A Post-Health Care Realignment?
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.
Palmer and Cowen on Libertarianism
On Tuesday I hosted a Book Forum for Tom Palmer’s new book, Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice. You can see the video here. I thought Tyler Cowen’s comments were very astute, so I reproduce an abridged version here:
The first question is, “What do I, as a reader, see as the essential unity or unities in the book?” And I see really two. The first is I see this as a construction and articulation of a vision of what I call reasonable libertarianism. I think we’re in a world right now that is growing very partisan and very rabid, and a lot of things which are called libertarian in the Libertarian Party, or what you might call the Lew Rockwell / Ron Paul camp, are to my eye not exactly where libertarianism should be, and I think Tom has been a very brave and articulate advocate of a reasonable libertarianism. And if I ask myself, “Does the book succeed in this endeavor?” I would say, “Yes.”
The second unity in the book, I think, has to do with the last thirty years of world history. I know in the United States now there is less liberty. But overall, the world as a whole, over the last thirty years, has seen more movement towards more liberty than perhaps in any other period of human history. And I suspect most of these movements toward liberty will last. So there have been these movements towards liberty, and they have been motivated, in part, by ideas. The question arises, which are the ideas that have been the important ones for this last thirty years? And I view Tom’s book, whether he intended it as such or not, as a kind of guide to which have been the important ideas driving the last thirty years. And a lot of the book goes back into history pretty far – the eighteenth century, the Levellers, debates over natural rights – and I think precisely because it takes this broader perspective it is one of the best guides – maybe the best guide – to what have been the most important ideas driving the last thirty years (as opposed to the misleading ideas or the dead-end ideas). So that’s my take on the essential unities.
Another question you might ask about a collection of essays is, “Which of them did I like best?” I thought about this for a while, and I have two nominations. The first one is “Twenty Myths about Markets,” which is the essay on economics. I don’t know any piece by an economist that does such a good job of poking holes in a lot of economic fallacies and just laying out what you hear so often. You would think an economist would have written this long ago, but to the best of my knowledge, not.
The other favorite little piece of mine is called “Six Facts about Iraq,” which explains from Tom’s point of view – and Tom has been there a number of times – what’s going on in Iraq and why. It is only a few pages long, but I felt that I got a better sense of Iraq reading this short piece than almost anything else I’ve come across.
I’m not sure exactly what’s the common element between the two I liked best – they both start with a number – but I think the ones I liked best reminded me the most of Tom when he is talking. I had the sense of Tom being locked in a room, and forced to address a question, and not being allowed to leave until he had given his bottom line approach. And I think what he’s very good at through out the book is just getting directly to the point.
There’s more to Tyler’s comments, and lots more from both of them in response to questions, so check out the video.
Remembering the Reporter Who Sued the Fed
With the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets publishing endless defenses of “Federal Reserve independence” and proclaiming the Fed as savior of our financial system, it is all to easy to dismiss much of the media as simply defenders of the status quo. There were many, however, willing to challenge this orthodoxy. Standing out among them was Mark Pittman, reporter for Bloomberg. It was Mr. Pittman who sued the Federal Reserve, winning a victory on August 24, as the Manhattan Federal Court allowed the suit to proceed. Sadly, Mark Pittman passed away on November 25th.
Mark Pittman and his employer, Bloomberg News, sought details on the Federal Reserve’s numerous special lending facilities. Which firms were getting loans, and for how much and at what terms? These were all details the American public were entitled to, yet were denied by the Federal Reserve. We all remember the Fed’s warnings that if AIG counter-parties were named, there would be market disruptions. Yet, after much public and Congressional pressure, those firms were named, with no adverse market consequences.
While Mark Pittman’s efforts will be greatly missed, his suit continues, as does the efforts by Rep. Ron Paul and others in Congress, to bring transparency to the activities of the Federal Reserve.
Is an Independent Fed Better?
Rep. Ron Paul now has a majority of the House of Representatives supporting his bill for an independent audit of the Federal Reserve System. He presented his case at a Cato Policy Forum recently, with vigorous responses from Bert Ely and Gilbert Schwartz.
Now more than 200 economists have signed a petition calling on Congress to “defend the independence of the Federal Reserve System as a foundation of U.S. economic stability.” The petition seems implicitly a rebuttal to Paul’s bill.
Allan Meltzer, a leading monetary scholar and frequent participant in Cato’s annual monetary conferences, declined to sign the petition and explained why: “I wrote them back and said, ‘the Fed has rarely been independent and it strikes me that being independent is very unlikely’” in the current environment.
Cato senior fellow Gerald O’Driscoll adds:
it is not the critics of the Fed who threaten its independence, but the Fed’s own actions. Its intervention in the economy is unprecedented in size and scope. It is inevitable that those actions would lead to calls for further Congressional oversight and control.
One of the lessons here is that once you create powerful government agencies, from tax-funded schools to central banks, there are no perfect libertarian rules for how they should be run. The way to protect freedom is to let people make their own decisions in civil society. Schools have to decide what to teach, offending the values of some parents and taxpayers. The Fed can be independent and unaccountable and undemocratic, or it can be subject to the political whims of elected officials; neither is a very attractive prospect.
Support for Federal Reserve Audit Increasing
Last week Cato hosted a policy forum on “Bringing Transparency to the Federal Reserve,” featuring Congressman Ron Paul. As mentioned in CQ Politics, Rep. Paul’s bill, HR 1207, has been gaining considerable momentum in the House, with currently 244 co-sponsors, ranging from John Boehner to John Conyers Jr. In fact, the Senate companion bill was introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke discussed the very topic of Federal Reserve Transparency at Cato’s annual monetary conference in the Fall of 2007.
After praising moves toward greater transparency at the Fed, Bernanke argued that “monetary policy makers are public servants whose decisions affect the life of every citizen; consequently, in a democratic society, they have a responsibility to give the people and their elected representatives a full and compelling rationale for the decisions they make.”
Chairman Bernanke also goes on to argue that “improving the public’s understanding of the central bank’s objectives and policy strategies reduces economic and financial uncertainty and thereby allows businesses and households to make more-informed decisions.” Bernanke’s full remarks can be found in the Spring 2008 issue of the Cato Journal.
Over the last two years, we have seen an almost tripling of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet to $2.3 trillion, resulting from the bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns and the creation of 14 new lending programs.
Our recent forum, and Rep. Paul’s bill, bring much needed debate and focus to the issue of Fed’s inner-workings.
Ron Paul at Cato: ‘Audit the Fed’
When Texas Congressman and former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul speaks about transparency in the Federal Reserve, he sums up his argument with one simple question. Why not?
“Why in the world should this much power be given to a Federal Reserve that has the authority to create $1 trillion secretly?” Ron Paul asked a standing room-only crowd today at the Cato Institute.
Paul was on a panel of speakers, including Gilbert Schwartz, former associate general counsel to the Federal Reserve, to discuss a new bill that will audit the Fed for the first time in its history. This comes at a time when the Fed’s balance sheet has almost tripled, from just over $800 billion before the financial crisis to almost $2.3 trillion now.
“We will only win when the people wake up and realize that transparency is what we need,” said Paul. “When we know exactly what’s happening, there will be monetary reform.”
Watch the rest of Paul’s comments below:
Bierfeldt v. Napolitano Roundup
Back on March 29th, Campaign for Liberty employee Steven Bierfeldt was leaving the Campaign’s regional conference in St. Louis, Missouri. He was carrying $4700 in cash donations and Campaign for Liberty and Ron Paul literature. TSA personnel at the St. Louis airport felt that carrying this amount of cash was “suspicious” and detained him for interrogation. The TSA personnel intended to take Bierfeldt to the local police station for further questioning after he refused to answer the questions associated with their fishing expedition. Luckily, a plainclothes officer arrived and spoke briefly with one of the TSA officers, who told Bierfeldt that he was free to go.
Bierfeldt is now filing suit against Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. The ACLU Blog of Rights has more on the suit, including a digital copy of the complaint. Filing suit to prove that “[c]arrying $4700 in cash poses no conceivable threat to flight safety” is a sign that airport screening is going too far.
Bierfeldt was right to be wary of airport screening while carrying Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty literature. The Missouri Information Analysis Center, one of 70+ “fusion centers” in the nation, had just released its report on domestic terrorism and the militia movement. Libertarians are expressly targeted as potential domestic terrorists:
Cato recently held a forum on this phenomenon, Fusion Centers: Domestic Spying or Sensible Surveillance? My colleague Tim Lynch hosted, and panelists included Bruce Fein, Constitutional Attorney, The Lichfield Group; Harvey Eisenberg, Chief, National Security Section, Office of United States Attorney, District of Maryland; and Michael German, Policy Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union. Audio and video are available at the link.
Mike German has written extensively on this topic. Read his November 2007 report, What’s Wrong with Fusion Centers and July 2008 update. Mike is a former FBI agent and author of the excellent book, Thinking Like a Terrorist.
You can watch Mr. Bierfeldt giving his side of the story to Judge Andrew Napolitano (no relation to Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano) on Fox’s Freedom Watch.
Judge Napolitano recently spoke at the Cato book forum, Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America. Co-panelists included my colleague Jason Kuznicki and Reason‘s Damon Root.
Stop the War, Stop the Spending
One of the great things about Ron Paul’s presidential campaign was its cross-ideological appeal. Libertarians, free-market conservatives, and antiwar young people all found his candidacy appealing. As someone who has despaired for years about the split between free-marketers and civil libertarians, who ought to be part of the same broad freedom movement, I looked forward to seeing that combination continue. So here’s a suggestion.
President Obama’s frightening tax-spend-and-take-over-private-businesses policies are re-energizing a free-enterprise constituency that had been depressed and dispirited by the reality of a Republican government giving us bigger, more expensive government for eight years. Cato’s full-page newspaper ads against the “stimulus” bill generated much enthusiasm and media discussion. CNBC’s Rick Santelli and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford have become folk heroes for speaking out against Obama’s economic policies. Now there are anti-tax “tea parties” planned in more than 300 cities. The growing resistance to Obama’s spending agenda is encouraging.
But meanwhile, where’s the antiwar movement? President Obama rose to power on the basis of his early opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to end it. Now he has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan and has promised to keep the war in Iraq going for another 19 months, after which we will have 50,000 American troops in Iraq for as far as the eye can see. If McCain had proposed this sort of minor tweaking of the Bush policy, I think we’d see antiwar rallies in 300 cities. Calling the antiwar movement!
So here’s my suggestion. Some libertarian group — which may or may exist already; the Internet makes it amazingly easy to organize a new group at a moment’s notice — should start a campaign to unite the antitax and antiwar constituencies with a simple message:
Stop the War, Stop the Spending
Or maybe it should be “Stop the Wars, Stop the Spending.” But it would pick up on Ron Paul’s appeal with his TV ads in which he said, “I’m the only presidential candidate who’ll bring our troops home from Iraq immediately and stop wasteful government spending.” Millions of Americans are tired of the war and worried about soaring federal spending. Somebody should give them a rallying point.
New at Cato Unbound
This month’s Cato Unbound continues our tradition of stirring up controversy. The lead essay is by Patri Friedman, who challenges the advocates of liberty as follows:
I deeply yearn to live in an actual free society, not just to imagine a theoretical future utopia or achieve small incremental gains in freedom. For many years, I enthusiastically advocated for liberty under the vague assumption that advocacy would help our cause. However, I recently began trying to create free societies as my full-time job, and this has given me a dramatic perspective shift from my days of armchair philosophizing. My new perspective is that the advocacy approach which many libertarian individuals, groups, and think tanks follow (including me sometimes, sadly) is an utter waste of time.
Argument has refined our principles, and academic research has enlarged our understanding, but they have gotten us no closer to an actual libertarian state. Our debating springs not from calculated strategy, but from an intuitive “folk activism”: an instinct to seek political change through personal interaction, born in our hunter-gatherer days when all politics was personal. In the modern world, however, bad policies are the result of human action, not human design. To change them we must understand how they emerge from human interaction, and then alter the web of incentives that drives behavior. Attempts to directly influence people or ideas without changing incentives, such as the U.S. Libertarian Party, the Ron Paul campaign, and academic research, are thus useless for achieving real-world liberty.
Cato isn’t called out by name, but it easily could have been. Like I said, Cato Unbound tries to be controversial.
What’s needed, Friedman claims, is not more study or advocacy, but a change in the deeper institutional structures that give rise to government policies. Competition among states (and non-state agents!), new technologies, and new intentional communities may just induce old-fashioned governments to behave a whole lot better. By contrast, just recommending somewhat better policies won’t do very much, not if all we do is write about them. (Friedman seems particularly skeptical about blogs. Ahem.)
Is this just a young person’s impatience? Or has Friedman found a serious weakness in libertarian activism? One reply I might make is that Cato scholars have researched quite a few topics that Friedman would probably find worthwhile. It’s important to document these things, and much of this work directly furthers the kind of structural reform that Friedman favors.
Consider the many Cato scholars who have heralded the rise of tax competition — in which states feel increasing pressure to deliver a low-cost product when their taxpayers can move elsewhere. Or consider Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, a book whose conclusions inform Friedman’s own project. This book began with a series of discussions among public policy scholars (on a blog no less!). Cato actively promoted Caplan’s work, and we would hope that Friedman would find this an effort well-spent. An upcoming event with author James Tooley shows how the world’s poor are founding their own schools to educate themselves, admirably free from any state interference — a new, private social practice bests an incompetent government! These things matter, I’d say, and they matter even if we accept Friedman’s premises. (We’re also giving a platform to Friedman, both here and at an event on April 7.)
In any case, this a big and very important discussion for the libertarian movement, of which the Cato Institute is only a part. Cato Unbound will have a remarkable series of panelists commenting throughout this week and next, including Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and noted philanthropist; and Brian Doherty, who has researched and written about more forms of libertarian activism than most of us can even recall. Whatever side of the debate you end up taking, be sure to stop by to catch this month’s edition of Cato Unbound.
Time to Think about the Gold Standard?
Back in 2007, presidential candidate Ron Paul generated a lot of talk, especially among libertarians, about monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, and the gold standard. As a longtime believer in sound money, I was surprised to discover how many smart young libertarians thought that talk of the gold standard was nutty. And perhaps more surprised to discover that they thought it was unnecessary now that the problem of central banking had been solved. As two of them wrote when I asked about their objections,
“The gold standard is the solution to no actual problem that is of concern to anyone. I think it’s a mistake to take a relatively professional and independent central bank for granted, but we have one. Inflation is low and predictable. The monetary climate is stable and amenable to savings and investment, etc.”
“What’s the beef with the Fed? By my estimation, it’s been one of the most effective, restrained government agencies over the last twenty five years. They’ve dramatically reduced the volatility of the business cycle while achieving low, reasonably constant inflation.”
Well. How’s that confidence in central banking looking now? I’m reminded of Murray Rothbard’s comment in 1975 about what the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation had done to trust in government:
Twenty years ago, the historian Cecelia Kenyon, writing of the Anti-Federalist opponents of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, chided them for being “men of little faith” – little faith, that is, in a strong central government. It is hard to think of anyone having such unexamined faith in government today.
Partly in response to such criticisms of the gold standard, in February 2008 Cato published a paper by Professor Lawrence H. White, “Is the Gold Standard Still the Gold Standard among Monetary Systems?” White argued:
The gold standard is not a flawless monetary system. Neither is the fiat money alternative. In light of historical evidence about the comparative magnitude of these flaws, however, the gold standard is a policy option that deserves serious consideration.
In a study covering many decades in a large sample of countries, Federal Reserve Bank economists found that “money growth and inflation are higher” under fiat standards than under gold and silver standards.
A gold standard does not guarantee perfect steadiness in the growth of the money supply, but historical comparison shows that it has provided more moderate and steadier money growth in practice than the present-day alternative, politically empowering a central banking committee to determine growth in the stock of fiat money. From the perspective of limiting money growth appropriately, the gold standard is far from a crazy idea.
And he quoted a devastating line from an essay (p. 104) by Peter Bernholz:
A study of about 30 currencies shows that there has not been a single case of a currency freely manipulated by its government or central bank since 1700 which enjoyed price stability for at least 30 years running.
In February 2008 White’s study didn’t get much attention. Most people still thought the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed was doing a great job, so why talk about alternatives to fiat money? But now, after the crash of 2008 and the growing realization that Dow 14000 was the product of a cheap-money boom that led to the inevitable bust, maybe it’s time to think about the gold standard or other constraints on politicized money creation.
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