Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Block-Granting Medicaid Is a Long-Overdue Way of Restoring Federalism and Promoting Good Fiscal Policy
This new video, based in large part on the good work of Michael Cannon, explains why Medicaid should be shifted to the states. As I note in the title of this post, it’s good federalism policy and good fiscal policy. But the video also explains that Medicaid reform is good health policy since it creates an opportunity to deal with the third-party payer problem.
One of the key observations of the video is that Medicaid block grants would replicate the success of welfare reform. Getting rid of the federal welfare entitlement in the 1990s and shifting the program to the states was a very successful policy, saving billions of dollars for taxpayers and significantly reducing poverty. There is every reason to think ending the Medicaid entitlement will have similar positive results.
Medicaid block grants were included in Congressman Ryan’s budget, so this reform is definitely part of the current fiscal debate. Unfortunately, the Senate apparently is not going to produce any budget, and the White House also has expressed opposition. On the left, reducing dependency is sometimes seen as a bad thing, even though poor people are the biggest victims of big government.
It’s wroth noting that Medicaid reform and Medicare reform often are lumped together, but they are separate policies. Instead of block grants, Medicare reform is based on something akin to vouchers, sort of like the health system available for Members of Congress. This video from last month explains the details.
In closing, I suppose it would be worth mentioning that there are two alternatives to Medicaid and Medicare reform. The first alternative is to do nothing and allow America to become another Greece. The second alternative is to impose bureaucratic restrictions on access to health care—what is colloquially known as the death panel approach. Neither option seems terribly attractive compared to the pro-market reforms discussed above.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Health Care; Tax and Budget Policy
Should the Government Ban ATMs and Create “Spoon-ready” Projects?
At the Britannica Blog today I note President Obama’s concern over ATMs, Hillary Clinton’s support for the candlemakers’ petition, John Maynard Keynes’s simple solution to the problem of unemployment—and how Bastiat refuted all their arguments more than 150 years ago:
And there’s your question for President Obama: Do you really think the United States would be better off if we didn’t have ATMs and check-in kiosks? . . . And do you think we’d be better off if we mandated that all these “shovel-ready projects” be performed with spoons?
In his 1988 book The American Job Machine, the economist Richard B. McKenzie pointed out an easy way to create 60 million jobs: “Outlaw farm machinery.” The goal of economic policy should not be job creation per se; it should be a growing economy that continually satisfies more consumer demand. And such an economy will be marked by creative destruction. Some businesses will be created, others will fail. Some jobs will no longer be needed, but in a growing economy more will be created. . . .
Finding new and more efficient ways to deliver goods and services to consumers is called economic progress. We should not seek to impede that process, whether through protectionism, breaking windows, throwing towels on the floor, or fretting about automation.
$1 Trillion in Phony Spending Cuts?
In the Washington Post Friday, Ezra Klein partly confirmed what I fear the Republican strategy is for the debt-limit bill—get to the $2 trillion in cuts promised through accounting gimmicks. As I have also noted, Klein says that there is about $1 trillion in budget “savings” ($1.4 trillion with interest) to be found simply in the inflated Congressional Budget Office baseline for Iraq and Afghanistan. Klein says, “I’m told that a big chunk of these savings were included in the debt-ceiling deal” that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Sen. Jon Kyl (D-AZ) are negotiating with the Democrats.
Republican leaders have promised that spending cuts in the debt-limit deal must be at least as large as the debt-limit increase, which means $2 trillion if the debt-limit is extended to reach the end of 2012. In a Daily Caller op-ed, I noted that you can find $1 trillion in “savings” from this phony war accounting and another $1 trillion by simply pretending that non-security discretionary will stay flat over the next decade.
There is more evidence that few, if any, real spending cuts are being discussed. One clue is that the media keeps quoting Joe Biden essentially saying that it was easy to reach agreement on the first $1 trillion in cuts.
The other suspicious thing is that the media keeps floating trial balloons for specific tax hikes, but I’ve seen very few trial balloons for specific spending cuts. Friday, the Washington Post story on the debt discussions mentions all kinds of ideas for raising taxes on high earners. A few days ago, news stories revealed that negotiators were talking about changing tax bracket indexing to create annual stealth increases in income taxes. The only item I’ve seen being discussed on the spending side is trimming farm subsidies.
If Republican and Democratic lawmakers were really discussing major spending cuts, then the media would be full of stories mentioning particular changes to entitlement laws to reduce benefits and stories about abolishing programs widely regarded as wasteful, such as community development grants.
I hope I’m wrong, but this is starting to look a lot like the phony $100 billion spending cut deal from earlier this year.
Sean, Rush, Greta, Glenn, Bill: When you get Republican leaders on your shows, get them to promise that they won’t use phony baseline accounting like war costs to reach the $2 trillion in cuts. The budget and the nation desperately need real cuts and real government downsizing.
Hayek on C-SPAN, Gillespie and Welch at the Hayek Auditorium
Sunday night at 8 on C-SPAN: Brian Lamb interviews Russell Roberts and John Papola about their Hayek-Keynes rap videos.
And Thursday afternoon at 4: Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason magazine, Reason.tv, Reason.com, and the vast Reason enterprises launch their new book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America at a Cato Book Forum with a multimedia presentation in the Hayek Auditorium.
“In a world where our [political] choices are limited to John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, the survivors envy the dead,” they write. But that’s not the world they actually see. They argue that despite our stunted politics, despite national bankruptcy, despite the war on drugs, revolutionary innovators have changed our world over the past 40 years: Vaclav Havel and the Plastic People of the Universe, Herb Kelleher and Southwest Airlines, Tiger Woods and the breakdown of categories, the personalization of media, and much more. It’s just politics that is resisting freedom and choice. And now millions of voters are trying to break out of stagnant political choices. Gillespie and Welch see a “future so bright, we gotta wear shades.”
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen writes, “This is the up-to-date statement of libertarianism. Not warmed-over right-wing politics, but real, true-blooded libertarianism in the sense of loving liberty and wanting to find a new path toward human flourishing.” Come see if he’s right.
Federal Jobs Programs Don’t Work
In a 1975 interview, Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
In writing and editing essays on www.DownsizingGovernment.org, I see that mistake in department after department. It is an important reason why policymakers find it so hard to control their spending appetites. They want to believe that programs work, and so they internalize the bedtime stories sold to them by program advocates.
In Politico today, I examine federal employment and job training programs. From FDR to Obama, and from Reagan to Ryan, policymakers have wanted to “do something” to help labor markets. However, jobs programs are not a proper exercise of federal power under the Constitution, and they simply haven’t worked very well despite decades of renaming, retooling, and reinventing.
ObamaCare’s Latest ‘Glitch’: Medicaid for Millions of Middle-Class Retirees
Remember how ObamaCare inadvertently kicked members of Congress out of their health insurance plans? (Just kidding! The Obama administration ignored that part of the law!)
Well, today we learned that ObamaCare also inadvertently gives free health care to millions of middle-class Social Security recipients:
President Barack Obama’s health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.
The change would affect early retirees: A married couple could have an annual income of about $64,000 and still get Medicaid, said officials who make long-range cost estimates for the Health and Human Services department.
Up to 3 million people could qualify for Medicaid in 2014 as a result of the anomaly. That’s because, in a major change from today, most of their Social Security benefits would no longer be counted as income for determining eligibility.
Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster says the situation keeps him up at night.
“I don’t generally comment on the pros or cons of policy, but that just doesn’t make sense,” Foster said during a question-and-answer session at a recent professional society meeting. It’s almost like allowing middle-class people to qualify for food stamps, he suggested.
What other surprises lurk in ObamaCare’s 2,000-plus pages?
Kudos to Rick Foster and the Associated Press‘s Ricardo Alonzo-Zaldivar.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Miss USA Contestants: America in Glamourcosm?
A rabid fan of both Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom and The Miss USA Pageant (some may know him as Jim Harper) just sent me a link to this YouTube video. In the vid, all the contestants in the just-completed, aforementioned pageant discuss whether the theory of evolution should be taught in schools.
I didn’t tally their responses, but just listening to the contenders it seems their consensus answer represents America in microcosm: Most seem to have serious doubts about evolution, but support teaching it along with other viewpoints. It reflects both the overall split within the American public—40 to 50 percent of Americans are creationists, and roughly the same segment evolutionists—as well as the consensus view on teaching human origins: About 60 percent of Americans support teaching both evolution and creationism in public schools.
Of the most interest to us here at CEF is whether public schooling can even handle a hot-button issue like human origins. Is a government system of schools that all diverse people must support capable of dealing with a controversial subject like this, or will it spark conflict that ultimately ends with no side getting the view it wants taught?
The existing evidence shows that government schooling generally can’t handle controversy, but that is almost never even mentioned in the seemingly endless war between creationists and evolutionists. And the same is true for the aspiring Miss USAs. While a few appeared to conclude that the nation is too diverse for public schools to deal with this topic—see Miss Kentucky at the 5:07 mark, and Miss Utah at 12:36—the majority made no mention of the problem. Fortunately, only one gave the answer libertarians should fear most: Miss Indiana ( 4:25 ) said “I think we should leave that up to the government.” (In the Hoosier rep’s defense, she did eventually conclude that we should “just leave that out of the equation” because it would be too controversial).
At least when it comes to the teaching of human origins in schools, Miss USA contestants really do appear to represent their country.
Poll Finds a Libertarian Shift
Polling wizard Nate Silver of the New York Times today points to a couple of poll questions that David Kirby and I have often employed and finds some welcome new results, along with a great graph:
Since 1993, CNN has regularly asked a pair of questions that touch on libertarian views of the economy and society:
Some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your own view?
Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?
A libertarian, someone who believes that the government is best when it governs least, would typically choose the first view in the first question and the second view in the second.
In the polls, the responses to both questions had been fairly steady for many years. The economic question has showed little long-term trend, although tolerance for governmental intervention rose following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The social libertarian viewpoint — that government should not favor any particular set of values — has gained a couple of percentage points since the 1990s but not more than that.
But in CNN’s latest version of the poll, conducted earlier this month, the libertarian response to both questions reached all-time highs. Some 63 percent of respondents said government was doing too much — up from 61 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2008 — while 50 percent said government should not favor any particular set of values, up from 44 percent in 2010 and 41 percent in 2008. (It was the first time that answer won a plurality in CNN’s poll.)
And then he offers this graph:
Check out that green line! Kirby and I used those same two poll questions in our studies beginning with “The Libertarian Vote” (see p. 9). Like Gallup, we combined responses to the two questions in a matrix, finding in 2009 (in “The Libertarian Vote in the Age of Obama“) that 23 percent of the public held libertarian views. Adding them, as Silver has done, seems much more fun.
Abolish the NLRB (and the NLRA)
The National Labor Relations Board is in the news for meddling in Boeing’s decision to build some aircraft in South Carolina rather than in Washington state. To most economists, the idea that a small regulatory board in D.C. should try to centrally plan $1 billion of private business investment is crackers.
However, the vast bureaucratic state in D.C. was built by overactive left-wing lawyers, not free-market economists. Consider that the federal government apparently has complex legal rules to determine when U.S. businesses are allowed to move investment and jobs from one state to another. The NLRB’s General Counsel Lafe Solomon said that in deciding whether it allows businesses like Boeing to adjust their production: “For us, it’s a motive analysis.”
“Motive analysis?” We’ve got obscure labor lawyers in the federal bureaucracy trying to mind-read the nation’s business executives on their huge capital investment decisions? That doesn’t sound like a very good prescription for U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.
This NLRB case highlights just one anti-growth and anti-freedom aspect of New Deal-era labor union laws. These laws–particularly collective bargaining–have no place in the modern economy. The NLRB should be abolished. Indeed, the entire National Labor Relations Act of 1935 ought to be repealed, according to Professor Charles Baird in his essay at DownsizingGovernment.org.
Economist Ludwig von Mises noted that “collective bargaining” is a euphemism for “bargaining at the point of a gun.” The system is not based on voluntarism and freedom of association. Voluntary unions would be fine, but current labor laws allow the creation of monopoly unions, which are inconsistent with a free economy and a free society.
The Non-war War in Libya
On Sunday, the Obama administration will have made war in Libya for more than 90 days without authorization from Congress. This violates both the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. The administration claims it does not violate the latter because the war in Libya is not actually a war for legal purposes. The non-war war argument is not going over well; even the New York Times editorial page says the administration’s case “borders on sophistry.”
Beyond the headlines and the political struggle, the administration’s efforts to expand the presidential power to start wars also shifts political authority from the U.S. Congress to the United Nations. For more on the problems of Obama’s radical moves in foreign policy, see my essay here.
That’s Not Healthy: ‘They Said What?’ Edition
Some quick hits from today’s health care news:
- As I predicted, the physicians lobby balks at ObamaCare‘s accountable care organization (ACOs) program, saying, obliquely: “Give us more money.”
- GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty left AHIP members and some reporters confused about how a person can support ACOs but still want to repeal ObamaCare. He and they should have read my column on ACOs.
- Pawlenty also endorsed a public option when he said his Medicare reform proposal would preserve Parts A, B, and D. He should have read my papers on a public option and Medicare reform (with Chris Edwards).
- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) says he will fight “to the end” to keep low-income Americans dependent on lousy government health care programs.
- Turns out, potential GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has endorsed an individual mandate after all: “I wouldn’t shy away from mandates. I think if you’re going to get it done and get it done right, [a] mandate has to be part of it…I’m not sure you get to the point of serious attempt without some sort of mandate.”
- Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D) gushes over ObamaCare’s rationing board.
- Ezra Klein enlightens Washington Post readers by telling them Medicaid could save money someday if the government somehow became really, really smart. Klein, too, should read my column on ACOs.
- According to one mother of a diabetic child, Washington state’s death panel members “knew nothing about type 1 diabetes. And they’re making this huge, important decision that affects all these people. It was mind-boggling,” while a death-panel defender non-ironically laments, “That’s what’s been driving health care — the whiteness of the hair, the more bravado, the more clout you have in politics — that’s what’s making health care not healthy.”
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
White House: ‘We Have Never Been at War in Northafrica!’
Pardon the somewhat trite Orwell reference in the title to this post. But sometimes this administration’s wordgames make it hard to resist invoking our keenest analyst of politics and the English language.
Some months ago, the Obama team began telling us that the Libyan War wasn’t a war—it was a “kinetic military action.” (Go here to watch Defense Secretary Robert Gates try—and fail—to maintain a straight face selling that line to Katie Couric on 60 Minutes).
In April, the president’s Office of Legal Counsel made the (bogus) argument that the president hadn’t violated the War Powers Resolution because the WPR recognized his authority to engage in hostilities for at least 60 days without congressional approval. We’re now coming up on 90.
Yesterday, in response to Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) request, the president issued a new explanation for why he isn’t in violation of the WPR, which requires the president to terminate US engagement in “hostilities” after 60 days in the absence of congressional authorization. And it turns out that, per Obama, not only is the Libyan War not a “war,” what we’re doing in Libya—supporting, coordinating, and carrying out attacks—doesn’t even rise to the level of “hostilities.”
The president’s report states that he hasn’t violated the WPR, because “U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of ‘hostilities’ contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision”: they don’t “involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof.”
As Jack Goldsmith explains, “The Administration argues that once it starts firing missiles from drones it is no longer in ‘hostilities’ because U.S. troops suffer no danger of return fire.” ”The implications here,” Goldsmith notes, “in a world of increasingly remote weapons, are large.”
I’ll say: this is an extraordinary argument: The president can rain down destruction via cruise missiles and robot death kites anywhere in the world. But unless an American airman might get hurt, we’re not engaged in “hostilities.”
Put aside the strange argument that acts of war don’t rise to the level of “hostilities.” Given that outrage over the illegal bombing of Cambodia was part of the backdrop to the WPR’s passage, it would have been pretty strange if the Resolution’s drafters thought presidential warmaking was A-OK, so long as you did it from a great height.
As legal arguments go, this is the national security law equivalent of the Clinton perjury defense. It’s the type of thing that gives lawyers an even worse name. Or maybe law professors, because, speaking of Bill Clinton, Obama’s the second former constitutional law professor in a row to violate the War Powers Resolution.
And yet, Obama continues to insist he’s in full compliance with the WPR, and he has no objection to the resolution on constitutional grounds.
God help me, I think I just felt a twinge of nostalgia for John Yoo. Say what you will about the legal architect of Bush’s “Terror Presidency,” at least he had the courage of his bizarre convictions. When the statutes couldn’t be tortured into complete submission, Yoo would make the case that—whatever the law said—the president had the constitutional power to do as he pleased. That’s clearly what Obama believes as well, but you’re not going to catch him admitting it.
Washington Post Grows Nostalgic for Big-Government Bush
E. J. Dionne Jr. has suddenly discovered the big-government George W. Bush, 12 years late, and he’s feeling nostalgic:
Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush….
Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.
Say what you will about his No Child Left Behind education-reform program. It accepted, correctly, that the federal government has to play an important part in reforming our public schools and held them accountable to a set of standards….
And while there are many problems with the way Bush chose to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, he was quite right to believe it had to be done….
Oh, yes, and I really do miss some of Bush’s early rhetoric. I cannot imagine a Republican today giving Bush’s 1999 speech in Indianapolis titled — shades of Barack Obama? — “The Duty of Hope.”
Bush criticized the view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” as a “destructive mind-set.” He scorned this as an approach having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than ‘Leave us alone.’ ”
Stick with us, E. J. We could have told you this in 2007, when Michael Tanner published Leviathan on the Right; or in 2003, when I complained in the Washington Post about Bush’s spending, education program, and entitlement expansion; or in, ahem, 1999, when Ed Crane wrote in the New York Times:
Bill Clinton’s impact on the American polity was never more evident than in the major address that the Republican Presidential aspirant George W. Bush gave in Indianapolis last week. The speech was, well, Clintonesque [in its] assumption that virtually any problem confronting the American people is an excuse for action by the Federal Government.
E. J. likes that view better than we do, but at least readers of the Washington Post will now realize that Obama’s out-of-control spending, nationalizations, and health care interventions are an extension, not a reversal, of Bush’s policies.
My First Year Battling Obamacare
Most people are by now familiar with the broad strokes of the lawsuits challenging Obamacare: more than 30 cases around the country allege, among other claims, that the federal government lacks the constitutional authority to require people to buy a product (the individual health insurance mandate)—and the only way to avoid the mandate is to become poor. After decisions going both ways in the district courts, we are now at the appellate stage in five of those suits, including Virginia’s and the Florida-led 26-state effort.
Those who follow developments in constitutional law are also familiar with the broad legal arguments being made: that the power to regulate interstate commerce, even when read in the context of the power to make laws that are necessary and proper to executing that specified commerce power, does not include the power to force someone to engage in economic activity—to create, in effect, the commerce being regulated. Not even during the height of the New Deal did the government require this, and there are no parallels in the Civil Rights Era or since. (And also that Congress can’t do this under the taxing power for various reasons that I won’t go into here; even those courts ruling for the government have rejected the taxing power assertion.)
Finally, those who follow Cato are probably aware that I’ve been spending a good part of my time since Obamacare’s enactment in March 2010 in this area: filing briefs, writing articles, debating around the country, appearing in the media. And I’m not alone; our entire Center for Constitutional Studies has been involved in various capacities. Indeed, Cato Chairman Bob Levy himself produced a very useful Primer for Nonlawyers about what is the clearly the central constitutional and public policy debate of our generation.
Well, if anyone cares to peek beyond the curtain of how Cato’s legal efforts against Obamacare have evolved, I have an article on that forthcoming in the Florida International University Law Review. Here’s the abstract:
This article chronicles the (first) year I spent opposing the constitutionality of Obamacare: Between debates, briefs, op-eds, blogging, testimony, and media, I have spent well over half of my time since the legislation’s enactment on attacking Congress’s breathtaking assertion of federal power in this context. Braving transportation snafus, snowstorms, and Eliot Spitzer, it’s been an interesting ride. And so, weaving legal arguments into first-person narrative, I hope to add a unique perspective to an important debate that goes to the heart of this nation’s founding principles. The individual mandate is Obamacare’s highest-profile and perhaps most egregious constitutional violation because the Supreme Court has never allowed – Congress has never claimed – the power to require people to engage in economic activity. If it is allowed to stand, then no principled limits on federal power remain. But it doesn’t have to be this way; as the various cases wend their way to an eventual date at the Supreme Court, I will be with them, keeping the government honest in court and the debate alive in the public eye.
Read the whole thing, titled “A Long Strange Trip: My First Year Challenging the Constitutionality of Obamacare.”
Will the GOP Finally Cut Farm Subsidies?
With trillion dollar deficits and mounting federal debt, will Congress finally get serious about cutting farm subsidies? We’ve been disappointed before, but there are a few hopeful signs—like the front-page story in this morning’s Washington Post—that this Congress may be serious about cutting billions in payments to farmers. As the Post reports:
In their recent budget proposals, House Republicans and House Democrats targeted farm subsidies, a program long protected by members of both parties. The GOP plan includes a $30 billion cut to direct payments over 10 years, which would slash them by more than half. Those terms are being considered in the debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Biden, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The Post story profiles a freshman Republican from Kansas, Tim Huelskamp, a fifth-generation farmer himself, who has been traveling his sprawling district telling his farmer constituents that they can no longer be exempt from budget discipline. Many farmers in his district appear to agree.
It remains an open question whether the Republican freshman class will live up to Tea-Party principles of limited government when it comes to agricultural subsidies, as we have speculated ourselves (here, here, and here) at the trade center.
Farm subsidies have certainly been a weak spot of Republicans in the past. According to our online trade-vote feature, more than half of the GOP House caucus voted in May 2008 to override President Bush’s veto of the previous, subsidy laden farm bill. In July 2007, more than half the GOP caucus voted against any cuts in the sugar program, and more than two-thirds opposed any cuts in cotton subsidies. (Of course, Democrats were just as bad overall on farm subsidies.)
The next farm bill, due to be written by this Congress, will tell us a lot about whether the Republicans really believe what they’ve been saying about limiting government and reducing the debt.
John Hospers, R.I.P.
My old philosophy professor has died. He was the only person I’ve ever met who both received a vote in the electoral college for president of the United States and published leading textbooks in ethics and aesthetics. I am fairly confident that he was the only person of whom that will ever be said.
When I enrolled at the University of Southern California in 1973 to study philosophy, John was chairman of the department. I already knew about him, however, as I had read his book Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow and had heard him debate against socialism the year before, alongside the late R. A. Childs, Jr. That was when John was the first presidential candidate of the brand new Libertarian Party. (He and his running mate, the first woman ever to receive an electoral vote, Tonie Nathan, were on the ballot in only 2 states that year.) It wasn’t a very vigorous campaign, but it helped thousands of people to say, “You know, I don’t fit in with either the left or the right; they’re both abusive of liberty.” Besides that electoral vote the Hospers campaign helped to launch a long-term political alignment that is very much with us today, as people increasingly see issues in terms of personal liberty and responsibility, rather than as a battle between two different flavors of statism.
John was a gentleman, thoughtful, and kind. I remember meetings and seminars with him in his office, when he was always engaged, challenging, and willing to reexamine his own views when challenged in turn. He was a scholar and a thinker.
John Hospers was born on June 9, 1918, so he had just reached his 93rd birthday. He had a long life full of interesting experiences and left the world a better place than it would be had he not been here. He will be missed, but his legacy will continue on. He helped to nurture a movement for liberty that broke away from the absurd left/right spectrum. That alone is a worthy monument.
Marriage and the Courts
In today’s Britannica column, I write about yesterday’s 44th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Loving decision and its relevance to the current Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now actually Perry v. Brown) case. It includes videos from Cato’s recent forum, from the American Foundation for Equal Rights, and from the 1967 ABC News report on the Supreme Court decision. You really should watch that one.
I also note some of the objections to the Perry case:
When it comes to the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case, there are legitimate federalist and democratic objections. One might say that marriage law has always been a matter for the states, and it should stay that way. Let the people of each state decide what marriage will be in their state. Leave the federal courts out of it. Federalism is an important basis for liberty, and that’s a strong argument. There’s also a discomfiting argument that a Supreme Court decision striking down bans on gay marriage is undemocratic, that it would be better to let the political process work through the issue. Some people, even supporters of gay marriage, warn that a court decision could be another Roe v. Wade, with decades of cultural war over an imposed decision.
For a response, read the column.
When Che Guevara Met Nat Hentoff
In the new video below, renowned civil libertarian and Cato senior fellow Nat Hentoff talks about his meeting with Che Guevara when Hentoff wrote for the Village Voice. (See it also here with Spanish subtitles.) El Che is romanticized by college kids and those on the left as a champion of the oppressed, but he was in fact a main architect of Cuban totalitarianism, a cold-blooded murderer whose defining characteristic was sheer intolerance of those with differing views. The best essay on Che, “The Killing Machine,” was written by Alvaro Vargas Llosa for the New Republic some years ago.
It is hard to imagine a symbol in popular culture in which the represented ideal is more far apart from the historical reality than in the case with Che. Surely that gap helps explain Che’s appeal among people all over the world with little knowledge of Latin America. Four years ago on a visit to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council I saw pro-democracy activist and Council member Leung Kwok-hung, a.k.a. “Long Hair,” wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt on the floor of the chamber. (Hong Kong is not yet a democracy and its Legislative Council is quite limited in its powers; in practice, the city is ruled by the communists in Beijing, which has ironically upheld the city’s free-market model and rule of law tradition inherited from the British.) Does Long Hair not know that Che despised democracy?
In his classic book, The Latin Americans, the late Venezuelan intellectual Carlos Rangel explained how outsiders, especially Europeans, have since their earliest contact with Latin America idealized the place, projecting their fantasies and frustrations, and promoting ideas there that they themselves would not find acceptable on their own turf. Thus the early inhabitants of the region were “noble savages” despoiled and degraded by the Europeans; the noble savages later evolved into the good revolutionaries, those authentic Latin Americans who fight for everything that is good and reject the imposition of all forms of oppression. Simplistic and wrong, but effective. So it is even in Latin America, where, as Rangel explains, that storyline has served political leaders well as they justify the imposition of any number of restrictions on freedom, from tariffs to censorship. Che’s image still abounds in the region. (For an excellent and eminently relevant video in Spanish of Rangel speaking in Caracas in 1980 about the central problems with Venezuela, see here.)
Incidentally, another Cato scholar had close ties to Che. The rebel was a cousin to well-known Argentine libertarian and adjunct scholar Alberto Benegas Lynch (Che’s complete last name was Guevara Lynch). In this article in Spanish, Alberto discusses his cousin Che.
Are Even Dems Getting Tired of Anti-Profit Crusade?
Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) held his fifth — and perhaps final – Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee show-hearing lambasting for-profit colleges. As usual, it was a decidedly one-sided affair, with no profit-defenders apparently invited to testify, and Republican committee members boycotting. Perhaps the only interesting thing that occurred was Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who has never given any indication he doesn’t support Harkin’s obsessive whale hunt, saying the proceedings could have benefitted from more than one point of view. According to MarketWatch, Franken lamented that “it would have been nice to have someone here to represent the for-profit schools.” Now, he might have only wanted a for-profit rep there to receive the beating, but even that would have been preferable to no rep at all.
Could this indicate that even Senate Democrats are getting tired of Harkin’s tedious grandstanding against for-profit colleges, especially now that the Education Department has issued its “gainful employment” rules? Maybe, and there are lots of Dems in the House who have opposed the attack on for-profit schools for some time. But don’t expect this to be over quite yet: Harkin still gets a lot of negative media coverage for proprietary schools with each hearing, while the scandals surrounding people he’s had testify; the decrepit GAO “secret shopper” report that turned out to be hugely inaccurate; and potentially dirty dealings behind the gainful employment rules seem only to get real ink from Fox News and The Daily Caller. And Harkin keeps indicating that he will introduce legislation — doomed to failure though it may be — to curb for-profits even further.
Of course, what should be the biggest source of outrage in all of this is that while Harkin fixates on for-profit schools, Washington just keeps on enabling all of higher education to luxuriate in ever-pricier, taxpayer-funded opulence. Indeed, as a new Cato report due out next week will show, putatively nonprofit universities are likely making bigger profits on undergraduate students than are for-profit institutions. Of course, they don’t call them “profits” – nonprofits always spend excess funds, thus increasing their “costs” – but that’s probably just plain smart. Be honest about trying to make a buck, and Sen. Harkin has shown just what’s likely to befall you.
“Weinergate”: It’s Entertaining–and Edifying!
I guess I should blush to admit that my Washington Examiner column this week focuses on “Weinergate.” But who among us can resist snickering at a scandal this hilarious—who so sober and serious that they could ignore the crotch pic that launched a thousand puns?
As I argue in the column, among all the horselaughs to be had, there are also lessons to be learned:
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a good old-fashioned political sex scandal. They’re entertaining, and they may even be edifying — reminding us that self-styled “public servants” are often less responsible, more venal, and just plain dumber than those they seek to rule.
Some writers with whom I’m normally simpatico disagree. Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway deplores “the odd American obsession with political sex scandals.” The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf also condemns the attention given the Weiner kerfuffle:
there is a significant cost to obsessing over these things. The opportunity cost, for the media, is covering lots of other matters that are actually of greater import to the public, whatever one thinks of sex scandals.
I just don’t see it. Sure, in a better world, the news cycle might consist of a dignified 24/7 seminar on debt limits, insurance exchanges, the War Powers Resolution, and the like. But here on earth, Weinergate’s mainly crowding out more coverage of Sarah Palin’s bus tour.
“And for the politician in question,” Friedersdorf continues, “scandal consumes all the time he’d otherwise be dedicating to his official duties.”
I confess, I have a hard time not seeing this as win-win.
Both Mataconis and Friedersdorf argue that “private” sexual behavior tells us little about how politicians do their jobs. And I see their point, to a point. I sometimes joke, lamely, that one of my favorite presidents was a draft-dodging, womanizing Democrat elected in ’92 (wait for it)… Grover Cleveland.
But whether or not we should care about congressional “sexting”—in the context of the modern media Panopticon, isn’t someone, like Weiner, who engages in it (especially after GOP Rep. Christopher Lee’s downfall) at least a reckless idiot? And isn’t that relevant to his job?
In a recent hand-wringing editorial, the New York Times fretted about disgraced former Senator and VP candidate John Edwards.
What the Times found unfortunate wasn’t the runaway prosecution–a legitimate complaint–but the fact that it would draw attention to yet another giant political phony. It’s “the last thing the nation needs: another cautionary tale of hubris,” says the Grey Lady, ”the woeful courtroom coda to [Edwards'] once flourishing political career can only invite a further slide toward wariness and cynicism for American voters.”
Oh no! Not more “wariness and cynicism”! Surely, that’s the “last thing the nation needs” in an era of promiscuous warmaking and reckless spending!
There’s a story (perhaps apocryphal) where F. Scott Fitzgerald says to Ernest Hemingway, “the rich are different from you and me,” and Hemingway supposedly replies, “yes, they have more money.” I don’t know about the rich, but the political class is, by and large, different from the rest of us–and not just because they have more power.
By reminding us of how untrustworthy and reckless these people can be–how little control they often exhibit in their own lives–political sex scandals may even serve an important social purpose: they remind us that we should think twice before granting them more control over ours.
