Matt Yglesias criticizes my comment in today’s USA Today when he writes, “making preventive health care free to the patient is…very cost-effective.”

Except it isn’t “free” to the patient.

And it isn’t cost-effective. The evidence strongly suggests we would “buy” as much health if we just waited for people to get sick and treated them then.

ObamaCare’s Preventive-Care Subsidies: Neither Free nor Cost-Effective is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias recently added his voice to the long running calls for principal reductions on underwater mortgages.  His argument is that such would create additional spending.  Or as he puts it, “I think that if people in Phoenix got a principal writedown on their mortgages, they’d have more disposable income and might go to the bar more.”

What Matt, and others calling for forced principal reductions, miss, or choose to ignore, is that while a mortgage represents a liability to the borrower, it is an asset to someone else.  Matt’s logic, which I agree with here, is that an increase in one’s net wealth (via a reduction in one’s liabilities) should increase one’s consumption.  To complete the analysis, however, we must extend that same logic to the holders of the asset, so that a reduction in the value of their asset (the mortgage) should reduce their spending.  Taking x from A and giving x to B is not going to increase A+B.  To assert otherwise is to engage in Enron-style social accounting.

Now if you want to argue that the borrower has a higher marginal propensity to consume than the investor (say, a retiree living off a pension) then provide some support for that position.  It is just as likely that those on the losing end will take efforts to protect themselves from this loss, decreasing overall social wealth.  So what one has to show is that the marginal propensity to consume for the borrower is so much larger than that for the investor that it offsets any costs from the investor trying to protect his investment from theft.

Now if you simply favor redistribution of wealth for its own sake, just say so.  If you hate investors and love defaulting borrowers, then just say so.  Personally, I don’t believe the role of government should be to take from A to give to B.  I just ask that we stop pretending, in the absence of compelling evidence, that redistribution of wealth is the same as wealth creation.

Do Forced Mortgage Writedowns Create Wealth? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias takes my recent post gathering three links a little too seriously. Beyond their subject matter—the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile—the theme running through the links was that they were all to the TechLiberationFront blog, not that “the federal government should not try to manage the development of the communications marketplace.” My humor is a little odd. Not everyone gets to come along….

But it’s true that the federal government should not try to manage the development of the communications marketplace. So I’ll defend that, and first principles, which Yglesias claims to have reached their limits when it comes to communications.

First, I’ll refine my thesis: the government should not manage the communications marketplace.

What is a “marketplace”? The handiest web dictionary has the following two relevant definitions: “1. An open area or square in a town where a public market or sale is set up. 2. The world of business and commerce.”

To “manage” such a thing ["to take charge or care of: to manage my investments"] would be to have a hand in much or all of it—not just meta-rules about the terms of buying and selling, but what may be sold on what terms, often up to and including price and quality.

Given these ordinary meanings, I think “manage the communications marketplace” has a relatively broad connotation, and the argument that the government should not manage the communications marketplace is easy. The give-and-take of the market is a better way to discover consumers’ true interests and to apportion resources to serve them. For all the effort and smarts they put into it, government regulators are at a serious disability compared to the market’s manifold forces. More often than not, regulators serve the interests of the corporations that are well organized to win their succor, and they nurture their own interests in maintaining and growing power.

If Yglesias holds the contrary view, that the government should regulate the price, quality, and content of communications services, I welcome that debate, including its free speech dimensions. (There’s a “first principle” worth keeping in mind.)

But he actually doesn’t take that position, not openly at least. He says, instead: “The federal government has to have some kind of policy vis-à-vis the electromagnetic spectrum.” From there, management of the entire communications marketplace is a few bootstraps away.

The electromagnetic spectrum is one input into the communications marketplace. Spectrum is a challenging policy area because we are unused to treating it as anything other than a federally controlled resource.

My thinking is not dictated by the choice Congress made in the Radio Act of 1912, though. It’s important to imagine what rules and tools for dividing up radio spectrum might have emerged had the federal government not assumed power over it. I would prefer to try to move in that direction. (I don’t exclude commons treatment of some spectrum as appropriate, btw.) The historical accident that the government presumed to control radio spectrum should not metastisize into government control of communications.

Holding communications policy as close to first principles as we can, including John Locke when we can, is not the same as intoning “government bad, markets good.” But if the two approaches reach a congruent result, so be it.

If Yglesias holds the view that the government should manage the communications marketplace, he should say so forthrightly. One suspects that he wanted to feature the ad hominem insinuated into his short post. (“Of course the Cato Institute isn’t allowed to reach any other conclusion.”) It certainly sells with his commenters! But there are very good reasons to keep the government from controlling the communications marketplace, and there is much work to be done wresting control of spectrum from the government as well.

The Government Shouldn’t Try to Manage the Communications Marketplace is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias plumps for monarchy, based on — what else? — human nature:

[I]t seems inevitable in any country for some individual to end up serving the functional role of the king. Humans are hierarchical primates by nature and have a kind of fascination with power and dignity. This is somewhat inevitable, but it also cuts against the grain of a democracy. And under constitutional monarchy, you can mitigate the harm posed by displacing the mystique of power onto the powerless monarch. We follow the royal family with fascination, they participate in weird ceremonies, they have dignity, they symbolize the nation, we all talk about them respectfully, etc. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister gets to be just another politician. Admittedly the one who’s most important at this given moment in time. But that’s no reason not to jeer at him during Question Time. He’s not the symbol of the nation who’s owed deference. He’s a servant of the people and people who feel he’s serving them poorly should say so.

Dignity and power?

Dignity, sure. I admit, I am fascinated by dignity. I delight when formerly servile people regain it. I love, without apology, the dignity of being an American, under which our “weird ceremonies” happen chiefly of our own volition. I love the dignity of the immigrant shopkeeper — she might not have much, but what she has is hers, she’s worked for it, and she knows it. I love the dignity of a good book, a well-baked loaf of bread, or Dvořák’s Ninth. I love the dignity of suburbia, and of bohemia. I’ve known them both, and what they have in common is this — large stretches of time in which you are left to your own devices. That’s dignity.

But power? In a wide swath all around it, power destroys dignity. That’s not just an unfortunate side-effect. That’s the whole point of power. That’s what it does. It’s telling that Yglesias manages to praise power unstintingly — but only among a group of preposterous twits who’ve long ago stopped wielding any significant power themselves. Except, evidently, the power to fascinate the power-hungry.

Is it human nature to love power? Maybe for some. Indeed, I could hardly explain otherwise the continued presence of coercion in the world. Thinkers far greater than I have come to the same conclusion, so let’s just leave it at that.

Not everyone, though, is quite so keen on power. As Ravi Iyer, Jonathan Haidt, et al. have recently suggested, one self-identified group — libertarians — has a high degree of skepticism regarding authority, tradition, and conformity. Self-described libertarians place a high value on individualism, personal choice, and reason, even sometimes at the expense of other values, like emotion or community. In short, when we see a king, we don’t say “Wow!” We say — “Why?”

Even if you’re not a libertarian, it’s probably a good thing that someone is out there asking that question for you. That’s particularly so if Yglesias is right, and if most humans are hard-wired to idolize. Even a few false idols can be pretty costly. Having people around who encourage us to see them can do us a lot of good in the long run.

As I’m sure I don’t have to point out, the mistrust of kings, of those so-called gods on earth, runs deep in the American tradition. As Thomas Jefferson put it:

[T]he mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.

Modern science is increasingly finding that humans aren’t equal in a positive, descriptive sense. You and I are emphatically and obviously quite different, from the genetic level on up. Modern political experiments have shown that we should not try to make ourselves materially equal by rearranging society, either. The results of all such projects have been atrocities.

But claims about human equality really do shine in one area. They say, as Jefferson did, that your notions of the superior man are probably delusions, and that we should be aware of our embarrassing tendency toward them. Personally, I’d no more bow to the queen of England than I would to the doorman at the Ritz-Carlton. They both have fancy clothes, and a retinue of servants attending them, and time-honored traditions that they uphold. Bully for them. But also for our power to place them, at least once in a while, on the same level.

The Moral Equivalent of Monarchy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias thinks my assertion that we would be better off economically if education money stayed with taxpayers rather than going to public schools and universities is “totally insane.” Ouch!

Now, I can actually understand this, because many people have difficulty envisioning things other than what they’ve always known. But have I really gone all Crazy Eddie? If government didn’t spend taxpayer dough on education, would the poor be much worse off than they are today? Can we never over-invest in schooling because education is just so important? Does the college wage premium mean we should never ratchet down subsidies for college education? And is it at least possible that spending more and more public dough doesn’t lead to more or better education — by which I mean actual, valuable learning — as much as more waste?

Unfortunately, it seems Ygelsias didn’t follow any of the links I provided in the post containing the line he objected to, which furnished some valuable data answering these important questions. And, by the way, it really was just one line he seemed to dislike – the point of the post was to argue against spending yet more taxpayer dough on an education-centered stimulus, not for complete separation of school and state. And, of course, tax-credit-based school choice leaves taxpayers in control of their money without eliminating support for education.

But let’s start answering our questions in more depth so that Mr. Yglesias and others can start to think outside of the “how we’ve always done it” box.

First, let’s hit one critical point: Spending taxpayer money on government schooling does not actually mean you get better education. Let’s look at that graphically:

Here you can see nearly four decades of precipitously increasing expenditures on K-12 education plotted against student performance. And what does it reveal? No correlation between the Death Valley of academic achievement and the Everest of spending. Ever-more taxpayer dollars have gone into the government education system, but the system hasn’t improved at all. Why? Because the educators receiving the money have no need to get better – they’ve gotten ever-more dough no matter what, in large part because many people simply assume that increased government spending on education equals better education. But if you spend hugely greater amounts and get no better results, that seems like it would be an economic drain, no? Which was exactly what I was arguing.

How about higher education?

On a per-pupil basis, over the last quarter-century spending on public colleges and universities has been steady overall, while aid per student at all schools has gone way up. And what do we have to show for that?

The first thing is  incredible tuition inflation – the bane of American higher education. On a per-pupil basis, since 1988 real aid per student has risen 144 percent, while prices have inflated 81 percent at four-year-private schools and 145 percent at four-year publics. It seems, at least in part, that colleges and universities raise their prices because, well, the aid makes sure they can.

Surely, though, the schools use that money to provide more people with ever-better educations? Maybe, but much of the new money seems to have gone just to hiring more administrators, freeing professors from teaching so they can conduct research, and erecting ever more fabulous amenities. Which brings us back to the economic point: Maybe taking money from taxpayers to subsidize all this empire-building and waste might be an economic loss because taxpayers would otherwise spend the money more wisely. Maybe they’d invest in companies that provide better, cheaper products; give money to charities; buy education from stripped-down — but more educationally effective —  schools; or use it for countless other things they need or want.

But what if all this subsidizing — even with its attendant waste — resulted in impressive educational outcomes? Then maybe, just maybe, it would be an economic net gain.  But things look pretty bad: The six-year graduation rate for bachelor’s degree seekers is just 57 percent; roughly one-third of first-year students need to take remedial courses; and literacy dropped (see p. 38) roughly ten percentage points for Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree between 1992 and 2003. Oh, and that wage premium? It could very well include massive credentialism: It might be that you now need a bachelor’s degree for jobs that require only skills or abilities you could have attained on the job or in relatively brief specialized training. But at this point even half-way decent prospective employees would be expected to have gone to a four-year college.

Enough conjecture, though. Let’s go to the videotape – an actual effort to isolate the effect of government higher-ed spending on economic growth. Economist Richard Vedder has done this, and what he has found is that the more a state spends on higher education, the lower its rate of economic growth. Why? Among other possible things, it seems that when education is largely funded by third parties — especially third parties who have no choice in the matter – it decreases schools’ and students’ motivation to act efficiently. So sure, build that on-campus water park — I ain’t really paying for it!

Looking at things this way – contemplating the myriad costs, not just the assumed benefits, of taxpayer funding of education — it seems maybe my ideas shouldn’t be assigned a cell between the Joker and the Riddler quite so quickly.

But what about the equalitarian argument? Forget about economic efficiency — what about justice for the poor?

First off, I’d note that freer, more efficient economic systems tend to be better for everyone, rich and poor alike. You can read all about that here. But we need look no further than American history to see that people — including the poor — will get educated without government help. Before there was widespread government schooling there was widespread education. Indeed, by 1840 – when Mann’s common-school movement was still in diapers – it is estimated that 90 percent of adult whites in America were literate, a very high level relative to Europe. And the nation was hardly the Monopoly Man at the time. In other words, poor people got educated on their own.

But how could this be? Certainly part of the answer was that many poor people emphasized education, and much education occurred in the home. It was also provided by religious institutions, as well as philanthropists. And, of course, poor communities sometimes got together to establish their own schools.

But that was then and this is now, right? Education is much more complex because the world is much more complex. How could poor people get an education today if government didn’t provide it?

Well, for one thing, education need not be nearly as complex and expensive as it is. All those computers and other bells and whistles? There is hardly overwhelming evidence that they do any good — they may just be a huge waste of money. Meanwhile, many relatively barebones private schools seem to do just as good a job or better at educating students. Oh, and there’s that charity thing again: Religious schools provide low-cost education to millions of kids, and it could be lower if they didn’t have to compete with “free” public schools. And despite massive government subsidies to higher ed, private philanthropists give tens-of-billions of dollars to colleges and universities every year — imagine how much they might give if government didn’t say it would do the job! In other words, there is absolutely no overwhelming argument — to say the least — that just because the world is  more complicated government must run schools and pay for education. Indeed, huge, bureaucratic, plodding government is about the least well-equipped entity to handle complication and fast change.

And guess what? There is a profit-motive to furnish education to poor students with demonstrated academic aptitude: If someone lends money to a poor student to go to college so she can get an education that enables her to increase her future earnings, both parties will end up profiting. And let’s not overlook India and numerous other developing countries, where many of the poorest people in the world, using their own money, attend for-profit schools that outperform the free public schools. And why is that? Because the parents whose valuable money is being spent have huge incentives to hold schools accountable, and schools have to respond to parents to stay in business.

But maybe all that’s not enough for Mr. Yglesias. Maybe he needs to also be reminded of what he himself noted:

The current state of schooling in America is already bad enough in terms of ill-serving poor people.

That’s for sure! Currently, wealthy people can choose schools: they do it by buying a house in a good district or paying for private schools. Meanwhile, poor parents are often trapped in awful schools because they can’t afford to buy a McMansion for tuition. In higher education, flagship public colleges and universities have disproportionately middle- and high-income student bodies. And student aid? With creation of tax credit programs you have to have sufficient taxable income to use, as well as loans like PLUS that have no income maximums, aid has been targeted higher and higher up income scales. Meanwhile, the tuition inflation that all that fuels appears likely to scare low-income people away from higher education more than any other group.

Finally, let’s not forget that it was government that for centuries prohibited millions of people — especially African-Americans – from receiving either an equal education, or any education at all.   Without question during those times many private Americans would have discriminated in the provision of education, but government required discrimination by both bigot and good man alike.

So the current education system — which tends to be bent toward the will of the large, voting, middle- and upper-income blocs — already massively underserves the poor, and quite possibly makes it much harder for low-income Americans to compete with rich people than if everyone paid for schooling themselves. The system also injects huge distortions and inefficiencies into education, hurting overall economic progress. Of course, this is not an open-and-shut case — few things are in public policy – but you sure need to do more than just call removing government from education “insane” to counter it. Unfortunately, that’s not something it seems too many people — including Mr. Yglesias – are prepared to do.

Is an Education Free Market Really ‘Totally Insane’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As someone who has his own snarky tendencies, I am really starting to have a hard time discerning when Matt Yglesias is being serious and when he is being sarcastic these days.  For example, he writes of President Obama’s Iraq speech last night that

I think Barack Obama’s Iraq policy was perfectly clear as of last week—war kinda sorta ending on August 31, 2010 and more honest-to-god ending in December 2011—so I wasn’t exactly glued to the set to watch his speech last night.

So Obama’s “perfectly clear” Iraq policy is that “the war” “kinda sorta ended” yesterday, and will have a “more honest-to-god [than kinda sorta?]” end on New Year’s Eve next year?  But when does it just plain end?

Or maybe the best way to clear this up would be if I could put Tom Ricks’ question to Matt: “How many U.S. military personnel will be in Iraq four years from today — that is, Feb. 25, 2014?” Or if we’re assuming one term, by January 2013?

Obama’s ‘Perfectly Clear’ Iraq Policy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at Matt Yglesias’ blog, Ali Frick wants to know why she hasn’t detected any “conservative outrage” over the great Texas textbook tangle. Strangely, though, she only critiques Cato by name. That’s odd because (a) Cato is a libertarian organization, not conservative, and (b) there are many other libertarian — as well as truly conservative — think tanks out there.

Unfortunately, those things are just the beginning of the post’s odd twists.

Before I get into the weirdness, though, let me cop to the charge of relative silence. I’ve been meaning to hit the Texas situation harder, but have been dealing with a much greater education threat to the country — truly national curriculum standards — as well as other big issues.

Which reminds me: If Ms. Frick is very concerned about having one set of standards imposed on the entire nation, I invite her — and anyone else — to a major debate we’ll be having at Cato on the same day that proposed national standards are expected to be released to the public. Register here to attend!

So anyway, I have been relatively quiet on Texas. But not completely silent, and Ms. Frick could easily have found things that both I and others have written on the Lone Star social studies shootout just by searching for “Texas” and ”social studies” on Cato’s website. That search brings up this, and this, and this. Oh, and we sent this statement to media outlets, resulting in lots of radio interviews on the subject. How Ms. Frick missed all of these things, I do not know.

What is especially strange about Ms. Frick’s post, though, is not that she called Cato conservative (that’s all too common), or didn’t actually seem to check if we’d done anything on this. What is especially strange — or maybe just confused — is that she thinks people at Cato should be very upset about the Texas situation because the content of textbooks for Texas is often the content other states get stuck with.

For one thing, that Texas essentially dictates content for everyone else is an increasingly debatable point. More important for Frick’s piece, though, is that she asserts that somehow Texas being a big, centralized market is clearly something that creation of the U.S. Senate was supposed to mitigate, as well as the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause:

[I]t’s hard for me to think of really anything so antithetical to the Founding principles than for one state to mandate radical changes that all the other states are forced to swallow. Indeed, avoiding such an outcome was in large part the purpose of the Senate, not to mention the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution — really, the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation altogether.

What?

First off, if you read Federalist no. 62, there is just no way to interpret it as saying that the Senate will represent states so that an individual state’s policies won’t adversely affect other states. It simply discusses the need to give representation to both states and people in the national government of the new republic.

But that isn’t Frick’s biggest stretch. That is reserved for her application of the Supremacy Clause, which reads:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Once again, this says absolutely nothing about whether it is constitutional for a big state to adopt textbooks even if it affects the textbook choices of smaller states. The clause is entirely about the supremacy of federal laws — when made to exert the specific, enumerated powers given to the federal government — over state laws. It says diddly about state actions that simply have some impact on other states, especially when those actions have nothing to do with federal powers.

All that said, libertarians do have good reason to be concerned about what has transpired in Texas, as it illustrates brilliantly the conflict, politicization, and academic dangers inherent to government schooling. But that is an issue about which many of us at Cato have dealt at great length.  I invite Ms. Frick to read it all.

Too Quiet on the Texas Front? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

From Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to Joe Biden’s Big F-ing Deal, progressives have led a consistent and largely successful campaign to expand the size and scope of the federal government. Now, Matt Yglesias suggests, it’s time to take a victory lap and call it a day:

For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of the welfare state. Today, that argument is largely over with liberals having largely won. [...] The crux of the matter is that progressive efforts to expand the size of the welfare state are basically done. There are big items still on the progressive agenda. But they don’t really involve substantial new expenditures. Instead, you’re looking at carbon pricing, financial regulatory reform, and immigration reform as the medium-term agenda. Most broadly, questions about how to boost growth, how to deliver public services effectively, and about the appropriate balance of social investment between children and the elderly will take center stage. This will probably lead to some realigning of political coalitions. Liberal proponents of reduced trade barriers and increased immigration flows will likely feel emboldened about pushing that agenda, since the policy environment is getting substantially more redistributive and does much more to mitigate risk. Advocates of things like more and better preschooling are going to find themselves competing for funds primarily with the claims made by seniors.

I’d like to believe this is true, though I can’t say I’m persuaded. It seems at least as likely that, consistent with the historical pattern, the new status quo will simply be redefined as the “center,” and proposals to further augment the welfare state will move from the fringe to the mainstream of opinion on the left.

That said, it’s hardly unheard of for a political victory to yield the kind of medium-term realignment Yglesias is talking about. The end of the Cold War destabilized the Reagan-era conservative coalition by essentially taking off the table a central—and in some cases the only—point of agreement among diverse interest groups. Less dramatically, the passage of welfare reform in the 90s substantially reduced the political salience of welfare policy. The experience of countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, moreover, suggests that if Obamacare isn’t substantially rolled back fairly soon, it’s likely to become a political “given” that both parties take for granted. Libertarians, of course, have long lamented this political dynamic: Government programs create constituencies, and become extraordinarily difficult to cut or eliminate, even if they were highly controversial at their inceptions.

We don’t have to be happy about this pattern, but it is worth thinking about how it might alter the political landscape a few years down the line.  One possibility, as I suggest above, is that it will just shift the mainstream of political discourse to the left. But as libertarians have also long been at pains to point out, the left-right model of politics, with its roots in the seating protocols of the 18th century French assembly, conceals the multidimensional complexity of politics. There’s no intrinsic commonality between, say, “left” positions on taxation, foreign policy, and reproductive rights—the label here doesn’t reflect an underlying ideological coherence so much as the contingent requirements of assembling a viable political coalition at a particular time and place.  If an issue that many members of one coalition considered especially morally urgent is, practically speaking, taken off the table, the shape of the coalitions going forward depends largely on the issues that rise to salience. Libertarians are perhaps especially conscious of this precisely because we tend to take turns being more disgusted with one or another party—usually whichever holds power at a given moment.

The $64,000 question, of course, is what comes next. As 9/11 and the War on Terror reminded us, the central political issues of an era are often dictated by fundamentally unpredictable events. But some of the obvious current candidates are notable for the way they cut across the current partisan divide. In my own wheelhouse—privacy and surveillance issues—Republicans have lately been univocal in their support of expanded powers for the intelligence community, with plenty of help from hawkish Democrats. Given their fondness for invoking the specter of soviet totalitarian states, I’ve hoped that the folks mobilizing under the banner of the Tea Party might begin pushing back on the burgeoning surveillance state. Thus far I’ve hoped in vain, but if that coalition outlasts our current disputes, one can imagine it becoming an issue for them in 2011 as parts of the Patriot Act once again come up for reauthorization, or in 2012 when the FISA Amendments Act is due to sunset. In the past, the same issues have made strange bedfellows of the ACLU and the ACU, of Ron Paul Republicans and FireDogLake Democrats.  Obama has pledged to take up comprehensive immigration reform during his term, and there too significant constituencies within each party fall on opposite sides of the issue.

Further out than that it’s hard to predict. But more generally, the possibility that I find interesting is that—against a background of technologies that have radically reduced the barriers to rapid, fluid, and distributed group formation and mobilization—the protracted health care fight, the economic crisis, and the explosion of federal spending have created an array of potent political communities outside the party-centered coalitions. They’ve already shown they’re capable of surprising alliances—think Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist.  Suppose Yglesias is at least this far correct: The next set of political battles are likely to be fought along a different value dimension than was health care reform. Precisely because these groups formed outside the party-centered coalitions, and assuming they outlast the controversies that catalyzed their creation, it’s hard to predict which way they’ll move on tomorrow’s controversies. It’s entirely possible that there are latent and dispersed constituencies for policy change outside the bipartisan mainstream who have now, crucially, been connected: Any overlap on orthogonal value dimensions within or between the new groups won’t necessarily be evident until the relevant values are triggered by a high-visibility policy debate.  Still, it’s reason to expect that the next decade of American politics may be even more turbulent and surprising than the last one.

A Post-Health Care Realignment? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail, the assembled knights look in awe upon the imposing walls of “Camelot”… until someone points out that “it’s only a model.”

I feel I’m watching a remake of Quest every time I read another blog post about the economics paper “Anti-Lemons” by MacLeod and Urquiola.

Matt Yglesias reproduced its abstract last month, saying “I would have to pay $5 to read the whole paper, but the abstract conveniently supports political positions I like, so I’ll talk about it some more.” That, needless to say, isn’t the sort of talk that calls for a thoughtful response.

But now that Megan McArdle has picked up the thread from a second Yglesias post, read the paper, and it given it a favorable verdict, it’s time to point out that “it’s only a model” — and not a very good one at that.

“Anti Lemons” is not an empirical study. Instead it presents a series of abstract mathematical models with arbitrary assumptions. The final model purports to demonstrate the authors’ conclusion that “For-profit entry turns out to be feasible, despite these assumptions, as long as private schools can cream skim the highest ability students from the public system.”

What are the authors’ assumptions?

i) individuals differ only with respect to innate ability

ii) all schools are equally productive

iii) for-profit schools must operate unsubsidized

The first two of these assumptions are nonsense and the third contravenes the whole point of a school choice program (whether tax credits or vouchers), which is to subsidize access to private schooling for those who could not otherwise afford it.

As if these problems were not enough, the model also incorrectly assumes that when academic selectivity is permitted, every private school will not only select students based on academic entrance tests, but that they will all use the same test. Like the others, this assumption is out of touch with reality. When I analyzed survey data for Arizona private schools in 2006, I found that nearly half of all private schools were not academically selective. Only a third actually administered an academic admissions test of any kind. The only admissions criteria applied by a majority of schools were measures of student and parent desire to attend the school and students’ and parents’ willingness to abide by its code of conduct.

So the MacLeod and Urquiola model has precious little to do with reality. It tells us nothing about the real world or about tax credit or voucher programs or proposals. In fact, it seems to serve no productive purpose whatsoever, unless one considers it productive to give left-wing bloggers a study abstract to talk about that “conveniently supports political positions [they] like.”

Though MacLeod and Urquiola briefly discuss a modified model that relaxes the proscription against subsidization of private schools, its other erroneous assumptions remain and so it produces a result that is, not surprisingly, completely at odds with the reality established by the large body of empirical findings in this field.

Last year, I reviewed the worldwide literature comparing public and private schools (65 studies reporting 156 different statistical findings) and found that the statistically significant findings favor private schools by a margin of roughly 8 to 1. More importantly, when we focus more precisely and compare truly market-like school systems to monopolies such as U.S. public schooling, the statistically significant results favor markets by a margin of nearly 15 to 1 (and they greatly outnumber the insignificant findings as well). It is thus the least regulated private schools that show the most consistent advantage.

MacLeod and Urquiola mischaracterize that research literature as follows: “there is no consistent evidence that introducing choice substantially improves learning, or that private schools have higher value added than public ones.” The sources they cite to back up their mischaracterization are both incomplete and imprecise, failing to look at a large swath of the research and failing to distinguish among various forms of “choice” with fundamentally different features.

So, no, the “Anti-Lemons” study is not the Camelot it is cracked up to be by recent rhapsodic blog posts. It’s not even a good model.

[Should anyone want to interject Hsieh and Urquiola's 2006 empirical study of the highly regulated Chilean voucher system at this point, I've already offered my thoughts on it here.]

It’s Not Camelot, ‘It’s Only a Model’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I have to thank Ezra Klein.  I have for some time been trying, without success, to spark a debate about whether expanding health insurance coverage would actually save any lives.  Even my bet with Karen Davenport seemed to go nowhere.  But when Klein accused Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people” because Lieberman was jeopardizing passage of legislation that would expand health insurance to 30 million people, Klein made a debate possible.

Following on my first response to Klein that the evidence supporting his claim is remarkably thin, others have joined the discussion.  Matt Yglesias of the Center for American Progress rose to Klein’s defense.  Megan McArdle (in The Atlantic magazine and her blog) and Tyler Cowen (at Marginal Revolution) both argue that we don’t really know if Klein’s claim is true.

Today, Yglesias poses the following question on his Twitter page:

Do rightwingers really believe that US health insurance has no mortality-curbing impact?

I see two problems.  First, there are no right-wingers in this debate.  McArdle, Cowen, and I all support gay marriage, for example.

Second, Yglesias sets up a straw man.  He asks whether health insurance on average has a positive impact on mortality, when the debate is actually over the effect of health insurance at the margin.  In other words, would covering the uninsured save lives?

I don’t know anyone who thinks health insurance has zero effect on mortality overall.  Yet it is entirely possible for the average effect to be positive and the marginal effect to be zero. One reason may be that the uninsured do benefit from the human and physical capital that health insurance makes possible.  It may also be the case that when the uninsured do obtain health insurance, the additional medical care they receive is more likely to harm them than to help them.  The researchers behind the RAND Health Insurance Experiment make essentially the same point.

If the marginal effect of health insurance on health is zero, it raises other interesting questions.  Would it also have zero effect on health outcomes if we were to reduce the number of people with health insurance?  What is the size of the margin over which health insurance has zero impact?  (Robin Hanson suggests it may be very, very large.)

Klein recently declined an invitation to debate these issues at Cato.  Too bad.  This is worth pursuing.

Average vs. Marginal Effects of Health Insurance is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

My, oh my. Transparency is getting defined down to excuse a breaking campaign promise.

At the Center for American Progress’ “Think Progress Wonk Room” blog (or whatever it’s called), Igor Volsky makes the case against allowing C-SPAN cameras into negotiations about the health care bill. Recall that President Obama promised on the campaign trail to have health care negotiations broadcast on C-SPAN.

“But if one actually considers the tone and tenor of the televised health care debate of 2009,” says Volsky, “filming the conference negotiations seems counterproductive.”

He does have a point. Television causes politicians to grandstand and doesn’t necessarily improve the legislative process.

But President Obama knew that when he made the promise, and he made the promise all the same. The credibility of the legislative process suffers from its overall opacity, and Candidate Obama promised different, starting with health care legislation — to progressives’ cheers as much as any other group.

Yet he appears to be walking away from that promise. And Volsky wants to abet him with a transparency caveat — only if it “improve[s] the underlying bill.”

Improvement is in the eye of the beholder, of course. This is not a welcome gloss. It’s bait and switch. “[T]he reality of politics doesn’t square with the promises of the campaign trail,” says Volsky.

Matt Yglesias’ short post backing his co-blogger is — appropriately, perhaps — opaque: “This is also an example of the concrete harm done to the country by politicians overestimating the impact of campaign tactics on election outcomes.” I don’t understand what that means.

Ezra Klein has the decency to say he’s conflicted. He admits that a transparent health care conference might be “better than nothing,” but he makes the same argument as Volsky: the process will change, but not necessarily for the better. No mention that this was a promise, or that the credibility of the president to marginal voters matters.

The argument that transparency is only useful if it leads to a better bill is reminiscent of Lawrence Lessig’s widely panned essay “Against Transparency.” I wrote of it:

Lessig sets up an interesting premise indeed: What he calls the “naked transparency movement” — unvarnished access to government data — “is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system off the cliff.”

Yes, Lessig has “change” and “pushing faith in our political system off the cliff” in opposition. So, the only thing that qualifies as “change” is improving faith in our political system? This pegged my bs detector.

These commentators have sounder premises, of course. They want transparency to improve legislation.

But transparency is not simply a means to better bills. It’s a means to better politicians — when people see one leader being smart and fair, while others are not. It’s a means to a better organized society — if people decide that politicians aren’t as qualified to apportion society’s resources as they thought. It’s a means to better-run programs — when people compare the dollars going in with the results coming out. Heck, transparency is a civics lesson for high school students! There is a transparency vision that these commentators eschew in favor of the status quo.

Even good John Wonderlich at the Sunlight Foundation, an organization dedicated to transparency, kicks the ground and mumbles about televising conference committees not being a panacea. The promise was to broadcast “negotiations,” of course, not just the formal meeting of any conference committee. And one of the commenters on his post has the better of it. “Open [conference committees] are not a panacea, but they are one tent-pole,” says Sarah Welsh of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. Her state mandated open conference committess last year, for the good.

And it was a campaign promise.

“The public should have ample opportunity to review the final product before the vote,” Igor Volsky says. Which brings us to another promise: On the campaign trail, Candidate Obama said, “[W]hen there is a bill that ends up on my desk as a president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government’s doing.”

The president is currently six for 124 on that promise, having shown recent improvement. But one has to wonder how Volsky would caveat away that promise and further define down government transparency.

One to watch: President Obama’s promise to “go line by line” over earmarks, which OMB has said it will implement by collecting and databasing Congressmembers’ earmark requests in the FY 2011 budget cycle.

On C-SPAN: What’s a Little Promise Among Friends? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias puts down the bloody shirt long enough to make the modest-on-its-face claim that “actions, not words, will clarify Obama’s foreign policy.”  I don’t think that’s quite right.

In one sense, of course, it is.  For the bean counters among us, the outcomes are the real metric: whether the United States remains the sole superpower on the planet; whether a diplomatic resolution can be reached with Iran; whether Obama can (assuming he has has any intention to) get our military out of Iraq; whether his spun-like-cotton-candy Afghanistan policy can stabilize that sorry land — these are the things we’ll be looking at.

But the more important thing in the short term for Obama is probably to slake the nearly-unquenchable thirst of the David Brookses of the world — and probably the American people — to have their identities stroked.  To take the most recent example, Brooks, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the Foreign Policy Elite of whom they are avatars were in desperate need of a cold shower and a trip to the nearest confessional after Obama indulged them by unsheathing the Mighty and Awesome Totem of American nationalism — before a crowd of peacey Norwegians no less.   To take another example, witness the veritable panic, the hysterical and fluttering response to the imaginary Obama “apology tour” that didn’t exist and had no affect on anything in any event.

Indeed the Foreign Policy Elite is so captivated by the rhetoric, imagery, and perhaps most importantly the identity surrounding U.S. foreign policy it hardly has time to think seriously about the material realities.  There are of course examples where analysts simply misrepresent material reality — witness this ridiculous characterization of Obama’s boost in defense spending as an “assault” on the defense budget — but in general the foreign policy commentariat seems more interested in how American power makes them feel than it is on the outcomes it produces.  And witness the frenzy over the Oslo speech, the “apology tour” claptrap, or the whining about Obama’s restraint from calling on the Iranian people to start a revolution.

Charles Krauthammer, in a recent essay, went so far in the anti-materialist direction to claim that “decline is a choice.”  “Decline — or continued ascendancy — is in our hands.”   Of course, it isn’t always a choice, says Krauthammer.  The British had it coming, for example, but the crucial factors in Krauthammer’s telling weren’t imperial overextension and the relative waning of its latent power but rather “the civilizational suicide that was the two world wars, and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion.”  Thus, nations decline in large part because of sapped will — perhaps this would be the foreign policy equivalent of the “mental recession” we heard about a year ago.  If this is right, keeping a careful eye on will-sapping things is more than a parlor game.

But of course Krauthammer’s charge that Obama is willfully precipitating American decline cannot be substantiated by reference to material factors, so it’s perhaps no coincidence that he takes aim primarily at Obama’s “demolition of the moral foundations of American dominance.”  Krauthammer’s central piece of evidence is telling:

In Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Interesting response. Because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.

Reading this, I was reminded of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s observation that

Ideally those responsible for international affairs ought to be able to understand and moderate the holy nationalism of their own country and to discern, even when disguised, the operations and limits of holy nationalism in rival countries as well as in third-party countries.

Unfortunately this may be too much to hope for.  There are serious cognitive difficulties involved.  Any nationalism inherently finds it hard to understand any other nationalism or even to want to understand it.  This is particularly true of holy nationalism.  Rejection of the other is part of the holiness.

All of this is enough to make you wonder then — if Obama wanted to, could he just keep the opinion columnists — and the American people — happy with a regular genuflection at the altar of American nationalism rather than by providing them with actual wars and actual crusading?  Would he if he could?

Obama, American Nationalism, and the Weird Anti-Materialism of the Foreign Policy Elite is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Nathan Hodge of Danger Room deserves credit for saying something uncouth: defense analysts may be biased by the money they raise from defense contractors or access they get from generals.  Recognizing that he’s in a minefield, Hodge treads lightly, insisting that he’s not “suggesting that there’s any funny business” even though that seems to be the point. Fair enough; the guy has to get his phone calls returned. Matt Yglesias follows up, pointing out that these pressures inflate support for militarized foreign policy.

My first reaction was that this is obvious. A little reflection should tell you that anyone who has to raise money to pay his salary fits Bob Dylan’s rule: you gotta serve somebody. And most somebodies in the defense world are parts of the national security bureaucracy or its paid help. Observation demonstrates the theory. But on second thought, maybe it’s not so obvious. Life is full of truths that go unstated and therefore under-appreciated because they are impolite. The fact that the emperor has no clothes is not obvious to everyone until someone has the chutzpah to say so.

Funds and access aren’t the only things that encourage defense analysts to support hawkish foreign policy decisions. I would add social pressure and jobs. The hawkish consensus in DC is reinforced by social convention. Put a guy from Berkeley in Washington, and I bet his social milieu alone would drive his stated views right. Political ambition is even more important. High-level foreign policy jobs in both parties go to those within the establishment consensus. Smart, ambitious people know that. It affects their stated views early.

What irritates me about this situation is not that analysts aren’t truly independent, it is that so many insist that they are. No politics here, they say, just us technocrats. Why not just admit it? Think tanks are political, especially when they take government money. That limits what you can say.

Here’s an essay (pdf) I wrote in 2007 about why we have a precautionary foreign policy. It includes a brief section, starting on page 38, about the biases that nominally independent analysts feel.

Anyone interested in how politics infects political analysis should read Hans Morgenthau’s essay, “The Purpose of Political Science.”

Of Course Defense Analysts Are Biased is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Blogger Matt Yglesias has described my CNN op-ed on health care as follows:

Meanwhile, in Harvard economist and Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Miron’s dystopia, if your parents wind up with no money through bad luck or poor decision-making and then you get sick you’ll just die on the street for lack of money.

Did I really say such an outrageous thing? Well, I did not use exactly those words (as Matt makes clear), but yes, that is the logical implication of my position.

And I stand by it. Here’s why.

First, my assessment is that even with no government health insurance, hardly anyone would die on the street for lack of health care. The poor would use their income transfers to buy some health care or insurance. The poor would receive private charity. And health care would be far less expensive due to elimination of the distortions caused by government health insurance.

Second, my position is that government provision of health insurance is enormously inefficient: it means worse health care for everyone, and it wastes resources that can be put to other uses. So the negative of having a few people suffer without government health insurance must be balanced against the good of having better medical care for all and against the good that can be accomplished with those saved resources.

That good might be lower taxes for everyone, or more government spending on education, or greater public health spending to combat HIV in poor countries. Whatever the alternate uses turn out to be, one cannot escape the fact that a tradeoff exists between protecting the poor and other goals.

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z

‘Letting the Sick Die on the Street’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I watched with interest the J Street debate between Matt Yglesias and The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait over the question “what it means to be pro-Israel.”  Matt’s a very efficient thinker, and Chait’s a particularly sharp debater.  I witnessed him slug it out at length in a debate with David Boaz a while back, not something I’d like to do.

Chait made a straightforward argument: to be pro-Israel, someone has to accept two premises.  First, one has to believe that historically, Israel is the more sympathetic party in the Middle East.  Second, one has to believe that the U.S. should not be even-handed in the Middle East, but rather should be on Israel’s side.

But what was most interesting about his argument was his accusation of guilt by association against J Street.  It was a problem, Chait argued, that J Street had been embraced by people who did not meet his definition of pro-Israel.  Chait rang the alarum that “The American Conservative magazine, which was founded by Pat Buchanan, …has been saying nice things about J Street.”  In addition, “the famous Walt and Mearsheimer have been saying extremely nice things about J Street — embracing J Street.”

This is a pretty straightforward guilt-by-association argument: The American Conservative doesn’t meet Chait’s definition of pro-Israel, therefore, for that magazine to praise J Street tarnishes its pro-Israel bona fides.  Same story with John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt.

First, the person at TAC who’s been praising J Street has a name: Scott McConnell.  Scott has a PhD in history from Columbia, and is the current editor-at-large (previously the editor) of the magazine.  I don’t know in great detail Scott’s views on Israel, but I think it’s fair to say that he thinks it’s very important for America, for Israel, and for the Palestinians to get a two-state solution set up, and sooner rather than later.  He also believes, I think, that in order for this to happen, Washington will have to put pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians to give up things they don’t want to give up.  The same view is held by Mearsheimer and Walt.  So the allegedly guilty parties’ view is certainly less zero-sum than Chait’s (would Chait characterize himself as “anti-Palestinian,” I wonder?), maybe even positive-sum.  But I don’t think that receiving praise from a person with such views on the matter necessarily should serve to taint J Street’s pro-Israel bona fides.

But beyond this, is guilt-by-association really something that Chait wants to engage in at all?  For instance, Chait’s boss at The New Republic, Martin Peretz, wrote last March that Mexican people suffer from “congenital corruption” and possess “near-tropical work habits.”  (The piece is no longer available on TNR‘swebsite, but the passage in question can be found here.)  Should we be asking what Chait’s views on Mexicans are, since he is a writer at TNR under Mr. Peretz?  When Peretz suggested two days ago that President Obama’s views on foreign policy are infused with an ideological narrative, and “Obama’s narrative is assumedly third world, maybe just by dint of his skin complexion,” should we be asking Chait to clarify his views on African-Americans?  Finally, although I’m no expert on Mr. Peretz’s views on Arab people, those who’ve paid closer attention make a good case that he has said some reasonably provocative things about them, as well.  Should Chait be brought in for questioning on these matters?

If people only wrote for magazines every word of which they agreed with, few people would write for magazines.  Even if people took the much more modest step of steering clear of writing for magazines that regularly publish offensive material like the above, consumers of magazines like The New Republic would suffer.  But the fact that Chait doesn’t feel the need to distance himself from Mr. Peretz’s various racial foibles ought to raise either questions about his views on Mexicans, blacks, and Arabs, or else questions about his standing to level charges of guilt by association.

The New Republic and Guilt by Association is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at Think Progress, Matt Yglesias takes me to task for saying that the so-called public option in the House’s health care bill “would all but eliminate private insurance and force millions of Americans into a government-run system.”

Yglesias apparently still buys into the myth that the public option is, well, an option.

For people who receive health insurance through their employers, which is to say the vast majority of the Americans who currently have health insurance, the House bill would change very little. Or, rather, the biggest change would simply be the confidence that if, in the future, you cease to get health insurance from your employer (maybe you’ll lose your job or want to change jobs) that you’ll still be able to get health care. What’s more, of the minority of Americans who would be getting health care through the new “exchange,” the majority will probably sign up for private health insurance and everyone will have the option of doing so. If the government-run public plan is, for whatever reason, vastly more appealing than the private options then it will dominate. But if you believe the government can’t run health care well, there’s no reason to think that will happen. Whatever you think of that, though, the basic fact is that even if the public option does dominate the exchange most people will still have private employer-provided insurance.

That might be true if the new government-run program were going to compete on anything close to a level playing field.  But, because the public option is ultimately supported by the taxpayers, the playing field can never be level.   True, the bill does say that the new program is supposed to be self-sustaining, covering administrative and benefit costs entirely out of premium revenues.  But remember that Medicare Part B was originally supposed to support 50 percent of its costs through premiums.  That has shrunk to the point where premiums pay for less than 25 percent of the program’s cost.

And the government has a myriad of ways to prevent the true cost of the program from showing up in premium prices.  For example, the government-run plan will not have to pay state or federal taxes, and unlike private insurance plans, who can be sued in state courts, the government-run plan could only be sued in federal court.

At the very least, the program carries with it an implicit guarantee against future losses.  Suppose the public option prices its products too low and loses money.  Can you imagine that Congress is simply going to let it go bankrupt, go out of business?  Would a Congress that has bailed out banks and automobile companies because they are “too big to fail” resist subsidizing the government’s insurance plan if it began to lose money?   Even without the actual bailout, such an implicit guarantee has a value. For example, the implicit guarantees behind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were estimated to have saved those institutions $6 billion per year.

All of this means that the government-run plan would be significantly cheaper than private insurance, not because it would out-compete private insurance or because it was more efficient, but because it had unfair advantages.  The lower cost means that businesses, in particular, would have every incentive to dump workers from their current health insurance plan into the government plan.  And, if other provisions of the bill make insurance more expensive, as is likely, the incentive for employers to shift workers to the government plan would be even greater.   Estimates suggest that nearly 90 million workers could eventually be forced into the government plan.

As Robert Samuelson, dean of economic columnists, writes in the Washington Post, “a favored public plan would probably doom today’s private insurance.”

Samuelson is right.  There is nothing “optional” about a public option.  And that is just the way the Left wants it.

Putting Private Insurance Out of Business is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias identifies a puzzle, comparing Cold War/Irving Kristol neoconservatism to today’s Weekly Standard Wilsonianism:

[E]ven though the high-level theoretical content of the realpolitiker 70s version of neoconservatism and the Wilsonian 2000s version of neoconservatism seem very different, the operational content is extremely similar. You have support for higher defense budgets, a tendency toward threat-inflation and hysteria, a belief in an aggressive military posture and extensive saber-rattling, hostility to negotiations, and hostility to international law both in theory and in practice. This was initially presented to the world as a “realistic” alternative to lefty critiques of US support for anti-communist dictators and more recently appeared as an “idealistic” critique of lefty reluctance to launch wars, but the continuity between the views is enormous.

What Matt doesn’t say is why the policy outcomes stayed largely the same despite shifting theoretical sands.  I think this piece by Brian Schmidt and Michael Williams can help shed some light on the problem.

Irving Kristol's Medal of Freedom Award (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times)

A social order based purely on narrowly egoistic interests, neoconservatives argue, is unlikely to survive — and the closer one comes to it, the less liveable and sustainable society will become. Unable to generate a compelling vision of the collective public interest, such a society would be incapable of maintaining itself internally or defending itself externally. As a consequence, neoconservatism regards the ideas at the core of many forms of modern political and economic rationalism — that such a vision of interest can be the foundation for social order — as both wrong and dangerous. It is wrong because all functioning polities require some sense of shared values and common vision of the public interest in order to maintain themselves. It is dangerous because a purely egoistic conception of interest may actually contribute to the erosion of this sense of the public interest, and the individual habits of social virtue and commitment to common values that sustain it.

In this context consider the worshipful treatment of men like Teddy Roosevelt and Rudy Giuliani by neoconservatives, and neoconservatives’ utter contempt for libertarians and individualism.  For neocons, the higher defense budgets and militarism, the aggressive military posture and extensive saber-rattling, the nationalism, were in some sense ends in themselves rather than rationally calculated means to defend the country.  Without an enemy and a grand national project — note in the article to which Matt points Kristol’s admonition that “statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies” — the society would descend into a variety of individual pursuits — family, profit, local community, learning — that provide no unifying politics.  Again, for Kristol, “a nation whose politics turn on the cost of false teeth is a nation whose politics are squalid.”  A grand national project, be it a global proxy war against the Soviet Union, a crusade to end terrorism, or even a recurring fetish for space travel, provides unifying substance for the country.

The trouble, as Matt rightly observes, is that you can’t explicitly just go around glomming onto whatever rationale provides the best argument for militarism and nationalism today. The citizens of the country seem unlikely to support costly and destructive policies based on the idea that it’s all for their own good.  I am reminded of Ed Crane and Bill Niskanen’s apt reference to neoconservatism as “a movement with a head but no body,” meaning that it lacked indigenous support at the grassroots level.  So the obvious play for neocons was to sew the neoconservative head onto the conservative nationalist body.  To justify endless war, the idea of “real America” being under siege by both an insular and tweedy academy (in Schmidt and Williams’ story, the scientific-rationalist realists) and an array of foreign devils allowed a group of radical ideas to strike a conservative pose:

In foreign policy as in domestic policy, neoconservatism claims to represent the majority of real Americans, to speak on their behalf, and to defend the validity of their beliefs in their virtues and values (and their place as the basis for the national interest of the United States), just as vociferously as it has represented those values against the depredations of elites in the culture wars. Although a high proportion of neoconservatives are intellectuals — and are often part of what would be considered an academic elite by any standards — they are able to represent themselves as outsiders shunned and victimized by liberal (and realist) intellectuals in precisely the same way that real people are, and for the same reasons — for expressing what the people really know in an elite cultural environment dominated by self-interested, self-righteous, and yet culturally decadent liberal elites.

In this reading, trying to ground the policy outcomes in a coherent theory of international politics is bound to be fruitless.  The policy outcomes themselves are designed to provide a centripetal counter to the polity’s natural tendency to fly apart.  On this point Schmidt and Williams cite Midge Decter (“domestic policy was foreign policy, and vice-versa”) and Robert Kagan (“there can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign”).  I think there’s something to this.

Neoconservatism and Militarism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The left loves Scandinavia, but for the wrong reason. Nations such as Denmark and Sweden have much to admire, particularly their open markets, low levels of regulation, sound money, and honest governments. Indeed, if fiscal policy is removed from the equation, both Denmark and Sweden are more laissez-faire than the United States according to Economic Freedom of the World (as I noted in this recent video).

But fiscal policy is where the Scandinavians have serious problems. Taxes are confiscatory, punishing people who work, save, and invest. High levels of government spending, meanwhile, reduce economic growth by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy and funneling them into the stifling welfare state.

Not surprisingly, this is the reason why statists admire Scandinavian nations. Matthew Yglesias, for instance, recently expressed his great admiration for Denmark. And I suppose I would agree with him if asked to pick the world’s best welfare state. I’ve been to the country several times and there is no question that laissez-faire policies in areas other than fiscal policy have helped the nation remain relatively prosperous.

But Yglesias is a bit lovestruck about the Danes (an understandable impulse for non-economic reasons), and it leads him to make some rather strange assertion — presumably because he wants us to believe that Denmark’s good points are because of (rather than in spite of) an onerous fiscal burden. What jumped out at me was his claim that Danes enjoy a “higher average material standard of living” than Americans. I’m not sure where he gets that, since the World Bank, CIA, United Nations, and IMF all show that the United States has more per-capita economic output.

To be fair, measures of per-capita gross domestic product are not a  perfect measure, even if they are adjusted for purchasing power parity. So let’s take a look at other statistics that try to compare living standards. The two that I found (perhaps Yglesias found others, in which case I look forward to his identifying the source) are from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and, coincidentally, the Danish Finance Ministry.

The OECD, many of you already know, is not my favorite organization. The bureaucracy’s anti-tax competition campaign is a reprehensible attempt to hinder the flow of jobs and capital from high-tax nations to low-tax jurisdictions. So surely nobody will claim that the OECD is a collection of market fundamentalists trying to manipulate statistics to make high-tax nations look bad. So let’s now look at this chart, which is based on the OECD’s calculations of average individual consumption per capita, pegged against an average for member nations of 100. It certainly appears that living standards in the United States are much higher.

Now let’s look at numbers from the Danish Finance Ministry. The bureaucrats there, in response to a parliamentary request, put together figures on per-capita individual consumption and per-capita private consumption.

I suspect the Finance Ministry is not trying to make Denmark look bad compared to the United States, yet the data certainly suggest that Americans enjoy higher living standards than their Danish counterparts.

Are Living Standards Higher in Denmark or the United States? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias has a post up looking at the PISA scores, and he seems to imply that for-profit schooling has been tried and found wanting in Sweden and the U.S.:

The big difference is that many Swedish charters are run by for-profit firms. We’ve had some experiments with that in the U.S. and it hasn’t worked very well. Nobody’s really found a great way of making consistent profits running K-12 schools in America.

Of course even he notes that Sweden’s schools are highly regulated by the state.

And in the U.S., the difficulty of succeeding in for-profit education just might have something to do with that government monopoly on k-12 education and the $560 billion or so in tax revenues that fund it. Maybe.

Why Is For-Profit Education So Difficult in the U.S.? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Matt Yglesias has a lot of smart things to say about the pervasive illiteracy plaguing the Afghan National Army. Upwards of 75 to 90 percent (according to varying estimates) of the ANA is illiterate.

As Ted Galen Carpenter and I argue in our recent Cato white paper Escaping the Graveyard of Empires: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan, this lack of basic education prevents many officers from filling out arrest reports, equipment and supply requests, and arguing before a judge or prosecutor. And as Marine 1st Lt. Justin Greico argues, “Paperwork, evidence, processing—they don’t know how to do it…You can’t get a policeman to take a statement if he can’t read and write.”

Yglesias notes:

This strikes me as an object lesson in the importance of realistic goal-setting. The Afghan National Army is largely illiterate because Afghanistan is largely illiterate…we just need an ANA that’s not likely to be overrun by its adversaries. But if we have the more ambitious goal of created [sic] an effectively administered centralized state, then the lack of literacy becomes a huge problem. And a problem without an obvious solution on a realistic time frame [emphasis mine].

Such high levels of illiteracy serves to highlight the absurd idea that the United States has the resources (and the legitimacy) to “change entire societies,” in the words of retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel John Nagl. Eight years ago, Max Boot, fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, likened the Afghan mission to British colonial rule:

Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets…This was supposed to be ‘for the good of the natives,’ a phrase that once made progressives snort in derision, but may be taken more seriously after the left’s conversion (or, rather, reversion) in the 1990s to the cause of ‘humanitarian’ interventions. [emphasis mine]

But as I highlighted yesterday at the Cato event “Should the United States Withdraw from Afghanistan?” (which you can view in its entirety here), policymakers must start narrowing their objectives in Afghanistan, a point Yglesias stresses above. Heck, as I argued yesterday, rational people in the United States are having difficulty convincing delusional types here in America that Barack Obama is their legitimate president. I am baffled by people who think that we have the power to increase the legitimacy of the Afghan government. It’s also ironic that many conservatives (possibly brainwashed by neo-con ideology) who oppose government intervention at home believe the U.S. government can bring about liberty and peace worldwide. These self-identified “conservatives” essentially have a faith in government planning.

Yet these conservatives share a view common among the political and military elite, which is that if America pours enough time and resources—possibly hundreds of thousands of troops for another 12 to 14 years—Washington could really turn Afghanistan around.

However, there is a reason why the war in Afghanistan ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking issues important to the American public, and why most Americans who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). It’s because Americans understand intuitively that the question about Afghanistan is not about whether it is winnable, but whether it constitutes a vital national security interest. An essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan has yet take place. America still does not have a clearly articulated goal. This is why the conventional wisdom surrounding the war—about whether we can build key institutions and create a legitimate political system—is not so much misguided as it is misplaced.

The issue is not about whether we can rebuild Afghanistan but whether we should. On both accounts the mission looks troubling, but this distinction is often times overlooked.

Pervasive Illiteracy in the Afghan National Army is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog