The Washington Post reported Tuesday that we are building more unmanned aerial vehicle bases around the Horn of Africa and Yemen to strike al Qaeda militants.

For a critical take on drone strikes in both places, read what I wrote here in July. I discuss the danger of conflating all jihadist militants with those bent on attacking us. Here’s the bit on Somalia.

Since our recent drone strike in Somalia on leaders of the al-Shabab insurgent group, the administration has claimed that Shabab’s leaders are plotting terrorism against American or western targets. The only evidence given for this assertion is vague claims of Shabab’s ties to Yemeni militants and its claim of responsibility for a 2010 terrorist bombing in Uganda. But that bombing came because Ugandan troops are in the African Union force fighting al-Shabab. While reprehensible, the attack does not show a desire to terrorize Americans.

At the risk of sounding quaint, Congress should make the administration substantiate its claims that Shabab is targeting Americans before we bomb them further. We have enough insurgents to fight these days outside Somalia.

I also questioned the Bush administration’s claims about the Shabaab-al Qaeda nexus here in 2008.

Prior links and several al Qaeda guys in the mix, while worrying, do not mean that organization is going to attack Americans, and is therefore one we should target.

Mixing a “war on terrorism” with the promiscuous designation of Islamic insurgent organizations as terrorists is a recipe for spending the next century tied up in other people’s civil wars. There’s a self-fulfilling aspect to this policy. Declaring war on insurgents may cause them to attack Americans or ally with those who do. There’s evidence that this dynamic is already occurring in Somalia.

Last month, I wrote a post for the National Interest about drone strikes in Pakistan, arguing that no one really knows how well they work. That uncertainty, combined with secrecy, is, I argue, good reason to oppose them. The principle applies elsewhere. Our leaders should have to work harder to make war.

Finally, globe-trotting reporter David Axe criticized U.S. policy toward Somalia in a 2009 Cato Policy Analysis, arguing for a more hands-off approach.

Nearly a year ago, I had an engaging debate at Berkeley Law School regarding “judicial activism.” Of course, as I clarified, the phrase is really just an epithet hurled by someone to describe a legal ruling with which he disagrees. The whole argument about whether a certain judge is “activist,” “restrained,” or anything else is irrelevant: fidelity to the Constitution should be the sole evaluative criterion—and point of debate—regardless of whether that means striking down a law or upholding it, deferring to the legislature or not.

As I said during this debate (which was against a young law professor named Fred Smith),

The purveyors of conventional punditry all miss the larger point. The role of the judiciary in terms of constitutional interpretation is to fully interpret and apply the Constitution, period. So, if that means upholding a law, fine. If that means striking it down, fine. Activism is doing something that is not supposed to be the judicial role or not being faithful to the Constitution, which is no small task in part because of the doctrinal mess the Supreme Court has made. Again, whether a particular statute stands or falls is of no moment. Fidelity to the founding document should be the touchstone, not a circular debate over the virtues of judicial restraint or—as John Roberts put it at his confirmation hearing—modesty: just calling balls and strikes, just being in a kind of modest judicial role. Again, where you stand on those sorts of debates depends on where you sit.

I can quote this debate because a transcript has been published in the Federalist Society’s journal, Engage. The current volume has plenty of other interesting articles, including some authored by various Cato-affiliated or ‑friendly folks.

On Tuesday, November 15, Cato will be hosting a day-long drug policy conference on Ending the Global War on Drugs. This issue, which has always been a crucial part of libertarian thought, has picked up wider support in recent decades. More and more people are realizing two fundamental truths about the war on drugs: 1) that the government has no place in deciding what you are or are not allowed to put in your body, and 2) that, even if it did, the costs associated with prohibition are, well, prohibitively high.

One of these costs, the effect that drug prohibition has had on South America and Mexico, will be highlighted at the November conference. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former President of Brazil, Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou, the Speaker of the House of Deputies in Uruguay, and Jorge Castañeda, former Minister of Foreign Affairs in Mexico, will all be on hand to discuss the effects of prohibition in their home countries.

The conference also features Glenn Greenwald, prominent Salon blogger and civil libertarian, as well as the author of one of our most-cited white papers, Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies. It should be a fantastic event. For those who may still be on the fence about ending drug prohibition, I advise taking a look at LearnLiberty’s excellent new video featuring Dr. Stephen Davies:

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be officially releasing a paper entitled “Publication Practices for Transparent Government” at a Hill briefing entitled “Publication Practices for Transparent Government: Rating the Congress.”

If you’re a smart and savvy Internet user, you probably noticed that the paper is there at the first link above, unofficially released just for you. This qualifies you to read it and get some of the fascinating and different technical aspects of transparency.

This is all a teaser for our release tomorrow of “grades” on how Congress is doing with publishing data about the essential parts of its legislative work. For that, you’ll have to attend the event or watch it live-streamed (here, commencing at 9:00 Eastern with remarks from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R‑CA)).

If you like transparency—and chances are you do—you can help spur discussion tomorrow (or even today) using the hashtag #RateCongress, along with, of course, #transparency. (Don’t know what a hashtag is? Well, here’s a little help.)

Despite good faith efforts on the part of the Obama administration and congressional leaders, government transparency hasn’t flourished as it could the last few years. The paper, event, and “report card” are intended to spur progress on that front.

Transparency is interesting not only technically and administratively, but ideologically. Libertarians and conservatives believe it will expose waste and corruption, fomenting downward pressure on the size and scope of government. Liberals and progressives believe transparency will expose waste and corruption, validating many government programs and roles.

I say let’s get on with exposing waste and corruption, so we can find out what happens next!

In a move that some are calling QE3, the Federal Reserve announced yesterday that it will engage in a policy called “the twist” — selling short-term bonds and buying long-term bonds in hopes of artificially reducing long-term interest rates. If successful, this policy (we are told) will incentivize more borrowing and stimulate growth.

I’ve freely admitted before that it is difficult to identify the right monetary policy, but it certainly seems like this policy is — at best — an ineffective gesture. This is why the Fed’s various efforts to goose the economy with easy money have been described as “pushing on a string.”

Here are two related questions that need to be answered.

1. Is the economy’s performance being undermined by high long-term rates?

Considering that interest rates are at very low levels already, it seems rather odd to claim that the economy will suddenly rebound if they get pushed down a bit further. Japan has had very low interest rates (both short-run and long-run) for a couple of decades, yet the economy has remained stagnant.

Perhaps the problem is bad policy in other areas. After all, who wants to borrow money, expand business, create jobs, and boost output if Washington is pursuing a toxic combination of excessive spending and regulation, augmented by the threat of higher taxes.

2. Is the economy hampered by lack of credit?

Low interest rates, some argue, may not help the economy if banks don’t have any money to lend. Yet I’ve already pointed out that banks have more than $1 trillion of excess reserves deposited at the Fed.

Perhaps the problem is that banks don’t want to lend money because they don’t see profitable opportunities. After all, it’s better to sit on money than to lend it to people who won’t pay it back because of an economy weakened by too much government.

The Wall Street Journal makes all the relevant points in its editorial.

The Fed announced that through June 2012 it will buy $400 billion in Treasury bonds at the long end of the market—with six- to 30-year maturities—and sell an equal amount of securities of three years’ duration or less. The point, said the FOMC statement, is to put further “downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and help make broader financial conditions more accommodative.” It’s hard to see how this will make much difference to economic growth. Long rates are already at historic lows, and even a move of 10 or 20 basis points isn’t likely to affect many investment decisions at the margin. The Fed isn’t acting in a vacuum, and any move in bond prices could well be swamped by other economic news. Europe’s woes are accelerating, and every CEO in America these days is worried more about what the National Labor Relations Board is doing to Boeing than he is about the 30-year bond rate. The Fed will also reinvest the principal payments it receives on its asset holdings into mortgage-backed securities, rather than in U.S. Treasurys. The goal here is to further reduce mortgage costs and thus help the housing market. But home borrowing costs are also at historic lows, and the housing market suffers far more from the foreclosure overhang and uncertainty encouraged by government policy than it does from the price of money. The Fed’s announcement thus had the feel of an attempt to show it is doing something to help the economy, even if it can’t do much. …the economy’s problems aren’t rooted in the supply and price of money. They result from the damage done to business confidence and investment by fiscal and regulatory policy, and that’s where the solutions must come. Investors on Wall Street and politicians in Washington want to believe that the Fed can make up for years of policy mistakes. The sooner they realize it can’t, the sooner they’ll have no choice but to correct the mistakes.

Let’s also take this issue to the next level. Some people are explicitly arguing in favor of more “quantitative easing” because they want some inflation. They argue that “moderate” inflation will help the economy by indirectly wiping out some existing debt.

This is a very dangerous gambit. Letting the inflation genie out of the bottle could trigger 1970s-style stagflation. Paul Volcker fires a warning shot against this risky approach in a New York Times column. Here are the key passages.

…we are beginning to hear murmurings about the possible invigorating effects of “just a little inflation.” Perhaps 4 or 5 percent a year would be just the thing to deal with the overhang of debt and encourage the “animal spirits” of business, or so the argument goes. The siren song is both alluring and predictable. …After all, if 1 or 2 percent inflation is O.K. and has not raised inflationary expectations — as the Fed and most central banks believe — why not 3 or 4 or even more? …all of our economic history says it won’t work that way. I thought we learned that lesson in the 1970s. That’s when the word stagflation was invented to describe a truly ugly combination of rising inflation and stunted growth. …What we know, or should know, from the past is that once inflation becomes anticipated and ingrained — as it eventually would — then the stimulating effects are lost. Once an independent central bank does not simply tolerate a low level of inflation as consistent with “stability,” but invokes inflation as a policy, it becomes very difficult to eliminate. …At a time when foreign countries own trillions of our dollars, when we are dependent on borrowing still more abroad, and when the whole world counts on the dollar’s maintaining its purchasing power, taking on the risks of deliberately promoting inflation would be simply irresponsible.

Last but not least, here is my video on the origin of central banking, which starts with an explanation of how currency evolved in the private sector, then describes how governments then seized that role by creating monopoly central banks, and closes with a list of options to promote good monetary policy.

And I can’t resist including a link to the famous “Ben Bernank” QE2 video that was a viral smash.

On Tuesday, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative launched a formal dispute at the World Trade Organization over China’s imposition of antidumping and countervailing duties on U.S. exports of chicken broilers. According to a summary of the U.S. complaint, China implemented its antidumping and countervailing duty laws in manners that violate that country’s WTO obligations. The alleged violations include: failure to observe numerous transparency and due process requirements; failure to properly explain the basis for its findings and conclusions; failure to properly calculate margins of dumping and subsidy amounts, and; failure to support findings of material injury to the Chinese chicken industry.

Under the WTO agreements, member governments are entitled to use their domestic “trade remedies” laws to measure and address imports that are alleged to be “unfairly” priced and injurious of the domestic industry. However, execution of those laws must comport with certain standards – fairly deferential standards, no doubt – that are spelled out in the WTO Antidumping Agreement and the WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. The basis for the U.S. complaint is that those standards were not met by the Chinese government, when it investigated and ultimately foundU.S.chicken exporters to be engaging in injurious dumping and benefiting from government subsidies.

I would say something about “just deserts” or “comeuppance” or “what goes around, comes around,” but that would wrongly imply that the U.S. poultry industry is to blame for U.S. antidumping abuse or its protégé, proliferating global antidumping abuse. Besides, there’s a different point to be made on this occasion. That is, transactions between parties in the world’s two largest economies are going to generate frictions from time to time. Sometimes those frictions will rub raw. But, by and large, there are proven mechanisms in place to alleviate pressures and resolve disputes that should be respected. Regardless of the final outcome in this case – the parties could settle after consulting over the issues or, barring settlement, the issues could be adjudicated by a dispute settlement panel and, ultimately, by the WTO Appellate Body – the course being taken comports with the meaning of trade enforcement and respects the rules of international trade.

Kudos to the USTR and his General Counsel’s office for doing the legal research and analyses necessary to ensure the strongest of cases, and for reminding antsy lawmakers across town that there are reasonable alternative to trade unilateralism.

Ronald Dworkin is probably the most prominent living liberal political philosopher in the United States. Unsurprisingly, he favors a national system of universal healthcare. But at a philosophical level, Dworkin also very clearly holds exactly the same position a lot of viewers seem to regard as not simply wrong, but self evidently monstrous when it was ascribed to Ron Paul (or at least Republicans in the audience) after the recent Tea Party debate. That is, Dworkin believes that if someone enjoys a fair share of social wealth and resources, and makes a free and informed choice about the level of health coverage and care they wish to purchase, then justice is satisfied when they receive the care they have chosen to pay for (either directly or by way of insurance). If it turns out that someone then needs care beyond what they chose to purchase under these conditions, it is not morally incumbent on society to provide that care. If you want to be melodramatic about it: Society (or at least the government) should “let him die.”

You don’t have to take my word for it, of course: Go read chapter 8 of Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin’s major work of political (as opposed to legal) philosophy. As he makes clear there, he believes government should provide some level of universal coverage under conditions where wealth and genetic luck are unjustly distributed, and the difficulty of becoming properly informed about the state of medical care and relevant statistics is so great. But he also reasonably rejects a general “rescue principle” for healthcare—the principle that society must never “let someone die” or go without care if there is money in the public coffers to intervene—as “useless,” “preposterous,” and one that “no sane society” would adopt. The correct standard for what kind of coverage a society should provide, he argues, is given by trying to figure out what kind of health insurance policy and coverage most members of a particular society would choose if they were well informed and had whatever fair share of social resources is specified by general principles of economic justice. (Those principles might specify that people just born with unlucky ailments are independently entitled to a larger share; Dworkin is mostly thinking here about people who begin life reasonably healthy and will require different levels and types of care over time owing to the vagaries of life.)

Most people, Dworkin acknowledges, would reasonably forgo coverage for many types of risks or treatments, preferring lower premiums and greater present consumption. He suggests, for instance, that most reasonable people under his idealized conditions would not find it worthwhile to purchase coverage that would support their indefinite sustenance in a persistent vegetative state, or heroic and expensive interventions likely to extend life by a few months in old age.

In a society where Dworkin’s background conditions are met:

[H]owever health care is distributed in that society is just for that society: justice would not require providing health care for anyone that he or his family had not purchased. These claims follow directly from an extremely appealing assumption: that a just distribution is one that well-informed people create for themselves by individual choices, provided that the economic system and the distribution of wealth in the community in which these choices are made are themselves just.

Now, again, Dworkin’s premise all along in this argument is precisely that our society does not meet his background conditions, requiring government to supply care as a kind of second best. In our far-from-ideal world, he writes, the government should simply “construct a mandatory coverage scheme on the basis of assumptions about what all but a small number of people could think appropriate, allowing those few who would be willing to spend more on special care to do so, if they can afford it, through supplemental insurance.” In Dworkin’s view, then, if someone needs medical care that the model informed consumer would not have chosen to cover under conditions of economic justice, that patient should get that treatment if and only if he has chosen to purchase supplemental insurance. If he has not chosen to purchase that coverage, there is no moral requirement for the public to provide it. Or again, if you still want to be melodramatic, society should “let him die.”

In a society that did satisfy Dworkin’s background ideal of economic justice—a society not perfectly egalitarian, but clearly far more so than our own—it follows from his argument that someone who made a free and informed choice to purchase less coverage than most also need not be provided by society with additional care. Our own society, of course, does not meet Dworkin’s background conditions. But Wolf Blitzer’s thought experiment at least arguably does satisfy them, if we take the liberty of reading his stipulation that the imagined patient “makes a good living” to imply that the person enjoys an economically just share of social resources, and has made the choice to forgo coverage after informed deliberation.

So under appropriate conditions—clearly not satisfied for very many poor Americans, but at least arguably satisfied within parameters of Blitzer’s hypothetical—the most prominent living liberal philosopher gives pretty much the same answer as Ron Paul: People should bear the consequences of their freely assumed risks, and “society”—or at least the government—should let them.

”But,” I hear the indignant cry, “Dworkin still advocates universal healthcare as a matter of public policy!” Well, yes. But you don’t pose stripped down, idealized, and unrealistic hypotheticals about single individuals to answer complicated public policy questions. You use them to get at very elementary moral principles. If the question is really about what kind of complex institutions should be established by statute in light of all we know about healthcare markets, reducing it to a single decision about how to respond to one imaginary person is obtuse. If the point is to reveal underlying principles, then those are valid or invalid independently of how they interact with other moral or political principles, or empirical considerations, to generate a real-world policy view.

Anyone who thinks Ron Paul’s answer to the hypothetical is appalling and outrageous, then, should direct some appalled outrage at Dworkin, because he gives exactly the same answer within its artificial, stipulated parameters. If Paul is a ghoul but Dworkin’s cool in virtue of their different policy positions outside the conditions of the hypothetical, then those who see Paul’s view as appalling should acknowledge that the reaction to the Blitzer thought experiment is an irrelevant red herring, and what matters is (say) Paul’s awful views on economic justice, where he pretty clearly does differ from Dworkin. Then at least everyone can work up a righteous lather about the correct issue.