A recent study compared the members of the lower house in the Canadian legislature to the members of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

The findings reveal large differences between the two nations in the backgrounds of their federal politicians.

• Share of members with a business or private sector background: Canada 61% vs. U.S. 17%
• Share of members with a background in politics (meaning a prior elected office or a prior job working for a politician): Canada 9% vs. U.S. 71%

Perhaps this explains why Canada’s economic policies have been far superior to U.S. policies in recent years.

Sometimes the twists and turns of socialism yield unwitting libertarian outcomes. Indian politicians, who remain socialist at heart despite some recent liberalization, have just enacted a Right to Education Act, giving every child in the 6–14 age group the right to free and compulsory education. Only a socialist state could call a compulsory provision a right! Yet this may ultimately create the biggest school choice program in the world.

The law mandates quality standards for all private schools but none for government schools, although teaching there is so pathetic that many poor people send their kids to private schools rather than free government schools. As a socialist twist, the new law says all private schools must reserve 25% of their seats from grade 1 onward for neighborhood children from “socially and educationally disadvantaged classes” — lower Hindu castes and poor people.

The government will reimburse private schools for actual costs, or pay the cost per student in government schools, whichever is less. This will not be a classical voucher system or scholarship system. Indeed, the word “voucher” is anathema to many politicians. Yet reimbursement of private school fees is a sort of voucher, and will provide school choice to a big chunk of the population.

Elite private schools will find the system a huge tax (the voucher will not cover their actual costs), and will wind up in the courts, which will have the final say on what is reasonable reimbursement. But private schools in slums and other low-income localities already have low fees and will get full reimbursement from the government.

India has an estimated 10 million students in grade 1 in private schools. Of those, 25% or 2.5 million should get government vouchers to attend grade 1. Each year another 2.5 million children will be added as the first batch moves to grade 2. By grade 12, there will be 30 million children attending private schools with government reimbursement of fees. The actual number could be much higher, since state governments are in dire financial straits and will probably depend more on private schools than new government schools to provide the extra education to kids not yet in school.

The central and state governments have yet to negotiate the sharing of costs of universal education. State governments will suffer no penalty if they fail to provide schooling for all kids, and so many will leave their task incomplete. Besides, the new system will be beset by corruption, exclusions, and bogus muster rolls. Many kids will not be covered by the 25% quota, and others may find there are no private schools within walking distance.

Despite all this, the new Indian scheme could become, without saying so, the biggest school choice program in the world.

Some people on the left can’t see any excuse for opposition to collectivism except racism. (Which is, of course, as Ayn Rand said, “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”) Today it’s Paul Krugman:

But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship.

That is, Paul Krugman can’t understand why people would oppose government control of health care — or skyrocketing deficits, or a federal takeover of education, energy, and finance along with health care — unless they’re driven by racism. But he’s not the only one who sees racists under every bed. Take Washington Post cultural writer Philip Kennicott yesterday, in an essay titled “Obama as the Joker: Racial Fear’s Ugly Face”:

[T]he poster is ultimately a racially charged image. By using the “urban” makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can’t openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and ’70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates…

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life.

He’s talking about a poster that depicts Obama as the Joker from last year’s Batman movie over the word SOCIALISM. It’s not a very effective poster; what does the Joker have to do with socialism? But it’s ridiculous to see racism in it.

More serious thinkers also try to tar the entire limited-government argument with the brush of racism. Take Cass Sunstein, the celebrated Harvard law professor who has been appointed to a high position in the Obama White House. In his 1999 book with Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (and you wonder why Obama chose him?), he made such a sweeping argument, called out here by Tom G. Palmer:

[I]mmediately after gallantly conceding that ‘‘Many critics of the regulatory-welfare state are in perfectly good faith’’ (p. 216) they turn around to tar all critics of the welfare state with the charge of racism: ‘‘But their claim that ‘positive rights’ are somehow un-American and should be replaced by a policy of nonintervention is so implausible on its face that we may well wonder why it persists. What explains the survival of such a grievously inadequate way of thinking? There are many possible answers, but inherited biases — including racial prejudice, conscious and unconscious — probably play a role. Indeed, the claim that the only real liberties are the rights of property and contract can sometimes verge on a form of white separatism: prison-building should supplant Head Start. Withdrawal into gated communities should replace a politics of inclusion’’ (p. 216).

The classical liberal ideas of individualism, individual rights, property rights, “negative liberties,” and limited government date back hundreds, even thousands, of years. They find their roots in the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the higher law, the Scholastic thinkers, the Levellers’ ideas of self-ownership and natural rights, the political theory of John Locke, the economic analysis of Adam Smith, and the political institutions of the American Founding. To suggest that the case for freedom and limited government — or the application of that theory to contemporary proposals for the expansion of government — must be attributable to racism is uncharitable, ahistorical, thoughtless, and indeed contemptible.

It cannot be the case that every parody of a president who happens to be black is racist. And it is not good for democracy to try to counter every opposing argument with such a blood libel. The good news for advocates of limited government is that our opponents are displaying a striking lack of confidence in the actual arguments for their proposals. If they thought they could win a debate on nationalizing health care, or running trillion-dollar deficits, they wouldn’t need to reach for such smears.

According to Inside U.S. Trade ($), an alliance of sugar-using industries sent a letter earlier today to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack asking for an increase in the quotas imposed on imported sugar. The organizations signing the letter complain, quite reasonably, that domestic sugar stocks have fallen to historic lows and that a potential shortage would jeopardize production and jobs in their sectors.

Here’s the letter, dated August 7, 2009:

Dear Mr. Secretary:

The organizations and companies below urge you to increase the sugar import quota immediately. Your experts forecast unprecedented shortages without prompt action. According to USDA’s “World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates,” the United States will end the next fiscal year with less than 13 days’ worth of sugar on hand, unless imports are increased. If this forecast is accurate, our nation will virtually run out of sugar.

The shortage does not have to happen. The only reason markets are forecast to be so tight is the restrictive U.S. policy on sugar imports. Imports are subject to restrictive quotas. But you have the authority to increase the sugar import quota, and we urge you to do so immediately, both for the current fiscal year — where high prices already indicate a painfully tight market — and for the upcoming year.

Without a quota increase, consumers will pay higher prices, food manufacturing jobs will be at risk and trading patterns will be distorted. Please act now in the interest of all Americans.

The letter was signed by, among other organizations and companies, the American Bakers Association, the American Beverage Association, General Mills, Gonella Frozen Products, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Hershey Company, the Independent Bakers Association, the International Dairy Foods Association, Kraft Foods, Krispy Kreme, Mars, the National Confectioners Association, Nestle USA, and Pepperidge Farm.

Protectionism is not just a consumer issue. As we elaborated in a 2005 Cato study on the high cost of U.S. farm programs (see pp. 4–6), trade barriers against agricultural commodities such as sugar also raise costs for U.S. producers, forcing them to raise prices, and thus reducing sales, output, and employment. Artificially high domestic sugar prices have forced thousands of domestic manufacturing jobs to be “shipped overseas” to countries that allow sugar to be imported at world prices.

If the Obama administration wants to encourage the domestic production of sugar-containing products, it should raise the quotas as far as they can and allow American companies to buy sugar at world prices.

Leaving work yesterday for some softball games, I wound up caught in terrible traffic on 15th Street, which is a major D.C. artery for commuters going to Viriginia. This is never a good street to be on since it carries people looking to head south on I‑395 and those who want to turn right on Constitution Avenue and then go west into Virginia.

After a 30+ minute crawl to travel three blocks, I finally got close to Constitution Avenue, where the road widens to three lanes, one of which is only for right turns. But since a large number of drivers want to turn right, it is very common for drivers also to turn right from the center lane — which normally is very efficient since Constitution Avenue has three lanes and the traffic flows more smoothly with two lanes of traffic making the right turn.

But when I made the right turn, I discovered why traffic was so snarled on 15th Street. There was a cop standing in the middle of Constitution Avenue waiting to snare drivers turning right from the center lane. Along with many other drivers that day, I got caught and lost another 10 minutes waiting for a ticket. But the $25 ticket is not what got me so irritated. It was the fact that thousands of commuters had to deal with horrible traffic (not only because people like me suddenly got stopped and traffic behind us also had to stop, but also because people in the right-turn-only lane also could not move with the cop blocking traffic) because some bureaucrat from the National Park Police found an easy way to fill his ticket quota.

If the private sector operated the roads (permit me to engage in some libertarian fantasizing), this would never happen. Because of a desire to please drivers (customers), the folks in charge of the road would have made right turns an option from the center lane. But when government sees a bottleneck, the reaction of politicians and bureaucrats is to figure out how to fleece people for more money — not to make travel safer and quicker.

Now, perhaps, you will understand why I chose this license plate.

I’ve written before about the “carbon tariff” debate, and will continue to do so as the Senate gears up to write a climate change bill. Indeed, I have a paper coming out in early September with a fuller analysis of the effects of slapping tariffs on countries in an effort to force them to sign up to international carbon-limiting agreements. [Spoiler alert: you’ll be shocked to know that I conclude that using trade measures in climate change policy is possibly illegal under world trade rules, definitely costly to the U.S. economy, and more than likely counterproductive in the efforts to forge a climate agreement (for what that’s worth).]

Seemingly unconcerned about the costs of green protectionism, ten Democratic senators crucial to the upcoming Senate vote (long-standing protectionists all, with the exception of newbie Al Franken) sent a letter to the White House yesterday, urging President Obama to rethink his (lukewarm) resistance to carbon tariffs. They argue that a dreaded “unlevel playing field” would result from saddling U.S. industries with higher carbon costs while, say, Chinese ones remain unencumbered.

You’ll have to wait for my paper for a full examination of those arguments, but in the meantime here’s some excellent analysis of the politics of it all by former Catoite, international trade lawyer, and friend of liberty Scott Lincicome. He assesses the scorecard as follows:

Pro carbon tariffs — Ten protectionist Senators, the US House of Representatives (in Waxman-Markey), France [link added], and Paul Krugman.

Anti carbon tariffs — the rest of the world.

Before leaving for the August recess, the House of Representatives passed a bill (HR3139) to extend the authority for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) until March 2010. The program was set to expire on Oct. 1, 2009. The bill now goes to the Senate. Instead of taking up HR3139, the Senate should insist on real reforms to the NFIP, rather then a blanket extension.

Since Hurricane Katrina, the NFIP has operated under a deficit of close to $17 billion, which had to be borrowed from the Treasury in order to pay claims. Under the NFIP’s current structure, it cannot even make the interest payments on its borrowing; these losses will ultimately hit the taxpayer. 

The Senate last Congress passed a strong reform bill that would have eliminated almost half of the subsidies in the NFIP. The House decided to instead seek an expansion of the broken program, adding wind coverage and raising the coverage levels (despite the availability of private flood insurance).

Many of the homes receiving subsidies under the NFIP are either vacation/​second homes or properties where the government has paid repeated claims. In one instance, a house in Houston this is valued at around $100,000 received over $800,000 in flood insurance claims over a 20-year period, before it was finally destroyed. 

Not only does the NFIP subsidize at taxpayer expense beach-front vacation homes, but there is growing evidence that the program causes substantial harm to the environment and local fisheries. Just last year, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a finding that the NFIP is pushing orcas and some runs of salmon to extinction. Before the federal government forces significant costs on the private sector to protect the environment, perhaps it should take a close look at the damage its own activities inflict.