Cato Daily Dispatch for October 20, 2003
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More Private Hands on Airport Luggage?Poll: Americans Want Drug Reimportation Legalized
Bush Tries Reconciliation with North Korea
More Private Hands on Airport Luggage?
"While the Transportation Security Administration works through issues, such as how best to screen luggage for explosives and whether knitting needles should be confiscated at airport checkpoints, there is a quiet movement afoot in the aviation industry to return a portion of the TSA's baggage screening workforce to private hands," Congressional Quarterly reports. "It has the support of most Republicans who oversee aviation security, and would be consistent with the Bush administration's broad vision of privatizing hundreds of thousands of federal jobs."
The Cato Handbook for Congress chapter on transportation policy states that using federal screeners could actually produce less security than before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"Although the legislation specified that the new federal employees would not have the same civil service protections as other Department of Transportation employees, there will be a tendency over time to give them more employment security," the section on airport security reads. "Already, there are efforts to allow aliens to remain as security guards. Firing incompetent workers will be much more difficult under this legislation than it was when private companies managed security. What is changing is not the nature of the security personnel but their employer."
Poll: Americans Want Drug Reimportation Legalized
"As their drug bills soar, a solid majority of Americans say they want Congress to legalize the importation of lower-priced medicines from Canada and Europe," according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
"The poll, conducted Oct. 9 to 13, found strong bipartisan support for opening drug markets, despite warnings by the Food and Drug Administration that it cannot guarantee the safety of those products. Two-thirds said they believe drug importation should be legal; 12 percent said that they or a family member had shopped for medicine outside the United States to save money."
In "Conservative Drug Split," Cato President Edward H. Crane and Vice President for Legal Affairs Roger Pilon write: "Because our drug market, burdened as it is with regulations and cost controls, is still free relative to such systems [abroad], America's drug companies, which do most of the world's drug research and development, recoup most of their costs, including R&D costs, in the domestic market, then sell abroad at prices far below true costs. Foreigners are thus classic free riders. As with defense, Americans are underwriting a good part of the health-care costs of the rest of the world."
They go on to say: "[D]ropping trade barriers and freeing U.S. consumers to purchase drugs at far lower prices overseas would significantly threaten the profit margins of the pharmaceutical companies. These companies would be forced to present the price-setting countries with an ultimatum: Either liberalize your market or we will leave. It's hard to imagine that countries in this situation will deny their citizens access to life-saving drugs. Instead, they will most likely ease their controls and increase the price they are willing to pay for their drugs. ... It is neither right nor good that Americans bear so great a portion of the health-care costs of the world."
Bush Tries Reconciliation with North Korea
"President Bush on Sunday took his most conciliatory step yet in his administration's campaign to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, saying he would consider signing a deal promising not to attack the isolationist country as long as the guarantee was not a formal treaty," the Los Angeles Times reports.
"North Korea has insisted that it would not renounce its nuclear weapons capability unless the United States abandoned its 'hostile intent,' and has demanded a written nonaggression treaty. Bush has said he has no intention of invading North Korea, but has resisted putting security assurances into writing."
In "Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Why Military Action Should Not Be Used to Resolve the North Korean Nuclear Crisis," Cato Senior Fellow Doug Bandow writes: "Rather than adopting the most dangerous course of action as a first resort, the United States should instead take the opportunity to reduce its threat profile in the region by focusing on multilateral diplomatic efforts that place primary responsibility for resolving the crisis on those regional actors most threatened by the North Korean nuclear program."
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org