Hashim Shawa, the head of the Bank of Palestine, says that in 2012 Palestine will adopt the private pension system that Chile pioneered 30 years ago and has exported throughout the world. As you can see from the map below, it will become the second Arab territory after Egypt to do so. Of course, the devil is in the details, and for the reform to be as successful as it has been in Chile, Palestine should introduce a whole set of complimentary economic reforms. But if done right, at least in this regard Palestinians will be ahead of almost all of their neighbors, including Israel.
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We’ve Had Enough Government ‘Stimulation’
After three years and $4 trillion in combined deficit spending, unemployment remains stubbornly high and the economy sluggish. That people are still asking what the government can do to stimulate the economy is mind-boggling.
That the Keynesian-inspired deficit spending binge did create jobs isn’t in question. The real question is whether it created any net jobs after all the negative effects of the spending and debt are taken into account. How many private-sector jobs were lost or not created in the first place because of the resources diverted to the government for its job creation? How many jobs are being lost or not created because of increased uncertainty in the business community over future tax increases and other detrimental government policies?
Don’t expect the disciples of interventionist government to attempt an answer to those questions any time soon. It has simply become gospel in some quarters that massive deficit spending is necessary to get the economy back on its feet.
The idea that government spending can “make up for” a slow-down in private economic activity has already been discredited by the historical record—including the Great Depression and Japan’s recent “lost decade.”
Our own history offers evidence that reducing the government’s footprint on the private sector is the better way to get the economy going.
Take for example, the “Not-So-Great Depression” of 1920–21. Cato Institute scholar Jim Powell notes that President Warren G. Harding inherited from his predecessor Woodrow Wilson “a post-World War I depression that was almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933 that FDR would later inherit.” Instead of resorting to deficit spending to “stimulate” the economy, taxes and government spending were cut. The economy took off.
Similarly, fears at the end of World War II that demobilization would result in double-digit unemployment when the troops returned home were unrealized. Instead, spending was dramatically reduced, economic controls were lifted, and the returning troops were successfully reintegrated into the economy.
Therefore, the focus of policymakers in Washington should be on fostering long-term economic growth instead of futilely trying to jump-start the economy with costly short-term government spending sprees. In order to reignite economic growth and job creation, the federal government should enact dramatic cuts in government spending, eliminate burdensome regulations, and scuttle restrictions on foreign trade.
The budgetary reality is that policymakers today have no choice but to drastically reduce spending if we are to head off the looming fiscal train wreck. Stimulus proponents generally recognize that our fiscal path is unsustainable, but they argue that the current debt binge is nonetheless critical to an economic recovery.
There’s no more evidence for this belief than there is for the existence of the tooth fairy.
Not only has Washington’s profligacy left us worse off, our children now face the prospect of reduced living standards and crushing debt.
This article originally appeared in a PolicyMic debate between the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven and Demos senior fellow Lew Daly. Check out Daly’s piece here.
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Grand Jury Reform Needed
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has just released a new report calling for reform of the federal grand jury system. Here’s an excerpt from the foreword to that report:
The same respect that the founding fathers had for the grand jury has faded in the modern criminal process. Undeniably, few institutions written into the U.S. Constitution manifest such disparity between design and practice as the federal grand jury. For an accusatory process that on its face emphasizes the role of the citizen, the grand jury is a patently un-democratic body. Indeed, the 94 federal grand juries across the country function more like feudal duchies, in which federal prosecutors exercise virtually unchecked power to indict. I say this having sought countless indictments before grand juries and having overseen the Justice Department’s work to promulgate uniform rules for federal prosecutions, including grand jury proceedings. Simply put, the federal grand jury exists today, for the most part, as a rubber stamp for prosecutors. This means that the grand jury no longer protects citizens from unfounded charges, government overreaching, and miscarriages of justice.
Those are the words of Larry Thompson, a former top ranking official in the Department of Justice who oversaw the work of federal prosecutors between 2001–2003. A link to the full report can be found here.
For Cato scholarship on this subject, go here.
Debate on Government Stimulus
I am debating the need for more government spending to goose the economy and create jobs over at PolicyMic.com. I argue that we’ve had enough government “stimulation” (see here). My opponent argues that the federal government hasn’t spent enough money (see here). Readers will decide the “winner” and can add their own two cents.
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Live Commentary on Tonight’s GOP Debate
The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and CNN are set to co-host a national security presidential debate at 8:00 pm ET tonight.
Get commentary on the debate as it happens from Cato Institute foreign policy scholars:
- Follow Malou Innocent via Cato’s foreign policy Twitter feed, @CatoFP.
- Follow Christopher Preble on Twitter via @CAPreble.
- Follow Justin Logan as he live blogs at RealClearWorld.
divEarlier Christopher Preble offered some questions the candidates should answer. You can tweet suggested questions to @WolfBlitzerCNN with the hashtag #CNNDebate.
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‘Monstrous Moral Hybrids’
Sunday’s dinner of the Society for Development of Austrian Economics featured a keynote from George Mason University economics professor Richard Wagner. The talk brought back a lot of memories for me. Wagner was chair of my dissertation committee and it was in his graduate public finance class (back in 1992?) that I first gave any thought to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when I wrote a paper on government sponsored enterprises. Little did I know I’d spend much of the following years working to reform Fannie and Freddie.
During his talk, Wagner invoked a term first used by Jane Jacobs: “monstrous moral hybrids.” I suspect Jacobs used the term to describe how Robert Moses managed to wield unaccountable power over development in New York City (Caro’s account of Moses, Power Broker, still being the single best read on city government). Ms. Jacobs describes two distinct moral syndromes, commercial and guardian. Obviously commercial pertains to the market, while guardian can pertain to government. The monstrous moral hybrids are when we get the worst of both instincts combined in one entity. For instance, I generally view competition as a good thing; however, competition underwritten by government guarantees will almost always lead to disaster. Its competition without the discipline of failure.
I repeatedly watched, while working in Senate, Fannie/Freddie invoke their “private” nature in order to avoid regulation while invoking their “public” nature to gain protection and privilege. The result was little accountability from either the market or the government (our largest banks currently enjoy a smaller version). Of course, one of the primary differences in debates over financial regulation is the degree to which one believes that either the market or government provides accountability. Setting aside those debates, we should all be able to agree that companies should be either private or government. That the mixing of the two, government sponsored enterprises, is a recipe for avoiding accountability and transparency. But then I suspect that might have been the intent all along. Monstrous moral hybrids by design.
It Goes Beyond the Supercommittee
Today Politico Arena asks:
Should Obama have led the supercommittee?
My response:
Whether or not Obama had led the supercommittee in its effort to trim a pittance from our federal deficits and debt, the effort was doomed from the start for the reasons committee co-chairman Jeb Hensarling stated in this morning’s Wall Street Journal: “Ultimately, the committee did not succeed because we could not bridge the gap between two dramatically competing visions of the role government should play in a free society, the proper purpose and design of the social safety net, and the fundamentals of job creation and economic growth.”
Obama has proven himself clueless about economics from the time he first entered public life, as evidenced by the economic disaster surrounding him and his party. Their vision was soundly rejected by the voters a year ago. If it is rejected again a year from now, we may start the slow climb out of the hole that they, as well as Republicans who share their vision, have put us in. But if the voters give us a mixed result, it’s only a matter of time before our creditors exact the price of our economic irresponsibility. These lessons, the subjects of children’s books and learned lectures, are as old as humanity itself. We have only to heed them.