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Cato Daily Dispatch for August 7, 2003

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First U.S. Troops Arrive in Liberia
EU Threatens Microsoft with Antitrust Sanctions
Group Sues Bush Administration over Unreliable Report

First U.S. Troops Arrive in Liberia

"President Bush sent a seven-member Marine team into war-ravaged Liberia yesterday, a small deployment that illustrates the narrowly defined role the Bush administration envisions for U.S. troops in the African nation," according to The Boston Globe.

"U.S. forces will remain at or near their current number until UN peacekeeping troops arrive in October. The administration's wariness on Liberia, despite weeks of urging from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and others, stems in part from a military stretched thin with commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Today in USA Today, Cato Director of Defense Policy Studies Christopher Preble writes about the overextension of the U.S. military. "Our military exists to defend the United States," he writes. "We must concentrate on the genuine threats facing all of us today--al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups with global reach that target Americans. And we should eliminate obsolete and superfluous military commitments abroad that have nothing to do with the war on terrorism."

"Our military is overcommitted because our men and women in uniform are called upon to police our sprawling American Empire," Preble says. "Refocusing our efforts certainly will ease the burdens on our servicemen and servicewomen and make us all safer and more secure."

EU Threatens Microsoft with Antitrust Sanctions

"The European Commission is close to a showdown in its Microsoft case that will test its ability to force the world's largest software company to make immediate changes in its controversial business practices," reports Reuters.

"On Thursday the Commission said again it intended to fine Microsoft for damaging competition in the past and would require that it change its business practices to preserve competition in the future."

In "Antitrust: The Case for Repeal," Cato Senior Fellow Robert A. Levy explains why antitrust laws should be scrubbed. He writes: "No one other than the owner has a right to the technology he created. Consumers cannot demand that a product be provided at a specified price or with specified features. Competitors are not entitled to share in the product's advantages. By demanding that one company's creation be exploited for the benefit of competitors, or even consumers, government turns a blind eye to core principles of free markets and individual liberty."

Levy concludes by calling antitrust "bad law, bad economics, and bad public policy. It deserves an ignominious burial--sooner rather than later."

Group Sues Bush Administration over Unreliable Report

"An antiregulatory group sued the Bush administration yesterday in an effort to force the government to stop distributing a report on climate change that the group contends is inaccurate and biased," reports The New York Times.

"The suit says the continued use of the report, which was published in 2000, violates the Federal Data Quality Act (FDQA), a law enacted that year that requires information disseminated by the government to pass standards for objectivity, quality, and utility--meaning the data are reliable enough to be used by the public."

The report at the center of the Competitive Enterprise Institute lawsuit is the National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. In "Science Junk Hits the Washington Fan," Patrick J. Michaels, Cato senior fellow in environmental studies, explains why the report violates the FDQA. "The Assessment purports to project the consequences of United States warming, produced by two computer models," he writes. "One is from Canada and the other from the United Kingdom. Both models are extreme outliers."

He continues: "How does even the rankest climate amateur know the Canadian model is a joke when applied to the United States? Because it 'predicts' that U.S. temperatures should have changed 300 percent more than they did in the last 100 years. In fact, neither the Canadian model nor the British can beat a table or random numbers when it comes to predicting U.S. temperature for the last century."

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org