The July issue of Cato Unbound hits virtual newsstands this morning with Cato VP for research Brink Lindsey’s new essay elaborating his argument in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture that the culture wars are over and a vaguely libertarian consensus is the result. While recognizing that principled libertarianism doesn’t have a significant constituency, Lindsey argues that the soft libertarian synthesis constrains the Democrats and Republicans as they seek to cobble together working political majorities. Keep your browsers pointed to Cato Unbound: Jonah Goldberg of National Review has first whack at Brink on Wednesday.
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Gordon Brown’s Finance Minister Defends UK’s Status as Tax-Haven
The United Kingdom has extremely favorable rules for “non-domiciled” residents, a policy that enables highly productive people to live in London while avoiding most taxes on capital income and foreign-source income. The left in Europe hates this policy, especially since entrepreneurs and investors are escaping high-tax nations to live in London, but the new Chancellor of the Exchequer seems content to leave well enough alone. The Observer reports:
London, the great global financial centre, has another claim to fame: it has become the fastest growing destination for international tax avoiders. The world’s super-rich and an elite cadre of financiers working in the Square Mile are increasingly using non-domicile tax status to sidestep paying tax on their fortunes. …Those benefiting from non-dom status have rocketed over the last five years. The Treasury…confirmed that 112,000 individuals indicated non-dom status in their self-assessment returns in the tax year to April 2005. This is a 74 per cent increase over 2002’s figures. …Unlike UK citizens, non-doms escape tax on income from property or capital gains. It is not only the international jet set who claim non-dom status; it is also available to some of the most powerful figures in the City. …Non-domicile status is self-assessed. Forms are easy to download from the web and there are just 19 questions. One tax expert says it is easy to convince the Revenue that a claimant is based overseas, whether it is through a relative or a series of overseas investments. In addition, the Revenue makes very few checks on status. Many senior City figures qualify for non-dom tax exemptions, including Dominic Murphy, the UK boss of private equity giant KKR. And it is widely thought that the Chancellor’s City adviser Sir Ronald Cohen and a large collection of Labour Party donors do too. …Earlier this week, new Chancellor Alistair Darling made it clear that nothing must harm the international pre-eminence of the City and he warned against ‘knee jerk’ reactions to calls to amend the regulation.
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The Anti–Universal Coverage Club Is Rolling Along
I started the Anti–Universal Coverage Club in part to make a point, but also because I was curious to see how many people agreed with its basic premises.
I’m pleased to report that such people do exist. As of today, I count 86 club members. Rather than list them all, I’ll run through just those who might be recognizable to the policy community. Affiliations are provided for identification purposes only and do not imply that any of those organizations agree with us. At all. Unless I list an organization by itself.
Nathan Benefield
Director of Policy Research
Commonwealth Foundation
Greg Blankenship
President
Illinois Policy Institute
David Brown
Editor
Laissez Faire Books Blog
Joseph Coletti
Health Care Policy Analyst
John Locke Foundation
Karla Dial
Managing Editor
Health Care News
Paul Gessing
President
Rio Grande Foundation
John Graham
Director, Health Care Studies
Pacific Research Institute
Curly Haugland
Republican National Committeeman
North Dakota
Carla Howell
President
Center For Small Government
Arnold Kling
Economist/Blogger
Cato Institute/Library of Economics & Liberty
Frayda Levy
President
Moving Picture Institute
Mark Litow
Consulting Actuary
Milliman, Inc.
Michael Ostrolenk
Director of Government Affairs
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
Tom Patterson
Chairman
Goldwater Institute
Jared Rhoads
Director
Lucidicus Project
James Rottet
Legislative Specialist
The Heartland Institute
Herbert Rubin
Professor
UCLA School of Medicine
Thomas Saving
Professor of Economics
Texas A&M University
Greg Scandlen
Founder
Consumers for Health Care Choices
Greg Schneider
Health Care Fellow
Flint Hills Center for Public Policy
Jeffrey Singer
Contributing Editor
Arizona Medicine
Henry Stern
Blogger
Insure Blog
Mary Katherine Stout
Vice President
Texas Public Policy Foundation
Andrew Sullivan
Journalist
The Atlantic Online
The club has received a fair number of favorable mentions from blogs I had heard of (Coyote Blog, MooreWatch.com, SPN Blog, and Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket) and some I had not (Blog of Bile, Chaos From Order, A Chequer-Board Of Nights & Days, Con Law Geek, DeadBeef.com, Health Care BS, I Was The State, and JasonPye.com).
Not everyone had a favorable reaction. Neil Versel’s Healthcare IT Blog described our one recruitment email as “unbelievably shocking.” Ezra Klein of The American Prospect wished us well in recruiting members, I think because he’s happy to have someone else compile his enemies list for him. Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic Online congratulated me for starting the club but then deftly missed the point when he wrote, “I’m fairly certain that, politically, ‘we don’t care if you can’t afford health insurance’ is a losing slogan.”
Some members (not listed above) asked that I not use their real names because they feared giving offense — or even receiving offense, in the form of professional reprisals. Some think my name is spelled “Canon.” Others think my name is spelled “Tanner.” That’s fine. I’m just happy to have them aboard. I especially love that we have a Curly.
Not bad considering how little effort I’ve put into this.
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The New Deal Was a Success — at Creating Dependency
Drawing from Amity Shlaes’ excellent new book The Forgotten Man, George Will notes that FDR’s policies were an economic failure but a political success.
It is particularly galling that Roosevelt’s statist policies were so harmful (as Chris Edwards has succinctly explained), yet he is portrayed as the man who saved the nation from unbridled capitalism:
Franklin Roosevelt’s success was in altering the practice of American politics. This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive.
…Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies — labor, retirees, farmers, union members — to be dependent on government.
…Roosevelt implemented the theory that (in [Shlaes’] words) “spending promoted growth, if government was big enough to spend enough.” In only 12 months, just one Roosevelt improvisation, the National Recovery Administration, “generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.” Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. …In 1936, for the first time in peacetime history, federal spending exceeded that of the states and localities combined.
…[A]s Roosevelt demonstrated and Shlaes reminds us, compassion, understood as making the “insecure” securely dependent, also makes the state flourish.
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Seeking a Political Savior
Conservative evangelical Christians are having trouble finding an appealing presidential candidate this year. Among the major Republican candidates, they note that Giuliani is pro-choice, Romney is Mormon, and McCain in 2000 called religious right leaders “agents of intolerance.”
I’d like to see a pollster ask conservative Christians two questions:
1. Would you support a presidential candidate who is divorced, has estranged relations with his children, never sees his grandchildren, rarely attends church, strongly opposes a law to ban gays from teaching school, and as governor signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law?
2. Would you support him if you knew his name was Ronald Reagan?
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A First Amendment for Broadcasting
Bill Monroe, who was moderator for NBC’s Meet the Press for about 10 years, is a longtime advocate of extending the First Amendment to broadcasting. Actually, I’m sure he thought that the First Amendment did cover all forms of the news media — but he knew that Congress and the courts didn’t see it that way, so he wanted an explicit amendment to make that clear.
Because his articles on this topic were published in the pre-Internet Dark Ages (yes, children, there are great ideas not online), I can’t link to any of them. But he briefly reprised the argument in the letters column of the Washington Post today, concluding:
Broadcasters are also open to government pressure through the Federal Communications Commission, whose members are appointed by the president. Newspapers are specifically protected against government interference by the granite wall known as the First Amendment.
When the present form of broadcast regulation was set up early in the previous century, nobody understood what powerful instruments of news and information would evolve from the primitive radio stations of that day. Now that we do understand it, we can repair that historic mistake. We can extend the clear, stirring language of the First Amendment to equal protection for freedom of the electronic media. The problem of allocating broadcast licenses does not have to cost the American people the benefit of free broadcasting.
The Anti-Universal Coverage Club Manifesto
The Anti-Universal Coverage Club is a list of scholars and citizens who reject the idea that government should ensure that all individuals have health insurance. It exists to challenge the idea that “universal coverage” is the best way to protect and promote health.
The following principles explain the club’s opposition to “universal coverage”:
- Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
- “Universal coverage” could be achieved only by forcing everyone to buy health insurance or by having government provide health insurance to all, neither of which is desirable.
- In a free society, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
- If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care, they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals, uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be forced by a policy of “universal coverage” to subsidize people via “insurance.”
To join, post something to your blog or email me here. If you blog about the club, pro or con, please send the link to that address as well.