The July issue of Cato Unbound hits virtual newsstands this morning with Cato VP for research Brink Lindsey’s new essay elaborating his argument in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture that the culture wars are over and a vaguely libertarian consensus is the result. While recognizing that principled libertarianism doesn’t have a significant constituency, Lindsey argues that the soft libertarian synthesis constrains the Democrats and Republicans as they seek to cobble together working political majorities. Keep your browsers pointed to Cato Unbound: Jonah Goldberg of National Review has first whack at Brink on Wednesday.
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Gordon Brown’s Finance Minister Defends UK’s Status as Tax-Haven
The United Kingdom has extremely favorable rules for “non-domiciled” residents, a policy that enables highly productive people to live in London while avoiding most taxes on capital income and foreign-source income. The left in Europe hates this policy, especially since entrepreneurs and investors are escaping high-tax nations to live in London, but the new Chancellor of the Exchequer seems content to leave well enough alone. The Observer reports:
London, the great global financial centre, has another claim to fame: it has become the fastest growing destination for international tax avoiders. The world’s super-rich and an elite cadre of financiers working in the Square Mile are increasingly using non-domicile tax status to sidestep paying tax on their fortunes. …Those benefiting from non-dom status have rocketed over the last five years. The Treasury…confirmed that 112,000 individuals indicated non-dom status in their self-assessment returns in the tax year to April 2005. This is a 74 per cent increase over 2002’s figures. …Unlike UK citizens, non-doms escape tax on income from property or capital gains. It is not only the international jet set who claim non-dom status; it is also available to some of the most powerful figures in the City. …Non-domicile status is self-assessed. Forms are easy to download from the web and there are just 19 questions. One tax expert says it is easy to convince the Revenue that a claimant is based overseas, whether it is through a relative or a series of overseas investments. In addition, the Revenue makes very few checks on status. Many senior City figures qualify for non-dom tax exemptions, including Dominic Murphy, the UK boss of private equity giant KKR. And it is widely thought that the Chancellor’s City adviser Sir Ronald Cohen and a large collection of Labour Party donors do too. …Earlier this week, new Chancellor Alistair Darling made it clear that nothing must harm the international pre-eminence of the City and he warned against ‘knee jerk’ reactions to calls to amend the regulation.
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The Anti–Universal Coverage Club Is Rolling Along
I started the Anti–Universal Coverage Club in part to make a point, but also because I was curious to see how many people agreed with its basic premises.
I’m pleased to report that such people do exist. As of today, I count 86 club members. Rather than list them all, I’ll run through just those who might be recognizable to the policy community. Affiliations are provided for identification purposes only and do not imply that any of those organizations agree with us. At all. Unless I list an organization by itself.
Nathan Benefield
Director of Policy Research
Commonwealth Foundation
Greg Blankenship
President
Illinois Policy Institute
David Brown
Editor
Laissez Faire Books Blog
Joseph Coletti
Health Care Policy Analyst
John Locke Foundation
Karla Dial
Managing Editor
Health Care News
Paul Gessing
President
Rio Grande Foundation
John Graham
Director, Health Care Studies
Pacific Research Institute
Curly Haugland
Republican National Committeeman
North Dakota
Carla Howell
President
Center For Small Government
Arnold Kling
Economist/Blogger
Cato Institute/Library of Economics & Liberty
Frayda Levy
President
Moving Picture Institute
Mark Litow
Consulting Actuary
Milliman, Inc.
Michael Ostrolenk
Director of Government Affairs
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
Tom Patterson
Chairman
Goldwater Institute
Jared Rhoads
Director
Lucidicus Project
James Rottet
Legislative Specialist
The Heartland Institute
Herbert Rubin
Professor
UCLA School of Medicine
Thomas Saving
Professor of Economics
Texas A&M University
Greg Scandlen
Founder
Consumers for Health Care Choices
Greg Schneider
Health Care Fellow
Flint Hills Center for Public Policy
Jeffrey Singer
Contributing Editor
Arizona Medicine
Henry Stern
Blogger
Insure Blog
Mary Katherine Stout
Vice President
Texas Public Policy Foundation
Andrew Sullivan
Journalist
The Atlantic Online
The club has received a fair number of favorable mentions from blogs I had heard of (Coyote Blog, MooreWatch.com, SPN Blog, and Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket) and some I had not (Blog of Bile, Chaos From Order, A Chequer-Board Of Nights & Days, Con Law Geek, DeadBeef.com, Health Care BS, I Was The State, and JasonPye.com).
Not everyone had a favorable reaction. Neil Versel’s Healthcare IT Blog described our one recruitment email as “unbelievably shocking.” Ezra Klein of The American Prospect wished us well in recruiting members, I think because he’s happy to have someone else compile his enemies list for him. Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic Online congratulated me for starting the club but then deftly missed the point when he wrote, “I’m fairly certain that, politically, ‘we don’t care if you can’t afford health insurance’ is a losing slogan.”
Some members (not listed above) asked that I not use their real names because they feared giving offense — or even receiving offense, in the form of professional reprisals. Some think my name is spelled “Canon.” Others think my name is spelled “Tanner.” That’s fine. I’m just happy to have them aboard. I especially love that we have a Curly.
Not bad considering how little effort I’ve put into this.
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Seeking a Political Savior
Conservative evangelical Christians are having trouble finding an appealing presidential candidate this year. Among the major Republican candidates, they note that Giuliani is pro-choice, Romney is Mormon, and McCain in 2000 called religious right leaders “agents of intolerance.”
I’d like to see a pollster ask conservative Christians two questions:
1. Would you support a presidential candidate who is divorced, has estranged relations with his children, never sees his grandchildren, rarely attends church, strongly opposes a law to ban gays from teaching school, and as governor signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law?
2. Would you support him if you knew his name was Ronald Reagan?
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The Anti-Universal Coverage Club Manifesto
The Anti-Universal Coverage Club is a list of scholars and citizens who reject the idea that government should ensure that all individuals have health insurance. It exists to challenge the idea that “universal coverage” is the best way to protect and promote health.
The following principles explain the club’s opposition to “universal coverage”:
- Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
- “Universal coverage” could be achieved only by forcing everyone to buy health insurance or by having government provide health insurance to all, neither of which is desirable.
- In a free society, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
- If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care, they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals, uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be forced by a policy of “universal coverage” to subsidize people via “insurance.”
To join, post something to your blog or email me here. If you blog about the club, pro or con, please send the link to that address as well.
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Wishful Thinking about Universal Coverage
One Richard Eskow criticizes an op-ed that Mike Tanner and I wrote for the L.A. Times. Rather than fisk the whole thing, I’ll zero in on just this one claim:
[W]hile the authors observe that some people on waiting lists are in chronic pain, they fail to note that few if any universal coverage advocates believe that is anything other than a flaw that needs to be corrected.
A flaw that needs to be corrected! Et si ma tante en avait, elle s’appellerait mon oncle.
In a Cato Institute policy analysis titled “Health Care in a Free Society: Rebutting the Myths of National Health Insurance,” John Goodman explains why Eskow’s belief that waiting lists are minor problems to be corrected is mostly just wishful thinking:
The characteristics described above are not accidental byproducts of government-run health care systems. They are the natural and inevitable consequences of placing the market for health care under the control of politicians. Health care delivery in countries with national health insurance does not just happen to be as it is. In many respects, it could not be otherwise.…
Why do national health insurance schemes skimp on expensive services to the seriously ill while providing so many inexpensive services to those who are only marginally ill? Because the latter services benefit millions of people (read: millions of voters), while acute and intensive care services concentrate large amounts of money on a handful of patients (read: small numbers of voters). Democratic political pressures in this case dictate the redistribution of resources from the few to the many.
Goodman offers other examples of problems inherent to political control of health care that are not so easily fixed. Read the whole thing.
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Conservatives and the Presidency
But for the intriguing–and unsettling–revelation that President Bush’s nickname for his attorney general is “Fredo,” there’s not much new in the Washington Post’s recent four-part series on vice president Dick Cheney. But the series does serve to remind us of how consistently Cheney has pushed for three decades to expand the powers of the presidency. That in turn is a good jumping-off point for examining how inconsistent post-Watergate conservatives’ affinity for powerful executives is with conservatism, properly understood.
Almost to a man, the postwar conservatives who coalesced around William F. Buckley’s National Review associated presidential power with liberal activism and viewed Congress as the “conservative” branch. In 1960 NR senior editor Willmoore Kendall, who had been one of Buckley’s professors at Yale, published an influential article called “The Two Majorities,” which made that case. In 1967, Russell Kirk and coauthor James McClellan praised the late Robert A. Taft, “Mr. Conservative,” for insisting that war had to be a last resort, threatening as it did to “make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, [and] break in upon private and public morality.”
Even so ardent a Cold Warrior as NR’s James Burnham recognized that “by the intent of the Founding Fathers and the letter and tradition of the Constitution, the bulk of the sovereign war power was assigned to Congress.” Burnham doubted that congressional control of the war power could be maintained, given the demands of modern war. But he wrote a book defending Congress’s centrality to the American constitutional system and warning that erosion of congressional power and the rise of activist presidents risked bringing about “plebiscitary despotism for the United States in place of constitutional government, and thus the end of political liberty.”
The politician who represented the culmination of postwar conservatives’ hopes for political success, Senator Barry Goldwater, could sound as extremist in opposition to presidential power as he did on other matters involving “the defense of liberty.” In his 1964 campaign manifesto “My Case for the Republican Party,” Goldwater wrote:
Read the rest of this post →We hear praise of a power-wielding, arm-twisting President who “gets his program through Congress” by knowing the use of power. Throughout the course of history, there have been many other such wielders of power. There have even been dictators who regularly held plebiscites, in which their dictatorships were approved by an Ivory-soap-like percentage of the electorate. But their countries were not free, nor can any country remain free under such despotic power. Some of the current worship of powerful executives may come from those who admire strength and accomplishment of any sort. Others hail the display of Presidential strength … simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power. This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means…. If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.