• On immigration, the president offers mostly nice words, not much else.
• The debate about the debt ceiling is important—take the time to get it right.
• When it comes to defense appropriations, it is worth keeping in mind that restraining ambition is the first step in sensibly trimming military spending.
• There is no empirical evidence that national standards improve educational outcomes.
• The tax code is not an appropriate tool for social engineering, despite bipartisan attempts to use it for that purpose.
  
  

Over at the American Conservative, I have a review of Eric Posner and Adrian Vermuele’s new book Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. Funny enough, the working title for my book on presidential power was “Executive Unbound,” but P&V have a very different take on the dangers of concentrating power in the executive (they coin the term “tyrannophobia,” for irrational fear of executive abuse).

From the review’s intro:

The New York Times book editors assigned their review to the Straussian political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, the self-styled expert on “manliness” who’s as rabid a supporter of the imperial presidency as you’re likely to find. In the late Bush era, Mansfield wrote a 3,000-word Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Case for the Strong Executive,” arguing that defects in the rule of law ‘‘suggest the need for one-man rule.”

Yet even Mansfield blanched at Executive Unbound’s case for unbridled presidential power. He began his review by noting indignantly, “Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, law professors at Chicago and Harvard, respectively, offer with somewhat alarming confidence the ‘Weimar and Nazi jurist’ Carl Schmitt as their candidate to succeed James Madison for the honor of theorist of the Constitution.”

Gott im Himmel! A book that embraces a leading “Nazi jurist,” applauds the American presidency’s liberation from law, and is apparently hardcore enough to scare manly Harvey Mansfield? What sort of work is Executive Unbound? A Satanic Bible for worshippers of the strong presidency? The black-metal version of John Yoo?

As I dug into the book—while Tomahawk missiles rained down on Libya in yet another unauthorized presidential war—that’s what I was expecting. But Posner and Vermuele have produced something very different and, quite to my surprise, I liked it.

You can read the rest here.

OK, I took some editorial license on the line from the 1970s song by C.W. McCall about truckers bantering on their CB radios, but the spirit of the song applies to our ongoing dispute with Mexico over access to U.S. highways.

On Friday, the comment period will end in the Federal Register on a pilot program proposed by the Obama administration that would allow qualified Mexican trucks and their Mexican drivers to make long-haul deliveries within the United States. With the exception of a brief interlude from 2007 to 2009, the U.S. has banned Mexican trucks from serving destinations within the United States.

I explain why this is bad for our economy and our reputation as a nation in an op-ed this morning in the Washington Times and in my own comments filed with the Federal Register. As I wrote in the op-ed:

Despite the hundreds of complaints already posted in the Federal Register, the Mexican trucking issue has never been about safety. The proposed pilot program would require Mexican trucks entering the United States to meet all federal regulations on driver qualifications, truck safety, emissions, fuel taxes, immigration and insurance.

Experience from the previous pilot program in 2007-09 demonstrated that Mexican trucks and their drivers are fully capable of complying with all U.S. safety requirements.

An August 2009 report from the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General found that only 1.2 percent of Mexican drivers that were inspected were placed out of service for violations, compared with nearly 7 percent of U.S. drivers who were inspected. In February 2010, the Congressional Research Service reported that recent data provided by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found that “Mexican trucks are as safe as U.S. trucks and that the drivers are generally safer than U.S. drivers.” What the Teamsters and their congressional allies really object to is that these trucks will be driven by Mexicans.

The Obama administration deserves credit for its effort to end this dispute in the face of pressure from its union base. The sooner we allow more freedom and competition in the cross-border trucking sector, the better.

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What Does This Mean? (Reuters/​Ceerwan Aziz)[/caption]

Today’s New York Times has a piece on the running discussion in Iraq about the prospect of U.S. military withdrawal from their country. As the article highlights, the discussion itself “reflects a nation still struggling with issues of sectarian identity, national pride, and how to secure its future.”

One of the few things former President Bush said about Iraq that I agreed with was his claim on Al Arabiya in 2005 that “the future of Iraq depends on Iraqi nationalism and the Iraq character—the character of Iraq and Iraqi people emerging.”

In general, I am not very fond of nationalism, but if you want to hold together a country of 25 million people, especially when they have been riven by decades of sectarian strife, a living-memory civil war, a variety of identity politics divides, and disputes over the rents from natural resources, you could probably use some. (Maybe we could find a way that a very diverse coalition of Iraqis could chase us out.)

As the article indicates, there are a range of views about the prospect of American withdrawal. One Iraqi remarks hopefully that “I prefer that the U.S. forces leave Iraq because then extremists wouldn’t have an excuse to carry guns.” A follower of Muqtada al-Sadr remarks that “Whatever [Sadr] says, we will do. We will keep on resisting until the last days of our lives.” An intellectual remarks that if American military forces leave, “the sectarian conflict between Iran and the rest of the Arab countries will seep into Iraq because the Iranians will try and make the Shiites more powerful and the Arab countries will support the Sunnis. This will lead to a sectarian war.”

Several of the Iraqis interviewed were profoundly cynical about American intentions, believing that the United States would try to stick around for various selfish reasons. At a time when political leaders like Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. John Boehner, and others are suggesting that we need to find a way to stay in their country, can you really blame the Iraqis for feeling a bit cynical?

Regardless, the future of Iraq will ultimately turn on whether Iraqis decide that there is such a thing as Iraq, and if so, whether they should identify strongly with it and be loyal to it. The fact that the jury is still out on those questions more than eight years after we changed the regime speaks volumes about the folly of the war in the first place.

The media makes it hard for ordinary people to be libertarians. In large part, this is because journalism is in the business of selling panic—panic about terrorism, panic about drugs, panic about food, panic about pornography, panic about our health care system. If it’s not an emergency, it’s not news. To the lazy journalist, everything becomes an emergency—and emergencies always—always—demand state action.

The media makes things hard for the would-be libertarian in other ways, too. Consider this story from today’s Washington Post, about… well, it’s hard to say, actually:

Senate Democrats unveiled a plan Tuesday to save $21 billion over the next decade by eliminating tax breaks for the nation’s five biggest oil companies, a move designed to counter Republican demands to control the soaring national debt without new taxes.

With the proposal, Democrats sought to reframe the debate over debt reduction to include fresh revenue as well as sharp cuts in spending. For the first time, Democratic leaders suggested an equal split between spending cuts and new taxes — “50–50,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.).

That represents a larger share for taxes than has been proposed by either President Obama or the bipartisan commission he appointed to recommend how to cut the national debt.

So far, the Democratic tax agenda is focused on ending subsidies for big oil companies, a hugely popular proposal involving what Democrats see as a prime example of wasteful giveaways in the tax code. By raising the issue, Democrats are trying to force Republicans either to drop their rigid stance against new taxes or to defend taxpayer subsidies for some of the world’s most profitable corporations, including Ex­xon Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.

The proposal came in response to remarks Tuesday by House Speaker John A. Boehner (R‑Ohio), who said raising taxes is “off the table.” A day earlier, he gave a speech demanding more than $2 trillion in spending cuts in exchange for GOP support for an increase in the legal limit on government borrowing through the end of next year.

Where am I confused, you ask? On almost everything a libertarian ought to care about. I’ll explain.

One of the key aspects of any good law is generality—that is, equality before the law. As F. A. Hayek put it:

[T]hough government has to administer means which have been put at its disposal (including the services of all those whom it has hired to carry out its instructions), this does not mean that it should similarly administer the efforts of private citizens. What distinguishes a free from an unfree society is that in the former each individual has a recognized private sphere clearly distinct from the public sphere, and the private individual cannot be ordered about but is expected to obey only the rules which are equally applicable to all.…

The general, abstract rules, which are laws in the substantive sense, are… essentially long-term measures, referring to yet unnkown cases and containing no references to particular persons, places, or objects. Such laws must always be prospective, never retrospective, in their effect (The Constitution of Liberty, chapter 14, section 2).

Now, with every passing day our government stomps all over this generality requirement again and again, chiefly in the economic sphere. But is it doing so on the front page of today’s Washington Post? That’s a good question.

I can think of lots of ways we might deny a tax break to a certain five oil corporations. Some are decidedly better than others in their generality. Consider the following, ranked from least general to most:

1. “The corporations known as Ex­xon Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips are hereby denied tax break X. All others still qualify, or not, as they did before.”
2. “Oil corporations with an annual revenue above $198 billion are denied tax break X.”
3. “We find that tax break X itself is lacking in generality. It is hereby repealed, and the overall corporate tax rate is increased accordingly.”

Which one are they proposing? From the story’s first paragraph, we could easily conclude that it was (1). Many people on the left would be happy with (1), because big corporations are anathema to them, and everything they do is evil, and punishing them—generality be damned—is just great.

But then, it could also be (2), and this measure is somewhat more general, even if ConocoPhillips—the smallest company on the list—just so happens to have an annual revenue of $198.655 billion. As Hayek noted, “[C]lassification in abstract terms can always be carried to the point at which, in fact, the class singled out consists only of particular known persons or even a single individual” (ibid., section 4). Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

And finally, there’s (3), clearly the winner in terms of generality. Is that in fact the proposal being discussed by members of Congress? Or is it still more general than that—something perhaps as described by my colleagues Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren earlier this month?

Last week President Barack Obama responded to rising public anger over soaring gasoline prices by banging the drums for the elimination of various tax breaks enjoyed by the oil and gas industry…

[L]et the record show that President Obama is right… about these tax breaks. They make the economy less — not more — efficient and do nothing to reduce prices at the pump.

Rigging the tax code to make investments in manufacturing artificially more attractive than investments in something else is an enterprise designed to harm non-manufacturers for the benefit of … manufacturers. Conservatives who want government to leave markets alone have no business throwing their political bodies in front of this tax break. If their political rhetoric means anything, they would see the president’s bid and raise him by calling for total repeal of this tax break for everyone, not just for oil and gas companies.

If only we were so lucky! Getting back to the Post, we learn much later in the story—in the fifteenth paragraph —that the congressional proposal “would close several long-standing tax loopholes, yielding roughly $2 billion a year in savings to be applied to lowering the deficit. It would affect only the five largest oil companies, excluding smaller producers.”

This is confusing to the point of deception. Does it really “close” a loophole to take a few entities and exclude them from the prior exclusion from the tax? By my understanding, it makes the law less general, more convoluted and more arbitrary, than it was before. Close the loophole—or just don’t close it, I think a Hayek might say. Don’t make companies play human Tetris to figure out whether they aren’t not un-disincluded.

One day I think people will look back on our era—from roughly the civil rights movement to the present—and marvel. They will be amazed at how, while the law grew much more general regarding many non-economic matters, it became increasingly partial and favoritist when it came to running a business. At times our journalism and even our language seemed blind to this contradictory development, which only encouraged it. Even thinking about the generality of our laws is made difficult when it’s just not a topic on the national media’s radar.

But equality before the law should apply, well, equally. Shouldn’t it?

House Speaker John Boehner has promised to tie substantial spending cuts to upcoming debt-limit legislation. He said spending cuts will have to be at least as large as the dollar value of the allowed debt increase. Thus, if the legislation increased the legal debt limit by $2 trillion, then Congress would have to cut spending over time by at least $2 trillion.

How can we be sure that spending cuts are real?

There are only two types of solid and tough-to-reverse spending cuts—legislated changes to reduce entitlement benefit levels and complete termination of discretionary programs. Republicans will have to define what time period they are talking about, but let’s assume it’s the standard 10-year budget window.

• Entitlements: The legislation, for example, could change the indexing formula for initial Social Security benefits from wages to prices. The Congressional Budget Office says that change would reduce spending by $137 billion over 10 years (2012–2021). Other options include raising the retirement age for Social Security and raising deductibles for Medicare.
• Discretionary: Each session of Congress decides the following year’s discretionary spending. Promises of discretionary spending cuts beyond one year are meaningless. Thus, the various promises in Republican and Democratic budget plans to freeze various parts of discretionary spending through 2021 or reduce spending to 2008 levels over the long term have no weight. Those are not real cuts.

The only way to get real cuts in discretionary spending—cuts that would be tough to reverse out in later years—is complete program termination and repeal of the program’s authorization. That way, policymakers in future years would generally need at least 60 votes in the Senate to reinstate the spending.

Thus, if the GOP promises to save $50 billion over 10 years by reducing the levels of Title 1 grants to the states for K‑12 schools, that is not a real and solid cut. However, if they pass a law to repeal Title 1 spending altogether, that cut may well be sustained over the long term.

To make spending cuts even more secure, the GOP should also insist on a statutory cap on overall outlays with a supermajority requirement to break, as I’ve outlined here. For program termination ideas, see www​.Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org.

In sum, the GOP needs to ensure that spending cuts tied to the debt-limit vote are either:

1. Changes to entitlement laws to reduce benefit levels, or
2. Discretionary program terminations.

Promises to hold down future discretionary spending levels and partial program trims are not real spending cuts.

President Obama has been saying that if the United States government can find and eliminate Osama bin Laden after ten years of searching, it can do anything:

Already, in several appearances since the raid, Obama has described it as a reminder that “as a nation there is nothing that we can’t do,” as he put it during an unrelated White House ceremony Monday. On Sunday night, during his first comments about the operation, he linked it to American values, saying the country is “once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Finding bin Laden, difficult as it proved to be, was an incomparably simple task compared to using coercion and central planning to bring about desired results in defiance of economic reality. You can’t deliver better health care to more people for less money by reducing the role of incentives and markets, even if you set your mind to it. As Russell Roberts said about a similar concept, “If we can put a man on the moon, then…”:

Putting a man on the moon is an engineering problem. It yields to a sufficient application of reason and resources. Eliminating poverty is an economic problem (and by the word “economic” I do not mean financial or related to money), a challenge that involves emergent results. In such a setting, money alone—in the amounts that a non-economic approach might suggest, one that ignores the impact of incentives and markets—is unlikely to be successful.

Obama should listen to Bill Clinton, who last fall seemed to be channeling Hayek:

Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Bill Clinton, 9/21: “Do you know how many political and economic decisions are made in this world by people who don’t know what in the living daylights they are talking about?”