According to a report out this morning from the U.S. Labor Department, the number of American workers belonging to labor unions declined again in 2010, continuing a long slide that began in the 1950s.

The number of unionized workers in the private sector fell by 339,000 last year, while the number in the government sector fell by 273,000. The share of private-sector workers belonging to a union dropped to 6.9 percent in 2010, the lowest “union density” in more than a century.

Union leaders are running out of excuses. They can’t simply blame a slowly recovering economy; the number of non-union workers employed last year actually increased by a small amount. And they can’t blame a hostile federal government; President Obama and the Democratic Congress that organized labor helped elect in 2008 tried to give unions just about everything they wanted during the 111th Congress.

The seeds of organized labor’s decline lie within the movement itself. Private sector unions are literally pricing themselves out of America’s increasingly competitive and open markets.

As I pointed out in an article [PDF] for the Cato Journal last year, unions are effective at raising wages and benefits for their members, but not at raising productivity. The result is a “union tax” on certain U.S. companies and sectors, a tax that puts them at a competitive disadvantage against non-unionized firms, resulting in a long-term loss of market share and reduced employment for union members.

Unless America’s private-sector unions change their approach and work more collaboratively with employers in the marketplace, they will continue to commit slow suicide.

As Caleb noted earlier, today marks the one-year anniversary of Citizens United, a case I first thought “just” concerned some weird regulation of pay-per-view movies, but turned out to be about asserted government power to ban political speech — including books and TV commercials — simply because the speaker was not one individual but a group (in corporate or or other associational form). See also this op-ed by ACLU lawyer Joel Gora.

Roger similarly noted the continuing discussion in Congress and elsewhere about the public financing of elections. As it turns out, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to such a system, specifically Arizona’s Clean Elections Act. Brought by our friends at the Institute for Justice and the Goldwater Institute and supported by our brief at the cert petition stage, this lawsuit challenges a law that aimed to “clean up” state politics by creating a system for publicly funding campaigns.

Participation in the public funding is not mandatory, however, and those who do not participate are subject to rules that match their “excess” private funds with disbursals to their opponent from the public fund. That is, if a privately funded candidate spends more than her publicly funded opponent, then the publicly funded candidate receives public “matching funds.”

Whatever the motivations behind the Clean Elections Act, the effects have been to significantly chill political speech: privately funded candidates changed their spending — and thus their speaking — as a result of the matching funds provisions. In elections, where there is no effective speech without spending money, matching funds provisions such as those at issue here diminish the quality and quantity of political speech.

In 2008, however, the Supreme Court struck down a similar part of the federal McCain-Feingold law in which individually wealthy candidates were penalized for spending their own money by triggering increased contribution limits for their opponents (Davis v. FEC, in which Cato also filed a brief). Even this modest opportunity for opponents to raise more money was found to be an unconstitutional burden on political speech.

Cato’s latest brief thus asks the following question: Whether Arizona may give a publicly funded candidate extra money because a privately funded opponent or his supporters have, in the state’s judgment, spoken too much. We highlight Davis and numerous other cases that point to a clear answer: if the mere possibility of your opponent getting more money is unconstitutional, then the guarantee that your opponent will get more money is even more so. Allowing the government to abridge political speech in this fashion not only diminishes the quality of political debate, but ignores the fundamental principle upon which the First Amendment is premised: that the government cannot be trusted to regulate political speech for the public benefit. Moreover, the state cannot condition the exercise of the right to speak on the promotion of a viewpoint contrary to the speaker’s.

The case is McComish v. Bennett, consolidated with Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett. The Court will hear it March 28, with a decision expected by the end of June.

The calls for cutting the federal budget continue to build in Congress as the new GOP members try to make good on their promise to rein in the deficit. And, right on time, the latest issue of the Weekly Standard features an article by Robert Kagan critiquing the chorus of calls for cuts to military spending. 

I think Kagan’s critique is reasonably fair, certainly more so than others of the recent past. But his basic premise, that national security spending is unrelated to the national debt, simply is not true. At the The Skeptics, I address this:

It is of course true that entitlements and mandatory spending pose the greatest threat to the nation’s fiscal health, but $700+ billion [in defense spending] isn’t chump change. The question of what we should spend on the military ought to take into account the trade-offs, an argument that Dwight Eisenhower advanced in his farewell address just over 50 years ago, and that Charles Zakaib and I highlighted last week. (See also James Ledbetter’s discussion on this point.)

…

Actually, it is a question of fairness, but not the one that [Kagan] proposed. Because security is a core function of government (I think one of the only core functions of government), it would be a mistake to treat military spending as synonymous with spending on, say, farm subsidies. But Kagan’s writings presume that other countries’ governments do not — and should not — see their responsibilities in the same way. Kagan contends that American taxpayers should be responsible for the security of people living in Europe or East Asia or the Middle East. Or anywhere in the world, really… It simply isn’t fair to ask Americans to pay for something that other people should pay for themselves. For reference, the average American—every man, woman and child—spends two and a half times more on national security than the French or the British, five times more than citizens living in other NATO countries, and seven and a half times as much as the average Japanese.

Justin Logan is in the process of authoring a lengthier response for publication, but in the mean time click here to read the full post at The National Interest.

The 1798 “Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seaman” is getting attention in the Washington Post and Forbes. The stories suggest that this act in the early republic was a precedent for socialized federal medicine today.

I offered this brief description of the law as part of a timeline on the evolution of the federal Department of Health and Human Services over at www​.down​siz​ing​gov​ern​ment​.org:

1798: Congress passes the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen. It provides health services to members of the merchant marine and funds a loose network of hospitals through the Marine Hospital Fund. The MHF is plagued by cost overruns, administrative mismanagement, and rationing of care. Some leaders oppose the new federal subsidies as an abuse of state sovereignty.

My timeline entry has footnotes to sources for those statements.

On the politics of this, note that John Adams, who signed the bill into law as president, was on the “big government” end of the Founders, and his big-government approach in office in the 1790s–like signing the Alien and Sedition Acts–led to the ouster of the Federalists by Thomas Jefferson in 1800. (Nonetheless, Adams was, of couse, a hero of the Revolution and a truly great man).

The Supreme Court majority in Citizens United asserted plainly that the federal government’s powers are few and defined in the realm of political speech. The decision has since been cast as one that does little more than give “corporations and unions the freedom to spend as much as they like to support or attack candidates.” Of course, the stakes were far higher. As the government’s attorney asserted during the initial oral argument, the Federal Election Commission retained the authority to ban the sale of certain books (e‑books included) in the weeks leading up to an election, a fact opponents of Citizens United rarely mention.

Shortly after that oral argument, Austin Bragg and I made a short video with Steve Simpson of the Institute for Justice, Allison Hayward of George Mason University School of Law (and now of the Center for Competitive Politics) and John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute.

Now that a bipartisan coalition in the House has voted to repeal ObamaCare, an even larger bipartisan coalition has approved a Republican resolution directing four House committees to “replace” that ill-fated law. House Resolution 9 instructs the committees to “propos[e] changes to existing law” with the following goals:

1. “Foster economic growth and private sector job creation by eliminating job-killing policies and regulations.”
2. “Lower health care premiums through increased competition and choice.”
3. “Preserve a patient’s ability to keep his or her health plan if he or she likes it.”
4. “Provide people with pre-existing conditions access to affordable health coverage.”
5. “Reform the medical liability system to reduce unnecessary and wasteful health care spending.”
6. “Increase the number of insured Americans.”
7. “Protect the doctor-patient relationship.”
8. “Provide the States greater flexibility to administer Medicaid programs.”
9. “Expand incentives to encourage personal responsibility for health care coverage and costs.”
10. “Prohibit taxpayer funding of abortions and provide conscience protections for health care providers.”
11. “Eliminate duplicative government programs and wasteful spending.”
12. “Do not accelerate the insolvency of entitlement programs or increase the tax burden on Americans;” or
13. “Enact a permanent fix to the flawed Medicare sustainable growth rate formula used to determine physician payments under title XVIII of the Social Security Act to preserve health care for the nation’s seniors and to provide a stable environment for physicians.”

Three things about the Republicans’ “replace” effort:

First, America’s health care sector has historically been handicapped by one political party committed to a policy of (mostly) benign neglect, and another party committed to degrading that sector’s performance through government subsidies, mandates, price controls, and other exchange controls. Republicans now appear to be taking a different posture, and that’s encouraging — but not entirely. When Republicans set their minds to reforming health care, they are often as bad as Democrats. (See the Republican “alternatives” to ClintonCare. Or Medicare Part D. Or #4-#7 above.) Exactly how House Republicans plan to deliver on the above goals remains to be seen.

Second, no matter how House Republicans plan to deliver on the above goals, their proposals will be preferable to ObamaCare. Republicans quite literally could not do worse if they tried.

Third, no matter how good the Republicans’ proposals are, they will be utterly ineffective so long as ObamaCare remains on the books. ObamaCare’s influence is so pervasive and harmful that it makes real health care reform all but impossible.

So it’s a bit premature to be talking about replacing ObamaCare.

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Would the House plan to vote next week on a proposal to end the system of financing presidential candidates and national conventions with federal funds wisely put to rest a public financing scheme that never worked well, or would it eliminate a bulwark against political corruption by forcing candidates to rely entirely on private money?

My response:

The decades long effort by the Left to finance presidential candidates and national conventions with federal funds — part of the Left’s more ambitious effort to finance all political campaigns with public funds — never worked as proponents hoped it would, with taxpayer participation through check-offs declining from 28.7 percent in 1980 to 7.3 percent in 2009 — and for good reason.

The corruption-prevention rationale was always bogus. And the idea that public financing would itself be corruption free didn’t pass the straight-face test. The American people may be dumb (quiet), but they’re not stupid! They’ll make their political contributions directly — thank you — not through the government — if the law allows them that right, which at present is highly regulated. Let’s hope that this move by the new House is only the first step toward removing government completely from the campaign financing business.