McNamara and others that alliances and military commitments automatically prevent war. More specifically, the claim is that if only the U.S. would bring the country of Georgia into NATO — or simply issue a Membership Action Plan, which neither offers a security promise nor guarantees NATO membership — Moscow would never dare take the risk of attacking Georgia.
History suggests this is a dangerous assumption. Both World Wars I and II featured alliances that were supposed to prevent conflict but which instead acted as transmission belts of war. One can argue whether or not the alliances were prudent. One cannot argue that they prevented conflict as so many people thought (and certainly hoped) they would.
Thus, alliances should be viewed as serious organizations. A promise to defend another nation should be treated as a momentous undertaking. And the public should be aware of all of the risks of policies advanced by the nation’s leaders. This should go double when a nuclear-armed power is involved and treble when the geopolitical stakes are trivial for the U.S. while significant for the opposing state.
For suggesting this Ms. McNamara argues that I am both an isolationist and a neo-isolationist. (I’m not sure of the difference between the two. Maybe the latter indicates that she realizes I believe in free trade, increased immigration, and international cooperation, which makes for a curious kind of “isolationism.” Still, advocating a reduction in military commitments and the consequent risk of war, rather than a policy of galloping about the globe tossing security guarantees hither and yon, apparently means I am at least a “neo-isolationist.”)
Even worse, I am accused of “appeasement” for suggesting that being prepared to trade Washington for Tbilisi is a bad bargain. Ah, the “A” word. To count the cost and not support every commitment, no matter how distant or irrelevant, is the same as encouraging the next Adolf Hitler.
Please.
Misinformation from Heritage
The Heritage Foundation has a chart up on its blog, showing defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product and declaring that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels.”
This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out that it’s misleading. The unfortunate truth is that Obama is increasing non-war defense spending this year and seems likely to increase it at least by inflation in the near future.
It’s true that defense spending will probably decline as a percentage of GDP, assuming the economy recovers. But that’s because GDP grows. Ours is more than six times bigger than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, we spend more on defense in real, inflation adjusted terms, than we did then, at the height of the Cold War. The denoninator has grown faster than the numerator.
By saying that defense spending needs to grow with GDP to be “level,” you are arguing for an annual increase in defense spending without saying so directly. That’s the point, of course.
To be straight with readers, charts that show defense spending as a percentage of GDP should either show GDP growth over time or include a line that shows defense spending in real terms. Otherwise they fail to demonstrate that the decline in defense spending as a percentage of GDP is a consequence of growing GDP, not lower spending.
Here’s a chart from the Congressional Budget Office’s report, “The Long Term Implications of the Current Defense Plans,” that does this.
The assumption in analysis like Heritage’s is that defense spending should be a function of economic growth, not enemies and strategies for defending against them. It’s easy to point out that this is strategically and fiscally foolish. And it’s worth noting, as I have on many occasions, that we face a benign threat environment and can cut defense spending massively as a result.
But there is something weirder going on here that warrants mention. Arguing that wealth creation should drive defense spending is to attempt to divorce the military from its strategic rationale. That’s an implicit acknowledgement that defense spending is not for safety. High military spending in this worldview is either an end in itself or a partisan or cultural tool. That’s not much of a revelation, I guess.
Questions for Heritage: REAL ID
The Heritage Foundation’s “The Foundry” blog has a post up called “Questions for Secretary Napolitano: Real ID.”
Honest advocates on two sides of an issue can come to almost perfectly opposite views, and this provides an example, because I find the post confused, wrong, or misleading in nearly every respect.
Let’s give it a brief fisking. Below, the language from the post is in italics, and my comments are in roman text:
Filed under: Telecom, Internet & Information Policy; Trade and Immigration
Does the GOP Recognize Socialized Medicine When They See It?
Rumor has it that Republicans in the House and Senate will soon decide whether their alternative to the Democrats’ health care reforms will include an “individual mandate” — a legal requirement that all Americans obtain health insurance.
A recent Consensus Group statement shows that the entire free-market health policy community — including scholars from the Heritage Foundation — opposes such a move.
The Cato Institute has published one study arguing against an individual mandate in itself, and two studies critical of its use in Massachusetts. Cato will soon publish additional studies showing how an individual mandate has — as predicted — led to exploding costs and government rationing efforts in Massachusetts, and arguing against its use at the federal level.
Worse, as I explain in this study, an individual mandate is in fact a large leap toward socialized medicine — regardless of the fact that health insurance would remain nominally “private.” Republicans may oppose creating a new government health insurance program. Yet if they are willing to force Americans to purchase insurance, they will effectively nationalize the health insurance industry.
Finally, as I explain in this op-ed, an individual mandate is always accompanied by taxpayer subsidies to people who may (or may not) need aid to comply. The more people who rely on government aid for their health care, the harder life will become for the party of tax cuts. Bill Clinton showed that the best way to defeat tax cuts is to paint them as a threat to YOUR health care. Just in case doing the right thing isn’t reason enough to reject this horrid idea, Republicans should know that by supporting an individual mandate, they will be slitting their own throats.
All for an idea that doesn’t even command support from a majority of the public.
Where Are the Muckrakers?
In the mythology of journalism, investigative reporters fall somewhere between archangels and demigods. They protect the public by exposing political deceit and corruption, burrowing relentlessly into the words and deeds of those in power, in search of the truth. And in the field of education, they are as numerous as leprechauns and unicorns.
In education, “muckrakers,” as Teddy Roosevelt called them, are few and far between. There are, however, legions of mucksailors — reporters who glide over the surface of a story, seldom probing beneath the public statements of those in power to determine their truth or falsehood. Through my web browser window I can watch the sails of a vast muck navy.
Consider the coverage of the battle over DC’s school voucher program. Democrats inserted language into the $410 billion omnibus spending bill that would sunset funding for the program after next year, instead of simply reauthorizing it for another full five-year term. The vouchers could still be reauthorized when they come up again, but since House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey ( D-Wis.) has already told DC public schools to prepare for the return of voucher students, that seems highly unlikely.
So here we have Democrats working to shut down a program serving 1,700 poor kids in the nation’s capital — kids who are so desperate to stay in their chosen private schools that they’ve made YouTube videos beseeching Congress and president Obama to save it. Given that most people are not inherently so cruel, why would Democrats want to kill this program? They say it’s because it robs money from needy public schools and gives it to private schools that are already flush from lavish tuition fees. But. Is. That. TRUE?
Is DC’s government-run k-12 system financially needy? Are the independent schools serving voucher students making a Madoff-style killing?
No. And… No.
These claims are rubbish. They are, in fact, MUCK. I have run the numbers on DC government k-12 education spending for the current school year and it is $26,555 per pupil. According to the government’s own published study of the voucher program, the average tuition charged by participating schools is $5,928. Furthermore, the voucher program actually added an extra $13 million a year to the DC public school budget, as a “sweetener” to elicit local and Democratic support.
But most Americans will never learn any of that. Because we have no muckrakers in the mainstream education media. We have mucksailors.
This is not entirely the journalists’ fault. Media businesses have been hit very hard in recent years, and are understaffed compared to earlier generations. Reporters are stretched very thin. But I ask the editorial establishment, what is more valuable to your readers: A dozen stories that merely regurgitate the official muck, or a single top notch investigative piece that demonstrates how our political leaders are flagrantly misleading the American people and exposes their real motives?
Speak truth to power? Anyone?
Anyone?
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