Democracy in America

WAS Barack Obama “a dick” when he said Congress was less diligent than his 12- and ten-year-old daughters, as an editor for Time magazine suggested this morning? Or is it the Republicans in Congress who are the bad guys, as many on the left are suggesting, for walking out of talks about raising the limit on the government’s borrowing? And does all the name-calling suggest that negotiations have broken down irreparably, that the debt ceiling will not be lifted by the deadline of August 2nd, and that some kind of financial calamity will ensue?

Washington has had its knickers in a twist over these questions this week, which is odd, since most Washingtonians have been predicting for months that it would come to this. Pundits have said all along that it would be near-impossible to reach a deal, that both sides were locked into irreconcilable negotiating positions, that the brinkmanship would go to the, er, brink and so on and so forth. How reassuring at such a gloomy juncture to know that the media, at least, has been doing its job even more promptly and thoroughly than Sasha and Malia.

From a naïve philosophical stance, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Republicans are in the wrong. As Mr Obama pointed out, they voted for the budget resolution currently in force, but are now denying the Treasury the authority to pay for all the measures it contains. They cannot simultaneously instruct the government to spend money and then refuse to give it any: it’s totally inconsistent and reckless to boot.

But from a more grimly realist perspective, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Republicans have a lot to lose by doing the right thing, whereas the political consequences of doing the wrong thing are uncertain. Their supporters, even more than the electorate in general, are implacably opposed to raising the debt ceiling, in part because they see it, wrongly, as a harbinger of future profligacy, rather than a hangover from past spending binges. Many freshman Republicans in Congress swore never to vote in favour of a rise. They are sure to face primary challengers who will accuse them of treason if they go back on their word. By contrast, if a failure to raise the debt limit throws the financial markets, not to mention the government’s finances, into chaos, the political fallout is likely to be more general and diffuse.

That is not to say that the Republicans demanding swingeing spending cuts and rejecting even the most innocuous of revenue-raising measures as the price of raising the debt ceiling have no consciences. On the contrary, my wager is still that a deal will eventually be done, for the good of the country, as rube-ish as that sounds. But it still makes sense for the Republicans to hold out to the last minute and to extract the best deal possible, to minimise the embarrassment inherent in any eventual climbdown. If the Democrats lose their nerve and fold altogether, so much the better.

The example of TARP is instructive, and not simply because Congress toyed with the idea of allowing the world to end for a few days before deciding against it. Republicans who voted for TARP are still paying the price: many were defenestrated by their own party at the past election, and more are likely to be this time around (Orrin Hatch, say, or Richard Lugar). People in that position naturally want to be sure they’ve exhausted all other options before doing the right thing, which means twisted knickers will be the default in Washington for several more weeks.

(Photo credit: AFP)

THE latest episode in the battle over health-care reform was overshadowed today by Barack Obama's press conference, where it was revealed that we live in a Bizzaro America in which Republicans and Democrats broadly agree on enormous cuts to the budget, but fail to reach a deal owing to disagreements over comparatively piddling tax breaks for the well-off, and America careens toward default, while the Democrats pine for a president more like Howard Dean. Setting that aside (because, really, what more is there to say?), let's briefly look at today's ruling by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Michigan, which deemed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) constitutional.

The three-judge panel rejected, by a vote of two to one, the argument that the ACA's mandate is unconstitutional because it strives to regulate inactivity, as opposed to activity, under the commerce clause of the constitution. From the decision:

Virtually everyone will need health care services at some point, including, in the aggregate, those without health insurance.  Even dramatic attempts to protect one’s health and minimize the need for health care will not always be successful, and the  health care market is characterized by unpredictable and unavoidable needs for care. The ubiquity and unpredictability of the need for medical care is born out by the statistics.  More than eighty percent of adults nationwide visited a doctor or other health care professional one or more times in 2009.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics, Summary Health Statistics for U.S. Adults: National Health Interview Survey, 2009, table 35 (2010).  Additionally, individuals receive health care services regardless of whether they can afford the treatment.  The obligation to provide treatment regardless of ability to pay is imposed by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd, state laws, and many institutions’ charitable missions.  The unavoidable need for health care coupled with the obligation to provide treatment make it virtually certain that all individuals will require and receive health care at some point.  Thus, although there is no firm, constitutional bar that prohibits Congress from placing regulations on what could be described as inactivity, even if there were it would not impact this case due to the unique aspects of health care that make all individuals active in this market.

Because we all get sick and the overwhelming majority of us eventually visit a doctor or hospital, we're all active in the health-care market. At present, one man's inactivity is another man's higher premium. That type of simple reasoning is why the idea of a mandate once had bipartisan support. Speaking of which, today's decision marked the first time a Republican-appointed judge ruled in favour of the ACA's constitutionality.

Still, two other appeals courts are expected to rule on the ACA this summer, and they are merely markers on the road to the Supreme Court. There it will be interesting to see how Antonin Scalia rules, considering his previous affirmation of Congress's "authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce" and its possession of "every power needed to make that regulation effective" in a case about medical marijuana in California. As Adam Serwer notes, in another ruling on the ACA in Virginia, Judge Henry Hudson gave Justice Scalia an out by ruling that Congress could not "compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce". But today the court ruled that we're already in the stream when it comes to health care, whether we like it or not. Justice Scalia would likely have to reach a different conclusion if he is to remain consistent.

IN WHAT was bound to be a controversial column, Ross Douthat, citing new work by journalist Mara Hvistendahl, argues that female empowerment has led to more sex-selective abortion:

The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as Hvistendahl points out, the reality is more complicated—and more depressing.

Thus far, female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder.

I haven't read the book Mr Douthat is discussing, so I can't assess his characterisation of its argument. However, his most provocative point, that there is sometimes a dark Malthusian underbelly to progress campaigns, is worth considering. It's also compelling that this issue has not abated since Amartya Sen called attention to it in 1990, and the issue surely deserves more attention. A good place to start would be last year's coverage of this "gendercide", in this paper. See the introduction to the report here and the leader here.

But we need to keep in mind that sex-selective abortion is an effect of social problems as much as a cause. While Mr Douthat seems to suggest more widespread access to abortion as the culprit, that is not the only cause of the gendercide—many baby girls are simply killed—and where sex-selective abortion is the cause it is only a proximate one. Sex-selective abortion is symptomatic of societies in which women are sufficiently marginalised, socially, economically, or politically, that people believe it is better for them not to be born. The consequences of the lopsided gender ratios that result are troubling and will become more serious over time. However, the tragedy here is the oppression of women, not the future disadvantages accruing to men who won't have access to a sufficient supply of potential wives. If female empowerment has led to more baby girls not being born, that can be taken as a measure of the vast disenfranchisement that still exists, and an indicator of the progress that is yet to be made. Per last year's leader:

And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life—using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said “women hold up half the sky.” The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down.

ROD BLAGOJEVICH, a former governor of Illinois, winced at every count on which a jury found him guilty—all 17 of them—in his second corruption trial. Mr Blagojevich was found guilty of wire fraud (ten counts), bribery, attempted extortion (two counts), conspiracy to commit extortion, conspiracy to commit bribery (two counts) and extortion conspiracy. If there was a silver lining (or at least an ash-grey one), it was that the jury found him not guilty on one count of bribery, and it deadlocked on two charges of attempted extortion. The highest-profile charges related to his attempt to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

Mr Blagojevich was arrested just one month after Mr Obama's election. Federal prosecutors had secretly recorded phone calls in which he tried to trade contracts and political positions (the senate seat, he said, was "fucking golden, and...I'm just not giving it for fucking nothing"). His arrest and his subsequent impeachment embarrassed a state that is not unacquainted with corrupt politicians. Mr Blagojevich will likely be the fourth Illinois governor to find himself behind bars. His predecessor is currently serving time for racketeering.

Even though the jury heard clearly damning recordings of Mr Blagojevich, it was a complicated case. The jury in the first trial deadlocked last August after deliberating for two weeks. They only agreed on one count: lying to the FBI. This time they agreed on all but two counts. He was found not guilty of trying to extort Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's new mayor, and unlike the first trial, Mr Blagojevich testified in his own defence, spending one week on the stand, often giving long rambling answers to simple yes and no questions. The presiding judge interrupted one particularly long-winded answer, saying, "Please stop. . . Can you just answer his questions?" Even his defence attorneys maintained all his talk was just political bluster, but the jury apparently had other ideas.

Today, the normally loquacious politician was without words. Indeed, rather amazingly, he kept his remarks short at the press conference following the verdict, noting "among the many lessons I've learned from this whole experience is to try to speak a little bit less." He said he was disappointed and stunned with the outcome. He has yet to be sentenced, but many of the counts bring fines of $250,000 each and prison sentences of up to 20 years.

He cannot travel outside northern Illinois without the court's permission until his sentencing hearing, which has not yet been assigned a date (his defence team has until July 25th to request a retrial). This will be difficult for Mr Blagojevich, who did his best to become a household name in the time since his initial arrest. He was a contestant on "The Celebrity Apprentice", Donald Trump's reality-television programme. He also wrote a memoir where he compared himself to Othello, King Lear, Henry V and even Richard III—the last "because...when the story of my years as governor ends, I was left with neither a kingdom nor a horse. Or for that matter, even a car." And after two trials and some $400,000 spent on his natty wardrobe, he probably has even less.

TIMING is everything. Forty-two years, almost to the day, after the Stonewall riots (often credited as the catalyst of the contemporary gay-rights movement); some 36 hours before the gay-pride march; and two years after a failed attempt, New York became the sixth and most populous state to legalise same-sex marriage. Late Friday night New York's senate passed the Marriage Equality bill by a 33-29 vote. New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, who made gay marriage a top priority of his first term, signed it into law at 11:55 pm. It will go into effect on July 24th.

The Senate is Republican-controlled, and the bill passed when four Republicans joined the 29 Democrats who supported it. One, Mark Grisanti of Buffalo, opposed gay marriage for religious reasons, but could not justify denying equal rights to gay couples. He told his fellow politicians that as a Catholic brought up to think marriage was between a man and woman, he struggled with the decision. "I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage. Who am I to say that someone does not have the same rights that I have with my wife, who I love, or to have the 1,300-plus rights that I share with her?" (Mr Grisanti was referring to the 1,324 state benefits afforded to married couples.) Roy McDonald, another Republican from upstate New York, told reporters on June 16th that he was going to support same-sex marriage, and that everything is not black and white or good and bad. "I'm trying to do the right thing," he said.*

For months, Mr Cuomo cajoled, pressured, leaned on and in recent weeks enthusiastically negotiated with legislators to get the bill passed. When it did, he called New York a beacon for social justice. Republicans and Democrats agree the bill would not have been passed without Mr Cuomo's guidance. He worked closely with gay-rights groups who spent millions on the advocacy campaign. In 2009 supporters of same-sex marriage were riven by divisions and infighting; this time they worked under a single banner, “New Yorkers United for Marriage", and they worked with Republican consultants. Commercials featuring athletes, politicians and celebrities advocating support for the bill flooded the airwaves. The most effective were the ones starring regular New Yorkers with gay relatives: the parents who wanted their son to marry his long-time partner, a second-world-war veteran who wants to see his grandson marry whomever he wants.  

The 2m energetic onlookers at Sunday’s gay-pride march down Fifth Avenue hugged, hollered, danced and cheered. One onlooker observed, “This year has more energy than other years.”  Loud cheers were directed at an elderly gay couple, sitting in a rickshaw, celebrating 54 years together. Many other couples dressed in bridal gear were greeted enthusiastically by the watching crowd. One happy fellow wore a bridal skirt and a tuxedo jacket. The noise went up several decibels when New York’s police department’s marching band played “Here Comes the Bride”.  The loudest cheers were reserved for Mr Cuomo who was accompanied by Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, who waved a rainbow flag, and by Christine Quinn, the openly gay New York City Council Speaker. Hundreds of marchers carried signs that read “Promise Kept” on one side and “Thank you Governor Cuomo” on the other.

In 2009, the last time the bill was sent to Albany, it was rejected soundly. Not a single Republican supported it and eight Democrats voted no. One noted that 73% of his constituents were opposed to gay marriage in 2009, but this year 80% supported it. Recent polls show that nearly 60% of New Yorkers are in favour of same-sex marriage. Nationally, the number supporting marriage equality hovers around 50%, but polls also show that a majority of younger voters support it. Success in New York will undoubtedly help give advocates a boost in Oregon, Maine, Washington and Maryland, all of which are considering similar measures. 

Essential to New York’s passage were measures exempting religious organisations from having to participate in same-sex marriages and protecting them from discrimination lawsuits. Still, this did not satisfy Catholic leaders. Nicolas DiMarzio, bishop of Queens and Brooklyn, said that “Governor Cuomo has opened a new front in the culture wars that are tearing at the fabric of our nation.” He also called on Catholic schools and parishes to ban gay-marriage supporters from speaking at their events. Timothy Dolan, New York's archbishop, lambasted lawmakers for tampering “with a definition as old as human reason”. But polls show a disconnect between the beliefs of Catholic hierarchy and those of parishioners: a poll taken in May found that 64% of American Catholics say homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared with 58% of all Americans. 

Catholic churches will probably remain gay-wedding free for some time, but marriages at restaurants, hotels and catering halls are likely to begin later this summer. And, according to a 2009 report by the New York City comptroller, gay marriages could generate up to $210m for the state's economy over three years.

* Initially we reported Mr McDonald's quote as, "Well, fuck it. I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing." He was directing at least part of that quote to reporters pestering him about same-sex marriage.

I HAVE voted in every single election in which I was allowed to vote, but I have only been summoned for jury duty twice. Once I was seated for a civil-liability case involving a six-year-old auto accident; an hour before the trial was to begin the parties settled. The second case was an especially nasty violent crime; as it happened, the prosecutor asked me whether anyone in my family had ever been the victim of or witnessed such a crime. One had; I went home. All of this is a complaint, but not in the way you might think. I love jury duty. I love the institution; I love getting the summons; I love being in a courtroom; and I suspect that if I ever actually served as a juror during a trial I would love that too. Stirring strings and waving flags in politicians' campaign spots annoy me. So does the ritual of singing the Star Spangled Banner before every single baseball game. But put me in a voting booth or ask me to serve on a jury and I get as misty-eyed and patriotic as my immigrant great-grandparents.

Juries do not only decide guilt or innocence; they can also serve as checks on unjust laws. Judges will not tell you about your right to nullify—to vote not guilty regardless of whether the prosecution has proven its case if you believe the law at issue is unjust. They may tell you that you may only judge the facts of the case put to you and not the law. They may strike you from a jury if you do not agree under oath to do so, but the right to nullify exists. There is reason to be concerned about this power: nobody wants courtroom anarchy. But there is also reason to wield it, especially today: if you believe that nonviolent drug offenders should not go to prison, vote not guilty. The creators of the television show "The Wire" vowed to do that a few years back ("we will...no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war," wrote Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon). And the illustrator of the children's book that has every author banging his head against his desk and every parent cackling just wrote a sweet if somewhat simple guide to nullification. The Fully Informed Jury Association has more. Happy Friday evening.

SYNCHRONICITY strikes, as a commenter on Matthew Yglesias's blog who happens to have the same initials as me writes something I find provocative. In response to a post in this paper Mr Yglesias argued back in May that the notion that people in Manhattan who make $250,000 are less well-off than people with the same income in Fargo and should therefore pay lower taxes is a form of confusion. Rather, Manhattanites are simply paying for the luxury good of living in Manhattan, which costs more than the value-conscious good of living in Fargo. Commenter MS (the one who isn't me) responds:

I believe the standard case you [Mr Yglesias] advance for progressive taxation is declining marginal utility of consumption and/or wealth. I hope you would agree with me that the relevant utility function is defined in terms of real, not nominal, dollars when considering declining marginal utility of wealth.

I suspect that if the BLS constructed a Manhattan Price Index it would indicate that the price level of Manhattan goods and services is much higher than that of Fargo. Thus, for any given level of nominal income people in Manhattan have lower real income than people in Fargo. As a result, as long as you believe in CPI indexing tax rate cut offs, I don’t know why you wouldn’t believe in some form of cost of living indexing.

This is an interesting idea that deserves some empirical elaboration. America's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) actually does measure the consumer price index (CPI) in 22 different areas around the country, but unfortunately I'm not very familiar with the BLS website and I'm not getting the best stats for this question. What I could get were the overall price and income breakdowns from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for four major regions, the Northeast, the South, the Midwest and the West.

There are some pretty clear differences between the Northeast and the South, which I think make it an acceptable stand-in for our "New York v Fargo" question. Average after-tax income of respondents in the Northeast in 2009 was $68,986. In the South, it was $56,795. Meanwhile, average annual expenditure in the Northeast was $53,868. In the South, it was just $45,749. But the differences in food expenditures, clothing expenditures, travel and so forth between the North-east and the South are minor or nonexistent. The biggest difference comes in housing expenditures, where people in the Northeast are paying on average $19,343 while Southerners are paying $15,387. (Northeasterners also pay about $1000 more per year for insurance.)

Is this just because Northeasterners live in bigger, better houses than Southerners? I doubt it; the CPI figures for urban regions show, rather, that the price of comparable housing has gone up a lot faster in, say, the New York City area than in, say, small towns in the South over the past 10 years. (Housing price levels went from 190 to 261 in the NYC area, a 37% rise; in southern towns with populations under 50,000 they went from 158 to 198, up 25%, where 1982-4 = 100.) So what we're seeing here is that housing just costs more in the Northeast than in the South. For a Northeasterner and a Southerner each earning the same amount of money, that should mean the Northeasterner is effectively poorer than the Southerner. And on the theory elaborated above, it would mean Southerners should have to pay higher tax rates than Northeasterners.

Let us note at this juncture that the idea that rich people shouldn't have their taxes raised because their expenses are higher than those of poor people, meaning they're not really as rich as they seem, is generally thought of as a politically conservative proposition. But a consistent application of this principle would mean that people in regions with low housing costs should pay higher taxes than those in regions with high housing costs. The South, where housing costs less, is on the whole far more politically conservative than the Northeast, where housing costs more. So it is hard to see where political support for such a consistent application of the principle might come from. However, an inconsistent and incoherent application of the principle would be that since rich people in urban areas have high housing costs, no rich people, in either urban or rural areas, should have to pay higher taxes. This would disproportionately favour rich people in Southern areas, since they would both benefit from lower taxes and have lower housing costs. Such a proposal could very well gather plenty of conservative political support.

Of course the other reason why a move to tax people at variable rates based on the local CPI in their area is never going to happen is that it would be administratively impossible, and would create far more severe distortions than it might solve. Housing prices fall from super-high suburban to low exurban levels somewhere on the ride out from Washington, DC into Fauquier County, Virginia, but there's no administrative boundary there on which to base a rise in tax rates; either you'd give the whole county lower tax rates, which creates crazy distortions, or you'd draw new tax lines around high-priced housing inside the county, which creates other crazy distortions. But the broader point I'd like to make here is that this is one of many examples of what I would call an objectively incoherent defence of powerful interests: in the face of a pragmatically possible reform (eg raising taxes on rich people), an argument is invoked whose full implications would require an even more thoroughgoing reform (eg the idea that people in high-cost areas should pay lower taxes), which since the thoroughgoing reform is a political non-starter results only in defeat of the pragmatic reform and no other change. This is a pretty effective strategy for defending powerful interests since, almost by definition, they're the ones who have succeeded best at gaming the current regulatory environment.

CHIMING in quickly with my colleague: Jack Shafer writes, "I get on my high horse about Vargas' lies because reporter-editor relationships are based on trust." Obviousy Mr Shafer knows that reporter-editor relationships are not the only relationships based on trust. Does Mr Shafer think that, for the same reasons he believes that Jose Antonio Vargas should not be hired as a journalist (because he grew up pretending to be a legal resident), he also should not be eligible for work as a banker, a physician, an elevator inspector, a babysitter? Mr Shafer's syllogism runs as follows:

Long experience telling (even justifiable) lies --> Becoming good at lying --> Becoming untrustworthy --> Should not be hired

Does Mr Shafer believe that closeted homosexuals should not be hired as journalists? Bankers? Physicians? Elevator inspectors? Babysitters? In 1946, would he have denied a job on the Suddeutsche Zeitung to a Jew who had spent the previous 12 years pretending to be Aryan? Would he have denied a job at the New York Times to Anatole Broyard because he hid his family roots in order to pass for white?

There are many reasons why people lie. The way to tell whether you can trust your reporters is to subject them to withering scrutiny during their introductory phase on the job, and then, periodically and without warning, to subject them to withering scrutiny again. The responsibility for scrupulous accuracy is a procedural responsibility that needs to be instituted at an organisational level by management. Trustworthy organisations are run by people who build systems that produce reliable information; they're not clubs composed of people who possess innate characterological trustworthiness. A newspaper editor should care whether his reporters are telling the truth in their professional journalistic work, and it's that editor's responsibility to institute reasonable procedures to ensure that they do so by making sure that systematic liars get caught quickly. Whether they've told their daughter that her father isn't actually her biological father, or whatever, is none of the editor's business. As I understand things, Jayson Blair doesn't seem to have become a systematic liar until after he started working in the newspaper business.

JONATHAN CHAIT and Andrew Sullivan hail a Huffington Post article on a Marine drill sergeant inculcating his recruits in the principles of sexual-orientation equity. "Let’s just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines," the sergeant says. "This is what social progress looks like," Mr Chait writes, and that's true. I'd like to call attention to another model of the same sort of social progress, from the Dutch news website AD.nl:

[Finance] Minister [Jan Kees] de Jager Out in Public With His Boyfriend

At the National Herring Party at Nyenrode University, Minister de Jager was spotted with his boyfriend Michael Angelo Schoop. It was the first time that the minister of finance had appeared in public with his better half.

Minister Jan Kees de Jager made it open knowledge last month that he is gay and has been happily dating a boyfriend for some time. The mysterious boyfriend, Michael Angelo Schoop, was out in public with de Jager for the first time on Wednesday.

Michael Angelo is a steward at KLM. They met each other six months ago. 'I know that it's not an issue that I have a boyfriend. And it shouldn't become one, so I didn't want to be secretive about it," the minister said.

The integration of non-homophobic values into America's military institutions is important in part because such institutions are precisely the places where homophobia is most likely to take root. But I think part of the reason we celebrate the adoption of gay-neutral values in the military is that the military is viewed by so many as more authentically American than other parts of society. Personally I think the first out gay secretary of the treasury will be more of a milestone. Mr de Jager, incidentally, is a Christian Democrat and a member of a centre-right coalition government.

THE Justice Policy Institute, a criminal-justice-reform advocacy group, has a report out today about America's for-profit prison industry. First, before the gnashing of teeth on both sides begins, let me state the obvious: there is nothing inherently wrong, or even objectionable, about private companies running prisons. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest such company, operated 66 "correction and detention facilities" in 2010, and saw $1.67 billion in revenue. In its 2010 annual report it said it "benefits from significant economies of scale", and it well may, particularly when compared to corrections departments in low-population states. (Having said that, evidence that private prisons offer significant cost savings to their state-run counterparts is both thinner and more ambiguous in practice than in theory.) Nothing in the constitution says that prisoners must be held in government-owned or -operated facilities, and as the report explains, American prisons tended to be privately owned before the advent of the penitentiary system. For its shareholders CCA has done well, increasing its revenue every year in the last ten as the share of prisoners held in private facilities has risen (the second-largest prison-operator, the GEO Group, saw similar rises but had a dip from 2004 to 2005).

But for these companies to do well, people have to go to prison. Again, this is not in and of itself a problem: there are for-profit hospitals, and for them to do well people have to get sick. The difference is that for-profit hospitals tend not to poison people and break legs to keep their beds fully occupied, while for-profit prisons, as the JPI's report explains, tend to lobby for policies that serve them: harsher prison sentences and greater reliance on incarceration than on probation and parole. Admittedly, the report shows a great deal more smoke than fire, and its most damning intimation—that private-prison lobbyists were behind Arizona's immigration bill—overlooks the regrettable popularity of such measures. And, once again, companies are free to lobby for their own interests.

The problem is that their interests—imprisoning more people and keeping them in jail for longer periods of time—are not ours. Imprisoning people is expensive, ineffective and increasingly unpopular. It is that latter quality that may provide the greatest amount of hope. For years criminal-justice reform failed because it was seen as soft on crime. No politician wants to advocate for murderers and child molesters (never mind that most prisoners are in for non-violent drug offences). Hence, for instance, the government's sloth in combating prison rape. And prisoners cannot plead their cases as effectively as prison builders can plead theirs—the former tend to be poor, so they cannot afford lobbyists, and are often disenfranchised, and thus have no political representation.

But recently groups like the Pew Centre on the States and Right on Crime have rebranded reform efforts as "smart on crime", rather than soft. And in a time of declining crime rates and tight state budgets, smart reforms are gaining ground, and most aim to reduce the prison population. That may not be in the interest of CCA—the firm says as much in its 2010 anual report—but it's high time for good sense to trump good lobbying and cowardly politics.

“IT'S not the most original location,” observes Kyle Dontoh, a 17-year old New Jerseyan, about Jon Huntsman’s chosen spot to launch his 2012 presidential bid. Liberty State Park in New Jersey, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, was the same place Ronald Reagan began his successful 1980 campaign. “It was a time of trouble, worry and difficulty,” Mr Huntsman recalled. But Mr Reagan “assured us we could make America great again, and through his leadership, he did.” Although he admitted he stands in Mr Reagan’s shadow, the comparison was clear.

For Kyle, too, it was obvious. The remarkably well-informed and thoughtful teen listed the reasons Mr Huntsman might be worthy of his first vote in 2012. "It's not that Obama is a bad president, he's just mediocre. And we deserve better than that." He likes that the former governor of Utah seems reasonable and realistic. "He doesn't pander to the Tea Party. He supports gay marriage* and he is a businessman," a point Mr Huntsman made himself during his speech. Indeed, a campaign video says Mr Huntsman created jobs, he didn't buy jobs, a little dig at Mitt Romney, his main Republican rival, who ran a buy-out firm.

And for all those reasons, Democrats are scared of Mr Huntsman. It is widely assumed that one of the reasons Mr Obama asked him to go to China was to take him out of the 2012 race. At the Gridiron Dinner in March, the president even poked fun at this dynamic when asked about the Republican candidates.

I’m a little biased toward my dear, dear friend Jon Huntsman. As his good friends in China might say, he is truly the yin to my yang. And I’m going to make sure that every primary voter knows it.

David Plouffe, the president's campaign manager, has been more forthright: Mr Huntsman's potential candidacy, he's said, made him feel "a wee bit queasy". And immediately following Mr Huntsman's announcement in New Jersey, the Democratic National Committee sent out an email pointing to some minor snafus at the event. The note revealed more about the Democrats' apprehension than it did about Mr Huntsman's campaign.

Oddly, one of the scarier aspects of Mr Huntsman's campaign, from the perspective of Democrats, is its respectful tone. "We will conduct this campaign on the high road," Mr Huntsman said today. "I don’t think you need to run down someone’s reputation to run for president. I respect my fellow Republican candidates. And I respect the president." Unlike the rest of the Republican field, Mr Huntsman has thus far refused to reproach Mr Obama in a meaningful way. That type of positive message may work well in the general election, but will it win him enough support in the primaries? The candidate is now off to New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, where voters may yearn for a bit more red meat.

*Mr Huntsman actually supports civil unions, not gay marriage.

THERE are more than a few problems with Stephen Metcalf's sprawling broadside against libertarianism in Slate, but let me say a few words about one paragraph that especially annoyed me. Mr Metcalf writes:

Libertarians will blanch at lumping their revered Vons—Mises and Hayek—in with the nutters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises never seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor. Even the renowned law and economics movement at the University of Chicago was, in its inception, heavily subsidized by business interests. ("Radical movements in capitalist societies," as Milton Friedman patiently explained, "have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals.") Within academia, the philosophy of free markets in extremis was rarely embraced freely—i.e., by someone not on the dole of a wealthy benefactor. It cannot be stressed enough: In the decades after the war, a kind of levee separated polite discourse from free-market economics. The attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, whose scribble in the margins of his copy of The Road to Serfdom reads: "An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."

This attempt to marginalise two great thinkers is as lazy as it is dishonest. A little light googling is enough to establish the basic facts, but it seems Mr Metcalf could not be bothered.

As it happens, Hayek came under Mises' influence while the two were working in an Austrian government office charged with managing the country's debt from the first world war. Mises left Vienna for Geneva in 1934 to accept an academic appointment at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, which was offered to him by William Reppard, the Institute's co-founder. It should be noted that, as a Jew, Mises' academic options in Europe were limited during the dark, anti-Semitic era leading up to Hitler's genocide. My understanding is that after Mises fled Nazifying Europe and resettled in America, he was offered a number of academic posts in the interior of the country, but preferred to stay in New York City, where his visiting post at NYU was funded by several businessmen. Mr Metcalf clearly means to suggest that Mises depended on subsidies from the simpatico rich because the quality of his work failed to qualify him for a legitimate professorship. But this is ridiculous to anyone who has bothered to read any of the man's scholarly work. To fair-minded, curious liberals I would recommend Mises' 1929 book Liberalism (free online), which makes a powerful case for a cosmopolitan, internationalist politics of free people, free movement, free trade, and peace against the grain of its era's calamitous trend of truculent racialist nationalism. It remains a relevant and inspiring work. You certainly don't have to agree with everything Mises argues to see that he was one of the good guys. 

As for Hayek, his post at the London School of Economics, from which he famously debated Keynes and cemented his reputation in the world of "polite discourse", did not involve corporate sponsorship, as far as I know. Maybe Mr Metcalf is troubled by Henry Hutchinson's £20,000 gift to the Fabian Society, which got the school off the ground, or subsequent gifts by the fledgling school's other moderately socialist donors? In any case, if the LSE or the University of Chicago's Committee for Social Thought survived, like art museums and symphony orchestras, by the good graces of wealthy benefactors, it's hard to see what this has to do with the quality the work Hayek produced while in the employ of these august institutions. If Mr Metcalf knows anything about the suspicious corporate largesse supporting Hayek at the Universities of Freiburg and Salzburg in 1960s and 70s, I'm keen to hear about it. 

In a letter to Hayek, Keynes did express pointed disagreement with much of "The Road to Serfdom"'s economics. "But morally and philosophically," Keynes confessed, "I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement." What a nutter. What a shill. 

If only a levee separated polite discourse from the sort of ax-grinding indifference to fairness and truth Mr Metcalf displays in his essay.

(Photo credit: The Ludwig von Mises Institute via Wikipedia)