Farmers Starting to Resent Strings Attached to Subsidies

By
Sallie James

Earlier this week, farming and some conservation groups announced that they had come to a deal to link eligibility for crop insurance premium subsidies to compliance with conservation measures. In return, in one of the great sell-outs in modern times, the conservation groups agreed not to push for payment limits or means testing on farm subsidies.

But it seems that the new link between conservation and government support for crop insurance has angered the House Agriculture Committee Chairman, Frank Lucas. From the DTN Ag Policy Blog yesterday:

Lucas, a Republican from Oklahoma, told DTN off the House floor Wednesday that he has a philosophical problem with various lobby groups “tying strings to how farmers farm” and dictating terms to producers when the farm bill is supposed to be about raising food and fiber.

“My perspective has always been, very sincerely, if a farm bill is about raising food — and I know 80% of it now is about making sure people have enough to eat, helping them buy their food — but if it is about raising food, farmers should have the tools to raise the food and fiber,” Lucas said. “And if you engage in whole series of things, such as you can’t get crop insurance unless you plant in a certain way, on a certain day, in a certain direction, or you can’t access a variety of other programs, then we aren’t having a farm bill that helps farmers raise food and fiber, but we have a social tool here that’s used to direct how farmers use their lives and conduct their business.” [emphasis added]

You’ll excuse me if I am having trouble summoning much sympathy for your special interest friends, Mr Lucas. It’s just that I feel that having to accept inconvenient conditions should be expected when you suck at the government teat. The Farm Bill was designed as a social tool, and you and your colleagues over the years have added more “social tools” like food stamps, environmental programs and energy subsidies in order to secure sufficient votes for your pork. Complaining now that all these other people are ruining your party is, to say the least, a bit rich.

If farmers don’t want to be directed on “how [they] use their lives and conduct their business,” then I suggest they start sending their cheques back. Ending farm programs will truly Free the Farm.

Topics: 
Energy and Environment, Tax and Budget Policy, Trade and Immigration

President Ashcroft

By
David Boaz

President Obama has drawn some fire for telling Ohio State University graduates, among other things:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

His critics included my colleagues Roger Pilon in the Wall Street Journal, who deplored Obama’s conflation of the family and the federal government, and Gene Healy in the Washington Examiner, who noted the president’s attempt “to reframe skepticism toward overweening federal power as “cynicism.’”

I was reminded of another political official’s warning back in 2001:

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists - for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies.

That was attorney general John Ashcroft testifying before Congress on the Patriot Act and the Bush administration’s exercise of power after 9/11. It’s a standard theme of those in power: If you question our actions, if you protest the expansion of government and the loss of freedom, you’re aiding the enemy. You’re undermining our faith in government.

The Founders of this nation had a different view. James Madison warned us that since men are not angels, we can’t entrust them with unlimited power. And Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions against the Alien and Sedition Acts, 

that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism–free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power: that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go….In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

That’s the spirit of freedom and self-government: Jealous of our rights and liberties, confident in our Constitution, and skeptical about power and about the men and women who seek it.

As for the president’s much-quoted attack on “individual ambition,” I addressed that in the Wall Street Journal back in 2008 when he made a similar argument to Wesleyan grads.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

Libertarians Shouldn’t Want Perfect Security—Reply to Professor Epstein

By
Jim Harper

I was pleased to see last week that Professor Epstein had penned a response to my criticism of his recent piece on Hoover’s Defining Ideas in which he argued against treating protection of civil liberties and privacy as “nonnegotiable” in the context of counterterrorism. It is not the disagreement that is pleasing, of course, but the opportunity to air it, which can foster discussion of these issues among libertarians while illustrating to the broader world how seriously libertarians take both security and liberty.

What’s most important in Professor Epstein’s rejoinder is what comes at the end. He says that I should “comment constructively on serious proposals” rather than take an a priori position that civil liberties and privacy will often impede expansions of government power proposed in the name of counterterrorism.

I believe that Professor Epstein and I share the same prior commitments–to limited government, free markets, and peace. Having left it implicit before, I’ll state that I, too, believe that protection of life and property is the primary function of the state. But I also believe that excesses in pursuit of security can cost society and our liberties more than they produce in benefits.

Some years of work on counterterrorism, civil liberties, and privacy bring me to my conclusions. I had put in a half-decade of work on privacy before my six years of service on the Department of Homeland Security’s privacy advisory committee began in 2005. While interacting with numerous DHS components and their programs, I helped produce the DHS Privacy Committee’s risk-management-oriented “Framework for Privacy Analysis of Programs, Technologies, and Applications.” From time to time, I’ve also examined programs in the Science and Technology Directorate at DHS through the Homeland Security Institute. My direct knowledge of the issues in counterterrorism pales in comparison to the 30+ experts my Cato colleagues and I convened in private and public conferences in 2009 and 2010, of course, but my analysis benefitted from that experience and from co-editing the Cato book: Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix It.

Whether I’m operating from an inappropriate a priori position or not, I don’t accept Professor Epstein’s shift of the burden. I will certainly comment constructively when the opportunity arises, but it is up to the government, its defenders, and here Professor Epstein to show that security programs are within the government’s constitutional powers, that such programs are not otherwise proscribed by the constitution, and that they cost-effectively make our society more secure.

The latter two questions are collapsed somewhat by the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonableness, or “fit” between means and ends when a search or seizure occurs. And to the extent I can discern the program that Professor Epstein prefers, I have commented on it as constructively as I can.

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Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Bureau of Justice Statistics Reports Firearm Homicides are Down 39% Since 1993; Continues to Severely Under-report Defensive Gun Use

By
Trevor Burrus

Yesterday, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a special report, Firearm Violence, 1993-2011. Not surprisingly, at least for those who follow crime statistics, the report shows that firearm homicides went down 39% between 1993 and 2011. The report also reconfirms many things that gun-rights supporters have been saying for decades: that less than 2% of prison inmates in 2004 bought their firearm from a “flea market or gun show,” and that “2% of state inmates and 3% of federal inmates were armed with a military-style semiautomatic or fully automatic firearm.”

Also not surprising is that very few people know about the dramatically reduced crime rate. Also released yesterday was a Pew study on Americans’ perceptions of the crime rate. Despite cutting the murder rate nearly in half in less than twenty years, only 12% of Americans believe that gun crime has dropped in the past two decades. Fifty-six percent believe it has increased, and 26% believe it stayed the same. This is not new. People often don’t realize how much better things are getting, and this fact can push public policy in misguided directions.  

Many have tried to explain this precipitous drop in crime, including one study that connected it to the decreased amount of lead in the environment. Whatever the cause, one thing is clear: there are about 50 million more guns in America now than in 1993 and crime did not go up.

Now, I will not oversell that statistic, not only because it does not prove the thesis “more guns, less crime,” but also because overselling statistics is a big problem in the gun control debate for both sides. For example, to take another statistic from the BJS report: the number of times per year people use guns to stop or curtail crime.   

Despite the fact that the BJS is quite good at some things, it is uniquely bad at measuring the level of defensive gun use (DGU) in America. And despite the fact that I can easily demonstrate this to anyone with even the slightest inclination to allow their minds to be changed, I am not optimistic that the gun controllers will listen.  

Gun controllers are constantly accusing gun-rights supporters of over-estimating the instances of DGU, and their primary source is the data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which they rely on unquestioningly. The disparity between the BJS statistics and other studies is stark, as much as 30x. For example, yesterday’s BJS report claims that, between 2007-2011, crime victims used guns to stop or curtail crime 235,700 times. This aligns with the general tendency for the BJS to record between 60,000 and 100,000 DGUs per year. By contrast, Florida State’s award-winning criminologist Gary Kleck has found there may be as many as 2.5 million DGU instances per year. Gun-controllers almost always dismiss Kleck’s data as wildly inaccurate, if not NRA-funded propaganda (it is neither), and instead unquestioningly accept the BJS numbers. See, for example, this study by the Violence Policy Center, which simply regurgitates the BJS numbers, and this discussion of the VPC report at Mother Jones. This New York Times post on the VPC report sneeringly offers this observation on the disparity between Kleck’s and the BJS’s numbers:

Readers can judge for themselves whether the V.P.C. or the N.R.A. is likely to have better numbers. The V.P.C. used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The N.R.A.’s estimate is the result of a telephone survey conducted by a Florida State University criminologist.

I accept the Times’s invitation, and I will judge for myself:

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Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

The Science vs. the Pseudoscience of Extreme Weather

By
Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger

Over at Capital Weather Gang, the always-perceptive Jason Samenow details a recent Twitterspat between Dot Earth’s (aka The New York Times’) Andrew Revkin and Penn State’s Michael Mann over attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change—tornadoes, in particular.

Revkin tweeted to ask whether the folks who were alluding to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions being behind the major (and deadly) tornado outbreak during the spring of 2011 were willing to attribute the record lack of tornado occurrences during the past 12 months to the same cause.

Revkin could have very well asked this same question about all kinds of bad weather—blizzards, hurricanes, droughts, floods, record heat, record cold, summer in Washington, winter in Chicago, etc.

Used to be, when the weather was bad, folks would logically cite Mark Twain’s “if you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”  Now, someone will show up on TV who is quick to point out that this sort of thing “is consistent with” expectations of global warming.  These same folks tend nap when the weather is hunky-dory, and to go into hibernation when the extreme weather category of their previous pronouncement has a hiatus.

Since the bang-up year of 2011, the number of tornadoes has dropped off the table, with the last 12 months showing the fewest since systematic observations began in the 1950s.

And like tornados, major hurricane strikes have also become scarce, in fact, they are so in remission that someone might soon announce they have been cured.  It has currently been more than 7 years since a Category 3 made landfall in the U.S., the longest time in more than 100 years—and all this when overall hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin has been elevated.  Maybe there is something to research that finds that while anthropogenic climate change may increase the frequency of major hurricanes in the Atlantic, it changes the circulation patterns such that they are more likely to remain offshore (see page 30-32 of our comments on the draft National Assessment Report)

But we digress…

Apparently the folks who rally around the anthropogenic climate change/extreme weather linkage don’t like being awoken when all is calm.

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Topics: 
Energy and Environment

This Month at Cato Unbound: The Future of Right-Libertarian Fusionism

By
Jason Kuznicki

This month our online ideas journal Cato Unbound boasts an all-new design, with new software to make reading and navigating a whole lot more intuitive.

Our latest issue tackles the topic of fusionism – the old-new idea that libertarians belong on the right side of the political aisle.

Fusionism has a long history. But will it play to millennials? That could be one of the most important questions in American politics.

Young voters are a lot less conservative on social issues like gay marriage and drug policy. In this, they echo previous generational trends on questions like interracial marriage and pornography, neither of which are live political issues anymore. Younger Americans also seem more skeptical of corporate influences in politics. That fact may tilt them to the left, but it could also pave the way for a less corporatist free-market movement, if only we can make the case to them. And some millennials might not even remember a time when America was at peace – a thing we can’t say about any previous generation.

How does the old right-libertarian alliance fare in this new environment? We decided to ask some young activists who’ve given some thought to the question.

Making the case for fusionism is Jacqueline Otto of the American Enterprise Institute’s Values and Capitalism Project. Economic liberty unites us, she says – and we ought not to let the rest divide us.

And contra, we have Jeremy Kolassa, a writer for United Liberty. He argues that libertarians haven’t gotten much from their old alliance with the right, and it’s time to stand on our own. Libertarians should offer good ideas to whoever will listen and form coalitions wherever specific issues allow it.

Over the next few days we’ll also have essays from Clark Ruper of Students for Liberty and Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute. Also be sure to stop by our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter as the conversation develops.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

Dollarize Argentina Now

By
Steve H. Hanke

Argentina is once again wrestling with its long-time enemy, inflation. Now, it appears history may soon repeat itself, as Argentina teeters on the verge of another currency crisis. As of Tuesday morning, the black-market exchange rate for Argentine pesos (ARS) to the U.S. dollar (USD) hit 9.87, meaning the peso’s value now sits 47.3% below the official exchange rate. This yields an implied annual inflation rate of 98.3%. For now, the effects of this elevated inflation rate are being subdued somewhat by Argentina’s massive price control regime. But these price controls are not sustainable in the long term. Indeed, the short-term “lying prices” only distort the economic reality, ultimately leading to scarcity. There is, however, a simple solution to Argentina’s monetary problems: dollarization. I have advocated dollarization in Argentina for over two decades, well before the blow up of their so-called “currency board.” To put the record straight, Argentina did not have a true currency board from 1991 to 2002. Rather, as I anticipated in 1991, the “convertibility system” acted more like a central bank than a currency board. This pegged exchange rate system was bound to fail—and fail, it did. The 2001-02 Argentine Crisis could have easily been avoided if the country had simply dollarized. Argentina had more than sufficient foreign assets to dollarize their economy even late into 2001. But the Argentine government, through a series of policy blunders, ended up “floating” the currency. Not surprisingly, Argentina is now back to where it was in the late 1980s. So, how can Argentina dollarize? In short, the Banco Central de la Republica Argentina (BCRA) would take all of the assets and liabilities on its balance sheet denominated in foreign currency and convert them to U.S. dollars. The Central Bank would then exchange these dollars for all the pesos in circulation (monetary base), at a fixed exchange rate. By my calculation, the BCRA would need at least $56.36 billion to dollarize at the official exchange rate (as of April 23, 2013).

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Topics: 
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, International Economics and Development

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