Juan Williams Blasts Obama, Duncan on Vouchers

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

juan-williamsYesterday on Fox News’ Special Report, Juan Williams had this to say about Obama’s silence and Duncan’s hostility to the DC voucher program, recently put on the chopping block by Democrats in Congress:

This is an outrage to me. … This is so important that you give young people a chance to have an education in America and especially in a failing public school system like you have in the District of Columbia. This voucher system is a direct threat to the unions. And so I think everybody on Capitol Hill, that’s getting money from the NEA or AFT, they should be called on the table. They should ask them, ‘where do you send your kids to school? And are you willing to say these kids getting the vouchers…and doing better than the rest of the kids, that these kids aren’t deserving of an opportunity to succeed in America?’ You just want to scream. Why Duncan and Obama aren’t in the forefront of education reform is an outrage and an insult to the very base that voted for them.

But we don’t have to ask President Obama where he sends his kids to school, do we? We already know he sends them to the prestigious private Sidwell Friends school also attended by several of the poor DC voucher students. But those voucher students will only remain classmates of Sasha and Malia for another year or so. After that, they’re out… because Barack Obama lacks the courage, the wisdom, or both to get his own party behind this program — a program that his own education department has shown is a success. Better results at a quarter the cost, and the reaction of our unified Democratic government ranges from outright opposition to malign neglect.

Future generations will look back on these politicians and bureaucrats as the Oral Faubuses of the 21st century. Like Faubus, they will ultimately fail.

Like Faubus, their names will live in infamy.

Pirates as Proto-Governments? You Bet!

Posted by Justin Logan

I have to confess I don’t understand why Roger Pilon and Ilya Shapiro are criticizing our colleagues Ben Friedman and Peter Van Doren below.  At the risk of being cast as yet another cog in the insidious piratofascist fifth column, I’d like to defend Ben and Peter.

Roger and Ilya reproach Ben and Peter for likening pirates to “pseudo-governments” and mount an impassioned defense of the nation-state as deserving a place in a different category from pirates.

On the distinction between the two, they write: “A tax, at least in principle, and most often in practice, is a charge for a service rendered –- not necessarily a wanted or an evenly distributed service, to be sure…”  To be sure, indeed!  There’s a term for charging people for an unevenly distributed and unwanted service.  It’s called racketeering.  Their description of taxation could apply quite well to a mafia.

Roger and Ilya would prefer to keep pirates and governments in two discrete categories but provide little reason why other than the above.  But if they dislike the analogy, their problem is not with Ben or Peter or Noam Chomsky or St. Augustine, but rather with a body of well-developed academic literature.  In particular, one of the preeminent scholars of the formation of national states, the late Charles Tilly, wrote a famous book titled Coercion, Capital, and European States that would help color in the gaps for them.  The short version is that European elites came to form national states as a means for protecting their fiefdoms from other proto-states, which frequently had predatory aims, and that this process sometimes had the incidental effect of protecting the populaces that lived under state jurisdiction and could be used as means for making war against the neighbors.

Tilly also wrote a well-known essay titled “War Making and State Making As Organized Crime” that makes the following claim: “Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum.” Tilly went on:

In retrospect, the pacification, cooptation, or elimination of fractious rivals to the sovereign seems an awesome, noble, prescient enterprise, destined to bring peace to a people; yet it followed almost ineluctably from the logic of expanding power. If a power holder was to gain from the provision of protection, his competitors had to yield. As economic historian Frederic Lane put it twenty-five years ago, governments are in the business of selling protection … whether people want it or not.

Governments and pirates both “put the victim to a choice between two of his entitlements — his freedom and his property.”  In the literature on state formation, this isn’t a controversial point.  I’m really surprised to see that it is for two libertarians.

Freedom of Speech Under Attack in Ecuador

Posted by Ian Vasquez

Freedom of speech is coming under attack again in President Rafael Correa’s Ecuador. Last year Correa sent armed soldiers before dawn to some 200 private businesses, including three television stations, on the pretext that the owner (an unpopular businessman and critic of the government) had not paid money owed to the government.

It was never clear why the government had to place its own people in charge of running those businesses rather than go through the usual auditing or bankruptcy procedures. The result was to reduce criticism of the government at those TV stations and send a message to the rest of the media. At the time, Gabriela Calderón, Cato’s Ecuador-based editor of our Spanish language web site, www.elcato.org, hosted a weekly talk show program on CN3 TV station with two other market-liberal commentators. The station was one of the ones taken over, after which, Gabriela and her colleagues were told that from then on, their show had to “balanced” and include pro-government spokespersons. Gabriela and her colleagues quit in protest and the show went off the air.

Now Correa is enforcing a law that explicitly violates freedom of speech. Ecuador has been an officially dollarized country since 2000, before Correa came to power. Years of high oil prices have financed an explosion in government spending. With oil prices down, Correa’s populist project is quickly running out of money and people are speculating that he will de-dollarize Ecuador, allowing him to run the printing presses. However, it is illegal in Ecuador to suggest that the country will de-dollarize, as that would violate the law against spreading rumors of devaluation. The first victim has been Rómulo López Sabando, an attorney and long-time columnist for the Diario Expreso. On March 24 he wrote a column indicating that the government is planning to dedollarize. For committing that crime, the government ordered his arrest. He has been in hiding since.

It’s a very good bet that the government will de-dollarize this year, yet the Ecuadorian press has been silent on the matter. As the law victimizes the press and, more generally, Ecuadorian democracy, López remains in hiding and the arrest warrant still holds. Will Obama and other hemispheric leaders meeting at the summit of the Americas later this week denounce these abuses?

Pirates as Tax Collectors?

Posted by Roger Pilon

[Co-authored with Ilya Shapiro.]

As we suspected, with world attention focused on the just-concluded piracy standoff, it was only a matter of time before someone would write something like this: “the right way to think about this problem is that pirates are imposing a tax on shipping in their area. They are a bit like a pseudo-government.” Perhaps the Mafia too –- “pay, or we break your legs” –- is like a pseudo-government.

The difference between a tax and extortion is not subtle, even if it seems to have escaped the cited authorities, including Noam Chomsky. A tax, at least in principle, and most often in practice, is a charge for a service rendered –- not necessarily a wanted or an evenly distributed service, to be sure, but most relevant here, protection from third-party pirates and other lawless predators, domestic and foreign. By contrast, a pirate’s shakedown puts the victim to a choice between two of his entitlements –- his freedom and his property. That distinction –- again, hardly subtle –- is what prompted us to leave the state of nature. Those who would like to return to that state will find it waiting for them on the horn of Africa.

Making Sure the Job Gets Done

Posted by Neal McCluskey

If you’ve been reading this blog over the last week or so, you’ll have noticed that the big story in education has been the highly suspicious handling of an evaluation of Washington, DC’s, voucher program by the supposedly politics-out-of-policymaking Obama administration.  The evaluation shows voucher students making clearly superior readings gains to students who applied for but did not receive vouchers, while math results were equal. In other words, vouchers seem to work. But it doesn’t matter: For all intents and purposes Congress killed DC choice last month, and throughout that murderous process this study was being held under wraps  – for numerous possible, but all unacceptable, reasons – in the United States Department of Education.

Well, on Saturday the Washington Post editorialized about the whole stinkin’ mess, and in so doing revealed something new: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan decided not to allow any new students to enroll in the program for the 2009-2010 school year, despite the program not being scheduled to end until 2010-2011. And, though it is close to unthinkable politically that both Congress and the DC City Council will reauthorize the program — just as Congressional enemies of educational freedom planned when they wrote those stipulations into law – it is not absolutely impossible. But in good hitman style, Duncan is making sure the job gets done, holding the pillow over the victim’s face as long and tightly as possible to make sure there won’t be any unforeseen and inconvenient coming back to life.

Oh, and irony of ironies? According to the Post, Duncan is doing this extra bit of dirty work because [italics added] “it is not in the best interest of students and their parents to enroll them in a program that may end a year from now.”

Who’s Blogging about Cato

Posted by Chris Moody

Are you blogging about Cato? Let us know. Send a link our way @catoinstitute or email cmoody@cato.org

Week in Review: Successful Voucher Programs, Immigration Debates and a New Path for Africa

Posted by Chris Moody

Federal Study Supports School Vouchers

arne_duncanLast week, a U.S. Department of Education study revealed that students participating in a Washington D.C. voucher pilot program outperformed peers attending public schools.

According to The Washington Post, the study found that “students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school.” In a statement, education secretary Arne Duncan said that the Obama administration “does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.”

Why then did the Obama administration “let Congress slash the jugular of DC’s school voucher program despite almost certainly having an evaluation in hand showing that students in the program did better than those who tried to get vouchers and failed?”

The answer, says Cato scholar Neal McCluskey, lies in special interests and an unwillingness to embrace change after decades of maintaining the status quo:

It is not just the awesome political power of special interests, however, that keeps the monopoly in place. As Terry Moe has found, many Americans have a deep, emotional attachment to public schooling, one likely rooted in a conviction that public schooling is essential to American unity and success. It is an inaccurate conviction — public schooling is all-too-often divisive where homogeneity does not already exist, and Americans successfully educated themselves long before “public schooling” became widespread or mandatory — but the conviction nonetheless is there. Indeed, most people acknowledge that public schooling is broken, but feel they still must love it.

Susan L. Aud and Leon Michos found the program saved the city nearly $8 million in education costs in a 2006 Cato study that examined the fiscal impact of the voucher program.

To learn more about the positive effect of school choice on poor communities around the world, join the Cato Institute on April 15 to discuss James Tooley’s new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.

Obama Announces New Direction on Immigration

The New York Times reports, “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.”

In the immigration chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, Cato trade analyst Daniel T. Griswold offered suggestions on immigration policy, which include:

  • Expanding current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas.
  • Creating a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration.
  • Refocusing border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.

In a 2002 Cato Policy Analysis, Griswold made the case for allowing Mexican laborers into the United States to work.

For more on the argument for open borders, watch Jason L. Riley of The Wall Street Journal editorial board speak about his book, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.

In Case You Couldn’t Join Us
Cato hosted a number of fascinating guests recently to speak about new books, reports and projects.

  • Salon writer Glenn Greenwald discussed a new Cato study that exadead-aidmines the successful drug decriminalization program in Portugal.
  • Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute explained his project to build self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to break free of national governments and start their own societies on the ocean.
  • Dambisa Moyo, author of the book Dead Aid, spoke about her research that shows how government-to-government aid fails. She proposed an “aid-free solution” to development, based on the experience of successful African countries.

Find full-length videos to all Cato events on Cato’s events archive page.

Also, don’t miss Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast with legal policy analyst David Rittgers on Obama’s surge strategy in Afghanistan.

New at Cato

Posted by Brandon Arnold

Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here

  • The new edition of Regulation examines the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the legal drinking age and climate change policies.
  • In The Week, Will Wilkinson argues that the Obama administration should rethink its drug policy and that prominent marijuana users should “come out of the closet.”
  • Gene Healy points out in the Washington Examiner why the Serve America Act (SAA) is no friend to freedom.
  • The Cato Weekly Video features Rep. Paul Ryan discussing the Obama administration’s budget.
  • In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Patri Friedman discusses seasteading and the prospects for liberty on the high seas.

The Bloom Could Not Survive

Posted by Neal McCluskey

“Among several outstanding nominations made by President-elect Obama, I believe Arne Duncan is the best.”

That’s what Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said of now-U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at his confirmation hearing. Alexander thought that Duncan was a man who truly embraced reform and could work with anybody, and who, like his boss, seemed to really want to get beyond politics.

That was before reality set in.

With the Department of Education’s media-dodging, Friday-afternoon release of a study showing that Washington’s voucher program is outperforming DC public schools at a fraction of the cost, and Duncan’s galling failure to report these results as Congress debated the voucher program’s fate last month, it has become clear that Duncan is far from above playing politics. Of course, he isn’t necessarily calling the shots. He works for President Obama, whom you might recall announced that his children would attend posh, private, Sidwell Friends on a Friday afternoon.

It’s not only on choice that Obama and Duncan are playing the game. They are great at reform-y talk about such things as accountability and high standards, but talk is all they’ve delivered. Oh, that and tens-of-billions of dollars to bail out public schools from which parents should never be allowed to take their kids and money, and which aren’t good enough for the president’s children.

So is the public starting to see that the administration might not be delivering the great change it has promised? It’s hard to tell, but some journalists and education wonks are catching on.

Read the rest of this post »

Who’s Blogging about Cato

Posted by Chris Moody

greenwald-catoOn April 3, Cato hosted a special blogger briefing with Glenn Greenwald, who was here to speak about his new paper on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.

Here are a few highlights from bloggers who wrote about it:

  • Jesse Singal, associate editor of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress

Also, a few links to bloggers who are writing about Cato:

If you are blogging about Cato, let us know by emailing cmoody@cato.org or catch us on Twitter @catoinstitute.

Week in Review: ‘Saving’ the World, Government Control and Drug Decriminalization

Posted by Chris Moody

G-20 Summit Agrees to International Spending Plan

g-2The Washington Post reports, “Leaders from more than 20 major nations including the United States decided Thursday to make available an additional $1 trillion for the world economy through the International Monetary Fund and other institutions as part of a broad package of measures to overcome the global financial crisis.”

Cato scholars Richard W. Rahn, Daniel J. Ikenson and Ian Vásquez commented on the London-based meeting:

Rahn: “President Obama of the U.S. and Prime Minister Brown of the U.K. will be pressing for more so-called stimulus spending by other nations, despite the fact that the historical evidence shows that big increases in government spending are more likely to be damaging and slow down recovery than they are to promote vigorous economic expansion and job creation.”

Vásquez: “The push by some countries for massive increases in spending to address the global financial crisis smacks of political and bureaucratic opportunism. A prime example is Washington’s call to substantially increase the resources of the International Financial Institutions… There is no reason to think that massive increases of the IFIs’ funds will not worsen, rather than improve, their record or the accountability of the aid agencies and borrower governments.”

Ikenson: “Certainly it is crucial to avoid protectionist policies that clog the arteries of economic recovery and help nobody but politicians. But it is also important to keep things in perspective: the world is not on the brink of a global trade war, as some have suggested.”

Ikenson appeared on CNBC this week to push for a reduction of trade barriers in international markets.

With fears mounting over a global shift toward protectionism, Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation are circulating a petition against restrictive trade measures.

Obama Administration Forces Out GM CEO

rick-wagonerPresident Obama took an unprecedented step toward greater control of a private corporation after forcing General Motors CEO  Rick Wagoner to leave the company. The New York Post reports “the administration threatened to withhold bailout money from the company if he didn’t.”

Writing for the Washington Post, trade analyst Dan Ikenson explained why the government is responsible for any GM failure from now on:

President Obama’s newly discovered prudence with taxpayer money and his tough-love approach to GM and Chrysler would both have more credibility if he hadn’t demanded Rick Wagoner’s resignation, as well. By imposing operational conditions normally reserved for boards of directors, the administration is now bound to the infamous “Pottery Barn” rule: you break it, you buy it. If things go further south, the government is now complicit.

Wagoner’s replacement, Fritz Henderson, said Tuesday that after receiving billions of taxpayer dollars, the company is considering bankruptcy as an option. Cato scholars recommended bankruptcy months ago:

Dan Ikenson, November 21, 2008: “Bailing out Detroit is unnecessary. After all, this is why we have the bankruptcy process. If companies in Chapter 11 can be salvaged, a bankruptcy judge will help them find the way. In the case of the Big Three, a bankruptcy process would almost certainly require them to dissolve their current union contracts. Revamping their labor structures is the single most important change that GM, Ford, and Chrysler could make — and yet it is the one change that many pro-bailout Democrats wish to ignore.”

Daniel J. Mitchell, November 13, 2008:  ”Advocates oftentimes admit that bailouts are not good policy, but they invariably argue that short-term considerations should trump long-term sensible policy. Their biggest assertion is that a bailout is necessary to prevent bankruptcy, and that avoiding this result is critical to prevent catastrophe. But Chapter 11 protection may be precisely what is needed to put American auto companies back on the path to profitability. Bankruptcy laws specifically are designed to give companies an opportunity — under court supervision — to reduce costs and streamline operations.”

Dan Ikenson, December 5, 2008: “The best solution is to allow the bankruptcy process to work. It will be needed. There are going to be jobs lost, but there is really nothing policymakers can do about that without exacerbating problems elsewhere. The numbers won’t be as dire as the Big Three have been projecting.”

Cato Links

  • As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrates its 60th birthday, there are signs of mounting trouble within the alliance and increasing reasons to doubt the organization’s relevance regarding the foreign policy challenges of the 21st century. In a new study, Cato scholar Ted Galen Carpenter argues that NATO’s time is up.
  • Should immigration agents target businesses knowingly hiring illegal immigrants? Cato scholar Jim Harper weighs in on a Fox News debate.

New Study: ‘Drug Decriminalization in Portugal’

Posted by Cato Editors

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm.

In a new study, constitutional lawyer and Salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald examines the Portuguese model and the data concerning drug-related trends in Portugal, and argues that, “judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success.”

Greenwald will speak at the Cato Institute Friday, April 3, about the success of the decriminalization program.

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