In Indiana the other night, two grassroots groups–one on the left, the other on the right–got together to discuss the merits of state schooling, home schooling, and private school choice programs. There doesn’t seem to have been any high-profile organization orchestrating the event. It was just two groups of citizens getting together to try to find the best way forward on education policy. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.

The Internal Revenue Code is nightmarishly complex, as illustrated by this video. Americans spend more than 7 billion hours each year in a hopeless effort to figure out how to deal with more than 7 million words of tax law and regulation.

Why does this mess exist? The simple answer is that politicians benefit from the current mess, using their power over tax laws to raise campaign cash, reward friends, punish enemies, and play politics. This argument certainly has merit, and it definitely helps explain why the political class is so hostile to a simple and fair flat tax.

But a big part of the problem is that tax lawyers dominate the tax-lawmaking process. Almost all the decision-making professionals at the tax-writing committees (Ways & Means Committee in the House and Finance Committee in the Senate) are lawyers, as are the vast majority of tax policy people at the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

This has always rubbed me the wrong way. Yes, some lawyers are needed if for no other reason than to figure out how new loopholes, deductions, credits, and other provisions can be integrated into Rube-Goldberg monstrosity of existing law.

But part of me has always wondered whether lawyers deliberately or subconsciously make the system complex because it serves their interests. I know many tax lawyers who are now getting rich in private practice by helping their clients navigate the complicated laws and regulations that they helped implement. For these people, the time they spent on Capitol Hill, in the Treasury, or at the IRS was an investment that enables today’s lucrative fees.

I freely admit that this is a sour perspective on how Washington operates, but it certainly is consistent with the “public choice” theory that people in government behave in ways that maximize their self interest.

There’s now an interesting book that takes a broader look at this issue, analyzing the extent to which the legal profession looks out for its own self interest. Written by Benjamin H. Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System explains that the legal profession has self-serving tendencies.

Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, interviews Professor Barton about his new book.

I freely confess that I’m looking at this issue solely through my narrow prism of tax policy. But since Barton’s thesis meshes with my observations that tax lawyers benefit from a corrupt tax system, I’m sympathetic to the notion that the problem is much broader.

One of the most qoted lines from Shakespeare’s Henry VI is, “let’s kill all the lawyers.” But rather than making lawyer jokes, it would be a better idea to figure out how to limit the negative impact of self-serving behavior — whether by lawyers or any other profession that might misuse the coercive power of government.

This is one of many reasons why decentralization is a good idea. If people and businesses have the freedom to choose the legal system with the best features, that restrains the ability of an interest group — including lawyers — to manipulate any one system for their private advantage. This new study by Professors Henry Butler and Larry Ribstein is a good explanation of why allowing “choice of law” yields superior results.

From today’s edition of Farm​pol​i​cy​.com:

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the American Sugar Alliance all recently expressed delight that Kansas GOP Senator Pat Roberts will be the new Ranking Member of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Senate Democrats deserve credit for this much: in voting to repeal the so-called “1099 reporting mandate,” they have acknowledged that this small part of Obamacare will be a disaster. With time and education, perhaps they will see what most Americans already see: The rest of Obamacare is a disaster too — a monumental one — for patients, doctors, employers, the Constitution, and individual freedom.

At this point, even the most ardent Obamacare supporters must have noticed that the law has not been well received. As public opposition further manifests itself, perhaps some supporters will begin to reconsider their fealty to this law.

It has not been a good week for Obamacare. Another court ruled that the bill was unconstitutional, while it took a party-line vote in the U.S. Senate to avoid a legislative repeal. Meanwhile, chipping away at the legislation began, with the Senate voting to repeal one of the bill’s most unpopular provisions, a requirement that businesses file 1099 tax forms on even small purchases. Supporters of the bill are bailing as fast as they can, but the ship is sinking rapidly.

On the National Interest’s Skeptics blog, I discuss Steve Walt’s article in the latest Foreign Policy magazine: “Where Do Bad Ideas Come From?” Walt explains why discredited ideas about foreign policy survive despite all the study and debate we give to them in this country. He is really talking about failure in what John Stuart Mill calls the “marketplace of ideas”—the tendency of free speech to bring debate that promotes good ideas and demotes bad ones, driving public policy toward improvement.

My take is that Walt’s impressive analysis has two flaws. First, he thinks it wise and possible to free policy debate from the clutches of interest groups. Second, he fails to appreciate how politics differs from academic semimars. Ideas about policy are generally the product, rather than the cause, of differing preferences about policy. They are tools to rally political support, not hypotheses that their authors are eager to test. Political debate tends to reify divisions rather than unify people around mutally-acknowledged truths.

From my post:

Walt writes that “this problem with self-interested individuals and groups interfering in the policy process appears to be getting worse.” That sentence carries the quixotic and undemocratic assumption that there once existed another kind of policy-making process, one free of self-interested actors, where all participants honestly argued in service of the national interest, and that those halcyon days can be restored. But a marketplace of ideas without self-interested groups and actors would be one robbed of the lion’s share of intellectual capital. Self-interest is the engine of policy-making in democracy, not its enemy.

Walt thinks that either the public or the politicians that serve them are like judges, weighing contending views to arrive at wise policy; or like academics, studying ideas to arrive at preferences, which they simply enact. A more accurate description of policy-making comes from pluralism (pluralist scholars include David Truman, Edward Banfield, Charles Lindblom, James Q. Wilson, and Robert Dahl), which imagines a more intense, but less efficient, marketplace of ideas. The American government, pluralists tell us, is an arena for the competition of interest groups (ideological or economic), manifested in pressure groups and governmental agencies. Collective action theory explains that only these concentrated interests will be reliably motivated to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Those interests’ contention is our politics; its current outcome is policy. Presidents preside over this fray, but their control is far less than we generally imagine. They accept the status quo far more than they change it, and having accepted it, they sell that compromise as their own policy, using ideas to match it to the national interest.

Bad ideas then persist because they are useful weapons in policy-fights. Policy-makers are more like lawyers than judges, using arguments about how their preferred policies serve the national interest to win adherents. Walt cites the resurrection of domino theory to illustrate his argument, arguing as if its intellectual defeat would prevent the policies it justifies. Instead, if no one believed in the domino theory, hawks would simply employ another argument about why we should fight in Afghanistan, or wherever we are next.

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6, so let’s celebrate his life by comparing the success of his pro-market policies with the failure of Barack Obama’s policies (which are basically a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies, so this is not a partisan jab).

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has a fascinating (at least for economic geeks) interactive webpage that allows readers to compare economic downturns and recoveries, both on the basis of output and employment.

The results are remarkable. Reagan focused on reducing the burden of government and the economy responded. Obama (and Bush) tried the opposite approach, but spending, bailouts, and intervention have not worked. This first chart shows economic output.

The employment chart below provides an equally stark comparison. If anything, this second chart is even more damning since employment has not bounced back from the trough. But that shouldn’t be too surprising. Why create jobs when government is subsidizing unemployment and penalizing production? And we already know the so-called stimulus has been a flop.

None of this should be interpreted to mean Reagan is ready for sainthood. He made plenty of compromises during his eight years in office, and some of them were detours in the wrong direction. But the general direction was positive, which is why he’s the best President of my lifetime.*

*Though he may not be the best President of the 20th Century.