Today’s Washington Post contains a smart piece by Ted Koppel on how U.S. actions since 9/11 have handed Osama bin Laden a great victory. I think that goes too far. Bin Laden and his tiny band are still on the defensive. His grandiose goals are ridiculous, and we should stop pretending that they are plausible. But Koppel makes a good point about how a society’s reaction to terrorism does most of the work of terrorism. The solution? Stop terrorizing ourselves.

Read Koppel’s op-ed; and if you like what he has to say, read our book, which includes contributions from a number of leading counterterrorism experts.

Washington Times reporter Shaun Waterman has a characteristically excellent article out today about U.S. cybersecurity authorities failing to secure their own systems.

According to a new report by government auditors, systems at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), part of the Department of Homeland Security, were not maintained with updates and security patches in a timely fashion and as a result were riddled with vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.

Time and again, people look to government intervention based on what they imagine government might do under ideal conditions. Real conditions produce far weaker results.

We’re better off distributing the problem of data, network, and computer security among all the self-interested actors in the country—fallible as they are. We should not abandon the problem to a central authority whose failure fails us all.

In a Washington Post obituary for billionaire John Kluge, Terence McArdle explains how he made his fortune by creating Metromedia, the nation’s largest chain of independent television stations:

Metromedia stations relied on a mix of local programs, old movies and syndicated reruns that often ran counter to what the big three network affiliates had in the same time slot.

Kluge’s key insight was:

Mr. Kluge believed that if the networks had an 80 percent share in a major market, 20 percent of the market wanted to watch something else.

And that’s a key difference between the market and government, one that’s so obvious we may fail to notice it. Kluge figured he could make money by offering a product that only 20 percent of consumers wanted. Many television networks these days make money by attracting 1 percent or less of the market. But in the political world, it’s usually one-size-fits-all. Politicians decide, and then that’s what we all get — phonics in the schools or not, prayer or not, instead of a market of schools from which parents could choose. Health insurance with 99 mandated coverages whether you want them or not.

I made a similar point in Libertarianism: A Primer (p. 189), on politics as a package deal:

Sesame Street recently gave us an example of what that means. In an election special, the Muppets and their human friends have $3 to spend, and they learn about voting by deciding whether to buy crayons or juice.

“Rosita: You count the people who want crayons. Then you count the people who want juice. If more people want juice, it’s juice for everyone. If more people want crayons, it’s crayons.

“Telly: Sounds crazy but it might just work!”

But why not let each child buy what he wants? Who needs democracy for such decisions? There may be some public goods, but surely juice and crayons don’t count. In the real world, one candidate offers higher taxes, legalized abortion, and getting out of the War in Vietnam, another promises a balanced budget, school prayer, and escalation of the war. What if you want a balanced budget and withdrawal from Vietnam? In the marketplace you get lots of choices; politics forces you to choose among only a few.

I sympathize with almost all taxpayers, but it’s difficult to feel sorry for government workers who get in trouble with the IRS. Compensation packages for federal bureaucrats are twice as lucrative as those for workers in the productive sector of the economy and their pensions are similarly extravagant. Yet they often can’t be bothered to fully pay their taxes, owing billions of dollars to the IRS according to a Washington Post report.

Among the biggest scofflaws are the folks at the Postal Service, who have accumulated more than $283 million of unpaid taxes. Retired bureaucrats, meanwhile, have amassed nearly $455 million of back taxes. Even tax collectors sometimes fall behind. Treasury Department bureaucrats owe $7.7 million. How hard can it be for them to walk down the hallway and cough up? Or do they think they’re exempt since their boss barely got a slap on the wrist after “forgetting” to declare $80,000?

The most startling part of the story, though, is the degree of tax dodging on Capitol Hill. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Capitol Hill employees owed $9.3 million in overdue taxes at the end of last year.… The debt among Hill employees has risen at a faster rate than the overall tax debt on the government’s books, according to Internal Revenue Service data. …The IRS data… shows 638 employees, or about 4 percent, of the 18,000 Hill workers owe money, a slightly higher percentage than the 3 percent delinquency rate among all returns filed nationwide. …“If you’re on the federal payroll and you’re not paying your taxes, you should be fired,” [Congressman] Chaffetz said in an interview. He said the policy should apply across the board and “there should be no special exemptions.”

The shocking part about this blurb, at least to me, is not the 638 staffers who owe money to the IRS. It’s the fact that there are 18,000 bureaucrats working for Congress. Do 100 Senators and 435 Representatives really need that many attendants? How I long for the good ol’ days, when each politician had about two staffers. I suspect it’s no coincidence that the federal government was a much smaller burden back when there were far fewer staff.

This month at Cato Unbound, political scientist James C. Scott joins us in a discussion of his landmark book Seeing Like a State. His lead essay “The Trouble with the View from Above” gets readers up to speed and reviews some of the key themes of the book. Here’s an excerpt:

State naming practices and local, customary naming practices are strikingly different. Each set of practices is designed to make the human and physical landscape legible, by sharply identifying a unique individual, a household, or a singular geographic feature. Yet they are each devised by very distinct agents for whom the purposes of identification are radically different. Purely local, customary practices, as we shall see, achieve a level of precision and clarity—often with impressive economy—perfectly suited to the needs of knowledgeable locals. State naming practices are, by contrast, constructed to guide an official “stranger” in unambiguously identifying persons and places, not just in a single locality, but in many localities using standardized administrative techniques.

To follow the progress of state-making is, among other things, to trace the elaboration and application of novel systems which name and classify places, roads, people, and, above all, property. These state projects of legibility overlay, and often supersede, local practices. Where local practices persist, they are typically relevant to a narrower and narrower range of interaction within the confines of a face-to-face community.

Local knowledge both empowers and constrains — it allows and/​or encourages some social practices, while making others more difficult. The progress of state power, meanwhile, depends on systematized, uniform knowledge of a wide area, with a loss of local particularity and the knowledge that goes with it. Seeing like a state has costs, in other words.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be joined by discussants Donald Boudreaux, Brad DeLong, and Timothy Lee, each of whom will have a chance to ask Scott about his work, discuss its significance, and relate it to their own thinking about states, markets, and societies.

A story yesterday on CNN​Money​.com describes the plight of Jenny Frank, who is young and eager to begin a career in teaching but hasn’t been able to land a job. It’s always sad to hear of people failing to find work in their chosen field, but the article in question completely misses a staggeringly important national story. As I mentioned this morning on Fox ‘n’ Friends: we have about 1.5 million too many teachers already!

Since 1970, public school enrollment has barely budged–up just 9 percent. Over the same period, employment has doubled. We’ve added 3 million new government school jobs. Half of those are teachers, another quarter are teachers’ aides, and the rest are service personnel and bureaucrats. This hiring binge has contributed to a quadrupling in the real, inflation-adjusted cost of a k‑12 education: from $38,000 to $150,000 (constant 2009 dollars). It has not contributed to improved student achievement which, at best, has been flat at the end of high-school over that entire period.

If we went back to the staff-to-pupil ratio of 1970, we’d save something like $200 billion annually. And since achievement didn’t go up with the hiring boom, there’s no reason to expect it would fall if we pared back the government school rolls. And if staff reductions were focused on the lowest-performers, we would likely see student learning gains as kids were pulled out of the classes of bad teachers and placed into the classes of better ones. Our classes are currently much smaller than those of other nations that outperform us anyway (about 22 to 24 students per class in the US, versus an international average of 29).

Alas, none of that is going to happen while the education of American children remains focused on serving the adults employed by the system rather than kids. But imagine if education were part of the free enterprise system, in which quality and efficiency are handsomely rewarded and failure is penalized. The right-sizing of America’s education labor force would happen automatically, as parents shunned inneffective, expensive, overstaffed schools in favor of those that hired and retained only competent teachers–and only as many as are actually required to effectively reach children.

Isn’t education important enough to do what actually works?

… says a colleague. Or maybe it speaks for itself.

“Sheriffs want lists of patients using painkillers”

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the War on Drugs is meant to help people: The helping hand of government strips away privacy before it goes to work.

My 2004 Cato Policy analysis on point is: “Understanding Privacy — and the Real Threats to It.”