Recent decades have seen the rise of a new “antiquities law” in which museums and private collectors have come under legal pressures to hand over (“repatriate”) ancient artifacts and archaeological finds to governments, Indian tribes and other officially constituted bodies, even when those artifacts have been in legitimate collector hands for 100 or more years with no hint of force or fraud. Some advocates frankly advance the view that government should entirely ban the private ownership of antiquities or limit it to authorized nonprofit institutions. The latest victim of the trend are numismatists, as the 1983 Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act authorizes the federal government to restrict importation of some ancient coins based on the expressed wishes of countries that participate in the convention. A federal judge has just rejected a challenge to the law, which — as I argue in a recent op-ed in the Examiner — should not put an end to the controversy.
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Paternalism and Parks
Or, as Timothy Egan titles it at the New York Times: “Nature Without the Nanny State.” After reporting on a higher level of deaths this year at Yosemite, and an increased level of warnings and lawsuits, Egan notes:
My experience, purely anecdotal, is that the more rangers try to bring the nanny state to public lands, the more careless, and dependent, people become.
That point might have broader application than national parks.
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Rick Perry’s Spending Record
In his run for the Republican nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry is positioning himself as a staunch fiscal conservative. Does his spending record match his recent campaign language in favor of smaller government?
I awarded Mr. Perry grades of “B” in the last two Cato governor report cards. My analyses revealed a pretty good tax and spending record, but Perry certainly fell short of the reform-minded zeal shown by former “A” governor, Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Recent articles by Shikha Dalmia of Reason and Aman Batheja of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram suggest that Perry’s fiscal record is a mixed bag.
Let’s look at the numbers. Rick Perry came into office in December 2000, which was in the middle of Texas fiscal year 2001. Texas general fund spending has risen from $29 billion that first Perry year to $41 billion by fiscal 2011, which works out to an average annual increase of 3.5 percent. (Data from NASBO).
Dalmia and Batheja compare Perry’s spending increases to increases under prior governor George W. Bush. But a better comparison is Perry versus the average spending increases of governors in all the 50 states over the last decade.
Here is NASBO data showing increases in state general fund spending between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2011:
- Texas, Perry: $29 billion to $41 billion, a 41 percent increase.
- Total of 50 states: $506 billion to $651 billion, a 29 percent increase.
However, the Texas population has grown faster than the U.S. population, so let’s put these figures on a per-capita basis.
- Texas, Perry: $1,360 per capita to $1,598 per capita, an 18 percent increase.
- Total of 50 states: $1,774 per capita to $2,091 per capita, an 18 percent increase.
Thus, Mr. Perry has been Mr. Average on state spending. Over the past decade, per capita state general fund spending rose the same amount in Texas as the nation as a whole.
Note that total Texas state spending has risen substantially faster than just the general fund part of the Texas budget over the last decade (see Figure 16 in here). However, governors have more control over the general fund part of their budgets, so that is probably the best measure of a governors’ spending performance. (Still, Mr. Perry might want to explain to primary voters why the overall Texas budget has grown so quickly).
In sum, Perry’s spending record appears rather centrist, but no one set of numbers can tell the whole fiscal story. Fiscal conservatives fear another big-spending Bush-style Republican winning the White House, so we should further probe the records of all the GOP hopefuls.
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Fed Up with Phony Federalism
My Washington Examiner column this week is on Rick Perry’s 2010 book Fed Up! Stylistically, if Conscience of a Conservative is Merle Haggard, Perry’s manifesto is Lee Greenwood. Still, like Goldwater’s book, it contains some fairly radical ideas, coming from a top-tier candidate. As Ezra Klein puts it, the book’s big idea is that “most everything the federal government does is unconstitutional.”
And, indeed, most of what it does is unconstitutional — no surprise to those familiar with Cato’s constitutional work. Still, it’s surprising to hear a major national candidate indict the New Deal, call Social Security “a Ponzi scheme,” and identify — correctly, I think — the combination of the 16th and 17th amendments as a death blow to robust federalism.
Interestingly, Perry all but promises that as president, he wouldn’t prosecute medical marijuana violations in states where it’s been legalized (which would be an improvement on Obama’s record).
“If you don’t like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California,” Perry writes. He complains that the Raich case made clear that “the federal government has the full prerogative to intervene in your private home if you are engaged in any activity that has some minimal relationship to the exchange of goods.” He calls the medical marijuana movement “a movement I disagree with, while appreciating the desire of Californians to decide for themselves.”
Would he stick to that? I’d bet not — it took him all of a couple of days to perform a Romney-style double-axel backflip on gay marriage. As I note in my column, his campaign is already backing off of what the Governor wrote about Social Security.
What Perry says about federalism and enumerated powers sounds sincere. Of course, Obama made all the right noises about civil liberties before he was elected. Is this sort of thing just cultural signaling to constituent groups?
In any event, it’d be a better world if promises of constitutional fidelity were taken even half as seriously by the candidates as are no-new-taxes pledges.
School Reform’s Shaky Foundations?
Philanthropy Daily has just published the most interesting review to date of my recent charter school philanthropy study (“The Other Lottery”). Scott Walter, an expert in charitable giving in the field of education, looks not only at the central finding (that there is no link between charter networks’ performance and the amount of grant funding they’ve received) but also extrapolates to what the findings imply about the nation’s top education foundations.
I’m curious to know if anyone else shares his interest in seeing the numbers crunched to allow education foundations to be ranked in terms of the performance of the charter school networks they have backed. Ping me on Facebook if you’d like to see that.
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Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism
Senior fellow Jeffrey Miron discusses some common myths about capitalism in this video by the Institute for Humane Studies’ Learn Liberty project. Learn more at LearnLiberty.org.
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In the Grip of Regime Uncertainty, Again
The first chapter in Robert Higgs’ anthology Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006) is titled “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War.” This is a fitting title for a piece penned by the scholar who first nailed down the regime uncertainty idea and who rigorously dealt with it. According to Higgs:
“…regime uncertainty pertains above all to a pervasive uncertainty about the property-rights regime—about what private owners can reliably expect the government to do in its actions that affect private owners’ ability to control the use of their property, to reap the income it yields, and to transfer it to others on voluntarily acceptable terms. Will the government simply take over private property? Will it leave titles in private hands, but strip the owners of real control and profitable use of their properties? These questions fall under the rubric of regime uncertainty.”
Higgs explains why the New Deal policies embraced by President Roosevelt generated regime uncertainty and why the Great Depression lasted so long and was transformed into the Great Duration.
Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau knew that FDR was turning off businessmen, private investment and the economy. The Treasury Secretary repeatedly attempted to persuade FDR to back off. Indeed, in a cabinet meeting in 1937, Morgenthau was forced to put the matter to the President and put it to him in clear terms: “What business wants to know is: are we headed toward Socialism or are we going to continue on a capitalist basis?”
The Treasury Secretary was no match for the President, however. FDR didn’t back off and the country staggered into WWII.
We are staggering again under the weight of regime uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial “How Not to Grow the Economy” contains data that amply support that conclusion.
It’s time for a powerful insider to present President Obama with the “Morgenthau Question.”