A View from Ankara

By
Christopher A. Preble

Ankara, Turkey — We arrived in Ankara this evening after some sightseeing on the Aegean coast, from the resort town of Kusadasi we traveled to the ancient city of Ephesus. These are the most impressive ruins from the Roman period that I’ve ever seen (excepting Rome).

The amphitheater (pictured below) seats over 24,000 people and is appropriately famous for its sheer size, but the city as a whole was impressive, boasting an estimated population of 250,000 people at its peak circa the 1st or 2nd century AD.

We took a one-hour flight from Izmir to Ankara, the capital. As in Izmir and Istanbul, I was struck by the sense of confidence and growth. Modern buildings are under construction everywhere, and there is an ebullient mood. We passed a large festival with carnival style rides. Cars speed along the main road through the center of town. It is an impressive place. But it will be interesting to see if this upbeat attitude can be maintained in the midst of widespread strikes.

When I first arrived in Turkey, a traveling companion helped me to understand its complexity. The society is characterized by multiple social and cultural divides and disparate identities. Some of the more obvious that I alluded to yesterday include the divide between secular and religious people, and between the military and civilian officials. There is also, of course, the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims. Among Muslims there are those who are very observant and conservative, and others less so. Most are Sunni, but there is also an Alawite community in Turkey, especially near the Syrian border. There are ethnic divisions, most prominently (and sometimes tragically) between the Turks and Kurds, but there are regional divides as well, for example, between the more laid back communities in the coastal cities, and the bustling cosmopolitanism characteristic in the mega-city Istanbul, or here in Ankara. Lastly, there is a traditional political divide between left and right, and various gradations along that continuum.

Consider, then, that someone can be a leftist, a Kurd, and a moderate Sunni Muslim. One can be a relatively conservative, practicing Muslim, and a supporter of the center-right AKP, but also respect a strict separation between church and state, and thus oppose regulations that would impose their beliefs on others. Other more religiously conservative Turks might want tougher laws restricting the use of tobacco or the consumption of alcohol, and be enthused about Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts in this regard. One can be a moderate leftist, a supporter of the main opposition party, the CHP, but also a practicing Muslim.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Federal Judge to Kentucky Bureaucrats: Stop Prohibiting Free Competition

By
Ilya Shapiro

Last Thursday, a federal district court judge issued an injunction blocking the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet – the genteel name given the Bluegrass State’s department of transportation – from enforcing the state’s anti-competitive licensing law for movers.

In Bruner v. Zawacki, which is being litigated by Cato adjunct scholar Timothy Sandefur and our other friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation, small business owner Raleigh Bruner argues that the licensing laws, which allow existing moving companies to file “protests” to block new companies from opening, create a “Competitor’s Veto” that has no rational basis. Judge Danny Reeves ordered the state not to enforce those laws, at least until he has the opportunity to issue a complete opinion – but he strongly indicated that he already thinks those laws are unconstitutional:

The Sixth Circuit has held that “protecting a discrete interest group from economic competition is not a legitimate governmental purpose.” And it appears that the notice, protest, and hearing procedure in the statutes – both facially and as applied – operate solely to protect existing moving companies from outside economic competition. The defendants have admitted that they know of no instance where, upon a protest by an existing moving company, a new applicant has been granted a certificate … .  [O]ver the past five years, no protest filed has been regarding an applicant’s safety record. Likewise, no applications have been denied on the grounds that the applicant was a danger to public health, safety, or welfare.

You can read more about the case at PLF’s Liberty Blog.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies

NH Court: You Can Choose a School So Long as It’s Secular

By
Jason Bedrick

Earlier today, a New Hampshire district court upheld the “Live Free or Die” state’s nascent scholarship tax credit (STC) program, but limited the use of scholarships to non-religious private schools.

Earlier this year, the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit claiming that New Hampshire’s school choice law was unconstitutional under the state’s Blaine Amendment, which prohibits the public funding of religious schools. The law grants tax credits to corporations in return for contributions to non-profit scholarship organizations that fund low-and-middle-income students attending the schools of their choice.

The decision hinged on whether or not tax credits constitute “public money.” Previously, the U.S. Supreme Court held that they do not, noting that when “taxpayers choose to contribute to [scholarship organizaions], they spend their own money, not money the State has collected from respondents or from other taxpayers.”

Likewise, the Arizona state supreme court upheld the constitutionality of Arizona’s STC program, forcefully rejecting the “public money” argument:

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “public money” is “[r]evenue received from federal, state, and local governments from taxes, fees, fines, etc.” Black’s Law Dictionary 1005 (6th ed.1990). As respondents note, however, no money ever enters the state’s control as a result of this tax credit. Nothing is deposited in the state treasury or other accounts under the management or possession of governmental agencies or public officials. Thus, under any common understanding of the words, we are not here dealing with “public money.”

While neither the Arizona supreme court nor U.S. Supreme Court serve as binding precedent for how a New Hampshire court may interpret the New Hampshire state constitution, their reasoning should have carried great weight as the question before the court was the same. Nevertheless, the NH trial court rejected this traditional understanding of “public money” in favor of the plaintiff’s “all your money are belong to us” argument. In the words of the trial court judge:

This Court concludes that the program uses “public funds,” or “money raised by taxation” … Money that would otherwise be flowing to the government is diverted for the very specific purpose of providing scholarships to students.

This is precisely the understanding of “public money” that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected: 

Respondents’ contrary position assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the … State Treasury.

The U.S. Supreme Court held, in essence, that your money is your own whether or not it qualifies for a tax deduction of some kind. A taxpayer’s money only becomes “public money” once the government actually collects it in the form of taxes. The NH trial court judge, by contrast, holds that any taxpayer’s income on which the government might have a claim is instantly “public money,” even before collection, and it remains so even if the existence of a tax credit or deduction means that government will never collect it.

Unfortunately, the legal theater of the absurd doesn’t end there. Charlie Arlinghaus, President of the Josiah Bartlett Center, which advised legislators on crafting the law, noted that the trial court’s logic leads to another absurd conclusion:

This ruling is particularly odd. The entire program is fine unless a parent by their own choice chooses a religious school. By this logic a program is illegal if neutral and only legal if actively hostile to religion. 

The Institute for Justice, which intervened on behalf of the Network for Education, the state’s first scholarship organization, will be appealing the decision to the state supreme court. IJ Senior Attorney Richard D. Komer stated:

The court’s ruling inflicts again the blatant discrimination that motivated New Hampshire’s bigoted Blaine Amendment in the first place.  We will immediately seek a stay of the court’s decision so that parents receiving scholarships can choose the educational options that best suit their child’s unique educational needs, regardless of whether that is a religious or secular school.

The trial court’s order halting the program is wrong on both the facts and the law. As a factual matter, the program is funded with private, not public dollars.  As a legal matter, the federal Constitution prohibits states from preferring non-religious schools over religious schools, which is precisely what the court’s ruling does.

We can only hope that the Granite State’s supreme court will exercise better judgment.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

We Need Real Change at the G8 Meeting

By
Doug Bandow

The G8 is meeting in Northern Ireland’s Belfast. The group of important industrial states is chaired this year by British Prime Minister David Cameron.  London’s three top objectives are trade, taxation, and transparency. 

No doubt, there will be a flurry of ponderous public statements and breathless press analyses. But as I argue on National Interest online, the meeting likely will be a waste. 

Trade liberalization is a worthy goal, but the U.S. and European commitment to agricultural subsidies has essentially killed the Doha round under the World Trade Organization. America wants to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but including Japan, which wants to protect its farmers, while excluding China, which is the largest economy in Asia, makes the process more than a little complicated. As for a U.S.-European Union agreement, France is standing in the way and other member states are likely to resist liberalization in one area or another.

Only on taxes is more progress likely—unfortunately. As Dan Mitchell long has pointed out, attacks on “tax havens” and such are primarily attempts to mulct more money out of the productive to subsidize the influential. (Influential and greedy. Indeed, higher taxes are used to satisfy perhaps the basest of human emotions, envy.)

Transparency is a better objective, but the greatest offenders are non-G8 members, especially in the Third World. As I point out:

The most important single step in this direction the G8 could take would be to discourage rather than encourage government-to-government transfers, or misnamed “foreign aid.” (G8 gatherings usually include boilerplate promises to up official development assistance.) The wealthy nations should cut the financial windpipe of the most corrupt and wasteful regimes.  Private humanitarian and development assistance from NGOs to private people, and private investment and trade to private companies, are far more likely to deliver positive economic and social results with more limited opportunities for graft and abuse.

Finally, the G8 involves a curious anomaly for the U.S. While Washington pursues greater economic integration in the name of encouraging prosperity and growth, the U.S. could achieve the same result by reducing subsidies to the same countries. The Cold War has been over for 24 years. World War II ended 68 years ago. It really is time for Washington to stop defending Europe and Japan, as well as a number of other, non-G8 defense dependents, such as South Korea.

The Obama administration could make this G8 meeting more useful than normal by adding real substance to the agenda.

Topics: 
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics

Richard Epstein’s Ricochet Post on the NSA

By
Tim Lynch

Over at the Ricochet website, Richard Epstein elaborates on his defense of the NSA surveillance programs that were recently exposed by Edward Snowden.  In this post, I want to scrutinize some of Epstein’s observations and arguments.

Epstein begins by waving off the track record of government abuse generally.  Forget about the recent IRS scandal and the Associated Press wiretaps, he says, we must focus instead on the “parts of the government” that are organized to address terrorist activity.  According to Epstein, those parts of the government “seem to have performed well.”  Thus, he concludes, we should have confidence in the federal government’s efforts to stop terrorists.

Let’s take a closer look at the “parts of the government” that address terrorism:

•    The Federal Bureau of Investigation:  The Inspector General of the Department of Justice found that between 2003 and 2007, the FBI violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times as agents collected phone and financial records.  A few years later, another investigation found that the FBI repeatedly broke the law while monitoring telecommunications.  Major telecom companies had their employees detailed to work in FBI office space and they would respond to very informal verbal requests for phone records, including the “calling circles” of certain reporters.  One FBI agent said it was like having an ATM next to his desk.

•    The Central Intelligence Agency: It is still hard to believe that the American government hid prisoners from the Red Cross and engaged in torture, but it happened.  In 2005, CIA Director Porter Goss went on a TV show and said “What we do does not come close to torture … We do debriefings.”  The American public was repeatedly misled about the prisoner policies, but we later learned about the “black sites” and “ghost prisoners.”  The CIA also destroyed audio and video tapes of its interrogation practices even after the federal courts issued orders to preserve such evidence.

•    The Pentagon:  We have also seen problems in the U.S. military.  The Pentagon kept a database of persons who protested against the Iraq war.  We also know that American prisoners, such as John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla, were badly mistreated while in military custody.  And those were among the most highly publicized cases.  (The treatment of Bradley Manning is worth mentioning even though he is not an accused terrorist.)  For the non-publicized cases, let’s just recall the letter from U.S. Army Captain Ian Fishback to Senator John McCain: “Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”   

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Cato Brief Gains National Acclaim

By
Ilya Shapiro

Remember Bond v. United States, that typical story of adultery, federalism, and chemical weapons?  Cato has actually filed four briefs in Bond, most recently last month, the last three making the point that the president can’t expand federal constitutional powers simply by signing a treaty.

Our arguments are based on a 2005 law review article by Georgetown law professor (and Cato senior fellow) Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, the primary author of these last three briefs. It’s certainly unusual for a law review article to play a pivotal role in a Supreme Court case, but, as those following Bond know, there’s little “usual” about this case. 

Maybe that’s why the national media is starting to pay attention to our attempt to get the Supreme Court to be faithful to this particular corner of the Constitution: last week, the National Law Journal declared our Bond filing its “brief of the week.”

For more on this case, and our arguments, watch the lunch panel we had on Friday, featuring Nick Rosenkranz and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Bond in October.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

First Impressions from Turkey

By
Christopher A. Preble
Kusadasi, Turkey, on the Aegean Sea – My impressions from my first 24 hours in Turkey are decidedly personal and narrow–I’m observing Turkish society through a straw. So notwithstanding the images of protest and unrest that are prevalent on Twitter and the international media, the vibe generally is of a confident, vibrant society that is proud of its progress.
 
I arrived in Istanbul yesterday (Saturday), and we spent most of today in Izmir (the ancient city of Smyrna). Doug Bandow wrote a fine column on the political turmoil–I’m reluctant to call it unrest, which makes it sound more serious than it is. But I have begun to pick up on some of the currents of opinion in this complex country that might help to explain how a minor dispute over some trees in Gezi Park has let loose some long-simmering feelings about Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).
 
I’ve seen lots of pictures on Twitter that prove the protests are not limited to a few hundred (or thousand) in Taksim Square. From my limited perspective on the first evening, at the Istanbul Gonen Hotel, and this morning at the airport, most Turks appeared to be completely oblivious. A wedding party at the hotel went well into the night (though I was too tired to care).
 

Istanbul is a massive, sprawling city, of at least 15 million people. There is construction going on everywhere, but also a fair amount left to do. The back streets are pretty much what you’d expect in a city like this (which is to say crowded and chaotic), but the dedicated bus lanes that operate in parallel with the main highway and elsewhere are popular and, I’m told by someone who uses them regularly, extremely convenient. The primary highways flow smoothly, including from and to the airport. 
 
Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul, is given credit for initiating a series of public works projects that will ease some of the traffic congestion, and various economic and governance reforms that have helped Turkey to achieve stunning growth over the past decade. Even during the economic doldrums in the United States and Europe, Turkey has done well. 
 
After a short flight this morning from Istanbul to Izmir, we met over lunch with Cevat Durak the mayor of Karsiyaka, one of the municipalities (about 325,000 people) adjacent to Izmir. Izmir, and Karsiyaka especially, is a stronghold of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). The CHP is proud of Izmir. Proud, for example, of its ability to maintain a hold on municipal politics, despite AKP attempts to thwart them. More generally, Izmir is proud of being different from Istanbul, and the rest of Turkey. Residents who know a bit about the United States liken it to the more laid back west coast. Think of it as the San Diego of Turkey.
 
Turkish flags, the iconic red with a white crescent and star, are everywhere. In Izmir, however, I saw many flags with Ataturk’s picture superimposed. I had to have one (8 Turkish Lira in the market). I figure this will be a collector’s item when Erdogan bans them.
 
He couldn’t actually do that, of course. Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, is an icon here. His picture is ubiquitous. In some circles, however, and especially among some in the AKP, to be called a Kemalist would be an insult. Erdogan has risen to prominence by promising to push back on some of the excesses of Kemalism, which some see as being anti-religious as opposed to merely secular. Others welcome Erdogan’s assertion of civilian control over the military. 
 
But not everyone is entirely pleased. In the rally held down one of the main streets in Izmir, a little after 6 p.m. local time, there were quite a few Turkish flags with Ataturk. I also saw banners for the leftist parties, the TKP and DSIP. The message on many small banners Boyun Egme, translates roughly to “don’t give up” or “don’t bow down” (to Erdogan and the AKP).
 
Finally, we arrived here in Kusadasi, a beautiful seaside town popular with European tourists. A medium-sized cruise ship was tied up at the pier not far from a Byzantium-era castle/fortress. New and old reside comfortably side by side here in Turkey (except when a new construction project stumbles upon ancient artifacts buried deep below the surface, which apparently happens with some regularity). 
 
As I checked into my hotel, a little after 10 pm, another small rally (several hundred people, I’m guessing) walked just beneath my window. I didn’t see the same left-wing party banners as in Izmir, and most of the flags were traditional Turkish (i.e. without Ataturk’s picture). But the words Gezi and Taksim were obvious even to my untrained (i.e. non-Turkish speaking) eye. This wasn’t a pro-Erdogan rally.
 
Kusadasi, Turkey
 
We’ll be seeing more of the coast tomorrow morning by boat, and then off to Ephesus, an ancient town with both religious and cultural significance. I’ll have time to gather my thoughts, and I’ll try to write more about my impressions of the political winds after we arrive in Ankara.
Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Pages