The Benefits of Frictionless Trade, as Seen in Saarland

By David Boaz

The European Union comes in for a lot of criticism, including around these parts. Not all my colleagues have been so critical. Still, burdensome regulations by an unaccountable bureaucracy would trouble any libertarian. 

But this article in the Washington Post reminded me of the original promise of the Common Market, which grew into the European Union:

The degree to which the European Union’s post-nationalist vision has transformed the continent is evident in the German region of Saarland, an area of 1 million residents hard on the French border. 

The region — marked by lush forests, gentle hills and rich coal deposits that once made Saarland an industrial jackpot — has changed hands eight times over the past 250 years. In the past century alone, it was traded between France and Germany four times.

The first of those came in the aftermath of World War I, when France claimed the territory as compensation for German destruction of France’s own coal industry.

Germany lost the land again after World War II and only got it back in 1957.

As recently as the 1990s, the nearby border was subject to strict controls. But today, it’s largely invisible. French citizens commute to Saarland for work or pop by to buy a dishwasher. Germans cross into France for lunch or to pick up a bottle of wine. French — the language of the longtime enemy and occupier — is part of the fabric of Saarland, and it’s welcome.

“We’re neighbors. We’re friends. We marry each other. One hundred years ago, we killed each other. It’s been a great evolution,” said Reiner Jung, deputy director at the Saar Historical Museum in the region’s capital, Saarbrücken.

Of course, countries could drop their trade barriers without creating a supranational bureaucracy. But too many people misunderstand economics and believe giving up their trade barriers is a cost, so creating a customs union, a common market, or even a European Union may often be the only way to get the substantial benefits of free trade. And frictionless trade is even harder to achieve without multinational negotiations. So there are pros and cons to arrangements such as the European Union, but we shouldn’t underestimate the great benefits of commerce and movement across national borders.

Topics:
Trade Policy

Will Malay Muslims Accept Equality Before Law?

By Mustafa Akyol

There is a heated debate in Malaysia these days on whether the country should affirm the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, or ICERD. Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1969, the internal convention calls for eliminating all legal structures that favor one group over another. 

Malaysia is among a handful of countries that have neither signed nor ratified the treaty. One major reason is that many within the country’s ethnoreligious majority, the Muslim Malays, do not want to lose the privileges they have over the non-Muslim minorities such as the Chinese or Hindus. The Islamists also feel alarmed that accepting legal equality will lead to more freedom of religion, freedom of expression, or the intermarriage of Muslims and non-Muslims. 

Free Malaysia Today, a popular newssite with liberal tendencies, asked me what I think. I encouraged Malaysians to accept ICERD, and gave a reference that even the Islamists could not easily reject: The Ottoman Empire, the very seat of the Islamic Caliphate. Here is how Free Malaysia Today reported my take:

Mustafa Akyol, an award-winning author on contemporary Muslim issues, said Muslim groups who oppose the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, or ICERD, should study the policies of past Islamic powers including the Ottoman caliphate with regards to equality.

“I would recommend that all those in Malaysia who oppose the ICERD on Islamic grounds read the Ottoman Constitution of 1876. It reads:

‘All subjects of the empire are called Ottomans, without distinction whatever faith they profess… [And] All Ottomans are equal in the eyes of the law. They have the same rights, and owe the same duties towards their country, without prejudice to religion.’”

The full story is available here: ”The Caliphate had ICERD, too”

Topics:
Criminal Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy

It’s Time to Put the Jones Act Under the Microscope

By Inu Manak

On December 6th, 2018 the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies will host a full-day conference entitled, “The Jones Act: Charting a New Course after a Century of Failure.” The purpose of this event is to shine an analytical spotlight on the Jones Act, a nearly 100-year-old law that restricts the transportation of cargo between two points in the United States to ships that are U.S.-built, crewed, owned, and flagged.

While supporters of the law claim the Jones Act is essential to ensuring a robust U.S. maritime industry capable of providing a ready supply of ships and qualified sailors in times of war and other national emergencies, both the number of ships built in the United States and U.S. sailors to crew them have been in a steady decline for decades. Not only has the Jones Act failed to deliver its promised benefits, it has also imposed a variety of different costs on the U.S. economy. This conference will examine these costs in greater detail, address the validity of the Jones Act’s national security argument, and evaluate options for reform.

As part of the conference, each of our participants will submit a short essay on a particular aspect of the Jones Act. These essays will be made available here as they are submitted by our speakers, and will be reproduced in expanded form after our conference. We encourage you to read, share, and provide feedback on these essays.

This event is part of our broader Project on Jones Act Reform, which seeks to raise awareness about the Jones Act and lay the groundwork for the repeal or reform of this outdated law. We hope you will visit our project page and join the discussion on Jones Act reform.

Reserve your spot to attend our event next month, read the conference essays, and be part of the conversation. We hope to see you there!

Topics:
Trade Policy

At Cato Unbound: How Best To Reform Child Protective Services?

By Walter Olson

This month I’m participating in a Cato Unbound symposium on Child Protective Services and family rights. In its lead essay, attorney Diane Redleaf details some of the ways in which CPS agencies can arm-twist parents into so-called interim placements and safety plans that separate families with little or no judicial review.  Participant James G. Dwyer, in a response essay, takes a relatively positive view of the agencies’s work. My essay, by contrast, generally backs up Redleaf’s critique of CPS as a species of government enforcement agency gone wild: far too often, these agencies seize children from parents based on flimsy evidence, second-guess everyday parental behavior and decisions, or act on misguided Drug War zeal. 

Redleaf in her essay then goes on to raise distinctive objections about how the agencies negotiate with parents before a judge has ruled on their cases, which I paraphrase thus: 

…what sorts of policy response should apply to agencies’ practice of proffering to parents ostensibly voluntary interim placements and “safety plans”? What happens when parents regret—the next month, or the next day—having agreed to those conditions? Can they reopen the concessions they made, and how? Does it matter whether the agency has withheld information from them or menaced them with worst-case scenarios?

In my response essay, I argue that the problems with these practices are real but that legal attack on the voluntariness of interim plans is likely to be of at best limited helpfulness because our courts follow a strong presumption of enforcing settlements as written. More promising in the long run, I argue, may be to impose direct obligations on agencies to respect families’ autonomy without attacking the settlement process as such. “Safeguarding every family’s rights will, as one of its benefits, shore up families against unwise surrenders of their rights.”

 

 

Topics:
Constitution, the Law, and the Courts, Education and Child Policy

Apprehended Border Crossers Spend an Average of 39 Hours in Detention: Evidence from 2014 and 2015

By Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester

Most information on Border Patrol activities along the border come from data that has already been aggregated and compiled by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol’s parent agency.  We acquired the Border Patrol microdata for every apprehension on the Southwest Border from September 1, 2014, through August 31, 2015.  That period adds one month from the end of the 2014 fiscal year and chops off the last month of the 2015 fiscal year.  The microdata allow us to answer specific questions about Border Patrol apprehensions that aren’t otherwise displayed in tables by CBP.  This microdata identifies an individual’s time and date of apprehension and release, which allows us back out how long they were held in Border Patrol custody. 

There is wide variation between the number of hours that illegal immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol on the SW border stay in detention based on the region of the world where they are from (Table 1).  Caribbean illegal immigrants spend an average of 61 hours in detention, but there were only 561 of them detained in 2015. 

But the most striking numbers from Table 1 is the standard deviation column.  The standard deviation measures the dispersal of the data points.  If the standard deviation is low, then the data points are all clustered about the mean.  If the standard deviation is high, the data points are spread out over a wide period.  The standard deviation for the number of hours spent in detention for Central Americans and Mexicans is about two to three times greater than the next highest standard deviation, respectively.  This is likely because of the large number of asylum claims made by Central Americans and Mexicans in 2015. 

 

Table 1

Hours Detained on SW Border by Country of Origin

Region of Origin Average Number of Hours Standard Deviation Number of Illegal Immigrants
Caribbean 61.06 40.92 561
South America 47.51 32.25 4,548
Central America 44.13 105.53 130,156
Oceania 37.87 30.55 3
Asia 37.61 23.63 4,309
MENA 37.10 29.33 151
Europe/Canada 36.54 53.17 529
Mexico 35.65 144.89 186,547
Africa 23.34 28.05 56
Other/Unknown 14.72 12.36 6
All 39.26 128.31 326,866

Source: CBP Microdata.

 

Table 2 shows how many hours immigrants spend in detention by the border sector where Border Patrol apprehended them.  There’s no correlation between the number of hours an illegal immigrant is held for with the border sector in which they were apprehended, even controlling for the number of Border Patrol agents by sector.

 

Table 2

Hours Detained on SW Border by Border Region of Apprehension

Border Sector Average Number of Hours Standard Deviation Number of Illegal Immigrants
Laredo 65.97 72.13 35,509
Big Bend 52.71 236.44 4,492
Rio Grande 41.06 86.95 145,493
San Diego 35.00 89.30 26,415
Del Rio 31.07 313.42 18,294
Yuma 29.81 118.89 6,633
El Paso 29.80 261.71 14,046
El Centro 28.88 66.67 12,615
Tucson 28.52 104.15 63,369
All 39.26 128.31 326,866

Source: CBP Microdata.

 

Altogether, illegal immigrants apprehended along the SW border spent over 12.8 million hours in detention in 2015 – equal to about 1,464 years of detention.  If the daily cost of maintaining a guarded bed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities is the same as the cost for those detained on the SW border, then it cost over $50 million in 2015 to detain those 326,866 people for more than half a million days.  

Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

DEFENSE DOWNLOAD: Week of 11/15

By Caroline Dorminey

Welcome to the Defense Download! This new round-up is intended to highlight what we at the Cato Institute are keeping tabs on in the world of defense politics every week. The three-to-five trending stories will vary depending on the news cycle, what policymakers are talking about, and will pull from all sides of the political spectrum. If you would like to recieve more frequent updates on what I’m reading, writing, and listening to—you can follow me on Twitter via @CDDorminey.  

  1. Today, Senator Rand Paul will take the floor to call for a vote on blocking arms sales to Bahrain—one of the countries waging war on Yemen. Senator Paul will be invoking the congressional oversight function included in the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). I’ll be watching the vote and covering its results on Twitter @CDDorminey. If you want more information on the conflict in Yemen, check out my colleague Emma Ashford’s work. For background on arms sales and congressional oversight, flip through the Risky Business report Trevor Thrall and I published earlier this year. 
  2. “Incoming HASC Chair: Scale Back Plans for New Nukes,” Marcus Weisgerber. Representative Adam Smith is poised to become the House Armed Services Committee chairman and aims to “totally redo the Nuclear Posture Review” during his tenure. Cost is a motivating factor that Rep. Smith says the current plans haven’t taken seriously enough: “When you look at the needs we have in national security, the needs we have in the country and the $22 trillion debt, what they’re talking about in terms of totally rebuilding a nuclear weapons capacity in all pieces of the triad is way beyond what we can afford.” 
  3. “Here’s what the Pentagon thinks the actual cost of a Space Force will be,” Aaron Mehta. Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan spoke to reporters this week and significantly decreased the government’s estimate of starting a Space Force. While the Air Force claimed it could cost as much as $13 billion, Shanahan’s team claims it can keep costs to the single digit billions, possibly as “low” as $5 billion. 
  4. “Providing for the Common Defense,” National Defense Strategy Commission. This new report discusses the findings of a congressionally-mandated study on the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) and a wide variety of emerging national security threats. The authors call for a vague yet drastic increase in defense spending, claiming it is out of their purview to estimate how much implementing the 2018 NDS will actually cost—just that current resource levels are insufficient. 
Topics:
Foreign Policy and National Security

Better Late Than Never?

By Jeffrey A. Singer

As I have written many times before, the opioid prescribing guidelines put forth by the Centers for Disease Control and prevention have been criticized for not being evidence-based. This has even caused the Food and Drug Administration to begin the process of developing its own set of guidelines.

In publishing the guidelines, the CDC emphasized they were meant to be suggestive, not “prescriptive,” pointing out that health care practitioners know their patients’ situations better than any regulators and should therefore individualize their prescribing to meet their patients’ unique needs. 

That has not prevented the majority of states from implementing opioid prescribing guidelines that place limits on the dose, amount, and length of time that doctors can prescribe opioids—usually restricting the dose of opioids to a maximum of 90 MME (morphine milligram equivalents) per day. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures at least 30 states have implemented such guidelines. These guidelines have caused many health care practitioners to return to the undertreatment of pain for which they were criticized in the 1980s and 90s. And it has driven many chronic pain patients to desperation as their doctors abruptly taper their pain medication or cut them off entirely.

The American Medical Association has gently criticized the misinterpretation and misapplication of the CDC guidelines in the past. Now two and a half years after the CDC published its guidelines, the AMA has taken a more adamant stand. This week, at the AMA’s interim meeting in Maryland, its House of Delegates resolved:

RESOLVED that our AMA affirms that some patients with acute or chronic pain can benefit from taking opioids at greater dosages than recommended by the CDC Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids for chronic pain and that such care may be medically necessary and appropriate. 

RESOLVED that our AMA advocate against the misapplication of the CDC Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids by pharmacists, health insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, legislatures, and governmental and private regulatory bodies in ways that prevent or limit access to opioid analgesia.

RESOLVED that our AMA advocate that no entity should use MME thresholds as anything more than guidance, and physicians should not be subject to professional discipline, loss of board certification, loss of clinical privileges, criminal prosecution, civil liability, or other penalties or practice limitations solely for prescribing opioids at a quantitative level above the MME thresholds found in the CDC Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids.

Sadly, the opiophobia-driven policy train left the station long ago. As an eternal optimist, my initial reaction is to think, “better late than never,” and to hope this new resolution will cause policymakers to reconsider their misguided policy. But the cynical voice inside me responds with a more negative cliché: “a day late and a dollar short.”

 

 

 

Topics:
Government and Politics, Health Care

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