The plaintiffs in the SpeechNow.org case have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to decide “whether, under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, the federal government may require an unincorporated association that makes only independent expenditures to register and report as a political committee.”
You can read all about this important case here.
It’s not at all clear that the political challengers whose fortunes are raised today won’t try to pull up the ladder of free and open political speech when their own incumbency receives a challenge. The Citizens United decision notwithstanding, the drive to be returned to office is a strong one.
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast (subscribe!), John Samples offers fans of free speech a few things to consider about this and future election cycles:
In this morning’s Charlotte Observer, I explain how ObamaCare is destroying consumer protections. Exhibit A is Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina’s decision to refund $156 million to its policyholders:
BCBSNC’s refunds show that ObamaCare is leaving seriously ill patients with less protection, not more. Health insurance was hardly perfect before ObamaCare, but BCBSNC’s policyholders had insurance that had pre-funded many of their future medical bills.
Now, ObamaCare has effectively transferred those reserves from the sick to the healthy. Seriously ill policyholders now have less protection against BCBSNC reneging on its commitments to them. Competition used to discourage skimping; ObamaCare rewards it.
Due to space considerations, the editors dropped the parts where I explain (A) how research by Harvard economist (and sometime Obama advisor) David Cutler shows that under ObamaCare’s price controls, insurers must compete to avoid the sick, and (B) that ObamaCare is blocking further innovations — such as those foreseen by University of Chicago economist John Cochrane — that would provide even greater protection to the sick.
The biographer of the great libertarian science-fiction novelist Robert A. Heinlein will speak at Cato on October 21. I liked Michael Dirda’s Washington Post review of the book:
Picture a Saturday morning during one of those endless summers of the late 1950s and early ’60s. A boy climbs on his red Schwinn bicycle and rides like the wind to the public library, then to several drugstores and thrift shops. He is on a mission. He is looking desperately for a book, any book, by Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988), the greatest science-fiction writer in the world.
The greatest? Back then, few adolescent sf readers would have seriously questioned such a cosmic truth. Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” was certainly cool (Hari Seldon! Psychohistory!), and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” could be poetic, scary and ghoulish almost at the same time, and, yes, Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination” just might be the single best sf novel of them all, but Heinlein was … Heinlein.…
[William H.] Patterson even asserts — and will presumably discuss more fully in Vol. 2 — that Heinlein “galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.”
I hope you can join us on October 21, or watch it streamed on the web.
Cato essays on the Department of Transportation contain a common theme: federal subsidies for various modes of transportation have stifled privately funded and operated alternatives. One emerging bright spot is private intercity bus companies.
From a Cato essay on Amtrak subsidies:
If Amtrak is privatized, passenger rail will be in a much better position to compete with resurgent intercity bus services. The rapid growth in bus services in recent years illustrates how private markets can solve our mobility needs if left reasonably unregulated and unsubsidized. A Washington Post reporter detailed her experiences with today’s low-cost intercity buses: “This new species offers curbside pickup and drop-offs, cheap fares, clean restrooms, express service, online reservations, free WiFi and loyalty programs … The bus fares undercut Amtrak and, depending on the number of passengers, personal vehicles.”
That’s why a story out of Minnesota is disturbing. According to the Duluth News Tribune, Jefferson Lines, which operates a bus line between Duluth and the Twin Cities, received $2.65 million in federal stimulus money to purchase five of the eight buses it has in service. One of Jefferson Lines’ competitors isn’t happy:
That angers Dave Clark, owner of Skyline Shuttle, which provides transportation from Duluth to the Twin Cities. Clark claims it’s unfair for Jefferson Lines to use government money to compete with his business and cut into his revenue.
“When there’s a market and they are competitors, it should be left to the market without government interference,” Clark said. “They could have taken the risk themselves, but they relied on the taxpayer to take the risk.”
The first problem is that federal taxpayers across the country are being forced to subsidize a private bus line in Minnesota. The second problem is that the government is effectively picking winners and losers in the market for intercity bus services. Instead of spreading transportation subsidies across every form of transportation, the federal government should cease with the seemingly endless interventions and allow free individuals to figure out what makes the most sense.
I dislike taxes as much as the next person (and probably a lot more), but other policies matter as well, so if I had the choice of replacing current government policies with the ones that existed at the end of the Clinton years, I would gladly make that trade. Yes, it would mean higher tax rates, but it also would mean slashing government spending from 24 percent of GDP down to 18 percent of GDP. It would mean no sleazy TARP bailout, no Sarbanes-Oxley red tape, no expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and no added power and authority for the federal government.
This is the argument that I made in this interview on CNBC, though my opponent tried to do his version of the Brezhnev Doctrine (what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable), so I concluded the interview by stating that in the real world higher taxes are completely unacceptable.
To elaborate on this discussion, here’s a chart showing actual revenue over the past decade and what spending would be if policy makers had simply maintained the overall budget level from the last year of the Clinton Administration and allowed spending to grow in line with inflation and population. The deficit would be much smaller. More important, the burden of federal spending would be almost $1 trillion lower.
The video speaks volumes: During a “friendly” game played in La Paz, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales (wearing green jersey number 10) approaches a rival player to confront him for a previous foul. Suddenly, Morales takes justice into his own hands and savagely knees the player in the groin. The referee sees the action but doesn’t red card Morales. Even the teammates of the assaulted player don’t complain. Instead, the referee expels the attacked player. The game goes on and Morales scores the tying goal for a 4–4 match. It was later reported that Morales’ security detail tried to arrest the player.
Evo Morales’ thuggish attitude towards his soccer rivals mirrors his attitude towards political opponents (actually, the team he was playing against was led by the mayor of La Paz, a political foe of the president). Before and since becoming president in 2006, Morales has repeatedly resorted to violence in order to advance his socialist agenda. A couple of other episodes are indicative of Morales’ governing style:
In November 2007, after months of impasse in the Constitutional Assembly in which the text of a new constitution could not be approved because of a lack of an absolute majority, the government called for a session of the Assembly to be held at a military base. When the opposition delegates tried to enter the premises, they were prevented from doing so by the military, the police and Morales’ supporters. The text of Bolivia’s new constitution was thus approved by the unrepresentative Assembly.
To become the law of the land, the new constitution had to be approved by a national referendum. However, the opposition-controlled Senate refused to call a referendum on a constitutional text that was rightly viewed as illegitimate. In February 2008 Morales called the leaders of the opposition to his official residence for a negotiation. Upon arrival, they were told that the president wasn’t there and that the bill to call for a referendum was about to be submitted for a vote on the Senate floor. When the legislators tried to return to the Congress, they were prevented doing so by Morales’ supporters and the police. The Senate passed the bill and Morales went on to win the referendum by a wide margin.
A couple of years ago, Evo Morales candidly recounted his attitude to following the rules: “When some lawyer tells me ‘Evo, you’re making a judicial mistake; what you’re doing is illegal,’ well, I keep going even though it’s illegal. I then tell the lawyers: ‘If it’s illegal, go ahead and make it legal. That’s what you went to school for.’”
Nobody should be surprised by Evo’s soccer antics. They are just a metaphor for his governing style.