I blogged about how Canadian government spending cuts since the mid-1990s coincided with strong economic growth.

Let’s take a closer look at the spending cuts. The chart shows Canadian federal spending from 1984 to 2009 in actual, or nominal, dollars. Spending includes all “discretionary” and “entitlement” programs, as we would call them, but excludes interest payments. (Data are here).

Spending peaked in the early 1990s, and it relied on massive deficit finance. As a result, interest costs were spiralling out of control. The prime minister and his finance minister–members of the center-left Liberal Party–decided to reverse course and start cutting.

They cut spending from $123 billion in in 1995 to $111 billion in 1997, a 10 percent reduction. Then they held spending at roughly the lower level for another three years. With the Canadian economy growing–due to pro-market reforms such as free trade with the United States–this amount of restraint was enough to start a virtuous cycle of falling interest costs and a shrinking government as a share of GDP.

Cutting total non-interest spending by 10 percent would be like cutting President Obama’s 2011 annual budget by $360 billion. Cato analysts could do that pretty easily, but for some reason American politicians–even of the conservative variety–so far seem to be alot more spineless than the politicians elected by Celine Dion and Anne Murray.

Canadian spending did grow during the past decade, but much less than U.S. government spending. Between 2000 and 2009, total Canadian federal spending increased 47 percent, but total U.S. federal spending rose 97 percent.

From a libertarian point of view, Canada’s spending cuts were modest. But the Canadian experience illustrates that a lot of progress can made if even modest cuts are made and then spending is constrained to grow at a slower rate than the overall economy.

For more on the Canadian fiscal reforms, see The Canadian Century by Brian Lee Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis.

The passage of Obamacare heralded an important discussion on whether the Constitution places any effective limits on federal power and, in particular, where Congress gets the constitutional warrant to require every person to enter the private marketplace and buy a particular good or service. This is a healthy discussion to have, including in the courts. 

Today’s ruling in Michigan, dismissing the Thomas More Law Center’s challenge to the individual mandate, while disappointing to those of us who believe that the government lacks the power to commandeer people to engage in transactions — “economic mandates,” as it were — is but one of many legal decisions we can expect on the way to the Supreme Court’s ultimate resolution of this important issue. Indeed, this summer we saw a ruling by a federal judge in Virginia allowing that state’s legal challenge to the individual mandate and other aspects of the health care legislation to proceed. And last month, a federal judge in Florida heard arguments in a similar lawsuit brought by 20 other states — a decision on which we can expect later this fall. Other serious cases continue in Arizona, Missouri, Ohio, the District of Columbia, and elsewhere.

Perhaps most notable about the Michigan opinion, however, is the scant space spent on the serious Commerce Clause arguments on which hundreds of pages have been filed in these cases by top lawyers, legal experts, and academics (including Cato — yes, I’m heavily vested in this litigation). After granting that the plaintiffs had standing and that the case was ripe for adjudication, and rejecting the government’s odd Anti-Injunction Act defense, Judge Steeh takes only seven and a half pages to reject the plaintiffs’ arguments — half of which is spent reciting existing doctrine. It is as if the court merely issued a “placeholder” opinion, pending a “real” resolution on appeal.

And the novel conclusion we gain from this curt disposition is that Congress can now regulate people’s “economic decisions,” as well as do anything that is part of a “broader regulatory scheme.” If the Supreme Court eventually upholds the kind of reasoning Judge Steeh used here, nobody would ever be able to claim plausibly that the Constitution limits federal power. Finding the individual mandate constitutional would be the first interpretation of the Commerce Clause to permit the regulation of inactivity — requiring an individual to engage in economic activity. 

The federal government would then have wide authority to require Americans engage in activities of its choosing, from eating spinach and joining gyms (in the health care realm) to buying GM cars. Or, under Judge Steeh’s “economic decisions” theory, Congress could tell people what to study in school or what job to take. That may be the unfortunate state of the law in a few years — once the Supreme Court has weighed in, and I doubt it would ever go so far in any event — but it is not up to district courts to extend constitutional doctrine on their own.

Both reason (the human faculty) and Rea​son​.TV (the Web network) say no:

The Washington Post has a poorly thought through editorial today on the Justice Department’s “CALEA for the Cloud” initiative. That’s the formative proposal to require all Internet services to open back doors to their systems for court-ordered government surveillance.

“Some privacy advocates and technology experts have sounded alarms,” says the Post, “arguing that such changes would make programs more vulnerable to hackers.”

Those advocates—of privacy and security both—are right. Julian Sanchez recently described here how unknown hackers exploited surveillance software to eavesdrop on high government officials in Greece.

“Some argue that because the vast majority of users are law-abiding citizens, the government must accept the risk that a few criminals or terrorists may rely on the same secure networks.”

That view is also correct. The many benefits of giving the vast majority of law-abiding people secure communications outstrips the cost of allowing law-breakers also to have secure communications.

But the Post editorial goes on, sounding in certainty but exhibiting befuddlement.

The policy question is not difficult: The FBI should be able to quickly obtain court-approved information, particularly data related to a national security probe. Companies should work with the FBI to determine whether there are safe ways to provide access without inviting unwanted intrusions. In the end, there may not be a way to perfectly protect both interests — and the current state of technology may prove an impenetrable obstacle.

The policy question, which the Post piece begs, is actually very difficult. Would we be better off overall if most or all of the information that traverses the Internet were partially insecure so that the FBI could obtain court-approved information? What about protocols and communications that aren’t owned or controlled by the business sector—indeed, not controlled by anyone?

The Tahoe-LAFS secure online storage project, for example—an open-source project, not controlled by anyone—recently announced its intention not to compromise the security of the system by opening back doors.

The government could require the signatories to the statement to change the code they’re working on, but thousands of others would continue to work with versions of the code that are secure. As long as people are free to write their own code—and that will not change—there is no way to achieve selective government access that is also secure.

The current state of technology, thankfully, is an impenetrable obstacle to compromised security in the interest of government surveillance. The only conclusion here, which happily increases our security and liberty overall, is that everyone should have access to fully secure communications.

The humor site Cracked rounds up some serious social science on the psychological effects of power and authority. The results are sobering—if not entirely surprising. When people in experimental environments were made to feel as though they were powerful—either by recalling actual instances for their lives or by being placed in simulated positions of power for a few hours—researchers found that they became less compassionate, less prone to take the perspective of others, more able to lie without feeling guilty about it, and more prone to consider themselves exempt from the rules and standards they righteously insist apply to others. What’s striking is how quickly and easily the experimenters elicited dramatic behavioral differences given that (unlike people who actively seek power) their “powerful” and control groups were randomly chosen.

It’s useful to keep this in mind because, while the overwhelming lesson of the last half century of social psychology is that situational influences can easily swamp the effect of individual differences in character, our political rhetoric takes scant account of this. Political campaigns focus heavily on questions of “character”—which especially in the case of “outsider” campaigns should be of limited predictive value. Republican candidates and officials try to portray Democrats as arrogant and out of touch, while Democrats cast Republicans as callous and greedy. In each case, the message is that these are bad people, and their character flaws are somehow related to their specific ideologies. The remedy is, invariably, to replace them in positions of power with better people from the other team. These social science results suggest that this is unlikely to work: The problem is power itself.

The left-wing blogosphere and left-leaning newspapers have spent the past few days joyously incensed over the story of a Tennessee city fire department that allowed a home to burn because the homeowner hadn’t paid his annual fire fee.

AlterNet’s Jonathan Holland titled-and-teased his post on the fire:

Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work — Firefighters Let Family’s House Burn Down Because Owner Didn’t Pay $75 Fee

Talk of limited government is appealing until you see what it actually means in practice: a society in which it’s every man for himself.

ThinkProgress’s Zaid Jilani thundered that the fire demonstrates that there are two competing visions of American society:

One, the conservative vision, believes in the on-your-own society, and informs a policy agenda that primarily serves the well off and privileged sectors of the country. The other vision, the progressive one, believes in an American Dream that works for all people, regardless of their racial, religious, or economic background. The conservative vision was on full display last week in Obion County, Tennessee.

(An aside: ThinkProgress loves to throw in partisan barbs, so Jilani claims that “every seat” of the Obion County Commission is “filled by a Republican,” a claim that Holland echoes. Nope. But then, ThinkProgress recently harangued Michael Cannon for an opinion that isn’t his, so ya’ know…)

Finally, today the New York Times editorial page chimes in:

In any case, the founding fathers left no message that government can make an object lesson of a neglectful citizen by letting his house burn down. The [homeowners] deserve an apology, even if it won’t come from the candidates peddling dreams of constricted government.

It’s unfortunate that these writers didn’t pause from their fervor to consider the facts. In a nutshell: The firefighters involved were from a city government fire department following a city government policy concerning people who didn’t pay a city government fee for a 20-year-old city government program that was adopted in response to a county government decision.

John Galt in Nomex this ain’t.

Beyond the facts, these writers are confused about basic political theory.

All three writers argue that fire service is a public good that shouldn’t be left to private action. “Public good” is a technical term referring to a type of market failure in which (to over-simplify) it would be easy for some people to benefit from a good without paying their fair share for it. As a result, public goods are at risk of being under-provided because of all the free-riding. The classic (though flawed) example of a public good is a lighthouse: a ship can benefit from the safety of its beacon without contributing to the lighthouse’s construction and upkeep.

But it’s unclear how the Obion County fire would be an example of a public goods failure — obviously a homeowner who fails to contribute to fire service can be excluded from receiving the service. A better example in support of the public goods argument might be that fire service is publicly provided so as to protect the neighbors of a house that’s on fire — though again, if you read the details of the Obion County fire, you find that it provides an example that such neighbors can be protected.

Indeed, the Obion County fire seems a clear example of government failure, not market failure. Because city government provides the service (albeit through a voluntary fee system for people like the affected owner who live outside the city lines), people likely consider it a subsidized public service. As a result, there is strong disincentive for any private firm to enter the market and offer competing service. It’s not difficult to imagine what a private fire service would do in an event like the Obion fire: it likely would extinguish the blaze and then send the homeowner a bill. There are plenty of examples of this sort of practice in private marketplaces. And it’s what the government fire company in Obion should have done. Instead, the firefighters stood by and watched the house burn.

One can’t blame the NYT editorial page, ThinkProgress, and AlterNet for trying to spin an example of government failure into a tale of the horrors of limited government. Just a few weeks out from a national election in which progressive candidates appear poised for a major waxing, the last thing the progressive side needs is a heartrending example of government failure. And yet, the Obion County fire is an example of why that waxing is sorely needed — and justified.

On behalf of all of my colleagues at the Cato Institute, I warmly congratulate Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa for having won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Mario has distinguished himself not only as one of the world’s greatest novelists, but also as Latin America’s most well-known classical liberal—a champion of democratic capitalism who has never been afraid of speaking truth to power. His essays and tireless activism have educated millions of people in Latin America and inspired new generations to cherish and cultivate a culture of liberty. His vision of a modern Latin America has also informed Cato’s work in the region and beyond. We are honored and grateful that Mario has long been a generous friend of Cato’s and look forward to continuing that friendship in pursuit of advancing the liberal principles we share.