As many of you may know, Australia had a federal election on August 21 that yielded an at-time-of-blogging inconclusive result. As a consequence, the Liberal-National coalition (currently in opposition) and the Australian Labor Party are both wooing the Green and Independent members in the hope of securing their support. A Canberra-based friend sent me a link to an article in today’s (or, strictly speaking given the time difference, yesterday’s) Australian about the trade-related aspects of the current negotiations to form a minority government.

I’ll admit, the story had me worried. I’ve bragged before about Australia’s bipartisan political consensus on free trade, and it looked as though that was under threat. According to the article, Labor — the party responsible for much of the unilateral trade liberalization undertaken in the 1980s — was considering “re-erecting tariff walls”:

Yes, modern Labor has degenerated to the point where the Treasurer allows the prospect of protectionist horse-trading to be part of the equation for forming Australia’s next government. And so Australia’s political deadlock threatens to encourage the rise of a new industry protectionism driven by the anti-capitalist Greens in cahoots with left-wing trade unions and rural populism…

A few hours later, a new, happier story was filed on the Australian’s website:

…Ms Gillard used her press club speech to offer continuity and certainty, but made clear she would not seek [Independent] Mr Katter’s vote by pandering to his passionate rejection of free trade, which he believes has ravaged sectors such as the sugar industry in his north Queensland seat of Kennedy.

“You’re talking to the leader of the political party that literally went to hell and back to modernise the Australian economy, including reducing tariff barriers,” Ms Gillard said.

“That is our heritage, that is our belief, that is in us.

“We would not have the modern resilient Australian economy we have now if Labor had not built it.

I’ll ignore that last preposterous statement about a political party building an economy, and instead focus on the main thrust of Ms. Gillard’s comments, which should come as a relief to free-traders everywhere, especially in Australia.

Three of the world’s largest companies involved in wireless telecommunications—Nokia, AT&T, and Verizon—this week asked the Obama administration to further loosen the U.S. embargo against Cuba. According to a Bloomberg News story this morning:

Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile-phone maker, is urging the U.S. to ease its 47-year-old trade embargo so it can sell handsets to Cuba. AT&T and Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless providers, urged regulators to make it easier for U.S. companies to directly connect calls to and from Cuba.

The almost half-century-old embargo no longer serves any legitimate national security purpose, as I’ve argued before. The remaining restrictions on providing wireless communication services only demonstrate how the embargo actually undermines our stated goal of bringing more freedom to the long-suffering people of Cuba.

To President Obama’s credit, he has done more than most presidents to ease the embargo, including modest steps such as easing travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans and authorizing telecommunications firms to offer limited service in Cuba. In practice, however, President Obama’s efforts have had little effect, and they have not gone far enough.

If the basis of current U.S. policy toward Cuba is democratic empowerment of its people, then removing telecommunications restrictions would be a logical and healthy next step. According to the Bloomberg story, Cuba still has the lowest mobile-phone penetration rate in Latin America. What better way to empower nearly eleven and a half million people than by easing restrictions on their communications with free residents of the democratic United States?

President Obama himself argued in a White House statement in April 2009 that two of the best ways to promote Cuban democratization were by “facilitating greater contact between separated family members in the United States and Cuba” and “increasing the flow of … information to the Cuban people.”

Here is an opportunity to translate those sound words into action.

The political science blog Rule 22 has a post discussing the likelihood of repealing at least some part of ObamaCare. Author Jordan Ragusa finds:

• If “the Republicans regain only the House in the upcoming election…the estimated likelihood of at [least] some repeal during the 112th Congress is 52 percent.”
• If “Republicans regain both chambers in the upcoming midterm…the estimated likelihood of at [least] some repeal is 59 percent.”
• If “Republicans regain unified control of government in 2012…the estimated likelihood of some repeal in the 113th Congress is 69 percent.”

Ragusa is predicting only that the odds are better than 50–50 that Congress will repeal some part of the law, such as the expanded 1099 reporting, which House Democrats have already moved to eliminate because small businesses find it so onerous. He is not laying odds on whether Congress will repeal the entire law or its most important and unpopular provisions (i.e., ObamaCare’s individual mandate).

His post does shed light on the likelihood of repealing the individual mandate, however. As the below graph shows, the probability of repealing any provision of major legislation rises in each of the next five Congresses (i.e., over the subsequent 10 years). After that point, the probability of repeal begins to fall.

Note that this graph shows the instantaneous probability of repeal. The cumulative probability is the area under the curve, and increases monotonically over time. Thus the probability that Congress will repeal some part of ObamaCare by 2020 is more than 13 percent.

Ragusa therefore concludes:

the newly enacted law will be most “at risk” not in the next Congress, but a decade from now. So sit tight.

Also noteworthy is that Ragusa presents only the probability of legislative repeal. The prospect that the courts may invalidate all or part of the law increases the probability that some day, ObamaCare will no longer be on the books.

Colombia’s new president Juan Manuel Santos came out last week in support of a debate on drug legalization, endorsing the call made a few weeks ago by his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderón.

Santos even said that if Californian voters passed a ballot initiative this November to legalize marijuana, he would team up with the presidents of Mexico and Peru “to work out how we are going to react and what is going to happen after this referendum.”

This seems to confirm the reports of the Mexican newspaper El Universal which claimed that Calderón’s turn around in his willingness to discuss drug legalization came after meeting with then president-elect Santos, who told him that Mexico should lead a debate on drug legalization. A week ago, Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla said she was open for a debate on legalizing marijuana [in Spanish], even though she personally was against it.

Santos’ statement came the same week that leading Latin American experts met in Rio de Janeiro for the 2nd Latin American Conference on Drug Policy that I spoke at. Among the speakers were government officials from several Latin American countries, representatives from international agencies such as the Pan-American Organization and the UN, and experts from academia and NGOs. Even though not all speakers favored drug legalization or decriminalization, most did. The experience of Portugal on the issue (thoroughly documented in a paper by Glen Greenwald published last year by Cato) was widely cited during the conference. One panelist, a Brazilian congressman from the incumbent Workers Party, said that Brazil needed to adopt the same model as Portugal.

Attitudes on drug policy are changing in Latin America. The question remains: Is anyone in Washington paying attention?

Officials in Montgomery, Alabama, are bulldozing homes in their historic civil rights district — and billing the homeowners for the cost of demolition:

Christina Walsh of the Institute for Justice writes about this injustice at the Daily Caller:

Imagine you come home from work one day to a notice on your front door that you have 45 days to demolish your house, or the city will do it for you. Oh, and you’re paying for it.

This is happening right now in Montgomery, Ala., and here is how it works: The city decides it doesn’t like your property for one reason or another, so it declares it a “public nuisance.” It mails you a notice that you have 45 days to demolish your property, at your expense, or the city will do it for you (and, of course, bill you).

Your tab with the city will constitute a lien on your property, and if you don’t pay it within 30 days … the city can sell your now-vacant land to the highest bidder.

The rest of her article is here. Also, see ABC News, Big Government and Reason magazine. And you can find Cato’s work on property rights here.

President Obama will not declare “mission accomplished” in his prime-time speech on Iraq tonight, nor should he. He should not claim that a flowering democracy has been created in Iraq. He should not make unrealistic predictions about the long-term prospects for that shattered country.

The war isn’t over for the 50,000 U.S. troops left behind in Iraq. The president should recognize the sacrifice of all our troops, who have performed admirably. The war won’t be over for Americans back home until every last man and woman in uniform returns home safely from a conflict that has claimed so many lives and consumed so much treasure.

The president should reaffirm the strategic rationale for the drawdown set in motion by the Bush administration in consultation with the Iraqi government. Leaving U.S. troops in Iraq for another seven years will not make Americans safer. U.S. troops should not try to fashion a functioning state in Iraq. That task is the responsibility of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people. Likewise, our troops should not serve as Iraq’s police force.

As our troops work hard to execute their mission, however, a rising chorus of voices is working diligently against the ultimate goal of U.S. withdrawal and Iraqi self-sufficiency. Some people are advising the president to leave a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, essentially arguing that the United States is the rightful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty, and that the Iraqis simply can’t be trusted with security matters. The president has wisely turned aside such recommendations in the past, and should do so again.

H.R. 3421, the “Medical Debt Relief Act of 2009,” has nothing to do with relieving people of medical debts. It adds to the list of information credit reporting agencies may not communicate to their clients.

Current law bars credit bureaus from sharing truthful information about bankruptcies occuring more than ten years in the past, and lawsuits, judgments, tax liens, accounts placed in collection, or other adverse information more than seven years old, except in certain high-dollar credit transactions. This bill would add a new item to the list of officially banned information: medical debts that have been paid more than thirty days before a credit report is issued.

There are many cases, of course, where people who incur medical debts deserve our sympathy. But do they deserve our money?

If this bill becomes law, it will relieve people of one burden of medical debt. Lightening the obligation to save for a medically rainy day or carry health insurance, the bill will produce more people who fall on hard times due to illness or injury. These spendthrifts are worse credit risks than others, and their ability to obfuscate this will drive up the cost of credit.

The result? More expensive credit for everyone to cover the risk of medical debtors. A transfer of wealth from people responsible enough to save and buy health insurance to those who are not.

Not to worry, defenders of the law may say, Congress has findings in the bill saying that “medical debt collections are more likely to be in dispute, inconsistently reported, and of questionable value in predicting future payment performance because it is atypical and nonpredictive.”

The credit industry has a highly sophisticated cadre of analysts working to determine what facts and circumstances are, and are not, predictive of financial acuity. Congress does not. ‘Nuff said.