Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Is Jeb Bush right that his father and President Reagan would find themselves out of step with today’s Republican Party because of its strict adherence to ideology and the intensity of modern partisan warfare?

My response:

Jeb Bush’s remarks about the Republican Party represent the views of some members of a party that, like the Democratic Party, has become more sharply defined than it was under his father’s or brother’s presidencies. Looking at the longer and deeper view, however, that’s not surprising, because the Bush presidencies were more anomalous than indicative of the party.

For much of the post-War period the Republican Party, especially under the eastern establishment, was little but “Democrat-lite.” That began to change with Barry Goldwater in 1964, suffered a setback under Nixon and Ford, but nonetheless continued under Governor and then President Reagan, who brought a fair measure of ideological discipline to the Party—affecting the Democratic Party in the process. (Compare the ideological opposition to Reagan to that of Ford, for example.) Despite the two Bushes thereafter, the intellectual and activist institutions that had underpinned the Reagan revolution continued to grow, especially as the Democratic Party itself became more polarized, and those forces increasingly influenced the Republican Party, encouraging it to stand for something, unlike the earlier “always-in-the-minority” party—the party Democrats remembered fondly as the “reasonable” Republicans.

There were plenty of counterexamples to those developments, of course—the collapse of the Gingrich bubble late in 1995, the rise of the Tom DeLay opportunists, and the spending of Bush II. And there were issues that continued, and continue even now, to deeply divide members, like immigration and the drug war. But increasingly the two parties have become more sharply defined—“polarized,” if you prefer—as the 2010 mid-term elections made especially clear. And contrary to the Washington establishment, that’s not a bad thing, because voters now have a real choice, not just a choice between two parties, both of which stand for essentially the same things, their respective candidates seeking simply to stay in power. Today, in the main, Republicans stand for the private sector and limited government, Democrats for the public sector and government services. We’ll soon see which course the American people want to take.

In this USA Today story, identity-based security mavens sputter about the availability of high-quality fake IDs that include digital holograms, credit-card quality plastics, and specialty inks found in “more secure” drivers’ licenses. Along with adding technical security measures to cards, states that once made driver licensing easier reversed course and discontinued issuing licenses over the counter so they could new-fangle their IDs. All this inconvenience and expense has done nothing but require bad guys (and college students) to order their driver’s licenses at sites like ID Chief.

One could have predicted all this:

The more valuable a driver’s license is for access to work, mobility, goods, and services, the more likely people will seek to acquire this document illegally. Reforms … may “stiffen” state-issued identification card processes, but they leave it brittle.

Meanwhile the expense and inconvenience of restricted access to identification cards will fall on all Americans—including the ones who need drivers’ licenses for the simple purpose of driving. Honest, law-abiding Americans will suffer impingement on their freedom of action, their individual power, and their security from identity-based frauds. The REAL ID Act is full of reforms that do not fix.

Instead of “strengthening” our national identification system, policies that reduce the value of breaking identification systems will improve identification. Jujitsu is needed much more than brawn.

That’s yours truly, writing in the 2006 Cato book, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood.

In a high-profile presser on the economy last Friday, President Obama’s central proposal was to hire more public employees. Then, in his weekly address, he argued that hiring more public school teachers would allow the U.S. to educate its way to prosperity. His Republican presidential rival, Governor Romney, has recommended precisely the opposite: reducing the size of government to boost private sector job growth–and he, too, mentions public school teachers. So… who’s right?

First, let’s look at public school employment and student enrollment over time.

As the chart makes clear, enrollment is only up 8.5% since 1970, whereas employment is up 96.2%. In other words, the public school workforce has grown 11 times faster than enrollment over the past 40 years. What difference does that make in economic terms? If we went back to the staff-to-student ratio we had in 1970, we’d be saving… $210 billion… annually.

Wait a minute, though! Research by economist Rick Hanushek and others has found that improved student achievement boosts economic growth. So if the 2.9 million extra public school employees we’ve hired since 1970 have improved achievement substantially, we might well be coming out ahead economically. So let’s look at those numbers…

Uh oh. Despite hiring nearly 3 million more people and spending a resulting $210 billion more every year, achievement near the end of high school has stagnated in math and reading and actually declined slightly in science since 1970. This chart also shows the cost of sending a student all the way through the K‑12 system–the total cost per pupil of each graduating class from 1970 to the present. As you can see, on a per pupil basis, a K‑12 education has gone from about $55,000 to about $150,000 in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

The implications of these charts are tragic: the public school monopoly is warehousing 3 million people in jobs that appear to have done nothing to improve student learning. Our K‑12 government school system simply does not know how to harness the skills of our education workforce, and so is preventing these people from contributing to our economy while consuming massive quantities of tax dollars. So what would hiring even more people into that system do for our economy…

The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) has come out against bipartisan spending restraint. The BPC has issued a report highly critical of the sequestration spending cuts that were agreed to in the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011.

The BPC is a center-left thinktank in Washington that houses some very good policy scholars. The goal of the group is to celebrate “times in American political history when two sides have come together in the interest of the country and the people.”

Surely that describes the Budget Control Act. The Act made some modest progress at trimming the giant federal budget deficit, which is an important concern of BPC scholars. The Budget Control Act passed the House 269 to 161 with 174 Republicans and 95 Democrats in favor. It passed the Senate 74 to 26. President Obama signed it. What could be more bipartisan than that?

However, the BPC complains that the sequester will cause “immense pain, disruption, and uncertainty,” and it could “cost the economy more than one million jobs” from the supposedly negative “multiplier effects.” But that’s not what happened the last time we had bipartisan spending restraint in Washington, which was in the 1990s. Federal spending fell from 22 percent of GDP to 18 percent during that decade, and the economy boomed.

Government shrinkage creates a positive multiplier, not a negative one, because the government releases resources—such as skilled workers from the defense industry in the 1990s—that are put to more productive uses in the private sector. You take an engineer from the Department of Defense or Energy and put her in the private sector producing goods for the market, and GDP will go up not down.

I don’t want to pick on BPC in particular, and their new report has lots of useful data and analysis. But how is America going to avoid a Greek-style fiscal disaster if even the supposed deficit-hawk groups start chickening out of spending restraint after just the first small reform steps?

Rather than reversing course, we should be build on the BCA with the reforms at www​.Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org.

On Friday, under leadership mostly associated with the Roman Catholic Church and the anti-abortion movement, protesters rallied in more than 150 cities against the HHS Obamacare mandate requiring church-affiliated universities, hospitals and other institutions to furnish access to “reproductive health services” that run counter to their church’s teachings. In today’s Washington Examiner, columnist Tim Carney writes, “What should have been obvious is becoming clearer to religious conservatives: Government is always a rival, and often an enemy, of religion.” An accompanying AP picture of a demonstration in Little Rock, Arkansas shows protesters waving crosses inscribed “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Carney goes on to discuss another controversy in the news, last week’s ruling by the New Mexico Supreme Court Court of Appeals that a photographer’s business counts as a “public accommodation,” which requires her to photograph a gay wedding for a prospective client despite her religious objections. (New Mexico does not legally recognize gay marriage; its courts instead ruled under a general anti-discrimination law covering sexual orientation.) Like Carney, and like most people I’ve talked to about the case, I find this result an appalling intrusion on the photographer’s wish to live her own life and run her own business as she pleases.

So I was taken aback when Carney goes on to assert that all this proves “Libertarians need to reassess their allegiances on social matters.” Who does he think has been on the front lines on these questions, during long stretches in which organized religion chose not to get involved, if not libertarians?

Take the photographer case. Google “Elane Photography” + “New Mexico” and the top entry you find is from libertarian-leaning law professor Eugene Volokh, who has spoken out strongly against the ruling as contrary to First Amendment values. Another of the top ten is from our friend Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who calls the decision “wrong” and “the imposition of progressive orthodoxy by judicial fiat.” Notably, two among the other top ten results are from writers at gay websites who argue on generally classical-liberal grounds that it is wrong to coerce the photographer.

The story is similar on the ObamaCare contraception mandate: any number of libertarians and classical liberals who do not necessarily share the Catholic Church’s views on contraception or gays have nonetheless spoken up for the importance of letting it run its institutions under its own lights, an argument that extends to other social service areas such as adoption.

Meanwhile, as Carney rightly observes, many who share his own religious convictions “have too often embraced government, either in the name of social justice or traditional values.” It might be noted that modern discrimination law accords “protected group” status to religion itself, an inclusion that remains curiously uncontroversial among many religious conservatives even though it carries with it a rich potential for chipping away at private conscience rights and the autonomy of private institutions.

As I understand it, the libertarian position is to prize religious liberty, while also disapproving the use of government as an instrument of culture war. That’s no contradiction. It’s the American way.

At the start of his long journey across Asia, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the Shangri-La Security Dialogue that the United States would play a greater role in the security of the Asia-Pacific region.

Specifically, Panetta explained, the United States would focus on “promoting strong partnerships that strengthen the capabilities of the Pacific nations to defend and secure themselves.” (Emphasis mine)

In a speech with the requisite amount of hand-waving and pleasing rhetoric, this statement stands out as one that is eminently measurable. If the U.S. strategy in the Asia-Pacific region succeeds, 10 or 15 years from now we will have observed that countries in the region expanded their military capabilities, such that they are better able to secure their territory and their wider interests. That was Panetta’s goal, clearly set forth in the speech, and he is speaking for the entire Obama administration.

How this will play out is still quite murky. If the pivot works as planned, does that mean that the Asian allies will be spending more money on their militaries? Not necessarily. Will they be better able to operate independent of the United States? Not clear; Panetta’s speech declared that the United States would “modernize and strengthen” existing “partnerships in the region.” Does that imply that there will be fewer troops in Europe and more in Asia? Probably not. Panetta has stressed, and he did again in Singapore, that there will be a U.S. presence in Asia, but it would be more flexible. The Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions are obviously more conducive to air and naval operations, and there is little need (and therefore little enthusiasm) for a vastly larger U.S. ground presence.

But while we can’t know the precise disposition of U.S. forces in the region in the future, we can assess where they are now, and where they have been. A recent issue of Defense News (June 4, 2012) includes a map of the region showing where U.S. troops are located, and in what numbers. The data is compiled from this quarterly report, plus a separate report on deployments in South Korea (numbers which are curiously excluded from the 309A report).

All told, the numbers are quite small. Of the 19 countries listed, 13 hosted fewer than 100 U.S. military personnel. There were more Americans stationed in China (74) than in India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh combined (71). And a substantial share of the U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific is based in Hawaii (42,502) and Guam (4,272).

Panetta reminded his audience that the U.S. military presence in Japan (36,708) and South Korea (18,470) will be smaller in the future, but this too is a continuation of a very long term trend. Consider, for example, that there were 136,554 U.S. active duty personnel in Japan (including Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands) in 1950, 82,264 in 1970, and just 46,593 in 1990. (The historical data can be found here.) The presence has leveled off since then, but is likely to decline still further, as more U.S. personnel are moved to Guam. This move, Panetta explained in Singapore, “will make the U.S. presence in Okinawa more politically sustainable, and it will help further develop Guam as a strategic hub for the United States military in the Western Pacific”

To recap: the U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region has been steadily declining for decades, particularly the number of active-duty personnel stationed in East Asia. Panetta implies that this trend will continue, but he also stressed that “the United States will play a larger role in [the] region.” The U.S. Navy is expected to boost its presence, but it is unclear exactly where or how. Singapore agreed “in principle” to host four littoral combat ships on “a rotational basis,” but that doesn’t come close to meeting Panetta’s promise to deploy 60 percent of U.S. Navy assets to the Asia-Pacific by 2020 (the current split between the Atlantic and Pacific is 50–50).

Another big unknown: Will the countries in the region be as committed to their own security as Panetta imagines? One way to measure this (though not the only way) is by the amount of money that each country is willing to dedicate to its military. The trends are not promising. IISS’s The Military Balance 2012 notes dryly that “elevated growth rates across Asia have not necessarily translated into equivalent increases in defence spending.” Over the past ten years, 2001 to 2010, spending as a share of GDP has fallen from 2.83 to 1.94 percent in the South and Central Asia Region; and has not budged in East Asia and Australasia (1.41 percent in 2001; 1.44 percent in 2010).

This is not surprising, especially given that U.S. spending rose dramatically during this same period, from 3.0 percent in 2001 to 4.8 percent of GDP in 2010. Much of this growth was driven by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore not directed toward the Asia Pacific region, per se. Still, people are disinclined to pay for things that others will provide them for free, and U.S. grand strategy, and the military posture that flows from it, discourages other countries from spending more on their defense.

American policymakers frequently complain about our allies doing too little, or of not sharing the burden more equitably, but many are content with the status quo. Fearful that other countries might either a) grow too capable militarily, appear threatening to their neighbors, and precipitate regional arms competition, or b) allow security challenge to fester and grow, necessitating U.S. involvement at a later date, Washington has preferred to maintain a forward military presence in both Europe and Asia in the hopes of preventing either from happening. We cannot know what would have occurred if Washington had withdrawn U.S. military personnel from both regions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but we can see that U.S. taxpayers have incurred higher costs, and U.S. troops have borne greater risks, while other countries have done relatively less. At times, U.S. policymakers seem to be quite worried that other countries might acquire greater military capability, and be more inclined to use it, but that has not occurred; most of America’s allies were militarily weak at the end of the Cold War, and they have allowed their hard power capability to atrophy further since then.

In 10 or 15 years, will we declare the pivot to Asia a success if we see this trend reversed, if Americans are spending less as a share of regional military expenditures, and if the countries in the region are contributing more? I would. I think that a majority of Americans would. But I remain skeptical that the foreign policy establishment here in Washington feels the same way.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Twenty-five years ago Tuesday, President Ronald Reagan made his famous speech at the Berlin Wall in which he declaimed:

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

On a trip to East Germany in 2006 I talked to a politician who had been involved in the 1989 Leipzig protests that led to the opening of the Berlin Wall. I asked him, “When Reagan said ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ in 1987, did you know that?” He said, yes, not from East German TV but from West German TV, which they could watch. And what did you think, I asked. “We thought it was good, but we thought it was impossible.” And yet just two years later, “peace prayers” in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche turned into protests for liberalization and open borders. The Leipzig politician told me, “As it says in the Bible, we walked seven times around the inner city, and the wall came down.”

Then I went to a museum exhibit in Leipzig on the history of the German Democratic Republic. It was very impressive, with a large collection of posters, letters, newspapers, video, and more. Alas, it was all in German, so I had only a dim understanding of what it all said. I did get the impression that it wasn’t a balanced presentation of communism such as might be found in a Western museum; these curators knew that communism had been a nightmare, and they were glad to be out of it. As it happened, the only English words in the entire exhibit came in the collection of audio excerpts that greeted visitors in the entry foyer. And they were a familiar voice proclaiming: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!”