In the New York Times my old friend Tyler Cowen writes:
Another conservative economist and Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, emeritus professor of economics at George Mason University,…
I guess Tyler has never read Buchanan’s 2005 book, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, reviewed here by another distinguished economist, William A. Niskanen.
The interest in New Jersey governor Chris Christie as a possible 2012 presidential candidate is understandable. His tough line against state spending, his willingness to take on entrenched interests in the Garden State, and his candor and blunt manner of speaking all appeal to Republicans weary of the current candidates. But while his views on domestic policy are relatively clear, Christie’s foreign-policy views aren’t. Indeed, governors have little reason to speak out on foreign-policy issues unless they run for president.
Without a track record, however, no one can know how a former governor will perform what is arguably a president’s most important job: deciding whether, where and when to deploy U.S. troops abroad. Recall George W. Bush’s plea for a humble foreign policy and his senior foreign policy adviser Condoleezza Rice’s assertion that the U.S. military should not be in the business of “escorting kids to kindergarten” in foreign lands. This was all forgotten by the time that Bush and Rice exited Washington eight years later. Rice essentially recanted her earlier opposition to nation building, and Bush had presided over a foreign policy that was anything but humble.
With that huge caveat in mind, can we venture a guess about Chris Christie’s foreign policy views? Not quite. But this passage from Christie’s speech at the Reagan Library hints at a measure of humility and pragmatism that is long overdue:
The United States must…become more discriminating in what we try to accomplish abroad. We certainly cannot force others to adopt our principles through coercion. Local realities count; we cannot have forced makeovers of other societies in our image. We need to limit ourselves overseas to what is in the national interest so that we can rebuild the foundations of American power here at home.
Such sentiments strike most Americans as eminently sensible. Numerous polls show that Americans want to stop fighting other people’s wars and building other people’s countries. Most believe it is better to husband our power and deploy our military abroad only when vital U.S. security interests are threatened. We should lead by our example, build a society that others wish to emulate, and avoid the temptation to meddle in other people’s affairs.
Not so, says William Kristol, Weekly Standard editor and Fox News commentator. In a famous essay co-authored with Robert Kagan in 1996 the two made the case for “benevolent global hegemony.” Kristol and Kagan especially took issue with those conservatives who:
succumb easily to the charming old metaphor of the United States as a “city on a hill.”
[…]
Because…the responsibility for the peace and security of the international order rests so heavily on America’s shoulders, a policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example becomes in practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor.
So why would Kristol be pushing Christie to run for president?
At first glance, it appears that Kristol is willing to look past Christie’s foreign-policy views in the interest of finding a candidate best able to defeat President Obama in 2012. Perhaps Kristol believes that he will be in a better position to influence Christie’s policies at a later stage. Kristol was notably lukewarm on Governor Bush in 2000 but was nonetheless able to influence President Bush’s foreign policy.
But should Republicans listen to Bill Kristol?
Kristol’s brand of foreign-policy activism has always looked more like Woodrow Wilson than Ronald Wilson Reagan. Indeed, notwithstanding Kristol’s deliberate efforts to wrap his foreign-policy views around Reagan’s legacy, Reagan was more skeptical of confrontation with the Soviet Union than the neoconservatives, as Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke expertly demonstrate in their book America Alone. And conservatives’ understandable skepticism of nation building at home has never fit with the neoconservatives’ notions of nation building abroad.
Beyond this serious philosophical disagreement, Republicans should recall the terrible effects that the neoconservatives’ foreign policies had on Republican candidates in recent elections. Kristol was a leading champion for some of the biggest foreign policy blunders in U.S. history. Those blunders denied George W. Bush a mandate for major domestic-policy reform in 2005, cost the GOP control of the Congress in 2006, and provided an opening that Barack Obama skillfully exploited on the road to the White House in 2008. Those are all reasons enough for Republicans to ignore Kristol’s advice.
It is too soon to say whether Chris Christie’s few early comments about foreign policy signal a genuine commitment to military restraint, or whether his skepticism toward foreign military adventures will be discarded as quickly and easily as George W. Bush’s humility. But there are modestly hopeful signs that Governor Christie hasn’t fully bought into the neocons’ benevolent global hegemony, and that suggests that he will be open to other points of view.
NFL Hall-of-Famer Fran Tarkenton writes in the WSJ this morning that lifetime tenure and fixed salary scales would make football as awful as they have made our public school system. Seems obvious enough… and that’s where truth comes in, which is said to go through three phases: first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as if it had been obvious to everyone from the start.
With regard to the bankruptcy of state monopoly schooling, we’re in stage two, teetering on the brink of stage three. And that’s good. But let’s all remember that acknowledging the wrongheadedness of the education monopoly does not imply the automatic understanding of the most effective alternative—or even of a good alternative. So once Truth gets the ball on the ten yard line, let’s be careful not to fumble it. That means empirically determining which policies will create lasting free markets in education, accessible to all, and which will not.
Back in March, Heritage Foundation scholar Ed Haislmaier wrote that states could blunt ObamaCare’s impact (A) by creating non-ObamaCare compliant, “consumer-centered” Exchanges and/or (B) by creating ObamaCare-compliant, “defensive” health insurance Exchanges. Many states, including some that are suing to overturn ObamaCare as unconstitutional, saw this as a green-light from the free-market groups and forged ahead with creating an ObamaCare-compliant Exchange.
In a blog post last week, Haislmaier recanted on Strategy B. He writes that “defensive” Exchanges won’t blunt the impact after all, and that states should refuse to create any type of ObamaCare-compliant Exchange and send back all federal ObamaCare grants:
Initially, while HHS was still deciding how to implement the legislation, a narrow window of opportunity existed for states to pursue a “pushback” strategy of creating a restricted exchange and requiring it to contract with the state’s Medicaid program and insurance department to perform the eligibility, enrollment, and insurance regulation functions that state lawmakers seek to retain control of. HHS effectively closed that window in its proposed exchange regulations issued in July…
The combined effect of these regulations and grant requirements are that a state would have to agree to surrender any last vestiges of meaningful control over how Obamacare is implemented. Thus, a state would now have no more real control over an exchange it set up than over one HHS established…
Consequently, at this point the best course of action for states is to neither apply for nor accept exchange establishment grant funding.
Free-market groups are now united on these points.
Haislmaier still recommends that states pursue Strategy A: a “consumer-centered,” non-ObamaCare Exchange using only state-government dollars. As I explain here, however, there is no such thing as a non-ObamaCare Exchange. Insurance carriers will not patronize non-ObamaCare Exchanges, and the federal government will commandeer them or push them aside to create an ObamaCare Exchange. Creating any type of Exchange merely lends manpower to ObamaCare’s federal takeover of health care. States should refuse.
Remember when you had to wait until the end of the month to see your bank statement?
Last week, on the cusp of failing to pass any annual appropriations bills ahead of the October 1 start of the new fiscal year, congressional leaders came up with a short-term government funding bill (or “continuing resolution”) that would fund the government until November 18th. For whatever reason, that deal (H.R. 2608) wasn’t ready to go before the end of the week, so Congress passed an even shorter-term continuing resolution (H.R. 2017) that funds the government until tomorrow, October 4th.
Every weekend, I hunch over my computer and update key records in the database of WashingtonWatch.com, a government transparency website I run as a non-partisan, non-ideological resource (disclosure: it’s my own, not a Cato project). Then I put a summary of what’s going on into an email like this one (subscribe!) that goes out to 7,000 or so of my closest friends.
Last weekend, the Library of Congress’ THOMAS website, which is one of my resources, was down a good chunk of the time for maintenance. Even after it came up again, some materials such as bill text and committee reports weren’t available. (They had come up by the wee hours this morning.) Maintenance is necessary sometimes, though when the service provider I use for the WashingtonWatch.com email does maintenance, it’s usually for an hour or so in the middle of a weekend night.
But when I went to update the database to reflect last week’s passage of H.R. 2017, I could find no record of its public law number. When a bill becomes a law, it gets a public law number starting with the number of the Congress that passed and then a sequential number, like Public Law No. 112–29. The Government Printing Office’s FDsys system lets you browse public laws. At this writing, it isn’t updated to reflect the passage of new laws last week. When THOMAS came back up, its public laws page also had no data to reflect the passage of that continuing resolution last week (and still doesn’t, also at this writing).
There is barely any news reporting on humdrum details about governing like the passage of a law expending $40 billion in taxpayer funds. (That’s about what H.R. 2017 spends to operate the government four more days, roughly $400 per U.S. family.) Where can you confirm with an official source that this happened?
The winning data resource this week, if by default, is Whitehouse.gov, which has a page dedicated to laws the president has signed. That page says that President Obama signed four new laws on Friday (Sept. 30). When might FDsys or THOMAS reflect this information? It’ll happen soon, and that data will start to propagate out to society.
But I think that’s not soon enough. A couple of days’ delay is a big deal.
If I were to take $400 in cash out of my bank account at an ATM, I could review that transaction from that instant forward on my bank’s website. If I had a concern or even a passing interest, I could just go look. That is an utterly unremarkable service in this day and age.
But it’s remarkable that such a service doesn’t exist in systems that are as important as our bank accounts. When Congress and the president pass a bill to spend $40 billion dollars, the fact of its passage is pretty much undocumented by any official sources until enough Mon-Fri, 9‑to‑5 work hours have passed.
In my recently published paper, Publication Practices for Transparent Government, I go through the things the government should do to make itself more transparent (thus improving public oversight and producing lots of felicitous outcomes). A practice I cite is “real-time or near-real-time publication.” Why? Because then any of the 300 million Americans who have an interest, real or passing, can see what is happening with their money as it happens, just like they can with their bank holdings. People like me (and many more) can propagate complete and timely information, making it that much more accessible.
When you’re talking about a potential audience of 200 million people and $40 billion in expense (one of the tiniest spending bills—others are much larger), it is not too much to ask to have the data published in real time.
I don’t expect a lot of people to join me at the barricades with pitchforks and torches on this one. Government transparency is an area ruled by implicit demand. People don’t know what they are missing, so they don’t know to suffer a sense of deprivation. I do that for them—all of them. (Heroic, idn’t it?)
Before too long, though, the government’s opacity will be recognized as a contributor to the public’s general—and strong—distaste for all that goes on in Washington, D.C. The idea of spending $400 per U.S. family without documenting every detail of it on the Internet will seem as absurd as waiting until the end of the month to see what happened in your bank account.
Cato Mencken Fellows Penn Jillette and Teller launch a new hour-long show, “Penn & Teller Tell a Lie,” on the Discovery Channel this Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time. Discovery says:
Penn & Teller bring their unique vision of the world in a new interactive series with a twist. In each episode, Penn & Teller make up to seven outrageous claims. While most of the wildly unbelievable stories are absolutely, positively true — one of them is a BIG FAT LIE. It will be up to viewers to spot the fake and VOTE LIVE online or with the new GUESS THE LIE app.
They’ll put lots of scientific claims and myths through rigorous testing, continuing their longstanding interest in science, truth, and skepticism.
If you have a DVR, note that Showtime is rebroadcasting an episode of their former series, this one a skeptical look at the environmental movement, at the exact same time: 10:30 p.m. Wednesday.
And if you can’t wait till Wednesday, listen to Cato’s podcast with Penn Jillette recorded a few weeks ago.
The Center for Freedom and Prosperity has released another “Economics 101” video, and this one has a very powerful message about the federal government’s so-called War on Poverty.
As explained by Hadley Heath of the Independent Women’s Forum, the various income redistribution schemes being imposed by Washington are bad for taxpayers — and bad for poor people.
The video has a plethora of useful information, but the data on the poverty rate is particularly compelling. Prior to the War on Poverty, the United States was getting more prosperous with each passing year and there were dramatic reductions in the level of destitution.
But once the federal government got involved in the mid-1960s, the good news evaporated. Indeed, the poverty rate has basically stagnated for the past 40-plus years, usually hovering around 13 percent depending on economic conditions.
Another remarkable finding in the video is that poor people in America rarely suffer from material deprivation. Indeed, they have wide access to consumer goods that used to be considered luxuries — and they also have more housing space than the average European (and with Europe falling apart, the comparisons presumably will become even more noteworthy).
The most important message of the video, however, is that small government and economic freedom are the best answers for poverty. As Hadley explains, poor people can be liberated to live meaningful, self-reliant lives if we can reduce the heavy burden of the federal government.
Last but not least, the video doesn’t address every issue in great detail, and there are three additional points that should be added to any discussion of poverty.
This last point is worth emphasizing because it is also one of the core messages of the video. The federal government has done a terrible job dealing with poverty. The time has come to get Washington out of the racket of income redistribution.