This month at Cato Unbound we’re debating campaign finance regulation, with a panel of notable contributors and a big, new idea.

That idea is semi-disclosure, in which information about campaign funding is collected and disseminated, but, much like the census, personal names and addresses aren’t attached. Political scientist Bruce Cain suggests semi-disclosure might break the impasse between privacy and the right to know. Others? Well… you’ll just have to wait and see. Joining us will be Nikki Willoughby of Common Cause, election law scholar Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School, and the Cato Institute’s own John Samples. Discussion will run through the rest of the month on this vital issue to our nation’s democracy.

The White House recently released a video, narrated by Austan Goolsbee of the Council of Economic Advisers, asserting that higher tax rates on the so-called rich would be a good idea.

Since Goolsbee’s video made so many unsubstantiated assertions and was guilty of so many sins of omission, here’s a rebuttal video, narrated by yours truly.

This new Center for Freedom and Prosperity video includes the full footage of the White House production, so viewers can decide for themselves which side is correct.

The recent European Commission proposal to create a radical and likely near impossible-to-implement “right to be forgotten” provides an opportunity to do some thinking about how privacy norms should be established.

In 1961, Italian liberal philosopher and lawyer Bruno Leoni published Freedom and the Law, an excellent, if dense, rumination on law and legislation, which, as he emphasized, are quite different things.

Legislation appears today to be a quick, rational, and far-reaching remedy against every kind of evil or inconvenience, as compared with, say, judicial decisions, the settlement of disputes by private arbiters, conventions, customs, and similar kinds of spontaneous adjustments on the part of individuals. A fact that almost always goes unnoticed is that a remedy by way of legislation may be too quick to be efficacious, too unpredictably far-reaching to be wholly beneficial, and too directly connected with the contingent views and interests of a handful of people (the legislators), whoever they may be, to be, in fact, a remedy for all concerned. Even when all this is noticed, the criticism is usually directed against particular statutes rather than against legislation as such, and a new remedy is always looked for in “better” statutes instead of in something altogether different from legislation. (page 7, 1991 Liberty Fund edition)

The new Commission proposal is an example. Apparently the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive didn’t do it.

Rather than some central authority, it is in vernacular practice that we should discover the appropriate “common” law, emphasizes Leoni.

“[A] legal system centered on legislation resembles … a centralized economy in which all the relevant decisions are made by a handful of directors, whose knowledge of the whole situation is fatally limited and whose respect, if any, for the people’s wishes is subject to that limitation. No solemn titles, no pompous ceremonies, no enthusiasm on the part of the applauding masses can conceal the crude fact that both the legislators and the directors of a centralized economy are only particular individuals like you and me, ignorant of 99 percent of what is going on around them as far as the real transactions, agreements, attitudes, feelings, and convictions of people are concerned. (page 22–23, emphasis removed)

The proposed “right to be forgotten” is a soaring flight of fancy, produced by detached intellects who lack the knowledge to devise appropriate privacy norms. If it were to move forward as is, it would cripple Europe’s information economy while hamstringing international data flows. More importantly, it would deny European consumers the benefits of a modernizing economy by giving them more privacy than they probably want.

I say “probably” because I don’t know what European consumers want. I only know how to learn what they want—and that is not by observing the dictates of the people who occupy Europe’s many government bureaucracies.

The Hill reports that the likely Speaker of the new Republican House, John Boehner (R‑OH) will move first to cut representatives’ pay.

Cutting member pay would show voters the new GOP majority in the House is going to lead by example in their efforts to rein in spending and start with their own wallets, say officials with three prominent taxpayer advocacy groups in Washington, D.C.

Give a read to the whole article, and some themes recur: “gesture”, “symbols”, “symbolic gestures”, “symbolic moves”, “symbolic things”, “the right message”, “signals and symbols”, “symbol to the public”.

Symbols are great, but they don’t actually do anything. Rather than symbols, it might be better to hear a commitment to substance.

Or even procedure! A commitment to pass the appropriations bills on time would be good, for example, providing the public an opportunity to weigh in on the spending priorities of Congress.

In case any of you are regretting not having been able to attend any of my September-October speaking events, here’s my public schedule for November-December (not counting a spirited Obamacare debate against Columbia’s Gillian Metzger last night at the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore) (events sponsored by the Federalist Society asterisked):

• Nov. 8 at noon — “Oh, That Rent-Seeking Mickey Mouse: Intellectual Property and Public Choice Theory” — Texas-Wesleyan (Fort Worth) Law School*
• Nov. 9 at noon — Debate, “The Arizona Immigration Law: Constitutional? Good Policy?” — St. Mary’s University (San Antonio) Law School*
• Nov. 10 at noon — Debate on the Use of Foreign Law in Constitutional Intepretation — Florida International University (Miami) Law School*
• Nov.11 at noon — “How I Got My Green Card or Why the Immigration System Is the Worst Part of the U.S. Government (and How to Reform It)” — St. Thomas University (Miami) Law School*
• Nov.12 at 9:45am — Panel as part of all-day law review symposium, “Cure, Botch or Opiate? Law, Politics, & the Constitutionality of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” — Florida International University Law School
• Nov. 15 at noon — Constitutionality of Obamacare — University of Alabama Law School*
• Nov. 16 at 11:30am — Panel, “Obamacare: Is it Constitutional?” Cumberland University (Birmingham) Law School*
• Nov. 17 at noon — Debate on the Arizona Scholarship Tax Credit Case — Catholic University (Washington, DC) Law School
• Nov. 22 at noon — Debate, “The Health Care Reform Act: What It Means for the Market, the Constitution, and You,” University of Michigan Law School*
• Nov. 22 at 4pm — “The Sweet Mystery of Anthony Kennedy,” Detroit-Mercy Law School*
• Nov. 23 at noon — “The Chrysler Bailout: Subverting the Constitution, Bankruptcy Law, and Good Sense,” Thomas M. Cooley Law School (Auburn Hills, MI)*
• Dec. 1 at 10am — Panel, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Health Reform, But Were Afraid to Ask,” American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2010 States and Nation Policy Summit (Washington, DC).
• Dec. 4 at 8:30am — Debate, “Point\Counterpoint: Diagnosing the Constitutionality of Federal Health Care Reforms,” Council of State Governments National Conference, Providence. 

As always, if you attend any of these events, please do come up and introduce yourself.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “From New York to Florida to Arizona, some taxpayers are opposing agreements to fund baseball projects after a decadeslong boom in publicly financed ballparks. The fights are complicating plans for stadiums, pitting residents against one another and driving some local governments to turn to U.S. stimulus programs.”

Well, it’s good to know that if local taxpayers don’t want to line the pockets of millionaire players and billionaire owners, the U.S. government’s stimulus program stands ready to oblige.

Several Cato studies over the years have looked at the absurd economic claims of stadium advocates. In “Sports Pork: The Costly Relationship between Major League Sports and Government,” Raymond Keating finds:

The lone beneficiaries of sports subsidies are team owners and players. The existence of what economists call the “substitution effect” (in terms of the stadium game, leisure dollars will be spent one way or another whether a stadium exists or not), the dubiousness of the Keynesian multiplier, the offsetting impact of a negative multiplier, the inefficiency of government, and the negatives of higher taxes all argue against government sports subsidies. Indeed, the results of studies on changes in the economy resulting from the presence of stadiums, arenas, and sports teams show no positive economic impact from professional sports — or a possible negative effect.

In Regulation magazine, (.pdf) Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys found that the economic literature on stadium subsidies comes to consistent conclusions:

The evidence suggests that attracting a professional sports franchise to a city and building that franchise a new stadium or arena will have no effect on the growth rate of real per capita income and may reduce the level of real per capita income in that city.

And in “Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for D.C. Baseball,” Coates and Humphreys looked specifically at the economics of the new baseball stadium in Washington, D.C., and found similar results:

Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city’s economy. The net economic impact of professional sports in Washington, D.C., and the 36 other cities that hosted professional sports teams over nearly 30 years, was a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area.

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

• Unfortunately, the party favored by tea party supporters at the moment has no interest in shuttering the Department of Education.
• Columnist Robert Samuelson is right: the Obama administration’s high-speed rail dreams “represent shortsighted, thoughtless government at its worst.”
• Attention GOP: the electorate wants spending cuts, and they will support the policymakers who take the lead on cuts if they are pursued in a forthright and serious-minded manner.
• New Republican members of Congress will be looking for ways to cut the budget deficit and also to increase economic growth. One way to do both is to privatize government assets.
• Will the House Republican leadership embrace spending cuts proposed by their own members in the conservative Republican Study Committee?