In today’s Cato Daily Podcast [mp3], Caleb Brown and I discuss why I went and created the Anti-Universal Coverage Club.
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A Scolding from the EC
The bureaucrats in Brussels may not be able to solve Europe’s demographic problems. They may not be able to promote economic liberalization in Europe’s welfare states. And they may not be able to provide any guidance to nations failing to assimilate large numbers of immigrants. But they can scold European men about not doing the housework.
The EU Observer reports on the latest farce from Brussels:
The European Commission is calling on Europe’s menfolk to help out more at home as a first step to improving women’s career prospects and ending the gender pay gap across the bloc. …EU employment commissioner Vladimír Spidla said, addressing a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday, “It is not possible to reduce the gender pay gap if we do not help out more at home.”
…In the communication, the Commission sets out ways in which the EU can bridge the gender pay gap. It wants the 27 member states to set objectives and deadlines to eradicate the gap, and will also push for equal pay to be made a condition for winning public contracts.
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Treasury Secretary Highlights Importance of Competitive Corporate Tax System
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, Jr. warns that America now has an uncompetitive corporate tax system. Mr. Paulson explains that other nations have been slashing their tax rates — and reaping big rewards — while the United States has been sitting on the sidelines. This means less investment in America, which translates into lower wages for American workers:
[T]he U.S. is once again a high corporate tax country. We now have, on average, the second-highest statutory corporate tax rate (including state corporate taxes), 39%, compared with an average rate of 31% for our top competitors… Ireland, for example, has engineered its own economic miracle, in large part due to a reform program that cut corporate tax rates to a level one-third that of the U.S. And the trend continues. Germany will reduce its total rate from 38% to 30% in 2008. France, Japan and the United Kingdom have signaled they may also lower their corporate rates.
…Business tax policy levers, such as the corporate tax rate, depreciation rates and investor taxes, as well as the taxes levied on small businesses through the individual income tax, should strive towards a similar purpose: to encourage economic growth by reducing the tax burden on additional investments. Yet, the current tax code distorts capital flows, hurting productivity, job creation and our global competitiveness. Take just a few examples. Taxes on capital income raise the price of future consumption and discourage saving and capital formation. Reduced capital formation gives labor less capital to work with and lowers labor productivity, reducing real wages and income.
…Over the past two decades, while U.S. tax law has grown more complicated and our statutory corporate income tax rate has increased, other nations have been reducing their rates to replicate our miracle. A study by Treasury economists estimated that a country with a tax rate one percentage point lower than another country’s attracts 3% more capital. It’s not surprising then, that average OECD corporate tax rates have trended steadily downward.
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Bush Waxes Philosophical on Health Care
People sick of the big-government conservatism practiced by the Bush administration might be excited at the headline in today’s Washington Post: “Bush: No Deal On Children’s Health Plan/President Says He Objects On Philosophical Grounds.” But President Bush’s philosophical objection to the proposed expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program is in no way a reversal from his stance that big spending is okay as long as Republicans can take credit.
What philosophy does Bush subscribe to? Apparently, it’s the philosophy that says the federal government should only expand the welfare state by billions of dollars, instead of tens of billions of dollars: “The president said he objects on philosophical grounds to a bipartisan Senate proposal to boost the State Children’s Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over five years. Bush has proposed $5 billion in increased funding and has threatened to veto the Senate compromise and a more costly expansion being contemplated in the House.”
Later in the article Bush is quoted as saying, “I think it’s going to be very important for our allies on Capitol Hill to hear a strong, clear message from me that expansion of government in lieu of making the necessary changes to encourage a consumer-based system is not acceptable.”
He also said, “I’m worried that there will be a strong incentive for people to switch from the private sector to the government.”
If only the president had adopted a similar attitude when he approved a $1.2 trillion expansion of Medicare in 2003 in lieu of consumer-based approaches.
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Save Wal-Mart, Save Class Action Law?
I’ve got a short Regulation Magazine piece on the notorious (or glorious, depending on your perspective) Dukes v. Wal-Mart case–a gender discrimination class action composed of as many as 2 million women, according to some estimates. You can read more about the case here and download my Regulation piece here.
Many believe the case is headed to the Supreme Court–if not this upcoming term, then the next. If it does, and if the Court takes up Wal-Mart’s constitutional arguments against certification, then, I argue, it might just set the stage for some far-reaching, and overdue, conceptual changes in the way we think about the constitutional rights of class action defendants. My piece uses Dukes as a springboard for sketching some of these defenses–admittedly quite adventurous–which just might become a bit less exotic if Wal-Mart succeeds.
Cost Overruns, More Liars
“Liar” is not a very scholarly word, but I don’t know how else to describe some of the comments that come from public officials. It’s not just the farm bill, check out this paragraph from a Washington Post story today on the Virginia highway project:
“Project officials hailed the interchange as ‘on time and under budget.’ But although the mid-2007 target date for completion was met, the final cost was nearly three times what was first projected. A more recent cost estimate of $676 million was ultimately met.”
Well, of course, the final estimate was met because it’s the final estimate. Obviously, what’s important for taxpayers is that politicians and government agencies stick to the numbers that they agree to when they first vote to approve projects.
It is my view that in many, but certainly not all, large government projects there is deliberate subterfuge about ultimate project costs. Many projects balloon in cost 50 percent or more.
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Yochai Benkler and the Libertarian Center
If you haven’t been reading Cato Unbound this month, you should be. Brink Lindsey defends his notion of libertarian centrism from left, right, and, um, Julian.
I found Jonah Goldberg’s follow-up contribution particularly interesting. He points out that much of what was wrong with the progressive movement of the early 20th century was due to its infatuation with centralizing institutions that were ascendant at the time: the army, heavy industry, and later, large-scale scientific endeavors like the Manhattan Project. Bigness and centralization were in, and intellectuals believed that the entire country should be governed in a similarly hierarchical fashion.
Goldberg thinks liberals will just discard the economic argument for central planning and move on to another one: public health, the environment, whatever. But I wanted to point out that there are also some liberals who are adopting a more appropriately skeptical attitude toward central planning itself.
One reason to think the 21st century is going to be more libertarian than the 20th is that the defining technology of our generation, the Internet, is radically decentralizing. After a century in which our cultural and economic lives were dominated by large, vertically-integrated corporations, we’re entering an era in which decentralization and disintermediation are the dominant trends. Instead of producing components in house, they develop networks of independent suppliers, knit together by sophisticated supply chains. And instead of vertically-integrated media companies like the New York Times and NBC, we’re increasingly moving toward a world in which writers, musicians, and other creators can reach their audiences directly.
The left, which has always fancied itself the party of modernity, is already beginning to be affected by these cultural currents. No work typifies the shift better than Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, a book about how the emergence of the Internet is reshaping the cultural landscape. What’s striking about the book is how much Benkler draws on the thought of libertarian thinkers like Smith, Hayek, and Coase in explaining how he envisions the media landscape of the 21st century. Indeed, on page 16 Benkler, who is not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, concedes:
My approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing primarily a negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy.
Benkler’s argument is too long to summarize in a blog post. You can get a taste for it in my review of Wikinomics, a book that draws heavily from Benkler’s insights. But I’ll just note the possibility that just as the technological developments of the early 20th century pushed progressive intellectuals in a socialist direction, so the emergence of decentralizing technologies like the Internet will push liberal intellectuals like Benkler in a libertarian direction.
An even more extreme example is Eben Moglen, the free software movement’s leading lawyer. He’s definitely a left-winger, and he has a lot of opinions that libertarians would not find congenial. But I find it striking how often he finds himself coming to libertarian conclusions almost despite himself. For example, check out this excerpt from a speech about the success of the free software movement:
People out there who had money to burn said: “Wait a minute. This software is good. We won’t have to burn money over it. And not only is this software good as software, these rules are good. Because they’re not about ambulance chasing. They’re not about a quick score. They’re not about holding up deep pockets. They’re about a real cooperation between people who have a lot and the people who have an idea. Why don’t we go in for that?” And within a very short period of time they had gone in for that. And that’s where we live now. In a world in which the resources of the wealthy came to us, not because we coerced them, not because we demanded, not because we taxed, but because we shared. Even with them, sharing worked better than suing or coercing. We were not afraid. We did not put up barbed wire, and so when they came to scoff, they remained to pray.
You may not share Moglen’s belief that proprietary software is inherently evil. I don’t. But as libertarians, we do have to respect the fact that he’s advanced his beliefs, and produced some great software, using entirely non-coercive means. In another era, Moglen might have been calling for the nationalization of the steel industry or the creation of a cradle-to-grave welfare state.
Instead, his policy agenda, to the extent he has one at all, is deregulatory. He believes that copyright and patent law are infringing on the freedom of programmers to do as they please with their computers, and so he wants to repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and software patents. Not all libertarians would agree with those goals, but they’re a far cry from nationalizing the software industry.