Campaign finance regulation met celebrity culture for one morning this week. I was not completely bemused.

Our friend Alberto Mingardi of the Bruno Leoni Institute in Italy writes about the Greek crisis:

In a way, the most surprising element of the Greek disaster is that taxpayers in other European countries aren’t outraged at being called to rescue an economy that has been marching towards disaster for so long.

The legitimate fear of contagion affecting other European countries is now being used to persuade the electorates outside Greece that: first, Greece has not manufactured its own fate, but is rather the victim of “locust-like” speculators and, second, a Greek bailout would be an indictment of the European social model, that is, the welfare state.

Where European public opinion is collapsing under its contradictions is in the attempt to reconcile the idea of the EU as the ultimate policeman of public finance with the ideological need to save the “European social model” no matter what. If the European Union has long been a major catalyst for reform in member states, it seems inappropriate that it now aims to artificially remove the ultimate incentive for fiscal wisdom: the possibility of a sovereign default. The problem of “moral hazard” should not be considered the exclusive preserve of too-big-to-fail banks; countries can suffer from it, too.

At two Cato forums last year Simeon Djankov, Steve Hanke, and Takis Michas discussed the background of the Greek crisis. Partial transcript here. Video here and here. Michas blamed the problems on “clientelism,” which he described as “a system in which political support is provided in exchange for benefits.… The largest part of public expenditure was directed, not to public works or infrastructure, but to the wages of public service workers and civil servants…. What makes the case of Greece interesting is that Greece can be said, in a certain sense, to provide the perfect realization of the left’s vision of putting people above markets. Greek politicians have always placed people (their clients) above markets, with results we can all see today.”

Dan Mitchell said “I told you so” about the failure of the previous Greek bailout. My thoughts on the Greek “anarchists” demanding a continuation of government subsidies here. And here’s a comparison between the Greek and U.S. debt problems.

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

• As Congress scours the budget looking for spending cuts, federal employment and training programs would be good targets.
• If Republican and Democratic lawmakers were really discussing major spending cuts, then the media would be full of stories mentioning particular changes to entitlement laws to reduce benefits and stories about abolishing programs widely regarded as wasteful, such as community development grants.
• Indexing the tax code to the chained Consumer Price Index = stealth tax increase.
• Putting $2 trillion in spending cuts in perspective.
• Not only is individual financial literacy not an appropriate concern of the federal government, but the federal government itself is a monument to financial illiteracy.

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Props to Grover Cleveland at Pileus for his short but perceptive take on David Greenberg’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. Cleveland places the piece in the “Not Worth a Read” category and asks:

Hasn’t this kind of simplistic “history” and inaccurate categorization of today’s critics of liberal internationalism/​neoconservatism been written about a million times already? And aren’t these types of pieces really just rhetorical bullying to prevent a serious discussion of American foreign policy?

Answer: Yes, and yes. And Cleveland is hardly the first to make this observation. (e.g. here, here, and here)
 
As with other writers who have crawled out of the woodwork recently to write about isolationism (so-called), Greenberg is sure that it’s bad, both for the country and for the Republican Party.
 
I agree with that statement. But I disagree with Greenberg’s characterization of the discussion taking place within the Republican Party (and the country) about the purpose of U.S. military power to be in any way comparable with the debate over ratification of the League of Nations Charter in 1919 or overwhelming public opposition to joining the war in Europe 1940 and 1941. Greenberg says that today’s isolationism “rejects America’s leadership role in the world.” I sense, instead, a skepticism toward the costs and benefits of American global hegemony, and a welcome (and to be expected) desire to shed some of these burdens.

To be clear, a sharp turn inward would be bad for the country. Global engagement has made the United States into the envy of the world. And yet, there is an ugly form of hostility toward outsiders that runs throughout U.S. history. Today, it manifests itself in the xenophobia, nativism, and outright bigotry that maintains that the United States can remain strong only by deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants and building a 20-foot high wall along the Mexican border. Isolationism is also manifested in protectionism, a false belief that American manufacturers and American workers can disconnect from the global marketplace, and that producers and consumers alike would both be better off if we were all confined to the domestic U.S. market.
 

But it is neither accurate to say that most Americans are isolationists nor that a different foreign policy, one more focused on self-defense and exhibiting restraint abroad, reflects isolationism. Rather, Americans crave a different foreign policy than that practiced by both Republicans and Democrats over the past two decades. They hunger for alternatives that would allow the United States to remain engaged in the world, but at less cost, and with other countries doing their fair share. In this context, it is hardly surprising that some Republicans (and some Democrats, too) are cautiously testing the waters of acceptable discourse. If they find that middle ground, between reflexive war-making and head-in-the-sand pacifism, they might strike political paydirt.
 
As to Greenberg’s claim that the GOP is mere moments away from being captured by the ghost of Robert Taft, I share Justin Logan’s skepticism. Still, I am bemused by the terror that the specter of so-called isolationism is currently striking in the hearts of interventionists of both the liberal and neoconservative variety. Given that so many of them were (and are) cheerleaders for the reckless war in Iraq, the unnecessary and doomed-to-fail armed social work being tried in Afghanistan, and the foolish and unconstitutional war/non-war in Libya, I might take grim solace in the fact that they are finally getting their just desserts.
 
I might, except that the backlash against these and other misadventures might eventually push the country toward genuine isolationism, with all of its ugly connotations.
 
Here’s hoping that we can find that sensible center, of a United States that remains deeply engaged with the world, but that has dropped all pretensions to managing it.

The Chinese Communist Party celebrates its 90th birthday today. Pardon me if I do not attend the party.

It is undeniably true, as the authorities in Beijing are trumpeting, that the Chinese Mainland under one-party communist rule has enjoyed spectacular economic success during the past 30 years. China’s rapid growth was unleashed by the reforms of the late communist leader Deng Xiaoping that began in the late 1970s, but those reforms—private ownership of business, farms and housing, market pricing, foreign investment, and trade liberalization, among others—were hardly an extension of the Communist Party’s agenda. In fact, those reforms were a direct repudiation of everything the Chinese Communist Party and its co-founder Mao Tse-tung believed and practiced before and after the communist takeover of 1949.

Under Mao, tens of millions of Chinese starved in the Great Leap Forward of 1958–60. Millions suffered cruelly at the hands of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. During the first 30 years of communist rule, the Chinese people enjoyed neither economic nor political and civil freedom. Even amid rising economic prosperity today, China’s one-party state continues to imprison, torture, and kill people who practice their faith or question the party. That is not much of a record to celebrate.

The Chinese people do not need communist rule to prosper. We can see that plainly enough 112 miles across the Taiwan Strait. Under the rule of the Nationalist Party, the 23 million people of Taiwan made the transition from military rule to a lively, multiparty democracy with freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. Behind liberal economic reforms dating back to the 1960s, the Taiwanese people have achieved a per capita gross domestic product (at purchasing power parity) that is four and a half times greater than on the mainland—$35,700 vs. $7,600.

It does not take much imagination to envision what Mainland China would be like today if it had followed the path of Taiwan rather than that of the 90-year-old Chinese Communist Party.

…that’s what former Cato policy analyst, Reason senior editor and now Huffington Post reporter Radley Balko reports:

I’m in Monticello, Mississippi, this morning, where Circuit Court Judge Prentiss Harrell has just signed a plea agreement between Cory Maye and the state. Maye has plead guilty to a reduced charged of manslaughter, and has been resentenced to 10 years in prison, time he has already served. He’ll be sent to Rankin County for processing. He should be released and home with his family in a matter of days.

Cory Maye’s is a story about a paramilitary-style drug raid gone grotesquely wrong, a cautionary tale about the human costs of the War on Drugs, and a lesson in how a dedicated investigative reporter can throw a wrench in the ever-grinding wheels of injustice. If you’re unfamiliar with the case, and Radley’s role in it, watch the terrific Rea​son​.tv video, “Mississippi Drug War Blues” below, and read this blogpost I wrote a couple of years ago, when Radley’s work first started drawing attention to the case: “The Cato Policy Analyst Who (May Have) Saved a Man’s Life.” We can remove the “may have” now.

And here’s Radley’s update at the Huffington Post.

South Dakota joined Idaho this week in declaring that it will not raise its student proficiency targets next year as required by the NCLB. Under the law, states have been required to bring increasing percentages of their students up to the “proficient” level on their own tests. By 2014, NCLB demands that all students be deemed proficient by their respective state departments of education.

The belief driving NCLB was that, if we we raise government standards for what students are supposed to know and be able to do, they will learn more. They haven’t, according to the best, nationally representative indicator of academic outcomes: the NAEP Long Term Trends tests. By the end of high school, overall student achievement is no better today than it was 40 years ago. In science, it’s slightly worse.

The reason NCLB failed is that its core belief was and is wrong: external, government-mandated standards are not the driving force of progress. It is the freedom and incentives of competitive marketplaces that drive up performance and productivity. I’ve already made this case in the context of the national education standards movement, and the same arguments and evidence apply to NCLB.

The testing component of NCLB was never more than a thermometer—and a broken, unreliable thermometer at that; allowing states to play games with test difficulty and the definition of “proficiency” in order to massage their results.

Thermometers don’t cure people. They are at best a diagnostic tool.

If we want to see the same kind of progress, productivity growth, and innovation in education that we’ve come to expect in every other field, we have one choice and one choice only: adopt the same freedoms and incentives in education that have driven progress in other fields. Either we allow education to benefit from the free enterprise system or we should get used to disappointment.