According to today’s Washington Post, the Cato pocket Declaration of Independence and Constitution have made the bestseller list!

This is going to make establishment Washington nervous — with good reason.

Order your copy here. More here and here (pdf).

The Economist’s print edition has published my letter taking it to task for a pretty uninformed piece it published on the impacts of climate change last month. Although the editors changed the title, dropped the references which I furnish reflexively, and is somewhat briefer, the printed version is for the most part quite faithful to the spirit of the original. For the benefit of readers interested in checking my statements and going beyond the “he said, she said” nature of most exchanges on the opinion pages of newspapers and magazines, my original letter is here.

• How cap-and-trade is like ritual self-flagellation.

• The Senate Finance Committee’s version of health care reform is definitely a step up from all of the other versions of the bill. But that’s still a pretty low bar.

• Change? The president cuts another deal for special interest lobbyists at the expense of American families.

• Why free trade is a boon to the environment.

• Podcast: Measuring Obama’s record on pursuing peace.

This week, Sen. Tom Coburn (R‑OK) blocked an attempt by Sen. Max Baucus (D‑MT) to move — without a recorded vote or CBO score – H.R. 3631, legislation to freeze Medicare Part B premiums. These premiums are automatically deducted from the Social Security checks of seniors, almost all of whom are enrolled in the Medicare Part B (Supplemental Medical Insurance) program.

Social Security recipients will not receive a COLA increase in their monthly checks beginning January 2010 because inflation between October 2008 and September 2009 was negative. But if Part B premiums increase, the dollar amount of their Social Security checks will decrease beginning in January 2010.

What would happen if the Part B premium were frozen for 2010? Seniors would get a double benefit. First they are gaining from a zero reduction in their Social Security checks even though inflation in 2008–2009 was negative. That means the purchasing power of their Social Security checks will be larger (assuming inflation remains low during the 4th quarter of this year).

On top of that, a frozen Part B premium would provide them with more generous Part B coverage because health care prices became more expensive during 2009 relative to other goods and services.

Senator Coburn’s action in blocking the premium freeze is courageous and correct. In a small but important way, it combats the busting of the federal budget by already generous Medicare Part B benefits that seniors receive — three-quarters of which are funded out of federal general revenues (that is, financed out of taxes paid by younger workers).

Note that the fiscal gimmickry this action prevents is not limited to seniors’ Medicare benefits. Some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are intent on raiding the Medicare Improvement Fund (MIF) established in 2008 to offset cuts in future physician reimbursements. That fund is actually empty right now — it is not scheduled to receive monies until 2014. But an “advance funding” provision in its legislation would allow lawmakers to make transfers from the Treasury’s general fund as a stop-gap mechanism until MIF’s revenues become available.

Of course, when it comes time to deal with the issue of physician payment cuts, there will be zero dollars left in the MIF. They will have been used up to finance the 2010 Part B premium freeze — and Congress will turn to taxpayers and demand more money to bail out physicians.

Hours after thanking the world for the Nobel Peace Prize this morning, President Obama will gather with his war advisers to ponder sending 60,000 more troops into a country where our national security objectives are unclear at best.

Instead of embracing General McChrystal’s proposal for a substantial increase in the U.S. military presence — or even adopting a “McChrystal-Light” strategy — the Obama administration should begin a phased withdrawal of troops over the next 18 months, retaining only a small military footprint relying on special forces personnel. Otherwise, America will be entangled for years — or decades — in pursuit of unattainable goals.

We need to “define success down” in Afghanistan. That means abandoning any notion of transforming ethnically fractured, pre-industrial Afghanistan into a modern, cohesive nation state. It also means reversing the drift in Washington’s strategy over the past eight years that has gradually made the Taliban (a parochial Pashtun insurgent movement), rather than al Qaeda, America’s primary enemy in Afghanistan. A more modest and realistic strategy means even abandoning the goal of a definitive victory over al Qaeda itself.

Instead, we need to treat the terrorist threat that al Qaeda poses as a chronic, but manageable, security problem. Foreign policy, like domestic politics, is the art of the possible. Containing and weakening al Qaeda may be possible, but sustaining a large-scale, long-term occupation of Afghanistan and creating a modern, democratic country is not.

More here:

Worse choices have been made than Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize.

There was Woodrow Wilson in 1919, an award that rates as one of history’s more grotesque international jokes. Wilson promised to keep us out of war and promptly got us into it, meanwhile laying the ideological and geopolitical foundations for 90 years of war-nationalism, war-liberalism, and war-socialism. To say nothing of saddling us with the terrible idea of world government. Among those who weren’t Nazis or communists, Wilson may have done more than any other individual to promote human suffering in the last hundred years.

So yes, there have been worse choices. (Next to Wilson, I’d have to give Al Gore and Yasser Arafat both honorable mentions. We could go on, of course.) But still, Barack Obama? Seriously? I doubt the committee has any idea how badly their choice will be mocked in the United States.

Over here, the prize will be a disappointment to the anti-war left, the anti-war right, and, of course, the pro-war right. The only contingent I can see taking pride in it over here is the establishment left, which hasn’t had much time lately for substantive work on peace, but which is always happy to make speeches and receive awards. Sometimes, the American image abroad is just that important.

Rather than piling on in what is sure to be a bipartisan laugh-fest, let’s think about what Barack Obama actually could have done for world peace. And weep.

Like Wilson, Obama ran a campaign promising peace and the international rule of law. Politically, peace is a winning message, and the advocates of peace would do well to remember this. Decade after decade, American voters are willing to give peace a chance.

Obama promised to withdraw from Iraq and to close the illegal Guantanamo Bay prison camp. He promised to end the Bush-era detention and rendition policies that have tarnished America’s reputation abroad and weakened trust among nations.

Americans embraced those promises, which are fully consistent with the ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize, recall, is awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Ending wars, treating prisoners of war humanely, and ensuring international criminal suspects’ due process of law are exactly the sorts of things that the peace prize was designed for. They’re just what you’d expect a laureate to do.

But once in office, Obama didn’t deliver. The promises disappeared, replaced by vigorous defenses of virtually every presidential power that the Bush administration invented for itself, including not only those that subvert domestic civil liberties, but also those that threaten the international rule of law.

And the withdrawal from Iraq? Delayed and partial. The latest word — received just as the peace prize was announced — is that it’s “complicated.” Sort of like a bad Facebook relationship.

Our other war, in Afghanistan, continues to escalate, even as its strategic goals seem further and further removed. As Cato author Glenn Greenwald notes, U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan continue to kill and maim the innocent, with very little to show in the way of stabilizing the country or defeating international terrorism. Withdrawal from Afghanistan is both possible and desirable, as my colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter argue. Yet our latest Nobel laureate doesn’t see peace as an option here either.

How sad. Not to sound bitter or anything, but when does the Cato Institute get a peace prize?

Last night, the House of Representatives approved a defense spending measure that included a totally unrelated bill that would ban so-called “hate crimes.” 

I’ve testified twice against federal hate crimes proposals. Here’s the case against the law (in brief):

First, the federal hate crime law is unconstitutional because it is beyond the powers of Congress. 

Second, the law will not prevent violent crime. Anyone already inclined to kill or beat up another human being is not going to reverse course because Congress passes a new law against violence motivated by bias. 

Third, the law does take the state too close to the realm of thought crimes. In order for a prosecutor to prove the “hate” aspect, detectives have to dig into a person’s life, thoughts, writings, conversations, etc., to gather the “evidence.” There’s no good reason to go there because — let’s remember — violent acts are already against the law!