November 03, 2000

Ballot Measures Face Skeptical Voters
Nation-Building's High Price
More Money for Federal Land Management

Ballot Measures Face Skeptical Voters

The Washington Post's David Broder reports today about how ballot measures face a skeptical electorate this year.

Around the country, said Dane Waters, head of the Initiative and Referendum Institute in Washington, D.C., "it does not look like a banner year for passing ballot measures." He said the 1998 success rate of 61 percent was "unusually high by historical standards," and is almost certainly not going to be duplicated next week.

The 70 voter initiatives and two popular referendums that share ballots with 130 measures placed there by legislatures touch on many inflammatory topics from assisted suicide to zoning controls, to say nothing of a batch of tax limitation measures. Waters foresees tough sledding for many of the propositions, including various animal protection or hunting limitation statutes.

David Broder spoke at the Cato Institute forum "Ballot Initiatives: Empowering People or Derailing Democracy," which can be viewed on the Cato Web site. Broder discusses his book, "Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money," where he argues that America's Founders preferred a system of checks and balances to direct democracy. He also debates whether initiatives are in fact a way to fight big government and a cry for help by majorities that find their freedoms restricted.

Nation-Building's High Price

On its front page today, The Wall Street Journal asks, Can the U.S. and its allies rebuild shattered foreign countries? "Judging from the U.S. experiences in Bosnia and Haiti," the paper says, "the answer is yes -- but nation-building isn't a job for the faint-hearted or the impatient."

Five years after NATO imposed peace in Bosnia, 21,000 alliance soldiers -- including 4,500 Americans -- still patrol the country. About $1 billion a year in outside aid keeps the economy afloat. An international high representative makes all of the toughest decisions: writing laws, firing obstructionist officials, even choosing the designs for the new currency, license plates and flag. According to one count, the high representative overruled Bosnia's bickering leaders an average of once every 10.5 days last year.

In "Imposing Perverted Democracy in Bosnia," Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies Ted Galen Carpenter writes that "the U.S.-led nation-building effort in Bosnia has moved from the impractical to the repulsive." Rather than admit failure, Carpenter writes, the would-be nation builders are now resorting to tactics that make a mockery of any reasonable concept of democracy.

In "'Isolationism' as the Denial of Intervention: What Foreign Policy Is and Isn’t," Earl C. Ravenal argues that the tendency of both the Clinton administration and its Republican opponents to frame foreign policy as a compromise between "global policeman" and "isolationism" misses the point entirely. "They erroneously assume that, to one degree or another, the United States can impose its policy preferences around the world, with acceptable costs and risks," Ravenal writes. "Moreover, advocates of so-called selective engagement would end up endorsing almost all of Washington’s current security obligations and recent military interventions, give or take a couple of strategically and budgetarily trivial cases such as Somalia and Haiti."

More Money for Federal Land Management

A huge restoration project for Florida's Everglades will most likely be the last major piece of legislation passed by Congress before Election Day, according to the Associated Press.

The measure, part of a broader water resources bill that has already passed the Senate, would authorize $1.4 billion for the first phase of an eventual $7.8 billion federal-state project intended to restore the Everglades' natural sheet of water flow after decades of human interference and pollution from agricultural runoff. The southern Everglades is a protected national park.

In "More Money for U.S. Land Acquisition? That's a Bone-Headed Move," Deroy Murdock writes that after watching millions of acres of western land go up in flames thanks to government mismanagement, giving the feds more land is not a good idea. In "How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands," Terry L. Anderson, Vernon L. Smith and Emily Simmons explain that although many Americans support the preservation of lands, both pro-privatization and pro-regulation analysts agree that the federal government has done an exceedingly poor job of stewarding those resources. Giving more land-management responsibility to the government is not a solution, they write; instead, land should be auctioned for certificates to be distributed equally to all Americans.

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