Do trade and economic growth conflict with human rights?

Too often, human rights advocates present development as incompatible with rights. So-called development agencies like the World Bank often ignore rights, including personal choice, when they push for top-down growth strategies around the world. Jean-Pierre Chauffour will speak at the Cato Institute tomorrow on his new Cato book, The Power of Freedom: Uniting Human Rights and Development, where he takes the human rights and development “communities” to task for working at cross purposes and muddled thinking.

Sign up here or watch online to hear him present a development agenda that respects the full range of human rights. Susan Aaronson of George Washington University will comment.

In a Cato paper to be released on April 28 (here’s a link to related policy forum), Scott Lincicome and I explain how President Obama can help restore the pro-trade consensus in America. “How?” is one question, but a skeptic might also ask: Why would the president want to do that given his anti-trade campaign rhetoric and the preferences of many fellow Democrats in Congress for a moratorium on trade liberalization and a focus on enforcement?

The answer is quite simple: we believe the president understands the importance of both trade and U.S. trade leadership to the broader objectives of economic growth and good will among nations. Since he is inevitably going to alienate some of the constituencies who helped get him elected by embracing trade openness, he could be forgiven for his perceived apostasy if he can articulate his rationale convincingly.

The most comprehensive and convincing articulation would begin with the moral case for free trade: that every American has the right to transact with whomever he chooses, regardless of the nationality or location of the other party. Voluntary exchange between consenting parties is inherently fair, while government coercion in that process on behalf of some citizens at the expense of others is inherently unfair, inefficient, and subversive of the rule of law. We are not holding our breath that this president will make this principled case for free trade. But his articulation of other pro-trade arguments, after so many years of hyperbole, myth-making and fear-mongering from his colleagues on Capitol Hill, could go a long way toward correcting and reversing Americans’ artificially-induced aversion to trade.

Why are we so sure that President Obama is going to embrace trade openness? Well, we’re not so sure, but it’s more than a hunch. Here are two broad reasons:

First, like all presidents in the modern era, Obama takes a national perspective on economic matters, and not a local or regional perspective, as most members of Congress do. Unlike a candidate or a member of the opposition party in Congress who is free to criticize the incumbent administration’s policy errors without having to seriously consider the pros and cons of the alternatives, the president has to concern himself with the consequences of policy changes. It’s potentially his mess to clean up. As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama promised to aggressively pursue remedies to China’s alleged currency manipulation. As president, Obama declined to act accordingly when given the explicit opportunity, knowing that provocation in that regard would inject more uncertainty into financial markets and could spark retaliation. A protectionist measure that briefly benefits producers in Illinois (which is why a Senator Obama might support it) could have consequences that penalize an array of interests across the country (which is why a President Obama might oppose it).

Second, President Obama—like all Democratic and Republican presidents in the post-WWII era—sees trade policy as a tool of foreign policy. And from his early trips abroad, Obama has learned that to many countries around the world, U.S. trade policy is the most consequential aspect of U.S. foreign policy. So a president who appears determined to repair the damage caused by eight years of unilateralist foreign policy can only embrace trade openness.

In our paper, Scott and I present several other reasons why we are “audaciously hopeful” that the president will help restore the pro-trade consensus. But some nascent support for our audacity can be found in the following examples:

1. President Obama spoke out against the protectionist Buy American provisions in the original “stimulus” package, and Congress subsequently removed its most egregiously protectionist aspects.

2. The president has encouraged Congress to resolve the Mexican trucking ban and bring the United States into compliance with its NAFTA commitments.

3. The Obama Treasury declined to label China a currency manipulator in its first semi-annual report on the topic

4. The president informed Mexican president Calderon last week that he did not think NAFTA would need to be reopened—contrary to his campaign rhetoric.

5. The president said as much to Canadian PM Stephen Harper back in February.

6. There are increasing signs of interest and promise from the White House and Congress that the long-frozen bilateral trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea could start moving soon.

The pro-trade environment is not certain, and it could be fleeting, but there’s a case to be made that it’s not as dire as some predicted it would be. If the president intends to facilitate a liberal trade agenda, he should start laying the groundwork with strong pro-trade arguments now.

From today’s Washington Post:

In another sign that the Department of Agriculture is embracing sustainable food, the agency today will unveil expanded plans for a People’s Garden that will include the entire six-acre grounds of the Whitten Building, the department’s neoclassic marble headquarters on the Mall.

The plans, to be announced at the agency’s Earth Day celebrations, include a 1,300-square-foot organic vegetable garden — slightly larger than the one at the White House — as well as ornamental flower gardens and bioswales, or mini-wetlands designed to reduce pollution and surface water runoff.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find out exactly what a “bioswale” is, and why I should pay for one in our new “People’s Garden.”

Arne Duncan has an op-ed in the WSJ today headlined, “School Reform Means Doing What’s Best for Kids: Let’s have an honest assessment of charter schools.”

So how about an honest assessment of how the DC voucher program is doing?

I guess I won’t hold my breath, since Duncan already neglected to bring the findings to light during the debate in Congress and then he tried to bury and spin away the positive results when they did come out. And then he needlessly prevented 200 poor kids from enjoying good schools for at least next year.

President Obama and Duncan’s unwillingness to address the facts show that they have been hypocritical and dishonest on education.

I can’t say it any better than Juan Williams did:

By going along with Secretary Duncan’s plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage …

This reckless dismantling of the D.C. voucher program does not bode well for arguments to come about standards in the effort to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. It does not speak well of the promise of President Obama to be the “Education President,’ who once seemed primed to stand up for all children who want to learn and especially minority children.

And its time for all of us to get outraged about this sin against our children.

@RadleyBalko points to a Washington Examiner column in which Jim Kouri, Vice President and Public Information Officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, says that Obama administration policy changes with regard to the “global war on terrorism” allow “suspected Fifth Column-type groups … to make symbolic demands on agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He says the Council on American-Islamic Relations has called on the FBI to confirm or deny that a number of Long Island mosques are under law enforcement surveillance.

It’s hard to find the answer to the first question this raises: “So what?” Kouri does not make the case he implies: that something sinister lurks because this group, having a suspicion of something they see as wrongdoing, asks the agency in question whether it’s happening or not.

But the piece raised another question for me: “What’s a ‘Fifth Column,’ anyway?” The expression has been around forever, but what does it really mean?

Ahead of the Siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War, a general under Francisco Franco claimed that he would take the city with the four columns of troops under his command and a “fifth column” of nationalist sympathizers inside the city.

The city never fell to the nationalists, but fear of this “fifth column” caused the Republican government under Francisco Caballero to abandon Madrid for Valencia and it led to a massacre of nationalist prisoners in Madrid during the ensuing battle.

So a “fifth column” is not so much an insidious group of spies or traitors as it is the threat of such a group which causes the incumbent power to miscalculate and overreact. That doesn’t clear up what Kouri is trying to get across, but it does have the air of unintended confession.

Last month, I warned that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals would soon be handing the school choice movement a legal setback. Well, it’s here.

As expected, the 9th Circuit has reinstated a lower court challenge to Arizona’s scholarship donation tax credit program. The program allows taxpayers to contribute to non-profit Scholarship Tuition Organizations (STOs) that provide financial assistance to families choosing private schools. The taxpayers can then claim a dollar for dollar credit for their donation.

While this ruling leaves the program intact for the time being, it would almost surely require the tax credit program to be amended if it is allowed to stand. Fortunately, as I noted in my earlier post, the 9th Circuit is overturned as often as a caber at the Highland Games. Its ruling is unlikely to stand if appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is the fact that taxpayers are free to choose the STOs to which they donate their money, and private STOs are free to set criteria for the schools at which their scholarships can be redeemed. There are thus some STOs that offer scholarships only to religious schools. This is essentially the same situation that obtains when taxpayers claim deductions for contributions to non-profit charities. The charities can legally be religious or secular, and they can infuse the services they offer with religion, or not, as they choose. The whole thing is constitutional because it is the taxpayers, not the government, that decides which charity gets their funds. This is all settled law.

To get around the fact that the legal precedents were against it, the 9th Circuit decided to do a compelling impression of Marcel Marceau, pretending to hem itself into an invisible legal box. Specifically, the 9th Circuit decided to pretend that the constitutional restrictions limiting government expenditures (as in school voucher programs) also apply to the private funds at issue under tax credit programs.

That box, of course, does not exist. No government money is spent under the tax credit program, and the tax credits are themselves available on an entirely religiously neutral basis, in scrupulous conformance with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

So here’s my next legal prediction: the constitutionality of the Arizona education tax credit program will ultimately be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and opponents of educational freedom will have to resort to some new ploy in their efforts to herd American families back onto the public school plantation.

Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here.

• “Bright Lines and Bailouts: To Bail or Not To Bail, That Is the Question”: Vern McKinley and Gary Gegenheimer have a new Policy Analysis that discusses the failure of bank bailouts.

• In a new piece at National Interest (Online), Doug Bandow offers a new strategy for dealing with Kim Jong Il.

• Nat Hentoff reports on Obama’s broken promises of transparency in the Washington Times.

• Make no mistake: “Of course it was torture,” says Gene Healy in this week’s Examiner column.

• In Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, foreign policy analyst Benjamin Friedman discusses the record of Defense Secretary Robert Gates under Obama.