[caption align=right]

Bill Kristol has a plan to help the US military[/caption]

George F. Will has called neoconservatism “a spectacularly misnamed radicalism” whose adherents are “the most radical people in this town.” (It is a shame that the Heritage Foundation has fallen so far from its sensible opposition to the neoconservative vision and evidently bought into the neoconservative program in toto.)

Like other radicals, however, they are pretty good at politics, which is clear from reading their latest offering, a talking points document [.pdf] produced by the “Defending Defense” initiative intended to demonstrate that U.S. military spending is not that large and should not be cut.

I have several things to say about the document, but all of the internet sniping and providing adversarial quotes to journalists probably aren’t the best way to adjudicate the debate. To that end, on behalf of my colleagues I extend the offer of an open, public, live debate to the Defending Defense people: Let’s debate the security of the United States, the strategy to best protect it, and the resources needed to fund the strategy. Any time, any place.

The overarching problem in this debate is that the big spenders keep inserting the red herring of defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP into the debate. This is relevant only as it pertains to their claim that “current levels of defense spending are affordable,” but last time I checked the mere fact that something wouldn’t, in itself, bankrupt the country is not a sufficient conservative justification for a government program.

The logic of basing the military budget on a percentage of GDP would imply that security and economic growth are inversely related. Of course, the simple fact is that economic growth does not pose a threat to the United States and economic contraction does not make us safer. During World War II we spent roughly 40 percent of GDP on our military, and given where we were, that seems sensible to this analyst. But the “given where we were” part of that sentence is doing a lot of work. Where are we today? What are the threats we face? How should we deal with them? How much would it cost to do so? Answers to those questions should provide the grounding for our military budget, not the deeply unconservative justification that “it won’t bankrupt us.”

Another point: It might sound pedantic, but many of what they characterize as “myths” can’t be myths. They might be wrong. They might be poor analytic points. But they can’t be “myths.” To correct just a few of what they call “myths”:

“Pentagon budgets were a “gusher” of new money in the Bush Administration.”

— A metaphor can’t be a myth.

“The United States should not be ‘the world’s policeman.’”

— Preferences aren’t myths.

“Defense spending should focus primarily on ‘winning the wars we’re in.’”

— Again, preferences aren’t myths.

Myths are mistaken empirical claims that people believe, or the stories surrounding mistaken empirical claims that cause people to believe them. For example, lots of people think President Obama signed the TARP. That’s a myth. President Bush did it. The way the neoconservatives are using the word “myth” in the document is something more like “argument I disagree with.”

But let’s take these “myths” one by one and have a look at the analysis.

1) “Additional defense spending is unnecessary as the United States already spends more on defense than half the world combined.”

Interestingly, the authors nowhere argue that additional military spending is necessary, although they strongly imply that it is. In 2005 Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt wanted 5 percent of GDP to go to defense, which today would be roughly $730 billion. It wasn’t clear whether they wanted to keep the supplementals going with the 5 percent comprising just the base budget, but with the wars we’re already spending roughly $730 billion on the military as it is. (Also, just a factual correction, the best estimate is that we spend just under what the rest of the world spends combined, not just over.)

The authors also spirit in a normative claim in the first sentence to fend off scrutiny: “No other country in the world has the enduring vital national interests of the United States, and therefore the U.S. military has global reach and responsibilities.” Given the weight hung around this claim, it would have been good if the authors could have offered even a superficial defense of it. They did not.

Instead, they move on to observing that using purchasing power parity, Chinese defense spending is closer to $150 billion than the $78 billion that market exchange rates would indicate. This is solid analysis. I am glad to see that someone has convinced Heritage president Ed Feulner, a leader of “Defending Defense,” to distance himself from his problematic 2007 judgment that “Beijing’s military spending, in purchasing power parity terms, would be around $450 billion — about what America spends.” (Maybe he read my blog post correcting him.)

2) “Pentagon budgets were a ‘gusher’ of new money in the Bush Administration.”

Again, “a gusher” is in the eye of the beholder. For facts, you should turn to the study authored by my colleagues Ben Friedman and Chris Preble. There they point out that U.S. military spending has risen by 50 percent over the last 12 years, not including inflation or the wars. If you include the wars, U.S. military spending has increased by more than 80 percent since 1998. Military spending constitutes 23 percent of the federal budget. That’s real money where I come from.

3) “Cutting waste and excess from the Pentagon budget will provide sufficient funds to make up for shortfalls.”

Depending on whether we change our grand strategy, this is definitely true. Our foreign policy is insolvent today. Given our commitments, defense spending is too low, but the commitments are the problem. We could spend less with fewer commitments and still be safe.

4) “Current levels of defense spending are unaffordable.”

Even though the rhetoric the authors assemble to knock down this claim isn’t very good, I agree with them. (I agree based primarily on Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth’s excellent book, which makes a strong case that the United States can afford a massive military budget.) Big, fabulously wealthy countries like ours can afford to do lots of expensive things, like Medicare Part D or funding a chunk of the defense of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Israel ourselves. But it doesn’t mean we should, necessarily.

5) “The United States should not be ‘the world’s policeman.’”

Again, this is a preference, not a myth. But the authors’ central defense of the implied claim that we should be the world’s policeman comes in the argument that “the cost of preserving America’s role in the world is far less than would be the cost of having to fight to recover it or, still greater, the cost of losing it altogether. While many Americans would prefer to see our allies and partners play a larger part in securing the blessings of our common liberty, no president of either political party has backed away from America’s global leadership role —a bipartisan consensus that remains strong evidence that American leadership is still necessary to protect the nation’s vital interests.”

This argument, in turn, is based on an unstated theoretical premise, which is that when America isn’t somewhere, all hell breaks loose, and that when all hell breaks loose, it tends to land on our heads. The balance of power doesn’t work, we live in a bandwagoning world not a balancing world, and therefore if we aren’t everywhere, chaos will be, and if chaos is everywhere, it’s going to hit us eventually.

I think this is a silly claim, and I also think the theoretical roots of neoconservative foreign-policy thought are underdeveloped, but it would be good if an actual neoconservative could speak for himself about his own theory of international politics rather than allowing others to try to assemble coherent theoretical groundings for his ideas.

6) “Defense spending should focus primarily on ‘winning the wars we’re in.’”

This might be a surprising area of agreement, but as someone who has long thought that the wars we’re in are dumb (and deeply unconservative), I believe strongly that focusing our defense dollars on winning the wars we’re in is a dumb idea.

Again, though, there’s lots left to discuss, so let’s hope AEI, Heritage, or the Foreign Policy Initiative will agree to a debate.

This summer, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a bill that would require foreign companies that import goods to the United States to appoint a legal representative in the United States who could be sued if their products caused injury. Exhibit A in the push for the bill was the case of contaminated drywall from China.

Advocates of the bill, titled the “Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act,” say it is necessary to ensure compensation for American consumers injured by faulty foreign-made products. Without a designated domestic agent, foreign companies could escape liability by dodging efforts to serve them with papers in a lawsuit. Hearings earlier this year highlighted the case of the drywall, in which damaged homeowners were finding it difficult to sue the Chinese producer.

The trouble with this approach, as my colleague Sallie James and I pointed out in a recent Cato Free Trade Bulletin, is that it would impose an additional burden on importers without adding significantly to the ability of consumers to gain compensation. We argued that sufficient remedies exist without adding a new law that looks suspiciously like a non-tariff trade barrier designed to protect U.S. manufacturers from foreign competitors.

As Exhibit A on our side, it was announced this week that a group of affected homeowners has struck a deal with the Chinese drywall company for compensation. As The Wall Street Journal reported in today’s edition:

Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin, along with suppliers and insurers, agreed to remove and replace the company’s drywall, as well as all the electrical wiring, gas tubing and appliances from 300 homes in four states.

They also agreed to pay relocation expenses while the houses, in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida, are repaired. The cost of fixing the houses, expected to take several months, is estimated from $40 to $80 per square foot per home. At $60 per square foot for a 2,500 square-foot home, the cost would be about $150,000.

Although the settlement involves a fraction of the homeowners who have file claims over the past few years, it is seen as a possible model for the resolution of other pending state and federal lawsuits …

The deal for compensation shows that the existing system works reasonably well for foreign-made as well as domestic-made goods. Congress should give up its efforts to place needless obstacles in the way of imports in the name of solving a problem that does not exist.

Jim Harper’s post Monday, responding to communitarian Amitai Etzioni on “strip search” scanners at airports, gives me an opportunity to mount one of my hobbyhorses.

My beef with Etzioni’s conclusory argument isn’t just that, as Jim observes, he purports to “weigh” the individual right to privacy against the common good (here in the guise of “security”) without any real analysis of the magnitudes on both sides. It’s that his framing is fundamentally backwards. The importance of privacy is, to a great extent, a function of its collective dimension—a point to which you’d think a communitarian theorist who’s written an entire book on privacy would be more keenly attuned. If I may indulge in a little self-quotation:

[W]hen we talk about our First Amendment right to free speech, we understand it has a certain dual character: That there’s an individual right grounded in the equal dignity of free citizens that’s violated whenever I’m prohibited from expressing my views. But also a common or collective good that is an important structural precondition of democracy. As a citizen subject to democratic laws, I have a vested interest in the freedom of political discourse whether or not I personally want to [engage in]–or even listen to–controversial speech. Looking at the incredible scope of documented intelligence abuses from the ’60s and ’70s, we can add that I have an interest in knowing whether government officials are trying to silence or intimidate inconvenient journalists, activists, or even legislators. Censorship and arrest are blunt tactics I can see and protest; blackmail or a calculated leak that brings public disgrace are not so obvious. As legal scholar Bill Stuntz has argued, the Founders understood the structural value of the Fourth Amendment as a complement to the First, because it is very hard to make it a crime to pray the wrong way or to discuss radical politics if the police can’t arbitrarily see what people are doing or writing in their homes.

I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to the notion that the individual harms that result from strip scanners are relatively slight, especially when passengers can opt for a pat down instead. In the worst case scenario, some unscrupulous TSA employee might find a way to save and circulate some of these blurry quasi-nude images, the embarrassment potential of which is likely to be mitigated by the fact that the x‑ray view doesn’t really show an identifiable face.

I’m much more concerned about the social effect of making such machines commonplace—of creating a general norm that people who wish to engage in routine travel must expect to expose themselves in this way. As Michel Foucault famously observed, surveillance is not merely the passive gathering of information; it exerts a “disciplinary” power, creating what he called “docile bodies.” The airport becomes a schoolhouse whose lesson is that not even the most intimate spaces escape the gaze of authority.

In his fine book The Naked Crowd, legal scholar Jeff Rosen recounts presenting his students and other audiences with a hypothetical choice between going through a strip scanner and a “Blob Machine”—a similar scanner programmed to filter out the passenger’s body image and project any foreign objects (as determined by density) on a generic wireframe mannequin. Though he assured them that the Blob Machine was just as accurate at detecting hidden objects, he found that in every group some significant number of people still preferred to subject themselves to the strip-scanner, in what Rosen calls “a ritualistic demonstration of their own purity and trustworthiness.” But there may be more to it than that. To expose oneself, render oneself vulnerable, is also closely linked to rituals of subordination—not just in human cultures, but in the animal kingdom. Think of the pack dog signaling his recognition of the alpha male’s (or owner’s) dominance by rolling over to expose his belly. In the context of pervasive fear of terrorism, this kind of routine exposure is a way of reassuring ourselves of the power of our protectors, quite apart from whatever immediate utility the strip-scanners have as a detection and deterrence mechanism. We ought to be a little wary of any “security” measures that seem to feed into that psychological mechanism.

While I don’t think these sorts of considerations ought to be dispositive by themselves in particular circumstances where a security measure is otherwise justifiable in more conventional cost-benefit terms, I think a communitarian commentator in particular ought to be a lot more sensitive to the cumulative cultural effect of many such measures. Formal institutions and rules are important to the preservation of free societies, but so are background norms and expectations. A society that comes to accept as normal the routine observation of our naked bodies by authority as an incident to travel is, I think, in danger of losing some important cultural capital.

On NPR stations this morning, the “Power Breakfast” segment from Capitol News Connection profiled Rep. Betsy Markey (D‑CO), who is fighting hard to keep her seat this year. The reporter noted:

She’s a Blue Dog, one of those fiscally conservative Democrats who frequently complicate things for Party leaders by insisting on spending offsets and the like.

A claim slightly complicated by the reporter’s earlier noting that Markey voted for the $787 billion stimulus bill, the health care overhaul, and cap-and-trade. How exactly does that make her a Blue Dog fiscal conservative? Oh, and in her first year she got a score of 19 percent on tax and spending issues from the National Taxpayers Union. The search for an actual Blue Dog goes on.

But I was really struck by this line about the massive stimulus bill:

MARKEY: [E]very economist from the far left to the far right was saying the government needs to step in because there was absolutely no private sector investment.

This is of course not true. Hundreds of economists went on record against the stimulus bill. The Cato Institute’s full-page ad with their names appeared in all the nation’s major newspapers. It is hard to imagine that Representative Markey missed it. If she wasn’t much on reading newspaper ads, lots of economists wrote op-eds and blog posts opposing the stimulus. If she didn’t read op-eds or blogs either, the ad and the economists were featured on dozens of television programs.

And so we come to the question in this post’s headline: Could Rep. Betsy Markey really be so misinformed that she actually believed that “every economist” supported a massive increase in spending and debt on top of TARP and the other bailouts?

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

• Could the results of the November elections be a nail in the Obama administration’s high-speed rail coffin? Let’s hope.
• The U.S. Postal Service can’t afford its unions.
• A new study finds that federal and state governments have wasted billions of dollars on subsidies for students who didn’t make it past their first year in college.
• The Obama administration’s plan to fix Head Start with some bureaucratic tinkering is not “almost enough to restore a person’s faith in the federal government.”
• Now is a good time to get rid of farm subsidies.

Note: Chris Edwards will be discussing Downsizing Government on Fox News’ Special Report With Bret Baier on Monday @ 6:00 PM EST.

There are many reasons to be glum about the impending coronation of dynastic heir Andrew Cuomo, now leading in the New York governor’s race against a GOP opponent (Carl Paladino) who at first polled decently but has since stumbled. Some fret about the Democrat’s reputation for political hardball: former governor Eliot Spitzer (Eliot Spitzer!) last month called Cuomo the “dirtiest, nastiest political player out there,” which is like being called overdressed by Lady Gaga. Others find Cuomo too much of a camera-chaser as attorney general in Albany, and almost everyone is queasy over his role (as Clinton-era housing secretary) in encouraging risk-taking by federally backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, leading by direct steps to today’s ongoing mortgage crisis. (For background, see Wayne Barrett’s famous 2008 Village Voice article.)

I have a different reason for cringing at the idea that voters would ever elevate Andrew Cuomo to higher office, and it’s also based on memories of his tenure as housing secretary. Not the Fannie-Freddie-subprime end of it, although I concede that in a strictly economic sense those were the most damaging things he did. No, what I find permanently hard to forgive is the way Cuomo threw himself into the role of chief national cheerleader for the municipal anti-gun litigation of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Because that litigation mostly fizzled out, it is now only half remembered and doesn’t much feature in Cuomo profiles. At the time, though, it was a close-fought battle and a big story. More than 30 cities and counties sued firearms makers, alleging that courts should hold them financially responsible for the costs of urban shootings. The cry was to make guns the “next tobacco,” following the successful litigation campaign against tobacco companies that extracted hundreds of billions of dollars for the benefit of state coffers (and private lawyers).

Of course there are enormous differences between the tobacco and gun businesses. One is that while major tobacco makers had billion-dollar revenue streams to share as part of a settlement, most gunmakers are smallish enterprises, often family-owned. And this in fact was a conscious element of the strategy for the lawyers who promoted the suits: because gunmakers were too thinly capitalized to withstand the costs of years of legal defense, it was thought they’d fold their hands and yield to “gun control through litigation” (explicitly couched as an end run against a then-Republican Congress resistant to gun control proposals). Smith and Wesson actually did yield to a settlement on this rationale, which soon collapsed following a public outcry from gun owners and others outraged by the use of extortive litigation to achieve gun control objectives. The gamble having failed, the suits eventually reached judges and were generally thrown out, but not before imposing huge and uncompensated costs on many small companies that had violated no laws. Some were bankrupted.

Mindful of traditional tenets of legal ethics that forbid lawyers from using the cost of legal process as a bludgeon, most backers of the suits prudently refrained from any hint that imposing unsustainable legal costs was part of the plan. One exception was Cuomo, who warned gunmakers that unless they cooperated, they’d suffer “death by a thousand cuts.” And another was then-New-York-AG Spitzer, who reportedly warned an executive of holdout Glock: “If you do not sign, your bankruptcy lawyers will be knocking at your door.”

I think Spitzer and Cuomo deserve each other, really. What I can’t figure out is why the good citizens of New York would want either of them.

You might have gotten the impression that spending by outside groups in the current election cycle will fund a “giant bullhorn” for Republican candidates in the current election cycle while Democrats and liberals will have to whisper.

Yet the Rothenberg Political Report finds:

Throughout the election cycle, the National Republican Congressional Committee trailed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in available money by at least a 2‑to‑1 ratio.

A detailed story in the Wall Street Journal summarizes “the Democratic Party and candidates had raised a total of $1.25 billion so far for the election. The comparable GOP figure is $1.1 billion.”

The Democrats enjoy, in other words, a $150 million dollar advantage, if we look only at party fundraising.

Now consider the outside groups:

In total, outside conservative groups—such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network and American Crossroads—could spend more than $300 million on TV advertisements, campaign mailings and other efforts to elect Republicans to Congress this year. Outside Democratic groups, by contrast, plan to spend about $100 million on those activities.

But don’t forget the labor unions:

The largest labor unions say they will spend $200 million combined, but most of their focus will be on rallying union voters.

I conclude that the outside GOP groups will raise almost exactly as much as outside Democratic groups and the labor unions combined. The Democratic Party, however, will still enjoy a significant fundraising advantage over the Republican Party.

The Republican outside groups thus tend to level what would have been, absent their activities, a very unequal playing field in 2010.

I am not certain whether this closing of what would have been a huge Democratic fundraising advantage has anything to do with all of the complaints about “secret groups undermining democracy.” What do you think?