Ron Paul Talks Sense on Trade
Presidential Candidate Ron Paul has a decidedly mixed record on trade policy. He often votes against trade agreements because he sees them as “managed trade” and an interference with true free trade. Well, ok, but that’ s like voting against income tax cuts because you think the IRS shouldn’t exist. I get the point, but c’mon…
In any event, he was the only participant in Thursday night’s debate between the Republican presidential candidates who spoke about trade with any sense at all. As Inside US Trade [subscription required] points out, trade policy was not a prominent theme of the debate, but that didn’t stop Mitt Romney from (again) spouting nonsense about balanced trade:
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney late last week took a swipe at the trade policies of the Obama administration in a debate of the Republican presidential candidates by implying they are unbalanced in favor of other nations.
As part of a seven-point list of actions to turn around the economy, Romney said the U.S. should “have trade policies that work for us, not just for our opponents,” as the third point…
(I’ll just interject here to say that by “opponents” I believe Mr Romney is referring to our trade partners. You know, the folks who sell us stuff and buy stuff from us. But I digress…)
Trade was only raised one other time during the debate. Prompted by a moderator, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) defended his earlier criticism of Obama’s sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program.
Saying it was “natural” that Iran would pursue nuclear weapons—given that India, Pakistan, China, and Israel also possess them—Paul attacked the sanctions policy as steering the U.S. toward conflict.
“Countries that you put sanctions on, you are more likely to fight them,” he said. “I say a policy of peace is free trade. Stay out of their internal business.”
Paul also suggested it was time for the U.S. to engage in a trading relationship with Cuba and “stop fighting these wars that are about 30 or 40 years old,” an apparent reference to the Cold War. [emphasis added]
(My friend Scott Lincicome has more on the economic illiteracy flowing from the debate here)
Mr Paul is right on this one. He and I no doubt disagree on a few issues, and on trade I have more tolerance than he does for multilateral (and, albeit to a lesser extent, bilateral and regional) trade agreements as the only likely avenues for trade liberalization in the foreseeable future. But the link between trade and peace is an important one, and often overlooked.
Speaking of Ron Paul, the following clip shows Jon Stewart at his devastating best, calling out the mainstream media—and particularly Fox News—for ignoring and/or outright mocking Ron Paul’s candidacy. Watch to the very end, you won’t regret it. (HT: RadleyBalko)
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Indecision 2012 – Corn Polled Edition – Ron Paul & the Top Tier | ||||
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‘Corporations Are [Made of] People’
Mitt Romney’s explanation of why he’s against raising taxes on corporations — indeed, America already has some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world — at the Iowa State Fair was a bit awkward but not wholly incorrect. Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward has a good post with video and transcript, but here’s the salient bit:
ROMNEY: We have to make sure that the promises we make — and Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare — are promises we can keep. And there are various ways of doing that. One is, we could raise taxes on people.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We can raise taxes on—
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, they’re not!
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn also goes to people.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It goes into their pockets!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend. So number one, you can raise taxes. That’s not the approach that I would take.
Now, obviously, Romney is not saying that corporations are living, breathing beings with rights to abortion (or not, or depending on the stage of development of the fetal/baby corporations) and marriage, who are subject to Obamacare’s individual mandate (or even Romneycare’s for Massachusetts corporations), can be put to death if they murder someone, and so forth. He means that corporate money always comes from, flows through, and ends up in human hands. It cannot be otherwise: we are the only beings/entities/”things” on the planet that deal in money. Not even the honey badger does that.
Wednesday Links
- Next up for marriage equality: Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Please join us at 12:00 p.m. Eastern today as co-counsels for the plaintiffs Theodore Olson and John Boies join Center for American Progress president John Podesta and Cato chairman Robert A. Levy for a panel discussion on marriage equality, exploring legal and moral questions dating back to the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that ended state bans on interracial marriage. If you cannot join us here at Cato, please tune in to watch a live stream of the event.
- “Republicans have an opportunity for a much more important debate, which will frame the election campaign next year.”
- In President Obama’s next speech, Cato director of foreign policy studies Christopher Preble hopes “that the president reaffirms the importance of peaceful regime change from within, not American-sponsored regime change from without.”
- What will former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s next position on health care be?
- Like cleanliness next to godliness, so is democracy next to tyranny.
- The U.S. hit the debt limit–what’s next?
Newt Tries to Out-Romney Romney, Endorses ‘Public Option’ in Medicare
In 1995, shortly after becoming Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich mulled a radical overhaul of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As he put it to a room full of health insurers, “Maybe we’ll take out FDA.”
What made Newt likable to advocates of freedom is sadly no longer part of his schtick. Here’s how Andrew Stiles reports on Newt’s appearance on Meet the Press yesterday:
“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said when asked about [House Budget Committee chairman Paul] Ryan’s [R-WI] plan to transition to a “premium support” model for Medicare. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.”
As far as an alternative, Gingrich trotted out the same appeal employed by Obama/Reid/Pelosi — for a “national conversation” on how to “improve” Medicare, and promised to eliminate ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ etc.
“I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options,” Gingrich said. Ryan’s plan was simply “too big a jump.”
He even went so far as to compare it the Obama health-care plan. “I’m against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.”
If you close your eyes, it’s like listening to The Princess Bride. Medicare and Medicaid are nothing if not social engineering. So by Newt’s logic, we should get rid of them. But Newt also says that radical change is bad, which means we can’t. That leaves incremental changes. But incremental changes to massive social-engineering experiments are themselves social engineering, so we clearly cannot make incremental changes, either. ObamaCare is both social engineering and radical change. Again by Newt’s logic, ObamaCare is bad, and we must get rid of it, but we can’t. Truly, he has a dizzying intellect.
Newt’s objection to Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms is no less incoherent. It appears to be that the reforms approved by the House would eliminate the traditional Medicare program as an option for Americans who enroll after 2021. So far as I can tell, Newt’s opposition to this feature is consistent with his past positions on Medicare reform. He wants to let people stay in traditional Medicare if that’s what they prefer, and would have traditional Medicare compete against private insurance companies for Medicare enrollees.
But it is completely inconsistent with Newt’s opposition to President Obama’s call for a so-called “public option” to compete with private insurance companies. In 2009, Newt told Good Morning America:
I guarantee you the language they draft for the public plan will give it huge advantages over the private sector or it won’t work…what they will do is rig the game…I mean, anybody who’s watched this Congress who believes that this Congress is going to design a fair, neutral playing field I think would be totally out of touch with reality.
Newt may not realize this, but he was actually explaining why his preferred Medicare reforms would fail: Congress would rig the game to protect the “public option” that Congress offers to seniors — i.e., traditional Medicare. House Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, rather bravely stuck to their guns when they kept a “public option” out of their proposed Medicare reforms. Ryan is offering Republicans credibility and success. By his own admission, Newt is offering them failure.
What’s up with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich? Does the Republican presidential nomination race have some sort of prize for insincerity or incoherence that I don’t know about?
Finally, Newt endorsed a “variation of the individual mandate” (tell me again why he opposes ObamaCare?) and said there is “a way to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy.” He must have meant to say leftists rather than libertarians. Regardless, I invite Newt to come to the Cato Institute so he can explain to people who actually care about freedom just how happy he’s going to make us.
How Dare Conservatives Stand athwart ObamaCare Yelling, Stop!
In a column for Kaiser Health News, Michael L. Millenson, President of Health Quality Advisors LLC, laments that conservatives in the U.S. House are approaching ObamaCare like, well, conservatives. He cites comments by unnamed House GOP staffers at a recent conference:
The Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services? “An innovation center at CMS is an oxymoron,” responded a Republican aide…”Though it’s great for PhDs who come to Washington on the government tab.”
There was also no reason the government should pay for “so-called comparative effectiveness research,” another said.
“Everything’s on the chopping block,” said yet another.
No government-funded comparative-effectiveness research? The horror! For my money, those staffers (and whoever hired them) should get a medal.
Millenson thinks conservative Republicans have just become a bunch of cynics and longs for the days when Republicans would go along with the left-wing impulse to have the federal government micromanage health care:
After all, the McCain-Palin health policy platform in the 2008 presidential election called for coordinated care, greater use of health information technology and a focus on Medicare payment for value, not volume. Once-and-future Republican presidential candidates such as former governors Mike Huckabee (Ark.), Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Tim Pawlenty (Minn.), as well as ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, have long promoted disease prevention, a more innovative federal government and increased use of information technology. Indeed, federal health IT “meaningful use” requirements can even be seen as a direct consequence of Gingrich’s popularization of the phrase, “Paper kills.”
He even invokes the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, as if Buckley would disapprove of conservatives standing athwart ObamaCare yelling, Stop!
Millenson’s tell comes toward the end of the column, when he writes:
traditional GOP conservatives… [have] eschewed ideas in favor of ideological declarations.
Eschewed ideas in favor of…ideas? My guess is that what’s really troubling Millenson is that congressional Republicans are eschewing left-wing health care ideas in favor of freedom.
Better late than never. Now if only GOP governors would do the same.
Mitch Daniels’s ObamaCare Problem
That’s the title of my latest column at National Review Online. An excerpt:
Mitt Romney isn’t the only Republican presidential hopeful with an Obamacare problem: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, were he to become the GOP’s nominee, could also undermine the repeal campaign that has united the party’s base and independent voters.
Among his liabilities:
Daniels’s decision to accept Obamacare funds and move forward with implementation is further undermining the repeal effort. Yesterday, federal judge Roger Vinson reversed his initial order forbidding the Obama administration to implement the law. He did so in part because plaintiff states such as Indiana are implementing it, which he said “undercut” their own argument that he should block it.
But all is not lost for Daniels.
Daniels can spare himself and the repeal movement such setbacks by following the lead of Florida governor Rick Scott (R.) and Alaska governor Sean Parnell (R.) and flatly refusing to implement any aspect of Obamacare. Daniels could even organize another letter in which his fellow governors all make the same announcement.
A move like that could separate him from the pack.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Romney and Huckabee, What a Choice
You know you’re really wrong when Mike Huckabee can call you out. But that’s the situation Mitt Romney finds himself in, as Michael Cannon points out below. Huckabee says Romney’s government-run health care plan with an individual mandate is a bad idea, Romney says he’s still proud of his plan, which is totally different from President Obama’s government-run health care plan with an individual mandate. But really, what can he do? In 17 years of seeking high political office, he is known for two things: changing his position on a surprisingly large number of issues, and his Massachusetts health care program. Which was of course the forerunner of Obamacare, as Michael Cannon and I pointed out in the video that Michael linked. So Romney is still defending a position I think we’ve already refuted.
Meanwhile, in speeches and interviews this week, Mike Huckabee continues to make the untenable connection between gay marriage and family breakdown that I discussed two weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times. Huckabee told reporters:
Huckabee opposes gay marriage on the grounds that, according to him, it destroys traditional families.
“There is a quantified impact of broken families,” Huckabee said. “[There is a] $300 billion dad deficit in America every year…that’s the amount of money that we spend as taxpayers to pick up the pieces because dads are derelict in their duties.”
But what’s the connection? As I wrote:
One thing gay couples are not doing is filling the world with fatherless children. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that allowing more people to make the emotional and financial commitments of marriage could cause family breakdown or welfare spending….
Social conservatives point to a real problem and then offer phony solutions.
But you won’t find your keys on the thoroughfare if you dropped them in the alley, and you won’t reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and preventing them from adopting orphans.
One might add that, as Huckabee knows very well, rates of divorce and unwed motherhood soared decades before anyone started agitating for gay marriage.
If Huckabee and Romney are the Republican frontrunners, President Obama must be sleeping well these days.
Romney Van Winkle
In 2006, then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) fought for and enacted a health care law now known as RomneyCare – though the law is so nearly identical to ObamaCare that one could call it ObamaCare 1.0. Romney is seeking the GOP nomination for president in 2012. But since 84 percent of Republicans want ObamaCare repealed, the fact that he paved the way for ObamaCare is causing problems for Romney among the party faithful. The most recent manifestation came in the form of a tongue-lashing from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R), whose book criticizes Romney both for enacting RomneyCare and for refusing to admit it was mistake. In a recent interview, Huckabee said:
The position he should take is to say: “Look, the reason Obamacare won’t work is because we’ve tried it at the state level and we know it won’t work.”
Through a spokesman, Romney has — once again! – defended ObamaCare 1.0:
“Mitt Romney is proud of what he accomplished for Massachusetts in getting everyone covered,” Romney’s spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, told the Boston Globe, in the first direct response Team Mitt made to Huckabee’s criticism of the health plan in his new book.
Fehrnstrom added the usual stuff about how, even though Romney is proud of what RomneyCare/ObamaCare has done for Massachusetts, RomneyCare/ObamaCare may not be right for the entire nation. As David Boaz and I explain in this Cato video, to which Romney has lent enduring relevance, Romney can’t have it both ways:
It’s as if the guy has just awakened from a 20-year nap and doesn’t realize the world has changed.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Tea Party Not Keen on RomneyCare
The following exchange took place yesterday on the Christian Broadcasting Network between host David Brody and Tea Party Express Chairwoman Amy Kremer.
Brody: Mitt Romney…on the Massachusetts health care situation, you’re going to tell me that’s going to fly in the Tea Party movement?
Kremer: Absolutely not…I’m being honest here…You can’t get away from that. And that’s the thing is, the days of people being able to do one thing in their state in front of a microphone, and then going to Washington and doing something else. I mean, the Internet, and 24-hour news cycles changed it all, and these people don’t have short memories, they’re digging up everything from the past, and they’re not going to let go of the health care.
Hmm. I wonder why…
Video of the CBN exchange is available here. For more on RomneyCare, read “The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain.”
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
On Differentiating ‘Realists’
Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a piece recently wondering “where have all the serious Republicans gone [on foreign policy]?” Heilbrunn observes correctly that the loudest Republican voices on national security these days are advancing a variety of zany views, taking as evidence Mitt Romney’s empirically-challenged attack on the new START treaty.
In a similar vein, Daniel Larison wonders whether a return to Republican “realism” is even anything to thirst for:
In practice, if the GOP “reclaimed its realist roots” I wonder how much would change for the better. Republican realism sounds good by comparison with what we have had for the last decade, but most actual Republican realists, especially those in elected office, did little or nothing to challenge the endless hyping of foreign threats and the frequent recourse to military intervention abroad in the ’90s… How many realists not affiliated with the Cato Institute expressed serious reservations about NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia before the August 2008 war? As sympathetic as I am to many realist arguments, and as much as I appreciate the efforts of the most sober realists to try to steer Republican foreign policy thinking in a constructive direction, until Republicans reject confrontational and aggressive foreign policy goals it will not matter very much if they adopt realist means and rhetoric.
The answer to Larison’s question about NATO expansion is that it was quite unpopular among non-Cato realists. John Lewis Gaddis wrote at the time [.pdf] that “historians — normally so contentious — are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.” He “could recall no other moment…at which there was less support, within the community of historians, for an announced policy position.” That might have been putting things a bit too strongly when it came to realists, but not very much. That is, actual realists, who don’t, by and large, get called to Washington.
This, I think, is the crucial distinction to make. The bottom line here is that there is a big disconnect between people in the Beltway who call themselves realists and actual realists. Ur-realist Kenneth Waltz once described himself as “a fierce critic of American military policy and spending and strategy, at least since the 1970s.” John Mearsheimer points out that realists opposed the Vietnam War almost to a man (except for Henry Kissinger), and that realists opposed the Iraq War almost to a man (except for Henry Kissinger). Since at least the Johnson administration, realists have tended to be dovish relative to the Beltway consensus as it has existed at any point in time, and active dovishness is not permitted in polite company in Washington.
Not only is it a mistake to hearken back to a Glory Day of Republican Realism, it is really a mistake to characterize any existing Beltway faction as “realist.” Belligerent nationalists, Wilsonians, liberal imperialists…all those we have. Realists, not so much.
RomneyCare Advocates: We Swear, This Time Centralized Planning Will Work
You know things aren’t going well in Massachusetts when supporters of RomneyCare write “there’s some evidence that the reforms signed into law by Mitt Romney in 2006 are struggling.” That’s how The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein puts it in a post defending RomneyCare. The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn offers a similar defense.
Klein mentions only a few of the difficulties confronting Massachusetts. Here are a few more:
- The Commonwealth Fund reports that even though Massachusetts already had the highest health insurance premiums in the nation, premiums rose faster post-RomneyCare than anywhere else; 21-46 percent faster than the national average.
- A recent study estimates that RomneyCare has so far increased employer-sponsored health-insurance premiums by an average of 6 percent.
- The success that Klein sees in Massachusetts’ individual market — which accounts for just 4 percent of the private market — is merely the product of shifting costs to workers with job-based coverage.
- Contrary to Klein’s post hoc spin that RomneyCare “was never an attempt to control costs,” Romney himself promised that “the costs of health care will be reduced.”
- Aaron Yelowitz and I find evidence suggesting that uninsured Massachusetts residents are responding to the individual mandate not by obtaining coverage but by concealing their insurance status. Coverage gains may therefore be less than official estimates suggest.
- Evidence is mounting that, despite stiffer penalties than ObamaCare will impose, increasing numbers of people are gaming the individual mandate by only purchasing health insurance when they need medical care. Such behavior could ultimately cause the “private” insurance market to collapse.
Nevertheless, the Klein/Cohn thesis is basically that costs have been climbing and employers have been dropping/curtailing health benefits for decades. So you can’t blame that stuff on RomneyCare. We should instead be thankful that Massachusetts enacted a new raft of government price controls, mandates, and subsidies to protect residents from those features of “the American health-care system.”
The only problem is that “the American health-care system” is the product of the old raft of government price & exchange controls, mandates, and subsidies. The largest purchaser of medical care in the country (and the world) is Medicare. Medicaid is second. The Left complains so much about fee-for-service medicine fueling rising health care costs and reducing quality, you’d never know that their beloved Medicare program is the primary reason for its dominance. Likewise, the reason why employers are dropping and curtailing coverage is that the government turned the private health insurance market into an unsustainable employment-based system that is doomed to unravel. Cohn’s book documents the inhumanity of that system so well, you’d think it would sour him on the sort of centralized planning that created it. I could go on…
RomneyCare and its progeny ObamaCare are attempts by the Left’s central planners to clean up their own mess. If Klein and Cohn want to defend those laws, pointing to the damage already caused by their economic policies won’t do the trick. They need to explain why government price & exchange controls, mandates, and subsidies will produce something other than what they have always produced.
Massachusetts Treasurer on ObamaCare: ‘We Should Stop It’
Massachusetts Treasurer Tim Cahill, who is running for governor as an independent, claims that former governor Mitt Romney’s 2006 health care law “has created a huge hole in our budget,” and has this to say about ObamaCare:
If the federal plan is the Massachusetts plan writ large, then we should stop it, because we’re going to be in the same place four or five years down the road.
Indeed, ObamaCare is the Massachusetts plan writ large.
Repeal the bill.
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