Cato At Liberty

Yet again the unanimous Supreme Court has slapped down a government attempt to deprive property owners of their civil rights.  What was at stake in Horne v. Dept. of Agriculture wasn’t even the property – raisins! – but the mere ability to challenge the government’s desire to take that property without meaningful judicial review.

Nobody should have to suffer a needless, Rube Goldberg-style litigation process to vindicate their constitutional rights. Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. Department of Agriculture sought to impose on raisin farmers Marvin and Laura Horne when they protested the enforcement of a USDA “marketing order” that demanded that the Hornes turn over 47% of their crop without compensation.

These New Deal-era regulations are bad enough – forcing raisin “handlers” to turn over some of their crop to the government so it can control raisin supply and price – but here the government kept throwing up obstacles to the Hornes’ attempts to assert that they shouldn’t legally be subject to them.  The government demanded about $650,000 from the Hornes and didn’t want to give them a day in court until they paid the money and jumped through assorted administrative hoops.

The Supreme Court correctly rejected that absurd position and reversed the California-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that upheld it, reinforcing the line drawn by five other circuit courts.  “In the case of an administrative enforcement proceeding,” Justice Thomas wrote on all his colleagues’ behalf, “when a party raises a constitutional defense to an assessed fine, it would make little sense to require the party to pay the fine in one proceeding and then turn around and sue for recovery of that same money in another.”

Indeed, there’s no reason to treat Fifth Amendment takings claims any differently than lawsuits against government violations of other constitutional provisions.

Here’s more background on the case and Cato’s amicus brief.

I have a new piece up this morning at CNN’s Global Public Square, co-authored with Mieke Eoyang of Third Way, making the case against an expanded Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Rather than thinking of new powers to hand over to the president, Congress should revisit the original rationale for the AUMF, and realize that, with the end of combat operations in Afghanistan by late 2014, such authorities are no longer required. In the future, should additional threats emerge that the president is unable to address without taking the country to war, then Congress can and should declare war, on an enemy, and with a clear end-goal in mind.

As it currently stands, the AUMF has become a catch-all for any U.S. government activities that can be cast as counterterrorism. It has allowed what should have been a small and achievable mission–killing or capturing those who planned the 9/11 attacks, and those who helped them, and degrading al Qaeda’s ability to carry out future such operations–to become a quixotic and unbounded global crusade, the longest war in the nation’s history, with no end in sight. One proposed revision would only compound this problem, making it easier for the president, this one or his successors, to expand the list of targets, and this war, at his or her discretion. So long as the nation remains on a war-footing, the government will always find new wars to fight. 

The GPS piece was written before the revelations of U.S. government surveillance of U.S. citizens’ phone records, and, perhaps, Internet usage. But the themes are connected: how does the U.S. government strike a balance between protecting the rights and liberties of American citizens, and securing those same citizens from physical harm, especially from individuals (i.e. terrorists) who use violence or the threat of violence against innocent people for political purposes? The American people, usually jealous of government intrusions in their private lives, have been far more tolerant of such intrusions over the past 12 years for a simple reason: they are scared. Indeed, they are terrified. Counterterrorism should address that psychological condition as much as it does the people that cause it. And we don’t need an expanded AUMF to do that.

The government has done an able job of rounding up terrorists and their accomplices; core al Qaeda has been practically eliminated, and its would-be successors are notably unsophisticated. The AUMF had little to do with that, with the important exception of those initial operations conducted in and around Afghanistan. The government has also collected, chiefly through traditional law-enforcement methods, an additional cohort of idiots, nitwits, and utter incompetents, many of whom were unlikely to harm even themselves, let alone innocent bystanders. The small likelihood that they might succeed has justified further extraordinary efforts, about which we now know a bit more. Again, such capabilities do not hinge on an AUMF.

By contrast, the government has done a terrible job of reducing people’s fears, and the context of the AUMF–reminding the public that we are at war–probably makes the problem worse. By and large, despite a few hopeful signs, we are still terrorizing ourselves. This was the overarching theme in a collection of essays that I edited with Jim Harper and Ben Friedman. The book was published nearly three years ago. Its message, unfortunately, still remains relevant today.

Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

A new paper shows that climate models are getting worse at replicating a collection of known climate changes as incentivized efforts to improve them have them universally veering off course.

Anyone who is familiar with John Allison’s book The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure knows that incentives can drive otherwise “independent” decisions in a common direction, with sometimes disastrous results. Allison documents how a collection of government incentives (intentionally and unintentionally) drove decisions in the wider financial markets towards overinvesting in residential real estate. The resulting massive misallocation of funds and ultimate bubble burst sent us into the Great Recession, from which we have yet to recover.

Obviously, that was not the intended outcome of the federal policies, but as Allison writes “Intentions that are called ‘good’ often do not produce favorable outcomes.” Allison argues that a free market, one that is free from centralized incentives, and one in which truly independent decisions are being made, is less susceptible to a universal failure and that when failures do occur, they are not as severe and they are more quickly recovered from. Had the financial markets been operating without federal regulations and incentives, not only would the Great Recession not have occurred (or would have been minor), but that our country would be in a much healthier financial state with an overall higher standard of living for everyone.

Not only can (and do) targeted incentives lead financial markets astray, they also operate the same way in the field of science.

In either case, the ultimate effect is to steer the outcome away from its most efficient pathway and instead send it veering towards dangerous territory that is marked by a decline in our overall well-being.

This is nowhere more evident than in the field of climate science, as a new paper by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Kyle Swanson clearly illuminates.

In his work “Emerging selection bias in large climate change simulations,” Swanson finds that the new generation of climate models has become worse at matching recent climate change than the generation of models which they supplant.

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