Mark Calabria does a fine job dismantling Laura Tyson’s argument that we need another stimulus to spur private demand and revive the comatose economy. I would just caution against the one thing he could be construed as implicitly supporting: more federal funding for education.

I don’t dispute that there are mismatches between employers’ needs and potential employees’ skills, but the solution to the problem is not still more money going to education. As I and others have argued – especially the Pope Center’s George Leef, in a deft takedown of a recent workforce study — lobbing sacks of taxpayer dough at education will mainly enrich schools and their employees while making our resource-blowing education system even less efficient. Indeed, we already have far more bachelor’s degree holders than we have jobs for them, and the Labor Department projects that the greatest number of new jobs in the next decade will require only on-the-job training (see Table 2). And skills retraining? There are big problems there, too, with people often training for jobs that for numerous reasons they cannot get.

Putting more taxpayer money into “education” is one of those sweet sounding ideas that few people can ever resist, but which produces continually rotten outcomes. So even when it comes to education — shrill objections about “de-skilling” and being “anti-education” notwithstanding — the best thing to do for the economy is to let money stay with taxpayers and allow them to consume education as they would anything else: according to their individual priorities and abilities, which they know better than anyone else.

Certain headlines seem to re-appear in one form or another on a regular basis, such as “North Korea Threatens Military Action” or “Myanmar Junta Tightens Grip.” A leading example from the world of trade is, “Congress Weighs Export Control Reform.”

For the past 20 years, variations of that headline have appeared regularly, yet Congress never gets around to actually reforming our Cold-War-era restrictions on what U.S. companies can sell abroad. This week, in a welcome move, the Obama administration plans to announce administrative changes that will help to bring our export control regime into the 21st century.

As part of their constitutional duty to provide for the national defense, Congress and the executive have the legitimate power to regulate the sale of sensitive military products and technology to foreign entities. The problem is in the implementation. Export controls today cover products that have no real connection to national security, but the controls do make it more difficult for U.S. companies to compete effectively in global export markets.

The Obama administration has an extra incentive to reform export controls. In his State of the Union speech in January, the president announced the National Export Initiative, with the ambitious goal of doubling U.S. exports during the next five years. But as I pointed out in an op-ed a few weeks ago, our current export-control regime is a significant impediment to that goal.

The administration has been sounding the right notes. In a speech in April by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and an op-ed today by National Security Adviser James L. Jones, the administration has signaled that it will allow a wider range of products to be sold abroad without special licenses while more effectively controlling the sale of technology that really would pose a danger in the wrong hands.

The next few days will tell us whether this administration is willing to take the steps necessary to make the long-promised reforms a reality.

I’m at the mid-point of an online debate hosted by the Econ​o​mist​.com on the proposition: “This house believes that governments must do far more to protect online privacy.”

I’m on the “No” side. In my opening statement, I tried to give some definition to the many problems referred to as “privacy,” and I argued for personal responsibility on the part of Internet users. I even gave out instructions for controlling cookies, by which people can deny ad networks their most common source of consumer demographic information if they wish. Concluding, I said:

Government “experts” should not dictate social rules. Rather, interactions among members of the internet community should determine the internet’s social and business norms.

In the “rebuttal” stage, which started today, I dedicated most of my commentary to documenting how governments undermine privacy—and I barely scratched the surface.

Along with surveillance program after surveillance program, I discussed how government biases protocols and technologies against privacy, using the Social Security number as an example. I don’t know what syndrome causes many privacy advocates to seek protection in the arms of governments, which are systematic and powerful privacy abusers themselves.

Nonetheless, I’m opposing the “free lunch” argument, which holds that a group of government experts can come up with neutral and balanced, low-cost solutions to many different online problems without thwarting innovation. Right now the voting is with the guy offering people the free lunch, not the guy arguing for consumer education and personal responsibility.

You can vote here.

The Washington Post, December 21, 2005:

The four Republican rebels — Larry E. Craig (Idaho), Chuck Hagel (Neb.), John E. Sununu (N.H.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — have joined all but two Senate Democrats in arguing that more civil liberties safeguards need to be added to the proposed renewal of the Patriot Act.

Let’s hope that some of the prospective new senators who consider themselves constitutionalists will raise their voices on issues like this.

According to news coverage, United Kingdom Prime Minister Cameron is imposing deep and savage budget cuts. I was interviewed by the BBC recently, for instance, and asked whether 25 percent spending reductions were too harsh. And here’s an excerpt from a New York Times story that is very representative of the news coverage.

Like a shipwrecked sailor on a starvation diet, the new British coalition government is preparing to shrink down to its bare bones as it cuts expenditures by $130 billion over the next five years and drastically scales back its responsibilities. The result, said the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a research group, will be “the longest, deepest sustained period of cuts to public services spending” since World War II. …Public-sector unions are planning a series of strikes. Charities — which Mr. Cameron has said should take over some of the responsibilities now held by the state — say that they are at risk of collapse because they are so dependent on government money. And the chief executive of the Supreme Court, the country’s highest, said she did not know whether the court would be able to function at all if its budget were cut by 40 percent.

To be blunt, this type of analysis is completely false. There are no budget cuts in the United Kingdom, at least in terms of total government spending. Instead, the politicians are measuring cuts against some imaginary baseline, which is the same scam that happens in Washington. So if spending increases by 4 percent instead of 7 percent, that is characterized as a 3 percent budget reduction. The chart shows what is happening with overall government spending in the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding phony stories about budget cuts, spending in Prime Minister Cameron’s first year is climbing by more than 4 percent — twice as fast as needed to keep pace with inflation.

This doesn’t mean that Cameron isn’t doing anything right. There is a two-year pay freeze for bureaucrats, for instance, which is at least a small step in the right direction. But the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition is not a good role model for those who want limited government and fiscal responsibility. There are promises of spending restraint in future years, but those belong in the I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it category. Spending is supposed to increase by less than 1 percent in next year’s budget, for instance, but politicians are very good with tough talk of fiscal discipline in future years. But if we judge them by what they’re doing today rather than what they’re claiming will happen in the future, Cameron’s policies leave much to be desired.

The tax side of the fiscal equation is even more depressing. There is small reduction in the corporate tax rate, but otherwise there is considerable bad news. The new government is leaving in place the new 50 percent top tax rate imposed by Gordon Brown as an election-year class-warfare gimmick. It is boosting the capital gains tax rate from 18 percent to 28 percent. And it increased the VAT rate from 17.5 percent to 20 percent.

POLITICO Arena asks a second question today:

Is Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer right to complain about the Obama State Department’s inclusion of Arizona’s new immigration law in its report to the U.N. on human rights conditions in the U.S.?

My response:

Quite apart from Gov. Brewer’s complaint, the Obama State Department’s first report on human rights conditions in the U.S., submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council last week pursuant to a U.N. mandate that members conduct self-assessments every four years, reads like a politically correct campaign brochure, touting everything from the administration’s stimulus spending to ObamaCare to financial reform legislation as promoting “human rights.”

We’re told, for example, that America falls short on “fairness, equality, and dignity” in such areas as education, health, and housing. And what’s the evidence? Among other things, it’s that unemployment for blacks and Hispanics is higher than for whites, that there’s racial and ethnic disparity in home ownership rates, and that “whites are twice as likely as Native Americans to have a college degree.” Or consider this claim: “Asian-American men suffer from stomach cancer 114 percent more often than non-Hispanic white men.” That’s a “human rights” problem? 

What the administration has done here is conflate real human rights — the rights protected under the U.N. Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party — with specious “rights” — the claims found in the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — which the Senate has refused to ratify. And all of this is submitted in a doument to be scrutinized by such human rights exemplars on the council as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba. 

After the U.S. ambassador walked out of the predecessor U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 2004, following the admission of Sudan to the commission in the midst of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, we did not join the commission’s replacement in 2006, the new U.N. Council on Human Rights, not wanting to lend that body any credibility. Last year, however, the Obama administration joined the council — part of its outreach to the world. Enough said.

Bill McClellan, the excellent St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist, had a must-read column the other day telling the story of Gary Heffernan, a 35-year veteran of the tuckpointing (masonry repair) business, and his recent run-in with an inspector from the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The inspector wrote up Heffernan with thousands of dollars in fines, though no one had been injured and the business’s only other employee — Heffernan’s nephew — had not complained. The violations? I won’t spoil the suspense, but they included, to name one, letting the nephew work on a chimney without posted warnings of the toxic dangers of sand. [Whole column here.]

Regulatory ordeals like Heffernan’s may soon become much more frequent and more likely to imperil business survival, under proposed legislation that would greatly expand OSHA’s authority [GovTrack/Thomas; Chamber letter in opposition]. Here’s a description from J.L. Wilson of Associated Oregon Industries:

HR 5663, also known as the Miner Safety and Health Act of 2010, included dramatic changes to OSHA’s enforcement procedures, penalties, abatement and whistleblower provisions. The proposed changes were extremely costly to implement, difficult to administer, created more conflict in the workplace, and encouraged lawsuits. For example, HR 5663 imposed new and vague standards for criminal liability, including felony criminal sanctions against “any company officer or director” for “knowing” violations of OSHA. The bill; however, provided no definition of “knowing,” nor did it provide any limitation or guidance on which “officers or directors” could face criminal charges.

Notice the bill’s misleading name, intended to capitalize on much-publicized recent disasters in underground mines; despite this terminology, the bill would impose broad new federal regulation in workplaces of every other sort as well. And note that although Wilson used the past tense in his account, the bill is very much alive: following hearings before the House Education and Labor Committee it cleared the committee late last month and now heads for the House floor.