Three weeks ago, a national commotion erupted when the Drudge Report headlined a story from the Heritage Foundation on the Obama administration’s implementation of a new tax on Christmas trees. I noted here that the 1996 legislation enabling the U.S. Department of Agriculture to implement the tax received most of its support from Republicans, including co-sponsor John Boehner.

The National Taxpayers Union gives a tidy explanation of how the law almost led to the “Christmas Tree Tax”:

The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 permitted producers of agricultural commodities such as beef, pork, or popcorn to create what are known as research and promotion programs, or “checkoffs.” These are analogous to unions: producers pay “dues” to the checkoff which works to fund research and advertising efforts on behalf of the industry represented. Board members are appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture who also has authority to enforce dues-payment. Because the dues are government-coerced, they are essentially taxes passed on to consumers.

There are currently 18 checkoff programs. And while the Obama administration quickly stopped the Christmas tree tax checkoff program from going into effect, there are still other agricultural commodity groups, such as the hardwood lumber industry, pushing for their own checkoff. There are also efforts to allow the creation of non-agricultural commodity checkoffs.

NTU notes that now another Republican wants to create a similar scheme at the Department of Commerce:

Congressman John Shimkus (R‑IL) introduced H.R. 3395 to create the Concrete Masonry Products Board to promote and market concrete products. The Board would be made up of representatives of the concrete industry appointed by the Secretary of Commerce. Producers and importers of concrete masonry would initially be assessed $0.01 per concrete masonry unit sold in the United States. The Board will have authority to change the assessment rate, but it can be no higher than $0.05 per unit. The Secretary of Commerce would have authority to levy late-payment and interest charges on those producers who fail to remit an assessment.

That would be the same John Shimkus who received a “Taxpayer Hero” award from the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste in October. Carrying water for a special interest at the expense of consumers is not what I would consider to be an act of heroism. Worse, granting this authority to the Department of Commerce would add another layer of cement to the foundation (pun intended) of a bureaucracy that one former Commerce secretary derided as “nothing more than a hall closet where you throw in everything that you don’t know what to do with.” Fortunately, the bill only has two co-sponsors (Republican Rep. Richard Hanna of New York is one of them), so it’s probably not going anywhere.

Republicans who say they want smaller government should walk the talk by introducing legislation that would eliminate agencies and programs. For example, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R‑KS) has introduced legislation to abolish Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. Otherwise, they’re just part of the problem, or—in the case of Shimkus and Hanna—they make matters worse.

See here for more on downsizing the Department of Commerce.

The New York Times’ Floyd Norris repeats the same old tired argument that if only we could get the housing market going, everything would be swell. Maybe that works if somehow you believe our objective is to get back to 2005.

Don’t get me wrong; 2005 felt great in terms of the economy. But it was a BUBBLE, driven by false and misplaced beliefs about housing prices (not to mention lots of easy credit). The result? We built more housing than we now need or want. Norris never gets around to explaining how exactly building more housing would solve our current problem of oversupply.

Norris’ solution? Yes, the same tired, old proposal of writing down mortgage debt. Again, nowhere does he explain how forgiving mortgage debt helps to clear the oversupply of housing—because it doesn’t. As I argued before, the notion that forced mortgage write-downs creates wealth, and hence increases spending, is false. But why let facts get in the way of a blind devotion to theft as a manner of creating wealth?

The solution is not to hope our housing market turns around (if you actually want to, try these). Counter to Norris’ bias against markets, letting prices fall and the market clear is the most workable path to fixing the housing market. The real solution to getting our economy moving is helping to transition resources out of housing and into other sectors of the economy, where they can be used to create real wealth and not simply to bid up house prices. I cannot envision a situation where we put more than half of the 2 million unemployed constructions workers back to work in residential construction any time soon. Ain’t going to happen.

I particularly find these positions most puzzling when they come from the Left. We’ve had a decade of stagnant wages. Why? Because we invested in running up asset (house) prices, rather than investing in capital (plant and equipment), which would have increased labor productivity and ultimately wages. Running up house prices does not increase wages or benefit the working class. It’s just a horrible form of regressive theft that benefits those with assets (houses) at the expense of those without.

The day after Thanksgiving didn’t see one of these updates, so we’ve got two weeks of new content at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org to cover.

George H. Smith continued his Excursions series with the first two parts in an extended look at the Declaration of Independence. In part 1, Smith discussed the intellectual history behind the document’s famous reference to “unalienable” rights. In part 2, he turned to two instances of curious wording: the use of “self-evident” and the lack of “property” in Jefferson’s list of inalienable rights.

We had a few new videos, too. In an addition to our “Libertarian View” series, Penn Jillette—magician and H. L. Menken research fellow at the Cato Institute—talks about what he sees as the important distinction between trying to convince someone that what you believe is true and just stating sincerely what you believe.

On November 29, we posted our first talk from Thomas Szasz. Speaking in 1994, the famous psychiatry skeptic addressed the problem of socialism in health care—an issue very much with us today.

And just today, we added a talk by Roger Garrison on monetary policy and central banking.

Finally, we had an extended—and ongoing—debate in the Free Thoughts blog between Julian Sanchez and Miles Pope on conceptions of morality in Jan Narveson’s The Libertarian Idea.

As always, there’s much more at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. Keep up to date with everything new on the site by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Last week’s killing of two dozen Pakistani soldiers by a NATO airstrike shows why the war in Afghanistan will continue to weaken, not stabilize, neighboring Pakistan, contrary to what U.S. officials and analysts claim. Perhaps the gravest outcome from this latest “tragic, unintended incident” will be the widening gulf between Pakistan’s senior military leadership and its junior officer corps, a chasm that opened under President-General Pervez Musharraf (1999–2008) and threatens to open far wider.

Pakistan’s alliance with the United States has always been a liability. After 9/11, Musharraf forced the reassignment or resignation of officers regarded as pro-Taliban or Islamist, because his decision to support U.S. counterterrorism efforts undermined his support among key military officials. In 2003, he narrowly escaped two attempts on his life—within 11 days of each other—that involved the collaboration of junior officers. The attacks came two months after al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released an audiotape urging Pakistanis to overthrow the military general.

B. Raman, the former head of the counterterrorism division for India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), writes that while many in India might rejoice at this intra-military split and the further deterioration of U.S.-Pakistan relations, “This need not necessarily be a beneficial development for India. It is in our interest that the US retains the ability to influence the behaviour of the Pakistani military leadership.”

That is exactly what Washington risks losing the longer it prosecutes this ill-conceived quagmire in Afghanistan. “Imagine how we would feel if it had been 24 American soldiers killed by Pakistani forces at this moment,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D‑IL) on Fox News Sunday. Fanning public anger in Pakistan is Jamaatud Dawa, Hizb ut-Tehrir, and other organizations that stand to gain whenever anti‑U.S. anger spikes. But is it any wonder why Pakistani streets and newspaper editorials were brimming with anti-American sentiment? Such escalating pressures against General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the chief of the army staff, come just after Pakistan’s security establishment was publicly humiliated for either being complicit or incompetent in America’s Osama bin Laden raid, and was accused of attempting to stage a coup in the recent “memogate” scandal.

Compounding the partnership’s endless string of controversies are recurring incidents along the Af-Pak border. These incidents hurt the honor of Pakistan’s military, decrease the country’s resolve to cooperate with America, and highlight a glaringly obvious problem with America’s current strategy. U.S. officials claim the coalition cannot fight its way to victory in Afghanistan. But by continuing to attack indigenous insurgents before withdrawing or engaging in negotiations, the coalition is undermining the potential for a diplomatic solution. Look no further than Pakistan’s refusal to attend this week’s Bonn summit. As Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, told Dawn News television this week, “It is definitely not Pakistan’s intention to work against the rest of the world. But the rest of the world also has to understand that if they have pushed Pakistan into this corner, violated red lines, then they have denied the basis of partnership.”

An iteration of this discrepancy comes from Pakistani columnist Ejaz Haider, who wrote last year:

Behind all the nice talk about setting the world right through a Lockean cooperative framework lurks Mr. Hobbes… Mr. Obama… (de-hyphenated) Pakistan and India by not including Pakistan on this visit even as Pakistan is supposed to be a vital strategic partner and a state that is, presumably, going to determine, by his own admission, not only the future of this region but of the entire world. This would be amusing if it did not indicate a deep policy flaw.

Only America’s hubris can explain why officials continue to believe that they can win a war in which the neighboring state—with legitimate security interests—actively assists elements of the insurgency, denies transit routes for delivery of war supplies, and uses its leverage to increase the costs of America’s military presence. The 10-year war’s latest casualty is the ongoing effort to bring insurgent networks into a broader power-sharing arrangement in Kabul. U.S. militarism has deprived diplomatic efforts of a key regional player. Absent the cooperation of Pakistan, the United States continues to dig its own grave.

Cross-posted from “The Skeptics” at the National Interest.

Nuclear weapons have played a major role in U.S. force planning for many decades. But we have never had a thorough accounting of the total cost of these weapons, and we still don’t. (The best to date is probably this study by Stephen I. Schwartz and Deepti Choubey, but they don’t claim to capture every nickel spent on nuclear weapons.)

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler published a fact checker article earlier this week that challenged the claim that we would spend $700 billion on nuclear weapons over the next decade. Since then, other organizations have come forth to decry the lack of transparency within the nuclear weapons budget, and call for the government to do a much better job of documenting all of the costs associated with our many nuclear weapons programs. This would include an understanding of the full life-cycle costs for fissile material, warheads, and delivery vehicles, from design and development, to production, to retirement and waste removal and abatement. As with the rest of the Pentagon’s budget, which has never been subject to a complete audit of its assets and liabilities, the nuclear weapons portion (much of which resides in the Department of Energy) remains shrouded in secrecy.

I hope that the latest dust-up over what we are actually spending creates additional pressure on the bureaucracy to open up its books.

This an excerpted version of a longer post from “The Skeptics” at the National Interest.

It is well established that presidents do not gain much of anything when they launch unsuccessful military ventures. However, they generally don’t gain much from successful ones either. The public does not seem to be interested in rewarding—or even remembering—foreign policy success.

The data are now in on the most recent such military venture: the expedition in Libya. The United States and its NATO allies materially supported popular rebels in their ultimately successful efforts to overthrow the decidedly unpopular regime of Muammar Qaddafi, efforts that resulted in the terminal demise of Qaddafi, a certifiable devil du jour in the American mind for decades. And all this at no cost in American lives.

After the rebel success and the death of the dictator in November, CBS News conducted a poll and asked a fairly mild question about the mission. It revealed that the public was quite capable of containing its enthusiasm for the venture, no matter how successful it may seem to have been:

Although it seems unlikely the venture will hurt President Obama’s reelection prospects, it seems equally unlikely it will furnish him with any real bragging rights.

The same thing happened in 1999 during Bill Clinton’s war over Kosovo, a venture that seemed considerably more risky and that inspired much more attention. As the bombs were being dropped there in support of the persecuted Albanian side, quite a few press accounts argued that the presidential ambitions and political future of Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, hung in the balance. From the standpoint of public opinion, the Kosovo venture seems to have been a success, not the least because no American lives were lost. But when Gore launched his campaign for the presidency a few months later, he scarcely thought it important or memorable enough to bring up.

And of course there is the legendary inability of George H. W. Bush to garner much lasting electoral advantage from the Gulf War of 1991. Although the success in that huge and dramatic victory caused even his ratings on the handling of the economy to rise notably, this effect was reversed within days in the polls. His slide continued into electoral defeat in the next year.

Lesser accomplishments seem to have been at least as unrewarding. Nobody gave much credit to Bush for his earlier successful intervention in Panama, to Dwight Eisenhower for a successful venture into Lebanon in 1958, to Lyndon Johnson for success in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Jimmy Carter for husbanding an important Middle East treaty in 1979, to Ronald Reagan for a successful invasion of Grenada in 1983 or to Bill Clinton for sending troops to help resolve the Bosnia problem in 1995. Although it is often said that the successful Falklands War of 1982 helped British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the elections of 1983, any favorable effect is confounded by the fact that the economy was improving impressively at the same time.

Even Harry Truman, who presided over the massive triumph in World War II, saw his approval plummet to impressive lows within months after the war because of domestic concerns.

And surely the ultimate case is that of Britain’s Winston Churchill. After brilliantly holding the country together during that war—at times, it seemed that the only thing the country had going for it was his rhetoric—he was summarily voted out of office a few weeks after its end. Or, as he put it, “At the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for the five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.”

In his perhaps-ironically titled book Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill recalls that, when the news about his electoral defeat arrived, his wife suggested, “It may well be a blessing in disguise.” Churchill replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” Other victors have had reason to express similar sentiments.

Cross-posted from “The Skeptics” at the National Interest.

Check out NPR’s Morning Edition today, at least at 8:00 a.m., and you’ll find the lead item isn’t the impending jobs report, the European economic crisis, or even President Obama’s latest campaign speech. No, it’s “Catholic Groups Fight Contraceptive Rule.” Sex, women, discrimination, religion, and health care: What could be more natural for NPR, more right down its alley? Yet the issues the story raises—not broached in this story, of course—go well beyond those pegs. What we have here, in microcosm, is a conflict with a thousand and one variations in the modern ubiquitous state.

New regulations under ObamaCare, it seems, will require employers, universities, and others who offer health insurance benefits covering prescription drugs to cover prescription contraceptives as well. For many Catholics, of course, that’s a concern. As Catholic University President John Garvey wrote recently in The Washington Post, “if we comply, as the law requires, we will be helping our students do things that we teach them, in our classes and in our sacraments, are sinful—sometimes gravely so.” He and others are asking for a religious liberty exception.

But why stop there? The issue is perfectly generalizable. And it arises in the thousand and one ways it does because our ever-expanding anti-discrimination laws, as they restrict private parties, conflict directly with our liberties—in particular, with our right to associate, or not, with anyone we wish, for any reason, good or bad, or no reason at all.

Currently, the story notes, 28 states require contraceptives to be offered in health plans, eight with no exception for religious organizations. Some have tried to get out from under those laws by self-insuring, but that’s where the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 kicks in. Still, the story adds, an EEOC ruling under that statute binds only if the people being discriminated against take action. Hence the ObamaCare rule, which compels up front.

And what’s the rationale for the anti-discrimination rule? “Prescription contraception is a form of health care that is unique to women,” says the ACLU’s Sarah Lipton-Lubet, “and the consequences of the inability to be able to access contraception, those fall primarily on women.” Women would have no access to contraceptives, we’re invited to believe, if their health insurance plans didn’t pay for them—or access as well to anything else not covered, presumably. That’s how we’ll all end up with “Cadillac plans,” until employers, unable to afford them, will stop providing any health insurance benefits at all—yet then will have to pay the penalty ObamaCare exacts for opting out.

But Ms. Lipton-Lubet’s rationale doesn’t stop there: “What the bishops and their allies are asking for is the ability to impose their religious beliefs on people who don’t share them,” she says. Think about that. It’s the bishops who are forcing their beliefs on others, not the government that is forcing employers to pay for coverage they oppose. That’s what we come to when, as Obama has repeatedly said, “we’re all in this together.” Opting out, cost free, is not an option—it’s discrimination, whether in health care, or housing, or lending, or college admissions, or employment, or any other private endeavor that today is so highly regulated by our anti-discrimination laws. Freedom of association is today the exception, not the rule, with government in charge of dispensing the exceptions.