Last week, the House passed a homeland security appropriations bill slashing funding for grants to states and localities. The New York Times has now noticed and unleashed an indignant editorial:

House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.

The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”

Only a few months ago, Times editorials accused King of trying to “hype” and “stoke” fear of homegrown Muslim terrorism. It’s sort of touching to see them get behind his fearmongering when the beneficiaries are local firefighters, police, and other local interests.

But the editorial has trouble worse than hypocrisy. For starters, it’s light on facts. Its accounting seems to omit over $320 million in funds for local firefighters that a floor amendment put in the bill. It also fails to mention that the bill eliminates a formula that ensures that homeland security funds are distributed to every state. Because it means that counterterrorism spending is highest per-capita in rural areas where the threat from terrorism is lowest, homeland security watchers have long attacked that minimum funding provision. So while this bill would indeed cut homeland security funds going to New York, it would also mean that New York gets more of the remaining funds.

More importantly, the Times evidently did not try too hard to find an explanation for the cuts once they settled on irresponsibility, given that Republican appropriators readily offered one: the funds are wasteful. Rather than explain why they think the money is well spent (my definition of responsibility), the editorial conflates spending on security with security itself. It says the cuts will be “damaging,” but it cites only damage to the budgets of recipient agencies, not their purpose.

In fact, the threat of terrorism is so low in the United States and the efficacy of the funds in mitigating it so uncertain that the right amount of homeland security spending in most parts of the United States is none. That is especially true now that we are roughly a decade removed from the September 11 attacks, which spawned a massive increase in homeland security grant-making. That splurge was meant to bolster our ability to defend against what has proved a massively inflated threat of catastrophic terrorism; it was not meant to be a permanent subsidy to state and local governments.

New York City is uniquely threatened, but that does not mean that federal taxpayers should foot the bill. The federal government should collect intelligence on terrorists and hunt them down. Local and state officials should use that information to determine the right amount of local security spending. They have to ask whether normal policing funds, school spending, or slightly lower taxes are worth sacrificing for a new camera or chemical clean-up suit. Federal grants, because they are buried in a massive budget and partially deficit-funded, dilute our ability to perceive those tradeoffs. They also heighten fear of terrorism by encouraging state and local interests to overstate their peril to win the grants, as the editorial demonstrates.

It ends by instructing the Senate to “stand up for security over politics” and restore funding to past levels. But these decisions should be made politically. We give power over security policy to politicians — rather than leaving it exclusively to unelected bureaucrats — because these decisions are important. That is a product of design, not an accident. The notion that security is too important for politics is backwards.

Luckily, the attempt to divorce security policy from electoral politics is a pretense. The Times is engaging in politics by asking for funds. They aim to politically punish those that oppose their preferred policies. If the Senate restores most of the grant funds, as it likely will, it will do so for sound political reasons.

Cross-posted from The National Interest.

The NYT‘s Weak Defense of Homeland Security Grants is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Five years ago, in the landmark property rights case of Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court upheld the forced transfer of land from various homeowners by finding that “economic development” qualifies as a public purpose for purposes of satisfying the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause.  In doing so, however, the Court reaffirmed that the government may not “take property under the mere pretext of a public purpose, when its actual purpose was to bestow a private benefit.”

State and federal courts have since applied that pretext standard in widely differing ways while identifying four factors as indicators of pretext: evidence of pretextual intent, benefits that flow predominantly to a private party, haphazard planning, and a readily identifiable beneficiary.  Moreover, since Kelo, 43 states have passed eminent domain reform laws that constrain or forbid “economic development” condemnations.

While many of these laws are strong enough to curtail abuse, in at least 19 states the restrictions are undercut by nearly unlimited definitions of “blight.”  The state of New York has seen perhaps the most egregious examples of eminent-domain abuse in the post-Kelo era, and now provides the example of Columbia University’s collusion with several government agencies to have large swaths of Manhattan declared blighted and literally pave the way for the university’s expansion project.  In this brazen example of eminent-domain abuse, the New York Court of Appeals (the highest state court) reversed a decision of the New York Appellate Division that relied extensively on Kelo’s pretext analysis and thus favored the small business owners challenging the Columbia-driven condemnations.  The Court of Appeals failed even to cite Kelo and ignored all four pretext considerations, instead defining pretext so narrowly that even the most abusive forms of favoritism will escape judicial scrutiny.

Cato joined the Institute for Justice and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in a brief supporting the condemnees’ request that the Supreme Court review the case and address the widespread confusion about Kelo’s meaning in the context of pretextual takings.  Our brief highlights the need for the Court to establish and enforce safeguards to protect citizens from takings effected for private purposes.  We argue that this case is an excellent vehicle for the Court to define what qualifies a taking as “pretextual” and consider the weight to be accorded to each of the four criteria developed by the lower and state courts.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to hear the case later this fall. The name of the case is Tuck-It-Away, Inc. v. New York State Urban Development Corp and you can read the full brief here (pdf).  You can read more from Cato on property rights here.

Eminent Domain Shenanigans is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, FoxNews.com posted a story on what appears to be a growing problem for public school systems across the country: accommodating Muslim holidays. Unfortunately, the report didn’t contain the solution to the problem. It did, though, contain a very succinct discussion of the root of the problem; an example of the good intent that causes people to ignore the problem; and the kind of “solution” that is ultimately at odds with the most basic of American values.

A quote from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg captured the essence of the problem:

One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school.

There you have the basic conundrum in a nutshell: Whenever you have a diverse population — whether in a hamlet, city, state, or nation — and everyone has to support a single system of government schools, you cannot possibly treat all people – or even most of them — equally. Either there are winners and losers, or nobody gets anything.

Understanding why public schooling  can’t handle diversity — why, simply, one size can’t fit all — is really basic common sense. So why isn’t there more outrage over, or even just recognition of, the utter illogic of our education system? Mohamed Elibiary, President and CEO of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, illustrated the attitude that likely causes lots of Americans to wear blinders:

I’m a little torn. I want Muslims to be getting the same recognition as other Americans, but at the same time I don’t want to see public education systems be a battleground between religious identities, because then we’re missing the point of why we have a public education system to begin with.

No doubt many people truly believe as Elibiary does: that a major purpose of public schooling is to bring diverse people together and, by doing so, unify them. It’s a fine intention, but also a classic case of intent not matching reality. Indeed, the reality is often very much the opposite. Rather than unifying people, public schooling has repeatedly forced religious conflict (as well as conflict over race, ethnicity, political philosophy, curriculum, and on and on).

It started almost on Day One, when Horace Mann, a Unitarian, was locked in conflict with Calvinists over what kind of Protestantism the state’s nascent “common schools” would teach. When Roman Catholics began arriving in America in large numbers, battles — sometimes deadly – erupted over who would get what kind of Christianity in the public schools. When Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” fired the first big blast in the war over the teaching of human origins, a fight we are still very much in. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the fighting moved to what, if any, religious expression is permissible in public schools. And now, we’re getting fired up over whose holidays will get the most deference from government schools. It almost seems like war without end.

Finally, the article gropes at – but doesn’t grab — the solution to our education and diversity problem. Says Georgetown University professor Bradley Blakeman:

That’s the beauty of having a school district responsive to the localities as opposed to blanket rules that affect multiple jurisdictions, states or even countries. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to these kinds of rules and regulations. We’re not a homogeneous nation, which makes us so great.

Blakeman is heading in the right direction (even as federal policy pushes us the opposite way): The closer that control of education gets to individual people, the more easily it can be tailored to unique needs, values, and desires. Unfortunately, Blakeman fails to identify the obvious last step: completely decoupling government funding from provision of education. In other words, instituting universal educational choice. Making matters worse, Blakeman for all intents and purposes concludes that as long as decisions are made at the local level, and the majority gets its way, everything is fine:

A school should reflect the beliefs and practices of the community that they serve. And if school boards are sensitive to their populations, that’s fine, provided the decisions of the board reflect the majority opinion of its community.

It may sound harsh, but one way to describe this is simply ”tyranny of the majority” — whatever the majority wants, it gets, as long as it is the local majority. It’s a solution that completely ignores that ours is not supposed to be a nation of majority rule, but rule of law that protects individual freedom. And, of course, one of the most basic protections is the prohibition on government tipping the scales in favor of one religion, two religions, or no religion at all. 

This solution also fails, by the way, to address the problem at hand: School districts — not states or Washington — having to accommodate diverse populations. In other words, ”local control” is ultimately no solution at all.

Universal choice is, quite simply, the only system of education compatible with the most basic of American values — individual liberty – and the only way to avoid constant, divisive battles over who will get what out of the schools. Hopefully, people will come to realize that before our conflicts get even worse.

Take Off the Blinders: Diversity Demands Educational Freedom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Supporters of the Cleveland Cavaliers, especially the owner of the team, are upset that basketball superstar LeBron James has decided to sign with the Miami Heat. The anger is especially intense because the Cavaliers offered James $4 million more over the next five years. But their anger is misplaced because more money in Cleveland actually translates into about $1 million less disposable income when the burden of state and local income taxes is added to the equation. Rather than condemn James for making a rational choice, local basketball fans should tar and feather Ohio politicians.

This story from CNBC walks through the calculations.

[I]f you match up what James’ salary would be for the first five years in Cleveland and the five years in Miami, you find that the Cavaliers are only offering him $4 million more. That advantage gets erased — and actually gives the Heat the monetary edge over — when you consider the income tax difference. …Playing in Cleveland, LeBron would face a state income tax of 5.925 percent, plus a Cleveland city tax of two percent. Over the first five years of a new contract with Cleveland, James would give back $3,953,060 combined to the state and city for the 41 games each season he’d play at home. But James would have to pay none of that for home games in Miami since Florida doesn’t have an income tax. Athletes have to pay income taxes to states that they play in on the road, so the games he’ll play away from home — whether he played for Cleveland or Miami — are essentially a wash. But there are, on average, 11 away games per season where James would have to pay Ohio and Cleveland taxes. Why? Because he has to pay when he plays in the six areas –– Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Illinois, Toronto and Tennessee –– that have no jock taxes. That’s another $1,061,128 he’ll have to pay in taxes that he wouldn’t have to pay in Miami.

New York basketball fans also should be angry. With some of the highest taxes in the nation, many of which target highly productive people as part of a class-warfare policy, New York is bad news for professional athletes. The New York Post, commenting on the probability that James would sign with the Miami Heat, identified the real villains.

[B]lame our dysfunctional lawmakers in Albany, who have saddled top-earning New Yorkers with the highest state and city income taxes in the nation, soon to be 12.85 percent on top of the IRS bite. There is no state income tax in Florida. On a five-year contract worth $96 million — what he’d get from the Knicks or the Heat — LeBron would pay $12.34 million in New York taxes. Quite a penalty for the privilege of working in Midtown.

Now let’s look at the big picture. The calculations that LeBron James made when deciding to sign with the Miami Heat are the same calculations that companies make when deciding whether to build factories and create jobs. So when people wonder why high-tax states such as Ohio, California, and New York are losing jobs to zero–income tax states such as Florida and Texas, part of the answer should be obvious. And if we move to the global level, folks should not be too surprised that companies and investors, all other things equal, are likely to avoid the United States, with its punitive 35 percent corporate tax, and instead create jobs and build wealth in places like Hong Kong, Ireland, and Switzerland.

Jilted Cavs Fans Should Blame Ohio’s Income Tax is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

U.S. News & World Report’s columnist Paul Bedard reports that Transportation secretary Ray LaHood told him that it’s fun playing Santa Claus to states and cities around the nation.

So let’s take a look at some recent examples of DOT gift-giving with federal taxpayers’ money:

• DOT’s Federal Highway Administration helped restore an old brewery in Petosi, Wisconsin with a $450,000 gift. That should make taxpayers want to drink.

• DOT is sending $116,000 to Calaveras County, California to restore a train that operated in the 1920s.

• Dolgeville, New York intends to use DOT stimulus money to repair sidewalks even though the village acknowledges that the new sidewalks will have to be torn up and replaced again due to impending water and sewage line upgrades. Keynes would be particularly proud of this one. Last year the city received a $1 million gift from DOT for the “installation of period street lights, trees, accent pavers, street furniture and sidewalk improvements” on the city’s Main Street.

• Cascade County, Montana plans on spending $75,000 of DOT money on the Montana Museum of Railroad History.

• The Michigan Department of Transportation plans on spending $5 million in federal DOT money on a bunch of projects that are of unquestionable national importance: cobblestone streets in Grand Rapids; exhibits at the Detroit Science Center; rehabilitating the historic Quincy and Torch Lake Railroad Engine House in the Upper Peninsula; a bridge for bicyclists and pedestrians over the Clinton River in Utica and bike racks at several locations in Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties.

• Boone County Regional Airport in Arkansas plans on using $50,000 in DOT money to market SeaPort Airlines. Fly, fly away taxpayer money.

These projects might be worthwhile, but they should be paid for by the local interests who can best judge their worth.

In his 1932 book, Congress as Santa Claus, constitutional scholar Charles Warren offered a prescient warning on the dangers of federal subsidization of state and local affairs:

The continuance of this practice of shifting to the National Government responsibility for payment for matters which formerly were dealt with by individual initiative, by community cooperation, by voluntary organizations, or by local or State governments – the continuance of this practice of making drafts on the National Treasury to carry out purposes not within the enumerated or implied powers of the National Government will inevitably have two results.

So far as these Government donations consist of direct appropriations for private or local interests, they will deaden and finally destroy the eagerness or willingness of State Governments and local communities to pay for their own needs. So far as they take the shape of the so-called Federal Aid laws for local projects to be matched by local appropriations, they will have ‘a tendency to induce excessive expenditures by State and municipal governments, with top-heavy bond issues and oppressive local taxation.’

I doubt in Warren’s worst nightmares could he have envisioned the examples of DOT spending above, let alone the existence of a $90 billion federal Department of Transportation.

Ray LaHood as Santa Claus is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Gene Healy on today’s election in Massachusetts: “If Republican Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts special election Tuesday, the Bay State will have its first GOP senator since the era when disco was king. And Brown will have the much-derided Tea Party legions to thank.”

• Why opportunistic politicians need to stop using times of crisis for their own ends and let the next one go to waste.

• George W. Obama? “Bush’s successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we’ve signed.”

• Can Google beat China? Cato’s Timothy B. Lee tackles the question in The New York Times Online.

• Podcast: “Our America Initiative” featuring former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. Johnson discusses out of control government spending, immigration, the Bush years, the drug war, defense policy and more.

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Congress hashes out an agreement behind closed doors to expand the government’s role in health care, a Medicaid story out of New York serves as another reminder that government is part of the health care problem, not the solution. Audits released by the state’s comptroller found $169 million in misspent funds, including a $196,000 cab bill for a woman who took a daily $300 taxi ride to visit her son in Albany for three years.

The following are some of the findings:

• $53 million in overpayments for Medicaid recipients who had multiple identification numbers.

• $20 million that was nearly spent because the state’s computer system failed to catch a clerical error. Auditors caught it before it was paid out.

• $5.4 million in overpayments to 10 hospitals that billed for discharging a patient when, in fact, the patient had been transferred to another facility. Hospitals receive higher payments for discharges rather than transfers.

• $1.2 million paid for services that were not medically necessary or not provided.

According to the state’s comptroller, “[T]he state Medicaid system is leaking millions of dollars… Safeguards designed to protect the taxpayers by detecting waste, fraud and abuse keep failing.” However, this is business as usual when it comes to New York’s notoriously fraud-ridden Medicaid program, as a Cato essay on fraud and abuse in federal programs notes:

The former chief investigator of the state’s Medicaid fraud office believes that about 10 percent of the state’s Medicaid budget is consumed by pure fraud, while another 20 to 30 percent is consumed by dubious spending that might not cross the line of being outright criminal.

A 2005 investigation by the New York Times found remarkably brazen examples of fraud and abuse in New York’s Medicaid. The article noted that the program has “become so huge, so complex, and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited… [T]he program has been misspending billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste, and profiteering.”

With the massive and complex expansion of Medicaid and other health programs in the pending legislation, we can expect a gargantuan expansion in fraud and abuse. The good news, I suppose, is that the government will need a massive hiring of new health care auditors, which should reduce the nation’s unemployment rate.

For more on fraud and abuse in government healthcare, see here.

Medicaid’s Cash Cab is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Terrorists are named after an emotion for a reason. They use violence to produce widespread fear for a political purpose. The number of those they kill or injure will always be a small fraction of those they frighten. This creates problems for leaders, and even analysts, when they talk publicly about terrorism. On one hand, leaders need to convince the public that they are on the case in protecting them, or else they won’t be leaders for long. On the other hand, good leaders try to minimize unwarranted fear.

One reason is that we shouldn’t give terrorists what they want. Another is that fear is a real social harm, particularly when it is exaggerated. Stress from fear harms health. It causes bad decisions. For example, if people avoid flying and drive instead the number of added fatalities on the road will quickly surpass the dead from a typical terrorist attack. Most important, excessive fear causes policy responses that often damage the economy without much added safety. Measured in lives on dollars, reactions to terrorism often cost more than the attack themselves.

If leaders talk only about the danger of terrorism and everything they are doing to fight it, without putting danger in context, they may be on safe political ground, but they risk causing or prolonging groundless fear and encouraging all sorts of harmful overreactions. That is the Bush Administration’s counterterrorism record, in a nutshell. If leaders just say “calm down and worry about something more likely to harm you,” they will be butchered politically.

So a reasonable approach is to sound concerned but reassuring. You want to convince people that they are mostly safe without appearing complacent. I don’t like many of this administration’s counterterrorism policies, starting with Afghanistan, but thus far its communication about terrorism is far more sensible than the last administration’s. That includes the aftermath of this attempted Christmas Day attack.

The administration made it clear that it is unacceptable that a guy we just got warned about got onto a plane wearing explosives. But the President also said Americans should be generally confident in their safety from terrorism. He didn’t act as if this incident was the most important thing on his schedule this year or compare the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen to the Third Reich or what have you, exaggerating their capability and power. I wish he had gone further and said that detonating explosives smuggled on to a plane is tricky and that flying remains incredibly safe. (Jim Harper will soon have more to say here on the security failures and how to talk about them.)

In a different political universe, the President could describe the terrorist threat honestly. He would say that recent attempted terrorist attacks in the United States show more amateurism and failure than skill and success. He could add that we are fortunate that our greatest enemy, al Qaeda and its fellow-travelers, are scattered and weak compared the sorts of enemies we historically faced. He would sound more like Michael Bloomberg, who told New Yorkers that they had a better chance of being struck by lightening than killed by terrorists, after a particularly inept terrorist plot on JFK airport was uncovered. He could even quote Nate Silver, who calculates that in the last decade of US flights, there was one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. It’s true, as Kip Viscusi demonstrates, that people don’t think like actuaries. They rightly value different sorts of deaths in different ways, and want more protection against terrorism than other dangers. But knowing the odds is still important in weighing the appropriate amount of concern and forming policy preferences. The president could also have treated voters like grown-ups and pointed out that whatever flaws in airline security that this attempted attack reveals, there is no such thing as perfect safety, and sooner or later even the finest security systems fail.

I also disagree with the argument that the trouble with our airline security or national security policy-making in general is insufficient presidential attention. Overall, we could do with a little more masterly inactivity in security policy, to use an old British phrase. Aviation security is another matter, but I struggle to see how presidential involvement would have fixed this problem. The 9-11 Commission did claim that September 11 occurred because leaders failed to pay sufficient attention to al Qaeda, but there, as in other matters, the Commission is wrong. At least in the executive branch, the attention paid to the threat in the 1990s was quite substantial, as you can see in this essay by Josh Rovner or in my contribution to this book. The historical record shows that the threat was well understood by security officials and the reading public. Time, for example, called Osama bin Laden the most wanted man in the world when they interviewed him in 1998. The trouble, in my opinion, was not misperception but our policies and the difficult and unprecedented nature of problem–a terrorist group ensconced in hostile country that refused to do anything about it.

Getting the line between confidence and vigilance right is not easy, but it starts with acknowledgment that there is such a thing as overreaction. That subject will be the on the agenda for our January 13 counterterrorism forum with James Fallows, State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Daniel Benjamin, Paul Pillar and others.

*My attempts to explain this stuff to Politico yesterday resulted in some confused and inaccurate uses of my quotes in this story by Carol E. Lee, which unconvincingly compares the Obama’s response to this terrorist attempt to his silly involvement in the Henry Louis Gates arrest fiasco. First, Lee absurdly uses me as example of “predictable” attacks from the right on Obama, when I said I was glad that the President said Americans should feel confident but that I’d have preferred if he’d done it more forcefully by saying flying remains safe and al Qaeda weak. That is more or less the opposite of the predictable take on the right. Then, she says that my views on the President’s response to the attacks referred to his post-press conference golf outing. I was talking about his overall response, or lack thereof, over the last several days. I can’t decipher the meaning of presidential golf.

Talking about Terrorism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A modest proposal: Suppose that we decide to streamline our inefficient criminal justice system by treating people under suspicion of involvement with violent crime—whether or not they’ve been arrested, charged, or even informed of this suspicion—as equivalent to convicted felons.  Suppose, then, that we permit them to be stripped of certain constitutionally protected rights at the discretion of the executive branch.

Outrageous?  Some depraved brainchild of the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel?  Actually, it’s the editorial position of The New York Times:

Under federal law, people who pose a heightened risk of violence cannot buy or own firearms, including convicted felons, domestic abusers, the seriously mentally ill and several other categories. Suspected terrorist is not one them.

Individuals on the government’s terrorist watch list can be barred from boarding airplanes, but not from purchasing high-powered guns or explosives. Bipartisan legislation in both houses of Congress would end this ridiculous loophole, commonly known as the “terror gap.

The Times does note, before dismissing the fact with the wave of a hand, that “thousands” of people have been found to be on the list improperly.  But let’s linger a bit longer over this.  The terrorist watch list, at last count, boasted about a million entries.  When you eliminate variant spellings and duplicate entries—and rest assured that this would be another enormous source of problems—there are about 400,000 unique individuals on the list, of whom some 20,000 are Americans. Thousands more are nominated for inclusion on the list each week.

Employ, for a moment, some common sense and arithmetic. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 people. (I should add: 19 people armed with box cutters.) If even one percent of those 20,000 were truly intent on staging violent domestic attacks, doesn’t it seem likely we would have noticed? To be sure, some small subset of them really are serious threats. They are probably the very people the government is actively investigating, and would prefer not to tip off by, say, having their attempted gun purchases denied.

There’s also, of course, an almost heartwarming faith in formal process here.  I can imagine circumstances where blocking someone at a point of sale might prevent bloodshed—some guy in the heat of passion or the haze of liquor acting on impulse to settle a score. But trained and fanatically committed terrorists, backed by the resources of an international network, who typically spend months or even years plotting significant operations? Are they serious? How does that conversation go? “No, no, I’m sorry Osama.  Yes, the Wal-Mart clerk, she would not sell us a pistol! I know, and after Ayman went to all that trouble making our fake passports by hand. I was disappointed too.  But I guess we’d better scrap the plan and head back to Yemen.”

What the other categories of “risky” people the Times lists have in common is  that they’ve been determined to be dangerous by a court, which is normally the process by which we go about depriving people of their rights. It seems perverse to depart from that principle precisely for the category of suspects least likely to be hampered by these sorts of limitations.

The John Yoo Theory of Gun Control is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ilya Shapiro warns us that the U.S. Supreme Court probably will not uphold property rights in a case involving Florida beachfront property.  But property rights did receive an unexpected boost in New York yesterday, where an appeals court overturned a taking for the benefit of Columbia University.

Reports the New York Times:

A New York appeals court ruled Thursday that the state could not use eminent domain on behalf of Columbia University to obtain parts of a 17-acre site in Upper Manhattan, setting back plans for a satellite campus at a time of discord over government power to acquire property.

In a 3-to-2 decision, a panel of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan annulled the state’s 2008 decision to take property for the expansion project, saying that its condemnation procedure was unconstitutional.

The majority opinion was scathing in its appraisal of how the “scheme was hatched,” using terms like “sophistry” and “idiocy” in describing how the state went about declaring the neighborhood blighted, the main prerequisite for eminent domain.

The $6.3 billion expansion plan is not dead; an appeal has been promised, and Columbia still controls most of the land. But at a time when the government’s use of eminent domain on behalf of private interests has become increasingly controversial, the ruling was a boon for opponents.

“I feel unbelievable,” said Nicholas Sprayregen, the owner of several self-storage warehouses in the Manhattanville expansion area and one of two property owners who have refused to sell to the university. “I was always cautiously optimistic. But I was aware we were going against 50 years of unfair cases against property owners.”

New York state is not a particularly friendly venue to property rights, but the judges rightly saw through the claims made by state official to justify seizing property from a private person for the benefit of a private organization.  The ruling could be reversed, but nevertheless is an important affirmation that property rights warrant constitutional and legal protection even in New York.

A Victory for Property Rights is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Chuck Schumer is perhaps my favorite U.S. Senator because of his endless capacity to make me laugh.  He often reminds me of Inspector Clouseau, the earnest but bumbling detective from the Pink Panther movies.

Through an excellent post by Scott Lincome today, I learned not only that official NBA jerseys (those worn by the players) are made for Adidas in upstate New York, but that Senator Schumer is attempting to thwart the company’s decision to move production to Thailand. 

I share Scott’s assessment of the absurdity of Schumer’s efforts, but more importantly, I wanted to share this humorous footage of Schumer’s awkward nativist appeal that basketball is an American-centric game….conducted in front of German-born NBA Star Dirk Nowitski’s jersey. 

Classic!

Schumer Fouls Out is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I agree with Chris Preble’s assessment of Steve Simon’s opinion piece in the New York Times Tuesday. “Why We Should Put Jihad on Trial” is animated by a sound understanding of the strategic logic of terrorism. Simon knows that the proper response is outclassing terrorists in terms of ideology and legitimacy. Trying KSM transparently in New York is just, and doing justice is powerful counterterrorism. The procedural and security fears about it are poorly founded.

It’s useful to compare another opinion piece, written with welcome thought and care, but missing a key point about counterterrorism. In “Holder’s al Qaeda Incentive Plan,” Wall Street Journal “Main Street” columnist William McGurn assesses the incentive structure terrorists face if they are accorded the niceties of a trial should they attack civilians in the United States, compared to the rough treatment they would and should expect were they caught attacking U.S. troops on a foreign battlefield.

It’s a troublesome irony, and it’s very smart on McGurn’s part to game out the thinking of terrorists rather than indulging impulses to react as they would have us do. But terrorists are not the actors a trial in New York is most meant to influence.

In her book, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns, U.S. National War College professor of strategy Audrey Kurth Cronin writes:

Most people think of terrorism as a dichotomous struggle between a group and a government. However, given their highly leveraged nature, terrorist campaigns involve three strategic actors—the group, the government, and the audience—arrayed in a kind of terrorist “triad.” More specifically, the three dimensions are the group that uses terrorism to achieve an objective, the government representing the direct target of their attacks, and the audiences who are influenced by the violence.

Similarly, at Cato’s counterterrorism conference, I argued that terrorism seeks to induce overreaction on the part of victim states, driving support to terrorists from their geographical and ideological neighbors. Declining to overreact, and having the discipline to meticulously accord terror suspects fair treatment, dissipates the gains terrorists want and expect: increased support from their neighbors.

This is why a public trial—for all its costs and complexities—is worth doing. It’s to gain advantage with the third strategic actor.

The Third Strategic Actor is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Dear members of Congress: If you’re not going to read the bills you pass,  at least read the Constitution. Don’t fret; it’s short and written in plain English.

• Richard Rahn: Pay members of Congress more. (Or less, depending on their performance.)

• NYC: “The city that never smokes.” A proposal to ban lighting up in New York’s parks has exposed the puritanical agenda behind the crusade against smoking.

• Tyler Cowen: With health care costs high and rising, government mandates to buy insurance would make many people worse off.

• Podcast: “Pay Czar Cuts Checks“

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Two figures that say it all.

Death Rates (deaths per 1,000 population), New York City, c. 1800-2007. Source: NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. Summary of Vital Statistics (2008). H/T to William Briggs for making me aware of this figure.

Infant Mortality Rate (deaths per 1,000 live births), New York City, 1898-2007. In 1898 IMR was estimated to be 140.9 Because of incomplete reporting of early neonatal deaths, this is almost certainly an underestimate. In 2007 IMR was 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births. Source: NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. Summary of Vital Statistics (2008)

The Improving State of New York City, circa 1800-2007 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An earlier post revealed that higher tax rates in Maryland were backfiring, leading to less revenue from upper-income taxpayers. It seems New York politicians are running into a similar problem. According to an AP report, the state’s 100 richest taxpayers have paid $1 billion less than expected following a big tax hike. The story notes that several rich people have left the state, and all three examples are about people who have redomiciled in Florida, which has no state income tax. For more background information on why higher taxes on the rich do not necessarily raise revenue, see this three-part Laffer Curve video series (here, here, and here):

Early data from New York show the higher tax rates for the wealthy have yielded lower-than-expected state wealth.

…[New York Governor David] Paterson said last week that revenues from the income tax increases and other taxes enacted in April are running about 20 percent less than anticipated.

…So far this year, half of about $1 billion in expected revenue from New York’s 100 richest taxpayers is missing.

…State officials say they don’t know how much of the missing revenue is because any wealthy New Yorkers simply left. But at least two high-profile defectors have sounded off on the tax changes: Buffalo Sabres owner Tom Golisano, the billionaire who ran for governor three times and who was paying $13,000 a day in New York income taxes, and radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

…Donald Trump told Fox News earlier this year that several of his millionaire friends were talking about leaving the state over the latest taxes.

Revenge of the Laffer Curve, Part II is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

David Rockefeller, the former chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, makes a compelling historical case in today’s New York Times for pursing free trade policies. Rockefeller has been around long enough to remember the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930 and the Great Depression that followed. In an op-ed piece titled, “Present at the Trade Wars,” he writes:

I lived through the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it, and I saw that there was no direct cause and effect relationship. Rather, there were specific governmental actions and equally important failures to act, often driven by political expediency, that brought on the Depression and determined its severity and longevity.

One critical mistake was America’s retreat from international trade. This not only helped to turn the 1929 stock market decline into a depression, it also chipped away at trust between nations, paving the way for World War II.

On the eve of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh this week, Rockefeller offers a timely warning to President Obama not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Learning from Trade Wars Past is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I have been trying for years to make people understand that a single system of government schools is fundamentally at odds with American values, especially individual liberty and equal treatment under the law. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in opposing a move to let city public schools close for Muslim holidays as they do for Christian and Jewish holidays, recently made my point in one, simple sentence:

One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school.

Exactly. So which religions, and which people, will get to be more equal than others, Mr. Mayor?

With universal school choice, we wouldn’t have to grapple with such terrible questions.

New York Mayor Opposes Closing Schools for Muslim Holidays is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column today would be astonishing in its incoherence if only Friedman hadn’t long ago sapped us of our ability to be astonished by his incoherence. Like many capital-’d’ Democrats, Friedman has soured on democracy for failing to deliver on his policy wish list.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Why does Friedman say the United States has one-party democracy? Because the Republican Party is effectively opposing the Democratic Party’s agenda! Not even kidding. Get this:

The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

Only the Democrats are really playing! You might think that would mean they can do whatever they darn well please. But no! The Democrats can’t do anything! Because the other party‘s opposition is so effective! So it’s exactly as if there’s just one party: nothing gets done!

My hunch is that the Times’ editors see Friedman aiming the gun at his foot, but watching a man stupid enough to actually pull the trigger is so fun they hate to intervene. That or they’re trying to explode the myth of American meritocracy.

So where were we? Oh, yes: one-party democracy is aggravating because sometimes one party can’t do what it wants because the other party gets in the way. Sooo frustrating!!! Why have democracy at all when all you end up with is a single party stymied by the other one! And so it is that Friedman comes to wax romantic about communist central planning:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

Nikita Kruschev, the enlightened leader of a now-defunct one-party autocracy, was also committed to overtaking the United States in technology and so much more. “We will bury you” is how he put it. At the time, more than a few left-leaning American opinionmakers suspected he was right. After all, how can inefficiently squabbling democracies possibly keep pace with undivided regimes wholly devoted to scientifically centrally planning their way into the brighter, better future? And that, children, is why we speak Russian today.

Thomas Friedman’s New Math of Democracy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Some well-known bloggers are being terrible bullies, beating up on private schools.

Felix Salmon kicks things off by hoping the government tightens the definition of a “charitable” organization and begins taxing private schools who don’t “do a bit more to earn it.” Matt Yglesias agrees that private schools are mooching deadbeats and ups the ante, calling them actively harmful as well. Finally, Conor Clarke at The Atlantic agrees, but makes the other two look like panty-waists by proposing the government radically narrow what is considered a charity in the first place.

Yglesias even has the temerity to indict private schools for the failure of NYC public schools:

And as best one can tell, their main impact on the common weal is negative, drawing parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect. You’d have to believe that New York City’s public schools would be both better funded and free of this kind of nonsense if a larger portion of the city’s elite were sending their kids to them.

Really? Would we have to believe what Yglesias says? No, it’s not “the best one can tell.” According to the evidence, Yglesias’ breezy, offhand accusation is demonstrably wrong. Increased competition from private schools actually improves public school performance.

And the more kids who leave public to go private, the more money the schools have for the kids who remain.

What ingrates. They complain about the lost tax revenue while dismissing out of hand the billions of dollars that parents and donors spend every year to educate children outside the government system. They dismiss the fact that these parents and donors are saving taxpayers in the neighborhood of $60 Billion a year based on current-dollar public school spending and the number of kids in private schools.

Finally, if this is all about rich people getting a free ride, why aren’t these guys screaming about means-testing public schools? Why shouldn’t we charge rich parents tuition to attend public schools? If a charitable deduction for private schools is so bad, why isn’t a free public education even worse?

I Would Rather You Just Said “Thank You, Private Schools,” and Went on Your Way… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I was never a fan of Dick Cheney’s one percent doctrine.

According to Ron Suskind, after 9/11 Cheney explained to law enforcement and intelligence officials that they should treat even the one percent chance of a terrorist attack as a mathematical certainty. The particular case was of a Pakistani nuclear scientist helping al-Qaeda to acquire a nuclear bomb, but the standard became a shorthand for U.S. counterterror efforts generally. No scale of effort would be too great. Better to chase down 100 leads, 99 of which turn out to be bogus, because finding just that one nugget would have been worth the level of effort.

Now we have evidence that the federal government is chasing down far more than 99 blind alleys for just one lead. From today’s front-page story in the New York Times, Eric Schmitt explains how the FBI has adapted and evolved since 9/11:

The bureau now ranks fighting terrorism as its No. 1 priority. It has doubled the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism duties to roughly 5,000 people, and has created new squads across the country that focus more on deterring and disrupting terrorism than on solving crimes.

But the manpower costs of this focus are steep, and the benefits not always clear. Of the 5,500 leads that the squad has pursued since it was formed five years ago, only 5 percent have been found credible enough to be sent to permanent F.B.I. squads for longer-term investigations, said Supervisory Special Agent Kristen von KleinSmid, head of the squad. Only a handful of those cases have resulted in criminal prosecutions or other law enforcement action, and none have foiled a specific terrorist plot, the authorities acknowledge. (Emphasis mine.)

So, just to review:

• 5,500 leads over 5 years
• 5 percent deemed credible
• “A handful” technically would mean five or less, but charitably might total a few dozen. Still, that translates to far less than 1 percent of leads investigated resulting in a criminal prosecution.

But, and here’s the kicker,

• None – zero, zip, nada – foiled a specific terrorist plot.

On the face of it, this seems like a waste of time and resources that should be spent elsewhere.

There are several plausible explanations, however, for why I’m wrong and why those who believe that we are not dedicating sufficient resources to combating terrorism are right.

• Perhaps other government agencies have been far more effective at disrupting terror plots. (But when the relative comparison is zero, it isn’t very hard to clear that bar.)
• Perhaps Schmitt got his facts wrong. (Doubtful. He is one of the most experienced and reliable reporters on the beat.)
• Perhaps the knowledge that 5,000 people chasing down 5,500 leads deters would-be terrorists from even attempting anything. (Or it could simply be helping bin Laden’s plan “to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy.”)

Two other points bear consideration. First, it is possible that arresting, prosecuting and convicting people of lesser crimes disrupts what might someday become a full-scale terror plot. There is no reason to think that the guy trying to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch was much smarter than the 15 guys who provided the muscle for the 9/11 attacks. The difference was leadership, which defined a plausible terrorist attack and devised the means to carry it out. That said, there are problems associated with the expansion of federal laws, and the growing power of prosecutors, and I would still much prefer that common criminals be handled in a run-of-the-mill fashion. Local cops, local prosecutors, local jails.

Which leads to the second point. Reflecting the growing federalization of the criminal law, the FBI strayed into a number of areas even before 9/11 that should have been handled by local law enforcement. This expansion of the federal criminal law poses a threat to individual liberty. (Thanks to Tim Lynch for pointing to this source.) But counterterrorism is one of the few legitimate functions for a federal law enforcement agency, and if the FBI is devoting more resources to that than to other crimes, that in and of itself wouldn’t be a bad thing.

I remain unconvinced, however, that what we are seeing is a wise expenditure of resources. And while I understand that zero terrorist plots uncovered is not equal to zero threat of a future attack, it is incumbent on the FBI — and more generally those who think that the problem is too little, as opposed to much, being devoted to counterterrorism – to prove why they need still more resources.

Until that occurs, I think that UCLA’s Amy Zegart, who is quoted in the Times story, should get the last word on this point:

Just chasing leads burns through resources. … You’re really going to get bang for the buck when you chase leads based on a deeper assessment of who threatens us, their capabilities and indicators of impending attack. Right now, there’s more chasing than assessing.

The Zero Percent Doctrine is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog