This is probably of great interest to a couple hundred people in the whole country, and maybe no C@L readers, but if it is, the Washington Post has compiled a list of who’s advising which candidates on foreign policy. It’s here.
Cato at Liberty
Cato at Liberty
Email Signup
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Topics
Do Texas Taxpayers Get Longhorn Straight through the Middle?
Let me make one thing clear right off the bat (pun not intended): I’m a fan of college sports.
As I’ve written before, though, I have some problems with big-time college athletics because I think that private schools are at a huge disadvantage against public schools, if for no other reason than private school alumni donors have to spend their money on lots of their alma maters’ needs, academic and athletic, while state taxpayers take care of public schools’ academic stuff, letting alums focus on sports. (There are lots of other problems, but I’ll stick to my favorite for now.) A fascinating breakdown of athletics spending at the University of Texas in Sunday’s Austin-American Statesman illustrates just how excessive at least one public schools’ athletics budget can get, with UT set to spend $107.6 million on athletics this year, double what the school spent just six years ago. Of course, UT probably needs to fork out that much cash to make sure its football players have such things as a “lounge area with game tables, 125 personalized lockers for the players, five flat-screen TVs and a three-dimensional, lighted 20-foot Longhorn on the ceiling.”
Of course, none of this proves that Texas taxpayers are footing the academic bills so alums can focus on the thrill of victory, but there is nationwide evidence that such displacement might just be happening. As the American-Statesman notes:
Big-time sports can cost schools money in other ways, too. This spring, an analysis of Division I‑A schools by the Journal of Sports Management found athletic department donations represent a larger and larger share of total university giving. “In some cases, the increase in athletics giving may be coming at the expense of academic gifts,” said co-author Jeffrey Stinson, a North Dakota State University marketing professor.
So, while we don’t know for sure from this article, it seems quite possible that, at least in part, Texas fans are able to cheer because Texas taxpayers are getting a longhorn straight through the middle.
Related Tags
More on Klein (and Cusack)
Tim flays poor Naomi Klein’s impoverished reading of Milton Friedman below, but there are even more bizarre assertions in the interview (which is conducted, unfortunately, by a fawning John Cusack).
Klein claims that times of crisis, such as the aftermath of terrorist attacks, are the most fertile moments to “push through radical free-market policies” against the will of the American people. This, of course, defies all systematic study of such things, which has proved to the contrary that the State, not the private sector, is the beneficiary of such environments. For starters, go to the books by Bruce Porter or Robert Higgs. There is a wealth of literature out there on this topic, and any undergraduate with a passing interest in the subject should be familiar with it. Such knowledge would preclude making the type of nutty claim that Klein does.
But even if one limits his analysis to, say, life under the Bush administration, one would be hard-pressed to point to the “radical free-market policies” which the administration has successfully and quietly spirited into American society in the wake of 9/11. Remember, for example, the widely-debated and spectacularly unsuccessful Bush approach to trying to partially privatize Social Security. Or, for a broader look, refer to my colleague Steve Slivinksi’s conclusion two years ago that
Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years…
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.
Those don’t sound like stealthily enacted radical free-market policies to me. To the extent that Klein gestures toward these facts in the interview, she seems to protest that she’s not against government exploitation of crises per se, but rather is disgusted that the beneficiaries of this largesse may include private sector companies. For example, Klein is aghast that “food” and “pest control” in Iraq are provided by private companies. The horror!
One might expect this type of nonsense from Klein, but it’s really disappointing to see John Cusack do the interview with his eyebrows raised about an inch and a half above his eyes, apparently floored by Klein’s analytical brilliance. A shame, really–the guy’s made some pretty good movies.
Klein Slanders Friedman
A video interview of Naomi Klein, who’s promoting her new book, has some truly vicious slander of Milton Friedman. Klein says:
I start the book with a quote from Milton Friedman saying only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. And you know Milton Friedman lived by this. His first laboratory was Chile under Augusto Pinoche, where the crisis was the coup and an economic crisis and it was after that that you had the economic shock therapy. And you also had another kind of shock which is torture, which was a way of enforcing these policies.
Klein seems to be insinuating that Friedman somehow orchestrated, supported, or encouraged the coup in Chile, or at least that he was an important Pinochet advisor. She also makes it sound like torturing people was one of Friedman’s policy recommendations. But here’s how Friedman tells the story:
MILTON FRIEDMAN: While I was in Santiago, Chile, I gave a talk at the Catholic University of Chile. Now, I should explain that the University of Chicago had had an arrangement for years with the Catholic University of Chile, whereby they send students to us and we send people down there to help them reorganize their economics department. And I gave a talk at the Catholic University of Chile under the title “The Fragility of Freedom.” The essence of the talk was that freedom was a very fragile thing and that what destroyed it more than anything else was central control; that in order to maintain freedom, you had to have free markets, and that free markets would work best if you had political freedom. So it was essentially an anti-totalitarian talk.
INTERVIEWER: So you envisaged, therefore, that the free markets ultimately would undermine Pinochet?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, absolutely. The emphasis of that talk was that free markets would undermine political centralization and political control. And incidentally, I should say that I was not in Chile as a guest of the government. I was in Chile as the guest of a private organization.
It’s true, of course, that Pinochet employed some of the economic policies Friedman had been advocating for decades, that some of Pinochet’s advisors had studied economics at the University of Chicago, and that Friedman subsequently cited the success of those policies. But just as Michael Moore’s endorsement of Cuba’s health care system doesn’t constitute endorsement of Castro’s dictatorial rule, so Friedman’s endorsement for Chilean tax or pension policies don’t constitute an endorsement of coups, purges, or torture.
There’s also some ideological slander at the heart of Klein’s argument, which she lays out later in the video. Klein seems to believe that Haliburton and Blackwater—companies that thrive on wartime corporate welfare—represent Friedman’s ideal society. Not only is this obviously wrong on a theoretical level, but it’s also flatly at odds with Friedman’s stated views. Milton Friedman was an opponent of the Iraq war and has been vociferous critic of corporate welfare for decades. Conflating Friedman’s advocacy of limited government with Bush’s interventionist foreign policy and profligate domestic spending illustrates either a failure to grasp the basics of Friedman’s position or a calculated attempt to play to the prejudices of her intended audience, many of whom will lump together anyone they don’t agree with as “right wingers,” even if they have little in common with one another.
Related Tags
Why We Fight Today… and Tomorrow?
Two news items highlight how divisive public schooling in the United States is today, and how much worse it could potentially be were we ever to adopt a national curriculum.
The first article tackles Banned Books Week, an event organized by the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other groups, that will feature readings all over the nation of controversial books like Judy Blume’s Forever and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War. According to the ALA, in 2006 there were over 546 challenges to books held in public and school libraries. Unfortunately, what the article neglects to mention is that in our public schools and libraries such battles are both inevitable and, no matter what the outcome, always result in the crushing of someone’s rights. As long as libraries are paid for by all taxpayers, all taxpayers have equal rights to demand both that the libraries carry the books they want and NOT carry material they find objectionable. One man’s book-banning battle is another’s revolt against compelled support of repugnant speech.
In Okinawa, Japan, the subject of the second article, we see just what kind of widespread acrimony a national curriculum can produce, again because all people are forced to support teachings imposed by the most politically powerful group, and because there is no alternative to government-sanctioned content, no matter how controversial that content might be. According to The Japan Times, on Saturday roughly 110,000 people rallied in Okinawa to protest a directive from Japan’s education ministry that history textbook publishers strike references in their books to military-imposed civilian suicides in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Were the United States ever to adopt a national history curriculum, imagine the fights we’d have over the treatment of race, religion, class, etc? And we don’t even have to think about something as inherently values-laden as history. Just look at the acrimony that’s accompanied our on-going “reading wars” and you can easily imagine the conflict any national standards would cause.
Related Tags
Debunking Coercion
The Congress for the New Urbanism has responded to my July policy analysis, Debunking Portland, with a paper titled, Debunking Cato. I am posting my reply on the Antiplanner blog.
New Urbanism refers to a recent architectural fad that includes mixed-use developments (retail and housing in the same complex), high-density housing (either multi-family or single-family on tiny lots), and pedestrian-friendly design (limited parking and storefronts on sidewalks instead of facing large parking lots). There is a demand for this type of development and no one objects to developers meeting that demand.
Portland, however, has decided to go far beyond market demand by imposing this type of development on many people. An urban-growth boundary has driven up the cost of single-family housing and the city uses subsidies, including tax-increment financing and below-market land sales, to promote high-density housing. A member of the Portland city council (and leading candidate for mayor) has even said that no new housing should be built in Portland that does not meet New Urban densities and designs.
My paper shows that Portland has achieved very little from this massive and cost coercion. The Congress for the New Urbanism basically argues that it has achieved slightly more than my paper says. But those benefits are still so tiny that they are overwhelmed by the costs to homebuyers, commuters, and taxpayers in the region.
Some people in the Congress for the New Urbanism say they merely want to build for the market and do not support coercive policies. Lovers of freedom can support New Urbanist efforts to dismantle obsolete zoning codes that prevent developers from meeting market demand for New Urban designs.
By the same token, I note in my reply, New Urbanists who oppose coercion cannot defend Portland’s policies, which are based almost entirely on coercive land-use regulations, taxation, and subsidies. Those policies don’t produce the benefits claimed for them and they do impose huge costs on the cities that apply them.
Related Tags
Police Create Roadblock to Collect DNA Samples for Private Research Firm
(This story was originally sent last week by Declan McCullagh to his politech e‑mail group. Most of Declan’s e‑mail follows.)
The Gilpin County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado, a rural area not that far west of Denver, recently set up a highway checkpoint where motorists were stopped and, at least in some cases, not allowed to leave until they gave breath, blood, and saliva samples for the benefit of a private research firm. A report by Ernie Hancock says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was involved as well.
A Denver Post article is here:
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_6922089
More:
http://cw2.trb.com/news/kwgn-invasive-checkpoint,0,2092732.story http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57733
http://freedomsphoenix.com/Discussion-Page.htm?InfoNo=024006
The Post says the private organization in question is the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, or PIRE, in Calverton, MD. Their Web site seems to be down but can be viewed here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050826173038/www.pire.org/
The thoroughly-misnamed PIRE is a major DC government contractor (and in fact its offices are within walking distance of the Beltway). It specializes in funneling over $35 million of taxpayer money a year into its own coffers through law enforcement contracts of dubious utility, mostly dealing with drugs and alcohol, from sources including the U.S. Department of Justice. 100 percent of its budget appears to come from government contracts or grants.
Although PIRE pretends to be a “nonprofit” organization — at least that label helps to collect those fat taxpayer-funded checks from the DOJ — in reality it spends about $1.35 million a year on lobbyists. Not a bad 30-fold return on investment. And its employees are paid six-figure salaries that would be handsome even by for-profit standards.
PIRE seems to specialize in devising new and intrusive ways of government meddling in personal lives. One PIRE success story helps to coerce retailers to card octogenarians who dare to try to buy a bottle of Cabernet. (“This method of enforcement gives retailers the necessary incentive to comply with the state’s law regarding the sale of alcohol, given that their next customer could be part of a compliance check. The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) has developed a detailed document to assist in the development and implementation of compliance checks.” See:
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/alcohol/dotpartners/chapter_5.htm
PIRE is an ardent supporter of the War On (Some Politically Unacceptable) Drugs, also known as an excellent way for Feds and contractors to fleece the public in a war that will never end, eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, and create a police state with perfectly legal no-knock raids. One PIRE researcher who focuses on “middle-school-based drug prevention programs” and has written a paper claiming anti-drug programs in schools actually work:
http://www.nida.nih.gov/Meetings/Prevention/PrevBios4.html
PIRE also supports higher taxes on alcohol and firmly opposes lowering the minimum drinking age to be akin to Europe or Canada (something that would probably do much to limit abuse). See:
http://www.higheredcenter.org/thisweek/tw010629.html http://resources.prev.org/documents/BeerTaxesNewsRelease.pdf