Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa announced Monday that his government is reviewing the broadcast licenses of radio and television stations and that it is finding “irregularities” to which sanctions will be applied, including revoking licenses. “Some sacred cows will fall,” he warned. The measures could affect hundreds of stations. The announcement was made just days after President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela also used an administrative pretext to close down 34 radio stations critical of his regime. Last week the Venezuelan congress began considering a press crimes law that would criminally penalize with prison sentences of up to four years members of the media “or any other person that expresses himself through any medium of communication” for reporting news that is false, harmful to mental health, or that produces instability. It’s not clear that Correa will also copy Chavez on a press censorship law or that he will close as many stations. But at the very least, Correa is seeking to significantly muzzle the independent press through intimidation and self-censorship.

That’s the title of Richard Cohen’s op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post. Cohen highlights the futility of using a hate crime to prosecute the Holocaust Museum shooter:

In von Brunn’s case, the hate-crime counts are an obscenity. To suggest that the effects of this attack were felt only by the Jewish or the black communities — and not, for instance, by your average Washington tourist — ghettoizes both its real and purported victims. It’s a consequence that von Brunn himself might applaud.

I couldn’t agree more.

Although “rationing” of health care, like any scarce resource, is inevitable, there are a lot of good reasons for not allowing government to decide who gets what. First among them is the fact that individuals have a basic right to make basic life choices themselves.

Moreover, irrespective of the rhetoric of self-interested politicians seeking votes, government does not have the interest of patients first and foremost in mind. Indeed, in Great Britain the primary interest of the National Health Service these days appears to be saving money by reducing care.

Reports the Daily Telegraph:

The Government’s drug rationing watchdog says “therapeutic” injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.

Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.

Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.

The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million.

But the British Pain Society, which represents specialists in the field, has written to NICE calling for the guidelines to be withdrawn after its members warned that they would lead to many patients having to undergo unnecessary and high-risk spinal surgery.

Somehow this doesn’t look like the sort of “change” most Americans were voting for last November.

(H/​t Matthew Vadum.)

Passed with scant deliberation amid a stock market panic, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 vastly expanded the federal government’s role in regulating corporate governance and the accounting industry. As part of that effort, Congress created a new agency to “audit the auditors.” Known as the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the agency has broad rulemaking and enforcement powers to set accounting standards, investigate accounting firms, punish criminal violations, and make whatever rules “may be necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors.”

Remarkably, the PCAOB (pronounced “peek-a-boo”) also has the power to fund its own budget by levying taxes on publicly traded companies. Despite giving the PCAOB all this power, however, Congress insulated it entirely from presidential oversight. Unlike with an ordinary “independent agency,” the president has no power whatsoever to appoint or remove PCAOB officials. Those officials may be removed only “for cause” by the SEC, not the president; and SEC officials may themselves be removed only for cause.

The Free Enterprise Fund challenged the constitutionality of the PCAOB and appealed to the Supreme Court. Cato’s supporting brief focuses on the PCAOB’s practical policy consequences, illustrating how the PCAOB’s unconstitutional structure has created incentives for out-of-control spending, agency aggrandizement, and lack of coordination between regulators. Our brief also highlights the PCAOB’s efforts to impose American accounting standards abroad, which has caused confusion and invited retaliation from foreign regulators.

I previously blogged about this case here and here.

The New York Times editorialized today about the supposed “brutalizing” effects of state and local government spending cuts. They claim that “most states also have cut their public workforces.”

Yet USA Today reporter Dennis Cauchon takes a look at the actual data, and he finds that state and local governments added 12,000 workers in the latest quarter, while the private sector cut 1.3 million jobs.

Thus, it appears that “brutal” restructuring is going on in the private sector, but not in the government sector. Indeed, Cauchon finds that “a huge influx of federal stimulus money to state and local governments more than offset a sharp drop in tax collections” this quarter. The article shows that state and local government spending rose quickly in the first three quarters of 2008, then dropped for two quarters, but is now rising again quite quickly. That doesn’t sound very brutal to me.

Too often editorial boards and columnists seem to write economics articles based on their preconceived notions about what they think is going on, without looking at any solid data. Cauchon’s columns at USA Today are a refreshing alternative to the sort of impressionist writing on economics we see in the NYT editorial today.

Lobbying expenditures are up in the second quarter of the Obama administration, reports the Center for Responsive Politics. Well-connected Democratic lobbyists like former House majority leader Richard Gephardt and Tony Podesta, the brother of Obama transition director John Podesta, did especially well. Given the administration’s focus on nationalizing health care and energy, it’s no surprise that health care and energy companies were the biggest spenders. Businesses don’t have unified interests, of course; some health care companies and industry sectors lobby against a government-run insurance plan while they support a federal mandate that every American purchase health insurance. Other firms may just work to get their own members onto the gravy train.

As Craig Holman of the Nader-founded Public Citizen told Marketplace Radio the last time such a report was issued, “the amount spent on lobbying … is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”

Marketplace’s Ronni Radbill noted then, “In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say…. With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy, lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time.”

Of course, this is not a new story. I pointed out in the Wall Street Journal in 1983 that Hayek had told us what to expect back in 1944:

If more money can be made by investing in Washington than by drilling another oil well, money will be spent there.

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained the process 40 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.”

In a graphic on page A6 of the February 13 edition, not available online, the Washington Post reported that “A Washington Post analysis found that more than 90 organizations hired lobbyists to specifically influence provisions of the massive stimulus bill.” The graphic showed that the number of newly registered lobbying clients had peaked on the day after Obama’s inauguration and continued to grow as the bill worked its way through both houses of Congress. More on the frenzied efforts to get a piece of the taxpayers’ money in the spending bill here and here.

And the beat goes on: The congressional newspaper The Hill reports, “Lobbyists lining up for shot at climate bill.”

And that of course is why Patrick Appel reports at the Andrew Sullivan blog that Washington is the hottest city for job-seekers these days.

If you want money flowing to the companies with good lobbyists and powerful congressmen, then all these spending and regulatory bills may accomplish something. But we should all recognize that we’re taking money out of the competitive, individually directed part of society and turning it over to the politically controlled sector. Politicians rather than consumers will pick winners and losers.

Just as important, businesses will devote their time, money, and brainpower to influencing decisions made in Washington rather than to developing better products and delivering them to consumers. The tragedy is that the most important factor in America’s economic future — in raising everyone’s standard of living — is not land, or money, or computers; it’s human talent. And an increasing part of the human talent at America’s companies is being diverted from productive activity to protecting the company from political predation. With every spending program and every new regulation, the parasite economy sucks in another productive enterprise. Do we really want the best brains at companies from General Motors and General Electric (this quarter’s biggest lobbyist) to Google and Goldman Sachs focused on working Washington rather than serving consumers?

One of the obstacles to reducing mortgage foreclosures is that so many of the homes being foreclosured upon are not occupied by their owners. Approximately 20 percent of homes are vacant investor-held properties, while according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition another 20 percent are occupied by renters.

Addressing the issue of renter occupied foreclosures has been one of the harder nuts to crack. We should have no sympathy for vacant homes purchased purely for speculative gain — the best course of action for those homes is foreclosure, or even better, speculators should be expected to continue paying those mortgages even in the face of losses. Where homes are currently rented however, it may be in the interest of both the bank and the renter to continue that relationship. Unfortunately, there is one larger barrier: the very same bank regulators who are pushing lenders not to foreclose.

As banks are not in the business of property management, their regulators strongly discourage banks from keeping foreclosured properties on their books. In fact bank regulations generally prohibit lenders from entering into long-term leases with tenants. Legislation (HR 2529) introduced by Republican Gary Miller and Democrat Joe Donnelly would allow banks to do so for up to five years. While the bill is sure to have some flaws — it merits a closer look.

Although most banks are unlikely to want to become property managers, allowing some to do so, even on an interim basis could reduce both the unnecessary eviction of renters and foreclosures on rental properties. And unlike proposals that would force banks to make uneconomical modifications, or prohibit lenders from taking ownership of a renter-occupied home, relaxing regulations governing bank management of foreclosured properties could keep some families in their homes without having to violate contracts or re-distribute wealth.