Cato Daily Dispatch for December 10, 2004
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Intelligence Bill Provokes Concerns over Civil LibertiesPrivate Accounts Needed to Reshape Social Security
Karzai Calls for War on Opium Trade
Intelligence Bill Provokes Concerns over Civil Liberties
"People indicted on terror charges will have a much harder time getting free on bail under a provision in the new intelligence bill. The provision also broadens the government's authority to spy on terror suspects," the Associated Press reports.
"Critics say the enforcement powers, attached to the bill with little debate in Congress, weaken civil liberties and privacy rights that already were undermined by the Patriot Act that was approved shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks."
In "More Surveillance Equals Less Liberty," Timothy Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, writes: "Too many conservatives have brushed aside grievances about civil-liberties violations in the mistaken belief that President Bush's political opponents are simply trying to dress up a partisan attack in noble-sounding rhetoric about liberty, privacy and the Constitution. The opposite is true. President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft have given their political opponents a just cause--namely, resisting the growth of a surveillance state."
Private Accounts Needed to Reshape Social Security
Social Security "reform should be based on workers gaining greater ownership of their retirement plan. Americans, about half of whom already own stock, agree. Exit polls show Bush's Social Security ideas helped him win, with 56 percent of voters favoring private individual-retirement accounts, as long as retirees and those soon to retire receive promised benefits," according to an editorial in the Daily Oklahoman.
"We encourage the president not to be timid. Smallish private accounts, as some are proposing, won't dramatically reshape Social Security as probably needs to be done."
In "Why America Needs Social Security Reform," Cato senior fellow Jagadeesh Gokhale writes: "A properly designed Social Security reform that resolves future uncertainties early, provides reasonable regulations against excessive risk taking, and does not replace today's overcommitment of Social Security benefits with a similar overcommitment of retirement income guarantees under personal accounts could boost national saving, improve the operation of capital markets, and increase economic growth. Ill-conceived measures and delays, however, could have the opposite effects."
Karzai Calls for War on Opium Trade
"Two days after being sworn in as Afghanistan's first popularly elected president, Hamid Karzai called on his countrymen Thursday to wage holy war against the booming Afghan opium trade, which he described as a worse 'cancer' than terrorism or the Soviet invasion of 1979," the Washington Post reports.
"At the opening of a two-day narcotics conference, a visibly impassioned Karzai warned that the drug trade was imperiling efforts to rebuild the country, restore national honor and establish democracy three years after the fall of the Taliban."
In "How the Drug War in Afghanistan Undermines America's War on Terror," Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, argues that U.S. efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's opium crops threaten to undermine the anti-terrorism campaign and could drive Afghan farmers, who have assisted in the war on terror, into the arms of anti-American terrorists.
"If zealous American drug warriors alienate hundreds of thousands of Afghan farmers, the Karzai government's hold on power, which is none too secure now, could become even more precarious," Carpenter writes. "Washington would then face the unpalatable choice of letting radical Islamists regain power or sending more U.S. troops to suppress the insurgency."
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org
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