Reason Magazine
“The Pro-Business Roberts Court Is Striking Out”
The Harlan Institute’s Josh Blackman reviews a batch of recent Supreme Court decisions and finds little evidence for the popular left-wing charge that the Roberts Court has a pro-business agenda:
In FCC v. AT&T Inc. Chief Justice Roberts, the great illusionist, wrote for a unanimous Court that corporations do not possess personal privacy rights under FOIA....
In Staub v. Proctor Hospital, Justice Scalia writing for 6 members expanded the ability of employees to sue their employers under USERRA under the “cat’s paw” theory. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, concurred in judgment, and would have reached the same result through reference to the statutory text, rather than to principles of agency law.
Last week in Williamson v. Mazda Motor of America, Inc., the Court unanimously found that a California car-safety law was not pre-empted.
In January in Thompson v. North American Stainless, LP, Justice Scalia wrote for a unanimous Court, and found that Title VII’s ban on workplace retaliation against an employee who challenges discrimination also protects a co-worker who is a relative or close associate of the targeted employee.
New at Reason: Ronald Bailey on the Political Economy of the End of Tyranny
We live in interesting times.
Long repressed peoples are revolting against decades of tyranny
throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Will it end happily?
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey looks at what
recent economic theory has to say about the fall of dictators and
the prospects of liberty.
Federal Government's Duplicate Programs Make Dupes Out of Taxpayers
Why fund a wasteful government
program once when you can fund it twice—or, for that matter, 82
times? According to a report on
duplication and overlap in the federal government released by the
Government Accountability Office today, the U.S. government has 82
distinct programs to improve teacher quality (which, judging from
our schools, is clearly working quite well). Many of those programs
“share similar goals,” according to the report, yet “there is no
governmentwide strategy to minimize fragmentation, overlap, or
duplication among these many programs.” Which probably helps
explain how we got so many programs designed to do the same damn
thing in the first place.
Teacher quality programs were just one area in which the GAO found significant duplication at the federal level. Indeed, the whole thing reads like a nightmare version of a Pete and Repeat joke. According to The Wall Street Journal’s summary of the report, the U.S. government has “15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless, and 80 programs for economic development.” Eggs are given double scrutiny:
The Food and Drug Administration makes sure that chicken eggs are "safe, wholesome, and properly labeled" while a division of the Department of Agriculture "is responsible for the safety of eggs processed into egg products."
Sounds unequally yolked to me.
Some of the duplication is apparently harder to count: The GAO isn’t even entirely sure how many programs the federal government has set up related to financial literacy—only that there are “more than 20 federal agencies providing about 56 programs” involved. That’s a ballpark figure, I take it.
All that duplication wastes effort and makes finding and emulating effective programs more difficult, according to the GAO. It also costs a lot of money. The GAO didn’t tally it all up, but Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, who lobbied for the report to be created, estimated that all told, the GAO found between $100 and $200 billion in spending on duplicate programs. A billion here, a billion there...eventually it really does start to add up.
Death of Environmentalism Update
Back in 2004 environmentalists Ted Nordhaus and
Michael Shellenberger released a report at the annual meeting of
environmental sugar daddies (Environmental Grant Makers) in
Washington, DC, giving them the unwelcome news about The
Death of Environmentalism [PDF]. In that report they declared
that environmentalism had devolved into being merely another
special interest. And worse yet, a special interest that was stuck
proposing the same brain dead policies of reduce, reuse, and
recycle as the solution to all environmental problems.
They pointed out that environmentalists were still peddling Malthusian doom-and-gloom and preaching hair-shirt sacrifice. Thus did environmentalists turn off possible supporters because they were invested in telling the public "I have a nightmare" stories rather than delivering "I have a dream" speeches.
Since 2004, they have concluded that the only way to address man-made global warming is by accelerating technological progress. They believe that government subsidies can call new cheap low-carbon energy technologies into existence. I have my doubts. Nevertheless, they do understand that our environmental problems will not be solved by imposed collective sacrifice, but instead by unleashnig human technical genius. The two gave a talk, The Long Death of Environmentalism, at Yale University that clearly articulates this point well:
The great ecological challenges that our generation faces demands an ecological politics that is generative, not restrictive. An ecological politics capable of addressing global warming will require us to reexamine virtually every prominent strand of post-war green ideology.
From Paul Erlich's warnings of a population bomb to The Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth," contemporary ecological politics have consistently embraced green Malthusianism despite the fact that the Malthusian premise has persistently failed for the better part of three centuries. Indeed, the green revolution was exponentially increasing agricultural yields at the very moment that Erlich was predicting mass starvation and the serial predictions of peak oil and various others resource collapses that have followed have continue to fail.
This does not mean that Malthusian outcomes are impossible, but neither are they inevitable. We do have a choice in the matter, but it is not the choice that greens have long imagined. The choice that humanity faces is not whether to constrain our growth, development, and aspirations or die. It is whether we will continue to innovate and accelerate technological progress in order to thrive.
Human technology and ingenuity have repeatedly confounded Malthusian predictions yet green ideology continues to cast a suspect eye towards the very technologies that have allowed us to avoid resource and ecological catastrophes. But such solutions will require environmentalists to abandon the "small is beautiful" ethic that has also characterized environmental thought since the 1960's. We, the most secure, affluent, and thoroughly modern human beings to have ever lived upon the planet, must abandon both the dark, zero-sum Malthusian visions and the idealized and nostalgic fantasies for a simpler, more bucolic past in which humans lived in harmony with Nature.
Amen.
Whole Yale talk here.
Ron Paul vs. Hillary Clinton
During a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) calls out Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the ugliness of American foreign policy commitments in the Middle East:
"we keep supporting Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, all these dictators, and yet we pretend that as soon as, well, it looks like the dictator might fall, we're all for democracy and we're for freedom and we're against these dictators,” he said.
Clinton says, hey, it's a tough world, pal, and nobody's perfect:
“Congressman, you make a very passionate argument, and my response is that, you know, the United States, over the course of its entire diplomatic history, has had to make some very difficult decisions,” she said.
“We try to balance what we believe to be in our interests. Sometimes, and I would argue most times, we get it right. Sometimes we don't."
Longer Clinton: "Sometimes, the bad results of our policies are either far enough in the past we can pretend they never happened, or far enough in the future we can pretend they'll never happen. But at least these policies requires the continued spending of shit-tons of money, much of which gets kicked back to U.S. munition interests, and provides me and my associates with our phoney-baloney jobs, so let's just be glad politics and good sense stop at the water's edge, and that the congressman from Texas's opinions are eccentric and easily ignored here in D.C."
Raising the Debt Limit: It Just Makes Sense. Not.
Some say the world will end in fire and some say in ice.
But in Washington, a lot of people say it will end if we don’t continually raise the debt ceiling.
The statutory debt limit, or debt ceiling, represents the maximum amount of debt the federal government can carry at any given time. The limit was created in 1917 so that Congress wouldn’t have to vote every time the government wanted to increase the amount of debt (which was becoming a more and more frequent occasion). Since then, the Treasury Department has had the authority to issue new debt up to whatever the limit is to fund government needs. Last year, the limit was raised to $14.3 trillion, an amount that is about to reached.
As it approaches, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said failing to raise the limit would likely mean the U.S. would default on its debt, creating “real chaos” in place of the fake chaos that’s out there now. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said that failing to raise the limit would be “deeply irresponsible” and and Austan Goolsbee, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, has said that not raising the limit would create “the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”
Eh, maybe.
As Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, has pointed out, we’ve maxed out the nation’s credit card in the past without such dire results. In the mid-1980s, the mid-1990s, and in 2002, for instance, the debt limit wasn’t raised for months at a time and the government got along just swell. The government has a big bag of tools it can use, ranging from playing around with the amount of spending that is liable to the limit to prioritizing interest and debt payments over other outlays. Interest on the debt for this year is projected to be about $225 billion and government revenue is expected to be around $2.2 trillion, so the government can easily pay the vig and avoid defaulting.
What it shouldn’t do is simply keep piling on the debt. The limit has been raised no fewer than 10 times in the past decade. When Republicans ran the White House and the Congress, they voted overwhelmingly to charge it and Democrats, including Sen. Obama, hollered bloody murder. In 2006, he called the need to yet again increase the debt limit “a sign of leadership failure.” Now that Dems run the show, the GOP has suddenly rediscovered its inner cheapskate.
So it goes.
The boldest plan to rein in spending and debt comes from newcomer Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a Tea Party favorite who dispatched Republican incumbent Bob Bennett in the primaries before coasting to victory in the general election last fall. Lee has vowed to block passage of a debt-limit increase unless Congress signs on to his balanced-budget amendment which would cap annual federal spending at 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The amendment would require a super-majority of two-thirds in the Senate and House of Representatives. Lee’s bill is competing with another Republican proposal from Sens. Hatch (Utah) and Cornyn (Texas) to cap spending at 20 percent of GDP. The Hatch-Cornyn bill has weaker rules on its higher cap as well.
In 2010, spending came to about 24 percent of GDP and it’s expected to come in around 25 percent of GDP in 2011. Since 1950, total federal revenues have averaged 17.8 percent and have reached higher than 20 percent exactly once. Spending over the same time has averaged just under 20 percent.
Whether Lee’s proposal carries the day – and there’s a strong case that its passage would do more to calm financial markets than simply bumping up the federal credit line – neither the Democratic nor the Republican leadership has yet to advance a serious proposal to cut spending and reduce outstanding debt. Indeed, both the president's budget proposal for 2012 and the generally non-existent Republican response are not only deeply irresponsible but clear signs of insanity.
That ain't right. But it does help explain why a government that has increased spending over 62 percent in real dollars can no longer get by on a $14 trillion debt ceiling.
Video written and produced by Austin Bragg; article text written by Nick Gillespie.
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Why Progressives Should Support Eminent Domain Reform
As Virginia moves toward eminent domain reform, Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist A. Barton Hinkle explains why progressives should applaud:
You don't hear about many eminent-domain cases pitting scrappy local governments against Lockheed Martin, Exxon or Proctor & Gamble. To the contrary, recent cases have involved:
•Roanoke seizing a building that belonged to the owners of a mom-and-pop flooring company so it could turn the property over to Carilion, a billion-dollar health-care corporation.
•Norfolk trying to seize the property of Central Radio so it could hand the land over to Old Dominion University.
•VDOT trying to cheat a small day-care owner out of just compensation — and spending more on lawyers to fight the case than it would have shelled out by paying her original asking price.
In these and other cases, those rooting for the underdog share common cause with property-rights activists....
Abuses such as those outlined above represent cases of Robin Hood in reverse. Like the original Kelo v. New London case that gave local governments a green light to steal, they take from the poor and give to the rich. Condemnations rarely if ever involve the seizure of fancy McMansions in tony gated communities. Rather, they run roughshod over working-class neighborhoods.
As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her Kelo dissent, "the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms." Indeed, permitting the use of eminent domain for economic development makes that not only possible, but necessary . There would be no point in seizing a building from Verizon and giving it to a hair salon. Eminent domain for the purpose of economic development always — always — goes in the other direction.
He offers a couple other reasons as well. I noted Hinkle's take on the Roanoke case last year. In a 2005 column, I wondered how The New York Times could applaud Kelo. Ilya Somin explored "The Limits of Anti-Kelo Legislation" in a 2007 Reason article.
Defining the Benefits of Unions Down
Mickey Kaus from his new home at Daily Caller thinks he sees the progressive left retreating in their defense of unions, or at least retreating in what they claim is so great about them:
Isn’t it odd that the defense of unionism on the left by Paul Krugman and Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum focuses almost exclusively on labor’s role as “countervailing” political power to business–especially its role in supporting the Democratic party with money and manpower? Time was pro-labor economists argued mainly about the actual effect of unions within individual firms and industries–they raised wages, we were told, not only redistributing profits but providing workers with a “voice” that even resulted in increased productivity. You don’t hear these arguments that much anymore. After the collapse of two of the three big UAW auto firms–beaten in the market by non-union American factories run by Honda, Hyundai and Toyota–the idea the unions actually help employers compete has apparently become too implausiblefor Drum and Krugman to advance with a straight face.
All that bolding is Kaus'.
Kaus then opines that if all unions are good for is being a countervailing power, then, well, their days even as the banner-waving cause of progressives are or should be numbered:
That’s the tricky thing about the “countervailing power” argument. If unions are valuable not because of what they actually do in the economy but because, in their extracurricular activities, they can support the left against “the influence of business interests and the rich,” as enhanced by Citizens United–and if the unions are manifestly withering and failing to perform that function, then erstwhile left wing labor supporters are perfectly justified in abandoning unionism to the ashheap of history while they look or other, newer ways of accomplishing the “countervailing” purpose unions once served.
What might that newer way be? You're reading it! Not Reason, but ye olde Internet and its new fangled wave of ways to beg farther, wider, and more effectively than any beggar has e'er before begged.
Reason interviewed Kaus in our August-September 2010 issue. Nick Gillespie sang a not-so-sad song of the death of unions earlier today.
Kaus on Reason.tv talking about how unions killed the Democratic Party with Gillespie:
Jurors Acquit Suspect, Then Give Him Their Jury Pay
Interesting story from Cleveland:
Jurors are so convinced that a Cleveland teen should not have been charged with assaulting another teen that they've gone beyond acquitting him. A few are writing angry letters to police and intend to donate their jury pay to him. At least three jurors plan to give the $100 they received to sit on the jury to defendant Demrick McCloud, 19, if McCloud earns a high school equivalency degree. They took only 30 minutes to find him not guilty in their deliberations Friday.
Most of the jury could not be reached for comment, but three members complained of a "sheer lack of evidence."
They said the prosecution's case hinged on the victim identifying McCloud as an attacker. But the victim also had told police he was certain another boy -- later found to be in school at the time -- was one of the assailants.
As they were leaving the courthouse, jurors Ana de Freitas Boe, an English professor at Baldwin-Wallace College; Jeanne Knotek, an obstetrician and gynecologist; and alternate juror Richard Nagin discussed ways to help McCloud.
The three have committed to donating their jury stipend to a fund for McCloud. Boe said the amount is too small to compensate McCloud for his jail time, but the jurors intend it as a "show of support."
"He seemed like a decent kid who was falsely accused," Nagin said.
I don't think I've ever read about this kind of indignation from a jury before, but it's nice to see.
The case against McCloud was brought by the office of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor William Mason. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer published a long investigation of Mason last year, finding hundreds of cases brought with what legal observers interviewed for the story said was little or no evidence. The investigation also found that Mason's office brought an unusually high number of cases that were dismissed by judges for insufficient evidence before ever reaching a jury.
How Wild Were Mitch Daniels' Oats?
Last week I noted that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels had attributed his youthful pot smoking to "the unfortunate confluence of my wild oats period and America's libertine apogee." I pointed out that 1970, when Daniels was arrested, was not the "apogee" of pot smoking by American college students, which came nearly a decade later (judging from the federal government's survey data). More to the point, since Daniels was trying to mitigate his own behavior while calling for a crackdown on people who do the same thing, marijuana consumption is about as common today as it was during his "wild oats period." A 1970 Gallup poll found that 43 percent of college students had tried pot, while a 2002 Gallup poll found that 46 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds had. The numbers for college-age Americans in the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health are similar. So to the extent that the "everybody was doing it" excuse applies to Daniels, it applies to current pot smokers as well.
Daniels' impression that pot smoking was ubiquitous at Princeton in 1970 makes sense given the big surge in marijuana use by college students that seems to have occurred during his junior year, as recounted by the drug researchers Lana D. Harrison, Michael Backenheimer, and James A. Inciardi in a 1995 paper:
The earliest survey data on marijuana use in the U.S. was obtained through a Gallup Poll in the spring of 1967. The nationally-based telephone poll of college students found a 5% lifetime prevalence of marijuana use. Two years later, this proportion jumped to 22%. A Gallup Poll of the adult population in the summer of 1969 found a 4% lifetime prevalence, with 12% of those in the 21-29 year old age group, 3% in the 30-49 year old group and only 1% of those aged 50 and over reporting ever trying marijuana. In the fall of 1970, another Gallup Poll of college students found 43% reported trying marijuana, with 39% reporting use in the past year and 28% reporting use in the past 30 days. By 1971, over half (51%) of the nation's college students reported lifetime use, and annual and thirty day prevalence rates stood at 41% and 30% respectively.
I'll have more on the drug policy positions of pot smokers who become politicians in my column tomorrow.
Krugman's Cruel Budget Cutting Myths
Paul Krugman revisited the Lone Star State yesterday, in another attempt to expose its underlying contradictions.
The Texas legislature
is proposing a 10 percent across-the-board cut in Medicaid to
help corral its
runaway spending. Observing that Texas has low rankings in
child poverty, graduation rates, and health, Krugman
asks us to think of the children:
Tax increases have been ruled out of consideration; the gap will be closed solely through spending cuts. Medicaid, a program that is crucial to many of the state’s children, will take the biggest hit, with the Legislature proposing a funding cut of no less than 29 percent, including a reduction in the state’s already low payments to providers — raising fears that doctors will start refusing to see Medicaid patients. And education will also face steep cuts, with school administrators talking about as many as 100,000 layoffs.
The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty — at this point you expect that — but the shortsightedness. What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?
This all comes after Krugman's recent column acknowledging that health care costs are the greatest threat to American solvency at both the state and federal level. When citing wellness indicators, he chooses to ignore that Texas has a much larger Hispanic population than average, of whom a third are in poverty. Not good, but absorbing a rate of population growth twice the national average over the last decade does tend to put some stress on institutions. And people are still moving to Texas.
Krugman also feeds the myth that more spending always equals more good. Spending more on schools, for example, means next to nothing: Costs have tripled since the early 1970s, without any noticeable increase in educational outcomes. And whether Medicaid is paying for 58 percent or 62 percent of beneficiary costs doesn’t make much difference if the whole program is bloated and ineffective.
More from Reason on the Professor here.
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Bell, California, Police Memo Outlines Rules for Motorist Baseball
A memo discovered in Bell police files appears to outline a game in which police officers compete to issue tickets, impound cars and arrest motorists.
Titled the “Bell Police Department Baseball Game,” the memo assigns “singles,” “doubles,” “triples” and “home runs” to progressively more serious infractions, starting with parking tickets and moving on to vehicle impounds and felony arrests of drivers. “Non-performers,” the memo says, are “sent for minor league rehab stint.”
The discovery of the memo comes as the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether Bell police violated the civil rights of residents through aggressive towing of cars and code enforcement. Part of the investigation focuses on claims by some officers that the department had quotas for issuing tickets and impounding cars, which they said was done to raise revenue for the city. Some officers said they were reprimanded when they did not meet goals.
It’s the first document suggesting a concerted effort to have officers pull over more cars, though it’s unclear who wrote the memo and whether department brass condoned it.
At least two Bell police officials said they were familiar with the memo, which they said circulated a few years ago. Bell Police Capt. Anthony Miranda said he thought a few patrolmen wrote it “to challenge themselves” and when department leaders found out about it, they “squashed it.”
“I think guys created it on their own and when the administration heard about it, they put a stop to it,” added Lt. Ty Henshaw. Department leaders said “It’s cool and fun and we appreciate the motivation, but it’s not going to look good.”
I suppose it's possible that this memo and the contemporaneous complaints of illegal towing, ticketing, and other harassment of motorists, coupled with the resulting revelation that Bell city officials were drawing massive salaries while the city went deep into the red . . . are entirely coincidental. Seems unlikely, though, doesn't it?
Also, assuming Capt. Miranda (great name!) is telling the truth, isn't it at least a little problematic that upon learning that some of their officers were making a game of due process, Bell police officials merely "squashed" the memo, instead of investigating and disciplining the officers responsible?
Here's my favorite part of the memo:
Honor system in place and violation will result in one day suspension.
Well of course. In our game to deprive motorists of their rights in order to enrich grossly overpaid city officials, there's no place for cheaters! Honor among thieves, and all that.
Reason's ongoing coverage of the Bell, California, scandal here.
Mayor Orders Code Inspectors to Home of Blogger Critic
North Miami Beach Mayor Myron Rosner makes a strong case for asshole of the week.
Last month, North Miami Beach blogger Stephanie Kienzle ripped her town's mayor, Myron Rosner, after finding that he'd spent more than $500 on hotels in nearby Hollywood and Miami. Days later, a code compliance inspector came knocking at her front door. "I had no doubt the mayor was trying to get revenge," she says...
Two days later, Rosner wrote an email to Philip Azan, head of the city's Building Department, to complain about Kienzle's house. "There appear to be several violations at the above property," he wrote in the email.
Rosner admits he sent the email but says there's no conflict. "I complained as a resident, not as mayor," he says.
An inspector later found nothing worth a citation, Kienzle says.
Rosner's opponent in the last election claims the mayor pulled something similar with him.
Civil Resistance and Security Studies
In a guest post at The Monkey Cage, Erica Chenoweth of Wesleyan's Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research asks her field to pay closer attention to nonviolent conflict:
It is time for security studies to take nonviolent conflict seriously, and to incorporate such episodes and their dynamics into the canonical literature.
In fact, many of the concepts and strategic dynamics that dominate in the security studies literature are perfectly compatible with those discussed in the literature on nonviolent conflict. For instance, a key for any actor in an asymmetric conflict is to attack the opponent at its weakest point and, if possible, to create divisions within the opponent. Ivan Arreguin-Toft argues weaker powers can do this by adopting indirect (or "guerrilla") strategies against stronger opponents that use direct (or "conventional") strategies. Gil Merom and Robert Pape have made the argument that democracies are particularly susceptible to challenges by violent non-state actors, because they create unsustainable divisions within democracies. But few have directly compared how nonviolent challenges would line up compared with violent ones, because most of the security studies literature assumes that the most forceful, effective means of waging political struggle entails the threat or use of violence.
The same concept of attacking the opponent at its weakest point applies to nonviolent conflicts, except that I would argue that nonviolent mass movements are actually superior at undermining regime opponents through asymmetric approaches. This is not because of the "moral high ground," but rather because their reliance on nonviolent resistance confounds their opponents, whose usual response to internal challenge is to use force. As Qaddafi's response to the Libyan uprising shows, many dictators are willing to use force against nonviolent protestors; however, this is seldom costless for these dictators. They usually pay a major price in the form of loyalty shifts among security forces or civilian bureaucrats, who are more likely to defect to a nonviolent opposition--especially one that appears to represent diverse constituencies within the country--than to a violent campaign, where their survival is not assured.
Read the whole thing here. More from Reason on nonviolent conflict here. My most recent interview with Gene Sharp, the best-known scholar on the subject, is here.
[Via Jay Ulfelder.]
New at Reason: Shikha Dalmia on Why India and China Have Nothing on America
Americans, hit first by outsourcing and then a
recession, are becoming deeply pessimistic about their country’s
ability to maintain its economic leadership in a globalized world.
In a December National Journal poll, 20 percent of
respondents said they believed the U.S. economy was no longer the
strongest. Nearly half picked China instead. Other pessimists
believe India will soon occupy the top spot.
But as Shikha Dalmia explains, there are at least five reasons why neither India nor China will knock America off its economic perch any time soon, at least not by the only measure that matters: Offering the best life to the most people.
We Now Interrupt This Two-Minute Hate to Bring You an Urgent Message from Emmanuel Goldstein, A.K.A. Charles Koch
Charles Koch, the billionaire businessman and
giver of lots of money to political causes, along with his brother
billionaire (and trustee to the Reason
Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website) David,
has emerged as the Emmanuel
Goldstein of the contemporary progressive movement, a figure so
reviled that merely to speak his name is to cause instant
solidarity with the good and decent peoples of the world. In the
current moment, the Koch Bros. are functioning among the left the
way that George Soros often functions among
right-wing nutjobs, as the motive force in a world where not
even a sparrow (or a currency or a school board election) falls
unless the big man decrees it.
Do people still read books like Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus!? They're satires and parodies, folks, not exposes.
Here's a Wall Street Journal column by Charles Koch himself, discussing "Why Koch Industries is Speaking Out."
Snippets:
The Congressional Budget Office has warned that the interest on our federal debt is "poised to skyrocket." Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is sounding alarms. Yet the White House insists that substantial spending cuts would hurt the economy and increase unemployment.
Plenty of compelling examples indicate just the opposite. When Canada recently reduced its federal spending to 11.3% of GDP from 17.5% eight years earlier, the economy rebounded and unemployment dropped. By comparison, our federal spending is 25% of GDP.
Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay.
Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.
Past Reason.com material on the Kochs here.
There are signs that at least some of the fever among progressives is breaking. Talking Points Memo punctured the conspiracy theory that Koch Industries was pushing on Wisconsin in order to get its blood-soaked mitts on a bunch of sub-investment-grade publicly owned power plants that provide energy for the University of Wisconsin.
The proximate cause for the latest anti-Koch crusade is the budget battle in the Badger State. As Tim Cavanaugh notes below, the bottom-line blues facing the Wisconsin tax-and-service-fee-payers who kick in 100 percent of the state budget has precious little to do with Kansas billionaires and a lot more to do with profligate legislators of both parties (finally, one public policy debacle that can't be blamed on libertarians). As that reality sinks in, and as budget fights spread from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol, it'll be genuinely fascinating to see how progressives respond. Especially as states with super-high tax burdens start working through the cuts they're going to have to make.
Reason.tv - Nanny of the Month (Feb 2011): Would-Be Brothel Banner Sen. Harry Reid!
Last month's Nanny tackled the scourge of distracted walking, and this month's runners-up have their sights set on banning big-leaguers from dipping and toddlers from talking.
But top dishonors go to the nanny from Nevada who's picking a fight with prostitutes.
Presenting Reason.tv's Nanny of the Month for February 2011: Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)!
Approximately 90 seconds
"Nanny of the Month" is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Associate Producer: Alex Manning.
Go here to watch previous "Nanny of the Month" episodes.
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Is Scott Walker a Pro-Union Mole?
Forget the pitiful polling performance, the shucking of friendly legislators, the phone punk that will live in infamy. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's greatest gift to the left is hidden in plain sight: He managed to turn a consensus position based on straightforward math into what looks like a partisan issue.
Just two weeks ago, the crisis of government employee pensions was an issue for Democrats. If you look closely at states around the country, it still is. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, California Gov. Jerry Brown, even Rahmbo himself, all are engaged to varying degrees in open campaigns to roll back compensation packages for government employees. In the Nutmeg State, Gov. Dan Malloy is seeking billion-dollar cuts in public sector compensation spending in his next budget. These Democratic executives and candidates are not alienating their union donors out of limited government principle; they're doing it because they see the logarithmic cascade of pension liability as a threat to public parks, environmental programs, rail transit, and other budget items Democrats like.
All that
has now been lost in a fog of Republocrat positioning. You'd think
everything was going swimmingly until the meddlesome voters gave
Republicans the upper hand in so many states.
It was probably inevitable that the government employee unions would find some Republican villain to be the foil for a George Lakoff-style reframing of the state fiscal crisis -- and what do you know, here's great Lakoff himself to suggest a new conceptual framework in which public employees’ unions, by seeking the maximum payout from taxpayers, are "raising deeper issues in which wealthy corporations and individuals play a huge role."
But Walker's angle of approach has allowed this national issue to bog down in sniping between people who think there's a difference between the two parties. I can't blame Walker for trying to use this moment to weaken the political power of government employee unions. (Though it's not totally clear that collective bargaining is the decisive factor in fat government worker contracts or government employee political clout; some of the most crushing burdens -- including California's SB 400 -- were accomplished legislatively rather than at the bargaining table.) But as Arnold Schwarzenegger found out with his failed ballot initiatives of 2005, directly targeting union political power is a great way to get your ass kicked. And Walker seems to have even less finesse than Arnold.
The problem is that once you've moved this national issue into the realm of left-right politics, you open the floodgates of horse pucky. Sure enough, The New York Times now would have us believe most Americans want to increase their own taxes and save less for their own retirements so that so that higher-paid cops, firefighters, and teachers can retire earlier with better pensions and benefits. Public Policy Polling claims Republicans in the Badger State are turning against Walker.
And for a true escape from reality, try this post by Forbes' Rick Ungar, bearing the breathless headline "Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions." In the New Normal of public union politics, "nothing" apparently means "100 percent." Ungar has updated his original post with a retraction (er, clarification) that's almost as long as the original article.
Ungar ran off half-cocked in this manner after half-reading a David Cay Johnston piece that boldly (i.e., wrongly) claims, "Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers." The Johnston piece has been getting a lot of attention on the left, so here are some things to bear in mind:
1. Deferred compensation isn't being paid for by state workers because it isn’t being paid for at all. Wisconsin has a $77 $63 billion unfunded pension liability.*
2. Unless Wisconsin has some black budget of funds it gets by selling arms to Minnesota, all compensation of public employees -- present and deferred -- is funded by taxpayers.
3. To go from the true statement that the employer pays 100 percent of the benefits package -- part of which is takehome pay and part of which is deferred -- to saying that the employee pays 100 percent is a lie. If you were to count the full 100 percent -- regular pay and all fringe -- as one compensation package, the total size of a public sector worker's compensation would go up substantially, and the $64k/$42k ratio of average annual public-to-private employee compensation would be much wider than it already is.
4. These are not 401(k) or other defined contribution plans, where your payout is based on the performance of the fund. These are defined benefit plans, which means your payout is guaranteed whether the pension plan is funded or not. The taxpayers (who, again, are actually paying that 100 percent of this money -- see point 2) have to kick in to cover the shortfall (see point 1).
5. The total amount it costs your employer to employ you is your total compensation package, and public workers cost a lot more than private sector workers. It is pettifogging to pretend the form of the compensation changes this math.
But this is the
kind of nonsense that has been unleashed by the Wisconsin political
firestorm. Maybe Walker will
become the game changer he clearly hopes to be. (In a real
investigative coup, U.S. Snooze’s Jamie Elizabeth Stiehm
speculates that the governor "must have read Niccolo
Machiavelli's classic Renaissance power tract, The
Prince.") But right now it looks like the game has changed in
favor of political speech and away from a bipartisan consensus
about pension costs and discretionary spending that was a generally
recognized problem long before we had Scott Walker to kick around.
For a return to reality, dig the Sacramento Bee’s ed board
– hardly a band of Republican zealots –
describing a new report from California’s Little Hoover
Commission:
Many local government workers earn more the day they retire than when they worked. And given earlier retirement ages – 55 for most public employees and 50 for firefighters, police and prison guards – and longer life spans, many retired state workers will actually pick up more retirement checks in their lifetimes than paychecks. Such high costs are unsustainable, economically and politically.
The report predicts that in coming years, cities like San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose and Los Angeles will spend one-third of their operating budgets to finance their pension systems. It's not just citizens who risk loss of vital government services as retirement obligations overwhelm state and local budgets. Public employees, the report says, "will pay a price for inaction – salary freezes, layoffs increased payroll deductions and the threat of a city or county bankruptcy. A pension not tied to a job is worthless."
That’s the reality in states around the country. The numbers don’t add up, and they will keep on not adding up until somebody – Republican, Democrat or other – succeeds in changing the formula. Math is no respecter of politics.
* Corrected. Thanks to David Cay Johnston, who takes on all comers in the comments. As is the case with such popular phrases as "California's $500 billion pension time bomb" and "America's $3 trillion unfunded pension liability," all pension liability numbers deal with future shortfalls estimated through projections about actuarial tables, market performance, changes in tax policy, future demographics, and related mumbo jumbo. As such they should be viewed only as best guesses or rhetorical gongs and should not be considered numbers that are quantifiable today. Except in a few states (such as California) where pension liabilities have actually begun to eat into discretionary spending, the pension crisis exists mainly in the future.
Why Private-Sector Union Membership Declined. And Why Public-Sector Unions Might Follow.
Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson has
written a rarely seen, free-of-cant disquisition on the rise and
fall of labor unions in the private sector. He notes that
private-sector union membership is lower now (6.9 percent) than it
was the Wagner Act, which mandated that employers allow and
negotiate with unions, was passed in 1929. The percentage of
private-sector workers in unions climbed to around 35 percent
during World War II and then began a long slide that greatly
accelerated in the '70s and '80s.
Georgia State's Barry Hirsch explains that, in 2006, union workers made about 19 percent more than non-unionized workers and that such a premium can exist when productivity and hence profits are higher.
The productivity advantages of unionized firms are scant, Hirsch says. The formula worked, because many heavily unionized industries were dominated by a few large firms with similar labor costs. These could be recovered in higher prices.
That changed in the 1970s and 1980s. Imports and "transplant" factories created new competition in steel and autos. Airlines, trucking and communications (telephones) were deregulated, allowing new low-cost rivals into the market. Digital technology and the Internet transformed communications and threatened many industries, including traditional phone companies and newspapers.
Samuelson, whose book The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath is one of the great explications of the post-war economy in America, goes to note that labor and management in big, typically long-protected firms, were slow in reacting to changes.
By and large, union concessions were too little, too late. Corporate managers, their business models besieged, were also slow. Both executives and union leaders underestimated the vulnerability of once impregnable market positions. The downfall of the "Big Three" automakers epitomized this disastrous cycle. Nonunion firms gained market share; union membership fell. Unions also had a harder time organizing other companies, because both managers and workers feared job loss.
How does this translate into
the public sector, which is where the action is (literally: more
union members are in the public sector now, despite the far lower
number of workers in that sector)? This is especially a tough
question since efficiency in the public sector is tough to enforce.
In the private sector, increasing productivity means doing more
with less, including fewer workers. In the public sector,
"investment" works in the other direction. The very goal of many
education reforms, for instance, is to increase the number of
teachers per student, which is by definition a decline in the
conventional understanding of productivity.
Among government workers, 36.2 percent are unionized. Their growth partially offset the erosion of private-sector unions (the combined unionization rate for private and public workers: 11.9 percent). Traditionally, public-worker unions flourished in an alliance with liberal Democrats. But the huge loss of state and local government revenue has - like new competitors for firms - transformed the economic and political climate. Labor costs put upward pressure on taxes and downward pressure on public services.
The result is a dilemma that transcends partisan union-bashing. Striving too hard to protect existing wages and benefits will stimulate more political opposition, and not just from Republicans (see Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York). But sacrificing too much may trigger a revolt from angry rank-and-file members. Private-sector unions couldn't solve this dilemma; they never reconciled past successes with future survival. So Big Labor became Little Labor. If public-sector unions fail, Little Labor could become Mini Labor.
Samuelson is right to note that Cuomo, along with Jerry Brown in California, are going to be doing the same thing as seen in other Republican-led states: They're going to be cutting total compensation for state workers, whether unionized or not. Progressives such as George Lakoff, Rachel Madow, and the folks at Alternet may think that the whole "we are out of money" is a "ruse" but wishing away the godawful bottom-lines of oh, about 50 out of 50 states ain't gonna help unions or taxpayers in the long run. That's exactly what the brainiacs at GM and US Steel did on both sides of the bargaining table did back when the world changed and look where they are now.
Check out Andrew Cuomo's ruse in this video about why state budget showdowns are coming to your state's capital city soon:
Reason Morning Links: Libyan Rebels Hold, Possible Government Shutdown, Ted Kennedy's Chilean Adventure
- Libyan rebels hold Zawiya after six hours of fighting with Gaddafi's forces.
- FBI memo: Ted Kennedy once attempted to rent out an entire Chilean brothel.
- Newt Gingrich preparing to announce presidential run.
- Report: U.S. has wasted billions of dollars on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Budget battle could result in government shutdown.
- Last known WWI veteran dies at 110.
New at Reason: Radley Balko on the Outrageous Gun Prosecution of Brian Aitken
Brian Aitken was sentenced in August for felony
possession of a handgun and sentenced to prison. If it weren’t for
a commutation of his sentence from the governor’s mansion, he would
have been stuck there for the next seven years. Before his arrest,
Aitken, the owner of a media consulting business, had no criminal
record. By all appearances he made a good-faith effort to comply
with the stringent New Jersey gun laws that eventually proved his
undoing. Even the jurors who convicted him seem to have been
looking for a reason to acquit Aitken. But as Senior Editor Radley
Balko writes, the judge gave them little choice.
Will Freedom for Libya Mean Peace for Somalia?
As surrealist Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi makes his horrifying last stand in Tripoli, it's probably for the best that the latest upheaval is not happening in one of our client states. But while Libya was not coddled by America in the way that Hosni Mubarak's Egypt was, the United States and Libya have worked together toward a common goal in Somalia.
When fellow Arab states began to shy away from Gaddafi after the Lockerbie bombing, he turned his eye to Africa. (In a famous 2009 hissy fit at an Arab League summit, after being quieted by the emir of Qatar, Gaddafi declared: "I am an international leader, the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims and my international status does not allow me to descend to a lower level.") Under his rule, Libya was a founding member and key booster of the African Union, whose seven thousand troops are the only thing standing between Somalia's internationally-recognized Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and complete collapse.
Gaddafi's eagerness to prop up the TFG in Somalia earned him the praise of American diplomats, who in a leaked cable, said that "when approached with appropriate deference, Libya can be an effective actor," able to "secure our foreign policy interests" in Somalia. Ali Treiki, a high-ranking Libyan diplomat who is said to report directly to Muammar Gaddafi, even tried to get the United States to press for action on Somalia at the United Nations Security Council.
But with Gaddafi unlikely to hold out much longer and an American foreign policy establishment that's growing weary of the Somali government's perennial failure to govern, the TFG may not be long for this world. Most international efforts have operated under the assumption that Al Shabaab, an Islamist insurgent group, would fill the power vacuum, but many have noted that Al Shabaab fighters seem motivated more by money than by fanatic ideology, and that the alliance might fall apart if it loses its common enemy, the TFG.
But if not Al Shabaab, then who? Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science at Davidson College who has written extensively about Somalia, has argued that Somalia's political equilibrium does not involve a traditional state at all. Rather, Menkhaus claims, a heterogeneous mix of local and regional governments, along with xeer, the traditional Somali legal code, would rise to fill the void.
Contrary to the popular image of Somalia as an irredeemable hellhole since state collapse in the early '90s, Somalis actually enjoyed a decade-long period of peace and prosperity (at least relative to Somalia's East African neighbors), beginning with the end of its civil war in the mid-'90s (which ended soon after the US and UN retreated) and ending with the 2006 Ethiopian invasion (backed by the United States and the African Union). If Gaddafi's fall saps the African Union of its power to intervene and the United States loses its taste for Somali adventures, the country might again revert back to official statelessness—which may mean a return to peace and economic growth for the Somali people, if not its government.
New at Reason: Jacob Sullum on the Silencing of Pain Treatment Activist Siobhan Reynolds
Last November the Supreme Court declined to hear
pain treatment activist Siobhan Reynolds' First Amendment challenge
to a grand jury investigation triggered by her advocacy. Senior
Editor Jacob Sullum says the Court thereby allowed an abuse of the
grand jury process that turns what is supposed to be a bulwark
against arbitrary government power into an instrument of
repression.
New Frontiers in Interfaith Dialogue
I understand why this story leads with Louis Farrakhan's friendly remarks about Col. Qaddafi, but I'm really much more interested in this bit:
Farrakhan also said he had spent time at the Church of Scientology's celebrity center in Los Angeles and had been impressed with the church's method of "auditing" -- a process he said was comparable to therapy.
He said the church's founder L. Ron Hubbard had a mission to "civilize white people," adding that Hubbard "is so exceedingly valuable to every white person on this earth."
Scientology books were available for sale at the Savior's Day event, but Farrakhan said he was not converting and did not need a new religion.
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