Doing Business: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

By
Dalibor Rohac and Marian L. Tupy

A few weeks ago, we published a piece that defended World Bank’s Doing Business project against its critics. At the time, we didn’t know much about the politics behind the attack on the project – namely that the initiative to review Doing Business had come from China, which ranks relatively low in the ranking.

Perhaps unwittingly, the Chinese government has been assisted in its effort to shut the project down by a spectrum of organizations skeptical of markets, including CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, or Save the Children. Most recently, Christina Chang, a lead economic analyst at CAFOD appears to react to our article on FP’s Democracy Lab:

By lamenting the “uniquely democratic” debate around Doing Business, its self-appointed supporters are doing it a disservice. An independent review and a public debate are exactly what is needed.

That is not exactly a charitable way of identifying our position. We say explicitly that the project can be improved and are perfectly willing to entertain some of the specific suggestions Ms. Chang makes in her article, including the idea that the costs of corruption to businesses should be explicitly captured by the project, that the measure of access to credit could be improved, and that infrastructure-related constraints to doing business (such as access to electricity) could improve the project’s accuracy.

What bothers us, however, is that the critics of the project are also trying to undermine the key elements of the survey – namely the measures of taxation and labor market regulation. A large body of evidence shows that corporate taxation and labor market regulation have real costs to businesses – a fact Ms. Chang downplays by saying that these do not come up frequently in enterprise surveys in the developing world. While surveys may serve as a useful complement to the analysis of objective data on institutions, it is not sensible to use them as a basis for discarding specific elements of the Doing Business report – especially if independent evidence indicates that these elements matter.

Also, the goal of measuring taxation and labor market regulation as a cost to business has little to do with advancing an agenda of radical tax cuts or deregulation - although we would argue that such agenda would yield significant welfare gains in many countries around the world - instead, it has to do with an understanding of the relevant policy trade-offs.

The most serious flaw of Ms. Chang’s article lies in a confusion between the problems afflicting crony capitalism in the West and the development of private markets in emerging economies around the world:

The 2008 financial crisis highlighted long-standing reasons why the world needs to take a fresh look at how it does business. Unemployment has reached painful levels in many countries around the world. Multinational corporations use offshore jurisdictions to avoid billions in tax. Rampant inequality has become a hot-button issue.

For all these reasons, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim is right to conclude that the bank’s flagship Doing Business report needs a fresh look.

Let’s ignore the claim that inequality is on the rise, which is not true globally, and focus on the fact that Ms. Chang argued that the economic problems of the developed West somehow justify rethinking a project that has mostly informed policymaking in low- and mid-income countries. That would make sense if the policy recommendations that can be supported by the Doing Business project were also connected with the factors that have been driving economic problems of the West, such as unemployment, or the financial crisis of 2008. Yet Ms. Chang offers us no evidence for such claim.

If anything, one can argue that the unemployment in Western countries is associated with heavy labor market regulation, that the existence of offshore jurisdictions helps curb confiscatory tax regimes in the West, and that the crisis 2008 was driven by government involvement in financial and housing markets, or perhaps by a failure of monetary policy. In other words, Ms. Chang is guilty exactly of what we identified as the main problem of the current discussions about the Doing Business project – namely that she picks up on a failure of a particular type of crony capitalism in the West and uses it – disingenuously, one is tempted to say – to attack free markets around the world.

Topics: 
International Economics and Development

Sebelius Shakes Down Companies She Regulates for Cash to Implement ObamaCare

By
Michael F. Cannon

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius’ latest abuse of power has strengthened the case for her removal from office. Before discussing her latest misconduct, let’s review some of Sebelius’ past abuses of power.

  • In 2010, Sebelius described anonymous political speech as “dangerous.” Ironically, Sebelius’ lashing out at her political opponents’ free-speech rights is dangerous because it is the sort of rhetoric that might encourage agencies like the IRS to target groups that “criticize how the country is being run.” That’s exactly what the IRS has admitted doing – which in turn is a good argument for protecting anonymous political speech.
  • So too is Sebelius’ 2010 threat to put health insurance companies out of business. Shortly after ObamaCare became law, insurers began telling their customers how much it was going to increase their premiums. In a September 2010 letter to insurers, Sebelius shot back that premiums would rise no more than 2 percent, even as her department predicted increases as high as 7 percent. Insurers that didn’t toe the party line “may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.” That was no idle threat, I wrote at the time. Since “Medicare’s chief actuary predicts that in the future, ‘essentially all‘ Americans will get their health insurance through those exchanges,” Sebelius was essentially threatening to put insurers out of business if they disagreed with her.
  • In 2011, Sebelius approved her department issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to private health insurance companies under the rubric of ObamaCare that the statute expressly forbids HHS to issue.
  • In 2012, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel concluded that Sebelius violated the Hatch Act by campaigning for President Obama and other political candidates while traveling on official business, an offense for which other federal workers are fired.
  • In a July 2012 letter to the nation’s governors, Sebelius arbitrarily rewrote and narrowed the Supreme Court’s ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius to allow HHS to continue coercing states into implementing parts of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.
  • When it became apparent that two-thirds of states would not implement one of ObamaCare’s health insurance “exchanges,” Sebelius dismissed the idea that a lack of congressionally authorized funding for federal Exchanges would stop her department from implementing them. “We are going to get it done,” she said. Now we learn she substituted her own judgment for Congress’ by raiding ObamaCare’s Prevention and Public Health Fund to the tune of $454 million to fund federal Exchanges. But even that wasn’t enough.

Now we learn, from the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff, “Sebelius has, over the past three months, made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and directly asked that they contribute to non-profits that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law.”

This too appears to be unlawful:

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

Why FIRE Is Hot under the Collar

By
Andrew J. Coulson

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), “the Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment.”

Here’s what FIRE is, well, fired up about:

The letter states that “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’ ” including “verbal conduct” (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation”—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished. 

So now, in addition to being a sadly moribund institution of dubious value to most students, college will be even more Orwellian in its policing of language than it had already become. Thank heavens technology is making it increasingly dispensable. College is dead. Long live higher education.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Law and Civil Liberties

Great Moments in Government: The IRS Apologizes for Bias while Simultaneously Denying Bias

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

I’m happy to bash the IRS, but I usually try to explain that our anger should be focused on the politicians who created the corrupt, 74,000-page tax code.

But sometimes the IRS deserves some negative attention. The tax collection bureaucracy has thieving employees, incompetent employees, thuggish employees, seemlingly brainless employees, and victimizing employees.

The senior folks at the IRS also deserve scorn for bone-headed decisions such as squandering millions of dollars on a P.R. campaign and a scheme to regulate and control private tax preparers.

Now it seems we have another reason to condemn the tax-collection bureaucracy. As Michael Cannon has noted, the IRS is engaging in Nixon-type political harassment.

Here’s some of what the Associated Press just reported.

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday. Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

IRS Chief, Who Defended Illegal ‘ObamaCare’ Taxes, also Denied Targeting of Tea-Party Groups

By
Michael F. Cannon

In 2011, members of Congress began criticizing a proposed IRS rule implementing ObamaCare’s health insurance tax credits. They claimed that the proposed rule violated the clear language of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as well as congressional intent, by issuing those tax credits in states that declined to establish a health insurance “exchange.” In effect, they claimed the proposed rule would result in the federal government taxing, borrowing, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional authorization. 

At the time, then–IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman leapt to his agency’s defense. He wrote that various provisions of the statute “support” the rule. He wrote that the “relevant” legislative history doesn’t show that Congress didn’t want the IRS to tax, borrow, and spend those hundreds of billions of dollars. He wrote that the proposed rule is “consistent with the language, purpose, and structure” of the law. The only thing he didn’t do was cite a provision of the law authorizing the rule, or even creating any ambiguity about the rule’s illegality.

The IRS finalized that illegal rule in May 2012. You can read all about it in my article with Jonathan Adler, “Taxation Without Representation: The Illegal IRS Rule to Expand Tax Credits Under the PPACA.”

It is worth noting that Shulman also leapt to the IRS’s defense against another charge that the agency was abusing its power. In 2012, conservative groups complained that the IRS was targeting them for audits. Shulman issued a forceful and categorical denial:

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that the IRS was not targeting groups based on their political views.

“There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee.

Shulman was wrong. Today, the IRS admitted it has been targeting conservative groups for audits. 

Perhaps some Friday afternoon hence we will be treated to an IRS admission that their tax-credit rule violates the Administrative Procedures Act and the PPACA, as two lawsuits now allege. I won’t hold my breath.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy, Tax and Budget Policy

Help Poor People in Bangladesh by Buying the Clothes They Make

By
K. William Watson

The tragic building collapse in Bangladesh two weeks ago, killing over 900 people, has focused public attention on working conditions for garment workers around the world. The attention has intensified calls for Western clothing brands to insist on better working conditions in  the factories around the developing world where their products are made. According to the New York Times, some companies are responding to consumer concerns by marketing their “fair labor” practices on product labels.

The development of a fair trade movement for clothing is in many ways encouraging. It demonstrates the power of consumers in a free market to impose their preferences on the supply chain. Businesses succeed or fail based on how well they meet consumer demand, and if consumers demand certain labor practices enough to cover the added costs, businesses will respond.

This voluntary mechanism does a much better job than government mandates. Even a requirement that companies merely put labels on their clothes does a poor job of informing consumers. Any mandated label is insulated from accuracy-enhancing, consumer-driven competition and vulnerable to capture by special interests.

On the other hand, refusing to buy clothes made in “sweatshops” is a terrible way to help the people of Bangladesh. The fact remains that despite the terrible working conditions, workers chose their sweatshop jobs over worse alternatives. Outlawing sweatshops or refusing to buy things made in Bangladesh removes those workers’ best option and forces them to settle for less. (LearnLiberty.org has an excellent video explaining the “Top 3 Ways Sweatshops Help the Poor Escape Poverty.”)

More foreign investment in industrial production would help the people of Bangladesh even more. It’s true that Bangladeshis’ poverty enables you to buy cheap t-shirts because they will work for next to nothing in dangerous factories. But the systemic effect of Western investment means more opportunity, and opportunity is the opposite of poverty.

That said, consumer demand for “fair trade clothing” may actually help factory workers, whereas a flat-out refusal to trade would not. This particular disaster seems to be largely the result of rampant cronyism, inept bureaucracy, and official corruption—problems that could be alleviated by reducing the discretion of local middlemen. If concerned consumers have more specific information about labor practices, they won’t have to rely on purely origin-based information. It would be a shame if someone decided not to buy a shirt just because it was “Made in Bangladesh.” Positive and voluntary inducements to improve working conditions are much, much better than refusing to do business with poor people.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

Targeting the Tea Party Isn’t the IRS’s Most Egregious Abuse of Power

By
Michael F. Cannon

Not by a longshot. 

As Jonathan Adler and I explain in this law journal article, and as I explain somewhat more accessibly in this Cato paper, the IRS is trying to tax, borrow, and spend $800 billion in clear violation of federal law and congressional intent.

Yes, you read that right: $800 billion.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

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