Archives: December, 2012

Happy Repeal Day!

By
David Boaz

Today is a great day for freedom. On this day in 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, thus repealing Prohibition. My former colleague Brandon Arnold wrote about it a few years ago:

Prohibition isn’t a subject that should be studied by historians alone, as this failed experiment continues to have a significant impact on our nation.

Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a key force in the passage of Prohibition, survive to this day and continue to insist that Prohibition was a success and advocate for dry laws.

Prohibition-era state laws, many of which are still on the books today, created government-protected monopolies for alcohol distributors. These laws have survived for three-quarters of a century because of powerful, rent-seeking interest groups, despite the fact that they significantly raise costs and limit consumer options. And because of these distribution laws, it is illegal for millions of Americans to have wine shipped directly to their door.

To learn more about the history and legacy of Prohibition, check out my podcast and watch the live webcast of Cato’s policy forum, “Free to Booze: the 75th Anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition.”

Topics: 
General, Law and Civil Liberties

No, Teachers in Finland Are Not Paid Like Doctors

By
Jason Bedrick

Photo Credit: Skeptical Libertarian

A meme that is floating around the interwebs claims that Finland’s education system outperforms the United States because “We pay teachers like doctors, students enjoy over an hour of recess, and there’s no mandatory testing – the opposite of what America does.”

That all sounds great … it just isn’t true.

In Finland general practitioners earn, on average, about $70,000 per year, which is less than half of what doctors earn in the United States. The average salary for primary education teachers with 15 years experience in Finland is about $37,500, compared to $45,225 in the United States. Moreover, the cost of living in Finland is about 30% higher.

In short: higher teacher salaries are not what make Finland’s education system better than ours. And I suspect it isn’t recess either.

And, of course, having a curriculum that is more closely aligned with the PISA (the metric by which people judge Finland to be better) than almost any other industrialized nation may exaggerate Finland’s superiority significantly.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

With Purge, House GOP Leadership Reaches New Low

By
Tad DeHaven

In December 2010, I wrote that “An indicator of the incoming House Republican majority’s seriousness about cutting spending will be which members the party selects to head the various committees.” The final roster ended up leaving a lot to be desired from a limited government perspective. For example, the House Republican leadership and its allies went with Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY), aka “The Prince of Pork,” to head up the Appropriations Committee.

Two years later, the committee situation is about to get even worse now that the House Republican leadership has decided to send a message that casting a vote according to one’s beliefs instead of one’s instructions is a punishable offense. On Monday, four congressmen were booted from “plum” committee assignments for failing to sufficiently toe the leadership line. I suspect that the purge was motivated, at least in part, by Team Boehner’s desire to have the rest of the rank and file think twice before casting a “no” vote on whatever lousy deal is struck with the White House to avoid the “fiscal cliff.”

Three of the purged Republicans are returning members of the 2010 freshmen “Tea Party Class”: Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ), Justin Amash (R-MI), and Tim Huelskamp (R-KS). Over the past year, I have been keeping a loose record of how the freshmen voted on opportunities to eliminate programs and prevent spending increases. On seven particularly telling votes*, Schweikert and Amash voted in favor of limited government every time. Out of 87 freshmen, only Schweikert, Amash, and five others had a perfect record. Huelskamp was six for seven. He also was one of only four Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee to vote against the bloated farm bill that passed out of the committee in July. The fourth outcast, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), had become an irritant to the Republican establishment after turning against the Iraq War and associating himself with more libertarian Republicans like Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).

The best that can be said for Team Boehner thus far is that it isn’t Team Pelosi. A common excuse is that House Republicans have been constrained by Democratic control of the Senate and White House. While there is an element of truth to that claim, we’re talking about a House Republican majority that wouldn’t even vote to get rid of the loan guarantee program that led to the Solyndra debacle. The reality is that most Republicans were only ever interested in using Solyndra to score political points against the White House. Ditto pretty much every other White House spending endeavor that House Republicans claim to oppose.

*Votes were to terminate the Economic Development Administration, Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia, Essential Air Service program, Title 17 Energy Loan Guarantees, Community Block Development Grant program, against reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, and against the Continuing Appropriations Act in September.

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

Senate Rejects U.N. Disabled-Rights Treaty. Good!

By
Walter Olson

How bad is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which the U.S. Senate today declined to ratify by a vote of 61 in favor and 38 opposed, short of the needed two-thirds? I provide some highlights in a new piece at the Daily Caller:

Libertarians, along with all those concerned with the autonomy of the institutions of private civil life, please note: under Article 4, section 1, part (e), states must “take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination on the basis of disability by any person, organization or private enterprise.” (Yes, “any.”) The employment provisions of the current federal ADA apply to employers with more than 15 employees, but Article 27 (1)(a) would seem to prescribe doing away with any such threshold; it requires states to “Prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability with regard to all matters concerning all forms of employment.”

New government spending programs going beyond anything presently in federal law? Yes, galore. For example, one provision requires ratifying states to “ensure” access to “affordable” personal mobility technologies. Another new right not embodied in present federal law: that “[p]ersons with disabilities have access to a range of in-home, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance necessary to support living and inclusion in the community.” How much might all this cost? Another provision explains that with “regard to economic, social and cultural rights, each State Party undertakes to take measures to the maximum of its available resources [emphasis added] and, where needed, within the framework of international cooperation, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of these rights.” …

The convention’s mandates, often quite burdensome to private actors, roll on and on: a new right of the disabled “to have equal access to bank loans,” live “guides, readers and professional sign language interpreters, to facilitate accessibility to buildings and other facilities open to the public,” equal access (at whose expense?) to all “information and communications technologies and systems,” a new right to “disability-specific sporting and recreational activities,” and, in Section 25 (e), a new right of disabled persons not to be discriminated against in the provision of life insurance. Under the existing federal ADA, terminal illnesses ordinarily count as disabilities. What does it even mean for a terminally ill person not to be discriminated against in the provision of life insurance?

How have the New York Times and Washington Post, which have both editorialized in favor of the treaty, responded to such concerns? For the most part, they haven’t; they’ve simply repeated the canned talking points of treaty advocates, as when the Post editorially asserts that the measure “would not require the United States to change its laws” (can they even have read it?) and the New York Times claims, again in bald contradiction to the convention’s own text, that its recommendations “would not be binding on state or federal governments.” As 36 Senators pointed out in a letter criticizing the treaty, the U.S. Constitution’s Article 6, Section 2 establishes treaties that receive the advice and consent of the Senate as the “supreme law of the land.”

To save face, to be sure, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee adopted a resolution seeking to assure doubters (quoting the Times) “that the United States would surrender none of its sovereign authority by joining the convention.” And yet the treaty itself declares in its Article 46, Section 1: “Reservations incompatible with the object and purpose of the present Convention shall not be permitted.” As for the implications for state and local government, Article 4, Section 5 of the convention has this to say: “The provisions of the present Convention shall extend to all parts of federal states without any limitations or exceptions.”

Even today, the left-leaning Media Matters was still sticking with its talking points, its Hannah Groch-Begley claiming against all evidence that “U.S. law already meets the standards the treaty requests.” Perhaps enough senators actually read the 50 articles of the convention to know how far this is from the truth.

Topics: 
General, International Economics and Development

Meet the Press, Check the Facts

By
Steve H. Hanke

This Sunday (2 December 2012), David Gregory hosted a lively session of NBC’s Meet the Press. The focus of Sunday’s program was the so-called Fiscal Cliff. Gregory rounded up many of the usual Washington suspects, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and drilled them on their talking points.

Several times, in the course of Gregory’s questioning, he referred to President Bill Clinton’s tough 1993 budget deal. Throughout the broadcast, Gregory kept stressing the fact that the 1993 deal included defense cuts. For Gregory, those cuts were the flavor of the day.

This isn’t surprising. Indeed, most members of Washington’s chattering classes parrot the line that the economy boomed during the Clinton years because Clinton was the beneficiary of the so-called peace dividend, which allowed him to cut defense expenditures.

In fact, if we look carefully at the federal budget numbers, while Clinton did cut defense expenditures, as a percent of GDP, the majority of the Clinton squeeze came from non-defense expenditures. Indeed, as can be seen in the accompanying table, the non-defense squeeze accounted for 2.2 percentage points of President Clinton’s 3.9 total percentage point reduction in the relative size of the federal government.

Clinton squeezed the budget and squeezed hard, from all major angles. This was a case in which a president’s actions actually matched his rhetoric. Recall that, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he declared that “the era of big government is over.”

Clinton’s 1993 deal marked the beginning of the most dramatic decline in the federal government’s share of the U.S. economy since Harry Truman left office. The Clinton administration reduced government expenditures, as a percent of GDP, by 3.9 percentage points. Since 1952, no other president has even come close. At the end of his second term, President Clinton’s big squeeze left the size of government, as a percent of GDP, at 18.2 percent—the lowest level since 1966.

The table contains the facts. President Clinton knew how to squeeze both defense and non-defense federal expenditures. Indeed, he squeezed non-defense a bit harder than defense. Since 1952, the only other president who has been able to reduce the relative share of non-defense expenditures was Ronald Reagan. Forget the “peace dividend”—it’s all about the Clinton “squeeze dividend.”

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

Reading the Washington Lawyer Magazine

By
Tim Lynch

The flagship publication of the DC Bar Association is the Washington Lawyer.  The December issue reviews a new book by legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin, The Oath.  Here’s an excerpt from the magazine’s regular reviewer, Ronald Goldfarb:

What is clear is Toobin’s ability to tell intriguing stories, and also to present sound overviews of important cases and the jurisprudence they represent without dumbing down the legal analysis. An example is his story behind the notorious District of Columbia v. Heller case dealing with gun control. I know the inside story from the man behind the case (not Dick Heller, the selected plaintiff, but Robert Levy, the chair of the board of directors of Cato Institute who dreamed up the case and managed its route to new constitutional law), and Toobin’s story rings true. Toobin’s characterization of the politics, history, and constitutional law surrounding this very important decision is smart and informative. His conclusion that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion was “an improvisation designed to reach a policy goal” is ironic. Scalia argues that the Constitution is “dead,” not a living document, and Toobin shows how perverted Scalia’s theory is by using the justice’s own words and reasoning in Heller. Rather than an example of his repeated preaching that the Constitution is “textualist” and “originalist,” Scalia’s opinion demonstrates that the Constitution is what the justices say it is: always dressed up in chameleonic jurisprudence to suit the justices’ predilections and to reach their political conclusions. (Bush v. Gore is a classic example.)

There you have it: A sound overview without dumbing anything down.  Cato chairman Bob Levy “dreamed up” an idea about some constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Then Justice Scalia said, “My predilections match your dream!”  Scalia then cobbled together some nice-sounding arguments and now America has to  live with this darn Heller precedent.

Mr. Toobin, the book author, makes the claim that Scalia was once a “conservative intellectual” but is now a “right wing crank.” The book reviewer, Mr. Goldfarb, then informs us that Toobin’s treatment of the justices is “quite balanced.”  (I know you don’t believe me—so go read it yourself.)

For a quick blog post, suffice it to say that Scalia was not alone on this. Four other justices agreed with his conclusion in Heller. I would also note that distinguished liberal scholars—Sanford Levinson, William Van Alstyne,  and Nat Hentoff, to name a few—hold similar views of the Second Amendment.

For more on the Heller case and the Second Amendment, go here and here.

For another look at the worldview of establishment liberalism, go here.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

A Good Day for Property Rights

By
Roger Pilon

Property owners enjoyed a qualified win in the Supreme Court this morning when a unanimous Court (Justice Kagan recused) decided that “government-induced flooding temporary in duration gains no automatic exemption from Takings Clause inspection.” The case, Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, was brought by AGFC, which owns and operates 23,000 acres of land as a wildlife refuge and recreational preserve. Clearwater Dam, a federal flood control project, lies 115 miles upstream. Water is released from the dam in quantities governed by a pre-approved “management plan” that considers agricultural, recreational, and other effects downstream.

Between 1993 and 2000, the federal government released more water than authorized under the plan. AGFC repeatedly objected that these excess releases flooded the preserve during its growing season, which significantly damaged and eventually decimated tree populations. In 2001, the government acknowledged the havoc its flooding had wreaked on AGFC’s land and ceased plan deviations. By then, however, the preserve and its trees were severely damaged, requiring costly reclamation measures, so AGFC sued the government, claiming damages under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. Today, the Supreme Court agreed, reversing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Earlier, Cato had joined the Pacific Legal Foundation on an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case, which it did. We then joined the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Atlantic Legal Foundation with a second amicus brief urging the Court to uphold the Fifth Amendment rights of property owners whose land is destroyed by the federal government.

As is so often the case with the Court’s property rights jurisprudence, however, today’s decision was not an unqualified win for property owners. Because there is “no magic formula” for determining whether a particular government action constitutes a taking of property, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the Court, “the Court has recognized few invariable rules in this area.” It has drawn some bright lines: regulations that constitute a permanent physical occupation of property or that require an owner to sacrifice all economically beneficial uses of his property will be ruled a taking. But in other cases, the Court will weigh several “factors.” Here, for example, in deciding whether the temporary flooding was a taking and hence compensable under the Takings Clause, the Court weighed the duration of the flooding, the degree to which the flooding was an intended or foreseeable result of the government’s action, the character of the land at issue, the severity of the interference, and—drawing from its infamously opaque Penn Central opinion—the owner’s “reasonable investment-backed expectations.”

Thus, the case is not over yet. Because the government had challenged several of the trial court’s fact-findings, including those relating to causation, forseeability, substantiality, and the amount of damages, the Court remanded the case for further proceedings. Still, the basic principle was settled: temporary government-induced flooding enjoys no automatic exemption from Takings Clause inspection. And that’s a win.

Topics: 
General, Law and Civil Liberties

Pages