One of the regular claims from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac apologists (you know who you are) is that the two entities were blameless as they weren’t involved in subprime. Back in 2008, Paul Krugman went so far as to say, “they didn’t do any subprime, because they can’t.” Just taking 10 minutes to read the actual statute and regulations would have revealed to him that they actually could. Krugman went on to say, “Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.” Of course, just reading Fannie’s 10‑K would have revealed that claim to be false. But why let facts get in the way?

Fortunately, the Securities and Exchange Commission has decided that not only could the GSEs buy subprime, but they did in fact do so and, even worse, they lied about it. The SEC’s complaints can be found here, and despite all the legal jargon, they make for quite an interesting read. If you’d like something with a little less legalese, my analysis of the GSEs’ role in subprime reaches similar conclusions.

Now of course, just like anyone else, former Fannie and Freddie executives deserve their day in court and should be assumed innocent until proven guilty. I hope that, in this instance, the SEC abandons its usual flawed practice of reaching settlements and avoiding trials. The public policy issues are simply too important here to let the executives just pay a settlement and bury the agreement. After having spent, so far, $160 billion bailing out these entities, the public has a right to know what was happening inside them. And of course, if the executives are innocent, they have the right to see that displayed before the public in a court of law.

It’s often difficult to recognize the value of things we already have and easy to take old gifts for granted.

For much of this year, an intense and bruising battle has raged over the issue of education vouchers in Pennsylvania. This week, the House once again rejected the voucher proposal that has passed the Senate and is supported by Gov. Tom Corbett.

Overlooked amidst the tumult is another, better school choice bill passed months ago by the House and now waiting for action in the Senate. The House passed a huge expansion of the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC), more than doubling the size of the program with an astonishing 96 percent in favor to 4 percent opposed. At current levels of student support, it would help more than 60,000 additional children get a good education.

The EITC program has been a priceless gift to the children and state of Pennsylvania each year since 2001, helping to improve public schools and allowing taxpayers to invest education dollars more effectively. And an expanded credit program would bring the gift of a good education to tens of thousands more children, the gift of empowerment to thousands of parents.

The Senate can easily deliver these gifts to Pennsylvania for the New Year; just unwrap the EITC bill passed by the House and take a vote.

Michigan has become the latest to repudiate Obamacare:

In an action with major implications for health reform in Michigan, the state House has voted to turn down—at least for now—nearly $10 million in federal funds to create a statewide health exchange by 2014 to sell more affordable, standardized health insurance to consumers and small businesses.

The Michigan House’s action is consistent with what everyone from the American Legislative Exchange Council to the Heritage Foundation to the Cato Institute has recommended that states do: refuse to create an Exchange and send the money back to Washington.

Our friend Jack McHugh of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy writes:

Under the Michigan Constitution, no money can be spent by the state—including federal grant money—unless the Legislature passes an appropriation bill authorizing the spending…

House Republicans have shown no eagerness [to create a state Obamacare exchange], and that reluctance extended to this appropriation bill. In the colorful words of House Appropriations Chair Chuck Moss, R‑Birmingham, to MIRS News, “They’d rather be caught sacrificing to Satan than voting for Obamacare, so that’s the way it is.”

Jonathan Adler and I explain in this Wall Street Journal oped how Michigan officials can protect Michigan employers (including the state government itself) from penalties under Obamacare’s employer mandate—and even help bring down the entire law—by refusing to create an Exchange.

Christopher Hitchens, a man of great passions and great talents, perhaps the greatest essayist of our age, has died. Among his lesser-known works was a Cato Institute talk, “Mayor Bloomberg’s Nanny State,” delivered at a seminar in New York City on December 10, 2004.

Ten years before that, in his still-thoroughly-leftist era, he offered us this backhanded compliment in the Nation of December 12, 1994:

During the lunacy of the Reagan period, I was impressed by how often it was the Cato Institute that held the sane meeting or published the thoughtful position paper.

Herewith “Mayor Bloomberg’s Nanny State”:

I often take the train from Washington, D.C., to New York and back. A few years ago they put the smoking car on the end of the train so nonsmokers wouldn’t have to go through it to get to other parts of the train. And then the day came when they said, “We’re taking that car off the train altogether.” And I thought, “Now we’ve crossed a small but important line.” It’s the difference between protecting nonsmokers and state-sponsored behavior modification for smokers.

And I thought there was insufficient alarm at the ease with which that was done. Because state behavior modification, no matter what its object, should be viewed skeptically at the very least. There’s serious danger in the imposition of uniformity—the suggestion that one size must fit all.

When the complete ban on smoking in all public places was enacted in California, I called up the assemblyman who wrote the legislation and I said: “I’ve just discovered that bars are not going to be able to turn themselves into a club for the evening and charge a buck for admission for people who want to have a cigarette. You won’t be able to have a private club. You won’t even be able to have a smoke-easy, if you will, in California.”

And he said, “That’s right.”

I said, “Well, how can you possibly justify that?”

And he said, “Well, it’s to protect the staff. It’s labor protection legislation. We don’t want someone who doesn’t want to smoke, who doesn’t like it, having to work in a smoky bar.”

And I said, “You don’t think that if there were bars that allowed it and bars that forbade it, that, sooner or later people would apply for the jobs they preferred, and it would sort of shake out?”

He replied, “No. We could not make that assumption.”

So we have to postulate the existence, if you will, of a nonexistent person in a nonexistent dilemma: the person who can find only one job, and that job is as barkeep in a smoking bar. This person must be held to exist, though he or she is notional. But everyone who actually does exist must act as if this person is real.

There used to be areas, like the West Village in New York or North Beach in San Francisco, that are now dull and boring and have to be policed. And I think that’s a terrible loss. I write better when I have a cigarette and a drink. I’m more fun to be with—other people seem less boring. The life of bohemia, of the small cafe and the little bar that never quite closes, is essential to cultural production. It may seem like a small thing. It doesn’t add very much to the GNP. But if you take it away, you may not know what you’ve lost until it’s too late.

But suppose all this was really a good idea—people might live longer. Suppose all that was really true. There would still be the question of enforcement, that awkward little bit that comes between your conception of utopia and your arrival there. The enforcement bit. You could appoint regulators and inspectors to enforce the law. It would take quite a lot of them, but you could do it. There are such people. I know about them because they’ve come after me.

My editor, Graydon Carter, the splendid editor of Vanity Fair, and I were having a cigarette in his office. And someone on our staff—it’s not very nice to think about it—was kind enough to drop a dime on us. And round the guys came. “You’re busted!” These people are paid by the city, which evidently has no better use for its police.

I think that’s bad enough. But then Graydon went on holiday, and I went back to Washington. And his office was empty. But they came round again and they issued him another ticket because he had on his desk an object that could have been used as an ashtray. In his absence. With no one smoking. But there are officials who have time enough to come round and do that.

The worst part is that the staff has to become the enforcers. The waitresses have to become the enforcers. The maitre d’ has to become the enforcer. He has to act as the mayor’s representative. Because it’s he who is going to be fined, not you. If you break the law in his bar, he is going to have to pay.

So everyone is made into a snitch. Everyone is made into an enforcer. And everyone is working for the government. And all of this in the name of our health.

Now, I was very depressed by the way that this argument was conducted. There were people who stuck up for the idea that maybe there should be a bit of smoking allowed here and there. But they all said it was a matter of the revenue of the bars and the restaurants. That was the way the New York Times phrased it.

In no forum did I read: “Well, is there a question of liberty involved here at all? Is there a matter of freedom? Is there a matter of taste? Is there a matter of the relationship of citizens to one another?”

And something about it made me worry and makes me worry still. The old slogan of the anarchist left used to be that the problem is not those who have the will to command. They will always be there, and we feel we understand where the authoritarians come from. The problem is the will to obey. The problem is the people who want to be pushed around, the people who want to be taken care of, the people who want to be a part of it all, the people who want to be working for a big protective brother.

Karl Rove writes in the Wall Street Journal that “the debates have allowed every potentially serious candidate to be seen by large audiences.” One thing that has generally made presidential candidates serious is experience in executive office, especially as governor. After voters elected Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush minor over a period of 30 years, it became conventional wisdom that governors make much stronger presidential candidates than senators. After senators swept the field in 2008, and Sen. Barack Obama won, that preference seemed in doubt. But now voices on both left and right are asking whether President Obama’s lack of executive experience is indeed a problem.

So it’s worth asking how much executive experience the Republican candidates have. Here’s what I come up with:

Rick Perry 11 years
Gary Johnson 8 years
Jon Huntsman 5 years
Mitt Romney 4 years
Michelle Bachmann 0
Newt Gingrich 0
Ron Paul 0
Rick Santorum 0

So Rove thinks “the debates have allowed every potentially serious candidate to be seen by large audiences.” And yet the Republican party and the big media have excluded the candidate with the second-most experience as governor. And so I wonder again, how does the establishment exclude a Republican governor who got elected twice—and served his full terms—in a Democratic-leaning swing state, had a successful record, vetoed more bills than all other governors combined, proposed the boldest policies in the country on both school choice and drug policy reform, and then left the state with a budget surplus?

As James Peron wrote at Huffington Post,

Johnson sees himself as socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Most polls show that a large percentage of voters fall into this category. A majority of voters supports depoliticized markets and balanced budgets, a majority supports gay marriage, and half the public wants to legalize marijuana, which is a plurality. A majority thinks sending troops to Iraq was a mistake and wants out. You’d think Gary Johnson would be a natural choice for them.

And you’d think that even Karl Rove would agree that a two-term Republican governor with that potential appeal would be a “potentially serious candidate” who ought to have a chance to debate the other candidates.

Trade ministers from more than 150 countries are gathering today in Geneva, Switzerland, for a three-day ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. These meetings happen every two years or so. No great breakthroughs are expected at this one, but it does offer an opportunity to take stock of where the WTO and world trade stand a decade after China’s entry into the organization and the launch of the still ongoing Doha Development Round.

News from the first day is a reminder that the organization can still deliver real trade liberalization. Forty-two members, including the United States, announced just a few hours ago that they had revised the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement to open up an estimated $100 billion in annual government purchases to more international competition, potentially saving taxpayers billions of dollars a year.

The revised GPA will also give U.S. companies a fairer shot at winning contracts to supply goods and services to foreign governments. It is a partial antidote to the protectionist trend in the United States and elsewhere to restrict government spending to domestic suppliers in the misguided view that that will stimulate domestic demand.

The Doha Round may be stalled, but global trade has continued to expand. Even with the sharp downturn in trade during the recent Great Recession, in the decade since 2001 global trade volume has increased 44 percent, according to the WTO web site. Trade growth has been especially robust in East Asia and other emerging markets. The anti-market protestors can take some satisfaction in the lack of progress in negotiations, but globalization marches on.

A decade after its entry into the organization, China remains a mixed economy with significant trade barriers, but it has become one of the more open major developing economies. And it is now subject to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism and other disciplines that keep its economy more open than it would be outside the organization. There were dire warnings about a flood of imports from China if we allowed it to join, but in the past decade U.S. exports to China have grown significantly faster than imports from China.

As the chart below shows, since China’s entry into the WTO in December 2001, U.S. exports of goods to China have grown more than five-fold while U.S. imports of Chinese goods have grown four-fold. The robust export growth reflects both the growth of the Chinese economy and the decline of its trade barriers against goods of major export interest to the United States. For that we can give the WTO a major share of the credit.

As I’ve written elsewhere, there are other good reasons to see the WTO as a positive if modest factor in the global economy–to the benefit of the United States and the freedom to trade across the world.

Watching the House Judiciary Committee’s markup session on the latest version of the Stop Online Piracy Act, I’m struck by how the bill exemplifies what F.A. Hayek called the “Fatal Conceit” of government planners and regulators. As Rep. Jason Chaffetz noted with incredulity, a bill that would perform major surgery on the Internet is moving forward, at breakneck speed, without any doctors in the room. Legislators who think it’s cute to make jokes about how little they understand network technology are endorsing regulation of that technology, in statutory language has only just been introduced in its current form, without so much as a hearing from the actual engineers who are loudly warning of its grave defects. But the “fatal conceit” is inherent in the attempt to issue this kind of top-down mandate on the Internet, even with the best expert advice.

In many ways, the Internet is a perfect embodiment of Hayek’s concept of an evolved “spontaneous order.” Its enormous complexity is the product of relatively simple rules that allow individuals to deploy their local knowledge productively without having to understand the total system. Each layer in the “stack” of protocols in the Internet is independent, which means I can write a network application or generate content without having to understand the details of Internet addressing, packet routing, or how WiFI and Ethernet work: I just need to know how to pass application data to the next layer.

Moreover, the standards themselves are the product of gradual evolution, as engineers voluntarily adopt them following a long process of deliberation and consensus-building. Often, that makes the process necessarily quite slow. As former assistant DHS secretary and NSA general counsel Stewart Baker observes, the vital DNSSEC standard, designed to secure the Internet addressing system and guard against malicious hijacking of Internet traffic, has been in the works for 15 years. But SOPA would create massive regulatory uncertainty about the status of client software robustly implementing that standard. In short, argues Baker, “SOPA will kill DNSSEC,” to the detriment of global cybersecurity. Legislators seem to imagine that they can simply add language saying that their mandates aren’t meant to impair cybersecurity, as if uttering the magic words were enough to make it so. But you can’t just inject a top-down national mandate into a global evolutionary process and expect to achieve the effects the planners intend without disruptive consequences.

This isn’t just a narrow issue with one specific protocol, though. The general approach of SOPA is to attempt to solve a content problem—copyrighted material circulating illicitly—with a mandate targeting a completely different level of the Internet’s architecture, where domain names are translated into network addresses.That guarantees a poor fit between regulatory aims and outcomes, and enormously magnifies the likelihood of unpredictable and unintended consequences. That unpredictability is increased because—in what might otherwise seem like a wise example of regulatory flexibility—SOPA leaves it to providers to pick the best method of blocking forbidden sites, which means we’re likely to see different providers testing a variety of approaches. A dramatic example of how attempts to blocking can generate unexpected cascading failures was provided in 2008, when Pakistan ordered the blocking of YouTube—and inadvertently broke access for millions of users around the world.

Some legal scholars have suggested a “Layers Principle” to guide Internet policymaking. In brief, legislators and regulators should respect the independence of Internet layers by targeting solutions, as nearly as possible, at the layer where the problem exists. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act takes this sort of approach by providing a notice-and-takedown mechanism that targets specific cases of infringing content. SOPA, by contrast, violates this principle by seeking to solve a content problem by regulating the Internet’s addressing system. A Congress that displayed a modicum of humility about its ability to effectively redirect the operation of such a complex, organic, evolving system would accept that these blunt and broad interventions, however well-intentioned, are more likely to damage the system than achieve the intended result.