Cato Daily Dispatch for October 31, 2003
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A Defeat with a Warm Side?Claim: U.S. Foreign Aid Too Bureaucratic
Mounting Privacy Concerns in Minnesota
A Defeat with a Warm Side?
"The Senate on Thursday rejected a plan to limit the gas emissions that most scientists link to global warming, but supporters claimed the 55-43 vote proved that they had gained substantial ground recently amid growing concerns about climate change," according to The Los Angeles Times.
"In a 1997 vote on global warming, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to urge the Clinton administration to reject an international climate-change treaty unless significant adjustments were made. The vote was 95 to 0.
"Sponsors of the new curbs said that winning 43 Senate votes was a sign that lawmakers would eventually place limits on greenhouse gases."
The Cato Institute's "Handbook for the 108th Congress" lays out the case against economically destructive greenhouse gas caps, pointing out that "no known mechanism can stop global warming in the near term. International agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, will have no detectable effect on average temperature within any reasonable policy time frame of 50 years or so--even with full compliance.
"The more serious question the facts on global warming provoke is this: Is the way the planet warms something that we should even try to stop?"
Claim: U.S. Foreign Aid Too Bureaucratic
According to The Washington Post, "The Bush administration should overhaul its approach to foreign aid and streamline a bureaucratic structure that is growing unwieldy with the addition of new programs and layers of authority, the largest U.S. alliance of international development organizations contends.
"InterAction, which represents 160 aid groups, alleges a fragmentation of foreign assistance and 'a loss of coherence in the field as multiple federal agencies pursue similar goals with little coordination.'"
In the months since 9/11, the Bush administration has proposed ramping up American support for various foreign aid programs. The administration, along with the World Bank, advocates an aid strategy, based on "selectivity," that channels aid into poor countries that have good policies and institutions, factors which are supposed to be highly effective at promoting growth and reducing poverty.
But according to a new paper by Cato's Director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty, Ian Vasquez, "the new aid enthusiasm is not justified. It is based on problematic claims about [foreign] aid's effectiveness and a dubious approach to development. Politicization and the prevalence of conventional foreign aid from multiple sources will undercut the U.S. effort to create a 'well designed' selectivity program."
A comprehensive listing of Cato's work on overhauling foreign aid is available on our web site.
Mounting Privacy Concerns in Minnesota
"Since 2001, the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association has been quietly linking the case files of law enforcement agencies around the state to build a searchable system police can use to share information on people that their officers have had contact with," the Associated Press reports.
"Now, spurred by citizens who have found themselves scrutinized because of the system, the network is facing questions. Questions about the state's involvement. Questions about what authority a private group had to build it. Questions about whether people can get access to information shown about them. And questions about whether the system is accurate and secure."
Writing in "Protecting Privacy in the Database Nation", Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., Cato's director of technology studies, argues that although "less sweeping" than a database covering even the law-abiding, "a partial governmental database containing details on criminals and suspects" is a real threat to individual privacy. In a partial database, Crews writes, "allegedly, the substantive information collection -- that pertaining to the criminals -- has already taken place under appropriate Fourth Amendment procedures, and no data are ever collected on passersby not already in the database. However, many doubt governments can be trusted to discard incidental data collected on innocents. Indeed, the needed safeguards against abuse of such systems do not yet exist."
Click here to see a full listing of Cato's work on privacy issues.
Christopher Kilmer, editor, ckilmer@cato.org