In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this morning, John Fund speculates about a post-election, lame-duck strategy in which Democrats move a variety of controversial proposals before giving up power to November’s presumed victors. Among these proposals is “a federally mandated universal voter registration system to override state laws.”

The answer to that idea is No.

Part of the reason is because this proposal hasn’t seen any discussion or debate. Its benefits, costs, and consequences have had no public vetting.

Likely, a national voter ID system would also be a national ID system. Its utility in addressing whatever voter fraud there is would be matched or outstripped by its utility for controlling our access to health care, travel, guns, financial services, and every other thing that the federal government might like to regulate more thoroughly. That’s also part of why the answer is No.

I’m not too worried. Fund is interested in voter and election fraud, so he may be overweighting the likelihood of legislation to address it. And, as I said this morning in a broader Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com blog post worth reading only for the pun, “Chances are that Fund is using the lame-duck speculation to goose (yuk yuk) his generally conservative readership, and that the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate aren’t thinking that far ahead yet.”

When I know I’m going to write something more technical and detailed, I generally switch over to writing on the TechLiberationFront blog, which has a lovable propeller-head audience (and authors). 

If you don’t mind wading through semi-technical talk of radio waves and encryption, you might enjoy the TLF post, “Consumer Watchdog Gets Creepy With Congress Trying to Make its ‘WiSpying’ Case.”

In its misleading and over-the-top effort to highlight corporate wrongdoing, Consumer Watchdog—a California corporation that reported over $3 million in 2008 revenue—arguably did more to invade privacy than the object of its attack.

Yesterday, actress Lindsay Lohan received a 90 day jail sentence after a judge determined Lohan had violated her probation by missing some scheduled classes. Lohan had been previously arrested on a DUI charge. Today, Lohan quotes from a Cato article that critiques the American criminal justice system for its rigid and mechanical sentencing rules. (Here are her Cato-quoting Tweets: 1, 2, 3, 4.) I have received letters from prisoners around the country who have read a Cato publication, or seen a Cato event on C‑SPAN, but this is our first celebrity tweet. The Institute is now abuzz!

I wish more celebrities would take an interest in our legal system because there is so much injustice to be found there. Alas, when celebs speak out after they have been personally caught up in the system, their calls for reform come across as self-serving — even when they are sincere. I wish more Hollywood writers would work criminal justice issues into their scripts. For example, why not write a popular character out of a show because of an arrest and a mandatory minimum sentence? In any event, we wish Ms. Lohan well and hope this is her final encounter with the criminal system.

For more Cato work on sentencing, go here. For more on criminal justice generally, go here.

Reliable national security reporter Siobhan Gorman at the Wall Street Journal has broken a story about an Internet surveillance program called “Perfect Citizen” to be managed by the National Security Agency.

Reading about it is frustrating, and for me blame quickly settles on Congress. Our legislature is utterly supine before the national security bureaucracy, which exaggerates cybersecurity threats and consistently uses the secrecy trump card to defy oversight.

If there is to be a federal government role in securing the Internet from cyberattacks, there is no good reason why its main components should not be publicly known and openly debated. Small parts, like threat signatures and such—the unique characteristics of new attacks—might be appropriately kept secret, but no favor is done to any potential attackers by revealing that there is a system for detecting their activities.

A cybersecurity effort that is not tested by public oversight will be weaker than ones that are scrutinized by private-sector experts, academics, security vendors, and watchdog groups.

Benign intentions do not control future results, and governmental surveillance of the Internet for “cybersecurity” purposes may warp over time to surveillance for ideological and political purposes.

These abstract criticisms of “Project Citizen” are all that publicly available information allows. Far better would come from me and others more qualified if Congress were to do its job.

Congress owes it to us, the United States’ true citizens, to have public hearings on “Perfect Citizen.” Congress should reject broad assertions of secrecy so that the whole body politic can participate in securing our country from all threats.

Congressional and public oversight—searching oversight that tests assumptions and asks hard questions—would strengthen any government cybersecurity effort we find warranted. It would also ameliorate the threat of such programs to our civil liberties, democratic processes, and privacy.

The European parliament has just approved a measure that would limit bonus payments and other aspects of compensation for bankers. National finance ministers are expected to approve the measure next week, and it will take effect Jan. 1. The goal of the legislation is to limit banker incentives to take risk, since this was allegedly a major cause of the recent financial crisis.

The key question about compensation limits is why shareholders and creditors have not imposed these on bank executives already. If the possibility of large bonuses indeed generates excessive risk-taking, then bank stakeholders have ample incentive to adopt such limits without government coercion.

The answer is that bank risk-taking was not necessarily excessive from the perspective of the bank stakeholders, since banks were living in a world with private gains but public losses. Stakeholders stood to earn large returns when times were good, and they knew taxpayers would cushion the losses — via deposit insurance or accomodative monetary policy — when times went bad.

Since events of the past two years have done nothing but reinforce the view that major banks are too big to fail, the incentive to pile on risk is stronger than ever.

So limits on bank compensation are fighting an uphill battle, and bankers will find ways around them via creative accounting and clever compensation packages. The limits are therefore just political pandering to populist outrage over banker excesses. That outrage is understandable, but limiting compensation will not prevent the next blow up.

C/P at Forbes​.com

What can I say about San Francisco’s ban on vending machines for sugared soft drinks on city property?

I could say that a twelve ounce can of Coca-Cola has fewer calories than twelve ounces of whole milk, because it does — 140 to 216.

I could say that you’ll be even fatter if you substitute whole milk for Coke, ounce for ounce, because you will be.

I could say that the extra nutrients in milk don’t do anything to make it less fattening, because they don’t.

I could say that 12 ounces of soy milk has 198 calories, which is still well above Coke’s 140.

I could even say that switching to skim milk doesn’t help you all that much — if you do the math, you’ll find that there are 124.5 calories in 12oz of skim milk, compared, again, to 140 for Coke.

I could also point out that a tall Starbucks Frappuccino — also 12 ounces, and not covered by the ban — has 190 calories, largely from sugar and fat.

I could ask: Does anyone ever order a plain Frappuccino? A tall mocha Frappuccino has 220 calories.

Finally, I could point out that banning vending-machine drinks while leaving Starbucks untouched is a pretty rank example of class privilege at work — my indulgences are sophisticated and upper-class, while yours are vulgar and prole.

And, I imagine I hardly need to make the case that this ban is the thin end of a wedge, and that comprehensive regulation of sugar, fat, and salt is on the way.

But really, it’s a lot simpler than that. What I should say is that your body is yours. Liberals themselves would tell you just the same in many other contexts. It’s yours to do with as you see fit. It’s yours to use, and it’s yours to use up, as Dan Savage once put it. (Can bans on risky sex be far behind?)

Part of being free is being free to make bad choices, to take risks, and to bear the consequences. Part of being free is that you, personally, may decide what you eat or drink. It’s a liberty so elementary that our founders never even imagined that it would need protection, but today, it does. (These same founders also rioted when the British taxed their tea. Which I’m sure Parliament only did for their own good anyway.)

To be sure, there are many costs associated with socialized health care, and some of the choices we make will certainly raise those costs. That’s one big reason why the nanny state is suddenly in the food business. But if we absolutely must have socialized health care — a point I don’t for a moment concede — then I’d prefer to pay a little bit extra and keep all my other liberties, thanks.

Yesterday, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Arizona’s recently enacted law that is designed to curb illegal immigration. The Arizona law has not yet taken effect — that will occur on July 29. To generate more discussion and debate, Cato will be hosting a policy forum on the legal challenge and related issues on July 21. If the weather in DC continues to cooperate, it will feel like we are actually in Arizona.

Go here for Cato work related to immigration policy.