At the Weekly Standard, Chris Conover explains.

AEI’s Michael McShane writes that America’s “school choice” policies have thus far failed to live up to their hype and have not created real, vigorous education markets. That’s hard to argue with. As McShane rightly points out, existing programs are still very small, mostly filling empty places in non-profit private schools that predate the programs’ creation. The creative destruction of real market innovation has yet to make its presence felt, and the few new entrants to the marketplace usually look much like the old ones.

It’s not entirely clear what McShane is proposing as a solution, but he offers a few hints:

New schools and school models need to be incubated, funding needs to follow students in a way that allows for non-traditional providers to play a role, new pathways into classrooms for private-school teachers and leaders need to be created, and high-quality school models need to be encouraged and supported while they scale up. In short, policymakers, private philanthropy, and school leaders need to get serious about what’s necessary to make the market work.

This seems to suggest the need for some sort of new school development organization, the picking of “high quality” schools by philanthropists for scale-up funding, and revisions to teacher certification rules. The first two would likely do more harm than good and the third can be improved upon by simply getting rid of government certification rules for private school teachers altogether.

On the first point, consider the very successful “functioning markets” to which McShane compares education. “New providers,” he writes, “are constantly popping up up to replace enterprises that are not meeting the needs of consumers. Through that winnowing process we move from hulking black-and-white televisions that cost $269 in 1958 dollars — over $1,700 in 2012 — to flat-screen LCD HDTVs that cost $249 in 2012.”

Indeed. And yet, there has never been a New TVs Development Organization. All of this innovation is the result of the unmolested operation of the free enterprise system. No government dirigisme was required to spur the creative destruction that gave us better TVs, phones, computers, grocery stores, coffee shops, book retailers, garden implements, running shoes, bathroom scales, or suntan lotions. If it ain’t broke.…

And while philanthropy has likely played an important role in protecting the free enterprise system that gave us all this innovation, philanthropists were not involved in picking which products and services should be brought to scale. That was left to the marketplace.

Nor do we need to speculate as to what might happen if philanthropists did pick which schools should be deemed “high quality” and scaled-up. We can simply look at their existing track record in the charter school sector, where they have played a major role. I did this in 2011, looking at the relationship between charter school networks’ academic performance and their total receipts from philanthropic grants. Essentially, there isn’t a relationship. The correlation between charter schools’ name length and achievement is stronger—and it’s weak, too. To drive its conclusion home, I called this paper “The Other Lottery,” to evoke the random process by which oversubscribed charter schools must accept their students.

So, yes, we’ve yet to create a free educational marketplace at the K‑12 level anywhere in the United States. But the policy solution to doing so is rather simple: encourage the growth of school choice programs that do not suffocate private schools with regulation, then sit back and watch.

There’s a reason Adam Smith called it an invisible hand. You don’t need a lot of very visible committees or technocrats pulling at the levers of government or NGOs to make the free enterprise system work. You just need freedom and the rule of law (okay, respect for entrepreneurs, too).

The Justice Department says it is reviewing the Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Special Operations Division”—the subject of an explosive report published by Reuters on Monday. The SOD works to funnel information collected by American intelligence agencies to ordinary narcotics cops—then instructs them to “phony up investigations,” as one former judge quoted in the story put it, in order to conceal the true source of the information. In some instances, this apparently involves not only lying to defense attorneys, but to prosecutors and judges as well.

DEA is taking a predictable “nothing to see here” stance in its public responses to the story, but on its face this seems like a fairly brazen violation of the right to due process. As several legal experts quoted in the Reuters article point out, the accused in our criminal justice system cannot effectively defend themselves unless they know how evidence against them was obtained, and this program is clearly designed to deprive them of that knowledge. Moreover, at least some of the information channeled to police derives from FISA electronic surveillance, and 50 USC §1806 explicitly requires the government to notify persons whenever it intends to use information “derived from” such intercepts against them in any legal proceeding. Flouting that requirement is doubly troubling because, in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Amnesty v. Clapper, the only way for any court to review the constitutionality of intelligence programs is for a defendant to raise a challenge after being informed that they’ve been subject to surveillance.

One way they’re able to get away with this is by exploiting the fact that our justice system relies so heavily on plea bargains. Prosecutors stack up charges against defendants in hopes of effectively coercing them into waiving their constitutional right to a jury trial and accepting a plea deal, which even for the innocent may make more sense than risking a conviction that could lead to an enormously longer jail sentence. Conveniently, avoiding a trial also greatly reduces the risk that one of these “phonied up” investigations will be exposed.

The Reuters report also suggests—though without providing any detail—that the NSA’s controversial phone records database is one source of leads provided to narcotics police. On face this might seem to conflict with repeated assurances from the administration that these records can only be used for counterterrorism purposes. But there are a few important loopholes. First, as the ACLU’s Patrick Toomey notes, NSA analysts may only submit “seed” queries to the database if they have a reasonable suspicion that the terms they’re searching—such as a phone number—is linked to a terror group specified in the court order authorizing the metadata program. But those queries then return the phone records of everyone within three degrees of separation, or “hops,” from the initial target number—which could easily sweep in thousands or tens of thousands of people—and dump them in a second database, called the “corporate store,” which can subsequently be accessed without restrictions or, indeed, without even creating an audit log of how it was accessed. Thus if a terror suspect’s cousin (one hop) calls a drug dealer (two hops), the phone records of that dealer’s suppliers (three hops) might automatically end up in the secondary database. There doesn’t appear to be anything stopping NSA analysts from then running algorithms against that database designed to detect call patterns characteristic of narcotics rings on behalf of their friends at DEA. From there, it is probably not too hard for government lawyers to justify the dissemination of the results to law enforcement: narcotics trafficking, after all, often funds the activities of foreign cartels engaged in “narco-terrorism,” and so ordinary enforcement of domestic drug laws can be classified as serving a “counterterrorism purpose” to the extent it disrupts those flows of funds.

Appropriately enough, this story comes just days after a New York Times report on how many govermnent agencies are greedily eyeing the vast stores of data collected by NSA. This should serve as a crucial reminder that you can’t build a massive architecture of surveillance “just for terrorism” and expect it to remain limited to that function: once the apparatus exists, there will inevitably be incredible pressure from other interests within government to expand its use. Once the data is already begin collected, after all, it seems a waste not to exploit its full potential. And indeed, we’ve seen again and again how—mostly because there just aren’t all that many terrorists out there—powers and programs justified by the need to fight the War on Terror end up getting coopted for the War on Drugs, from the Patriot Act’s “Sneak and Peek” searches (used almost exclusively in drug rather than terror investigations) to federally funded “fusion centers.”

For those interested in a more extended discussion, I joined a panel on HuffPost Live on Monday evening to talk about the story in depth.

The military regime in Cairo continues to kill supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi with Washington’s financial support. The Obama administration is turning hypocrisy into an art form. 

Washington labors under the delusion that it controls the world. The administration insists that it must preserve its influence by giving more money to the generals in Cairo. Yet when has the United States ever exercised influence in Egypt?

For four decades American taxpayers have subsidized dictatorial regimes. The administration tried to save former president Hosni Mubarak from revolution, before supporting his overthrow. Washington’s attempts to convince Morsi to rule more inclusively, and military commander Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi not to stage a coup, failed completely. Now the coup leader is ostentatiously ignoring the administration’s plea that he not force the Muslim Brotherhood underground. 

Yet President Obama refuses to acknowledge the military coup, which under U.S. law would require the cut-off of American aid to Egypt. If that happened, says the administration, Gen. al-Sisi might ignore American advice! 

As I point out in my latest Forbes column:

It would have been better years ago had American officials simply shut up and done nothing. No money would have been wasted. Washington’s impotence would not have been demonstrated. The U.S. would not be complicit in decades of military rule.

Alas, Egypt is not the first instance in which the U.S. government has managed to look stupid while spending a lot of money. In fact, that is far more the rule than the exception for Washington.

For decades Washington has given away tens of billions of dollars a year for economic “assistance.” Among the lucky recipients? Crackpot communists such as Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania and Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Ethiopia.

As in Egypt, local despots quickly learned that U.S. officials hate to admit failure and end assistance. So the money continues to flow no matter what.

Around the world, Washington officials cheerfully talk about the importance of democracy while ostentatiously backing autocracy. Today the hypocrisy is most flagrant in Central Asia and the Middle East. Indeed, the administration praised the “Arab Spring” while supporting repression in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and now Egypt.

Much ink has been recently spilled on preserving American credibility after President Obama made Syrian use of chemical weapons a “red line” for intervention. In fact, Washington routinely draws meaningless red lines around the globe, which are routinely ignored.

American officials never learn!

In Egypt Washington has combined equal parts hypocrisy and futility. U.S. officials are never content to just shut up and stay home. If President Obama wants to leave a positive foreign policy legacy, he should do and say less abroad.

When I’m in Europe giving speeches and participating in conferences, it’s quite common that folks on the left will attempt to discredit my views by asserting that Americans are selfish and greedy.

Since I’m generally sympathetic to Ayn Rand’s writings, I don’t see anything wrong with people striving to make themselves better off. Moreover, Adam Smith noted back in 1776 that the desire to earn more money leads other people to make our lives better. One of his most famous observations is that, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

But, for the sake of argument, let’s accept the premise of my statist friends in Europe and simply look at whether their assertion is correct. Are Americans more selfish and greedy that their counterparts across the ocean?

The most obvious way of testing this proposition is to compare rates and levels of voluntary charity. Selfish and greedy people presumably will cling to their money, while compassionate and socially conscious people will share their blessings with others.

So how does the United State compare to other nations? Well, I’m not a big fan of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but the bureaucrats in Paris are quite good at collecting statistics from member nations and producing apples-to-apples comparisons.

And if you look at rates of “voluntary private social expenditure” among nations, it turns out that Americans are easily the most generous people in the developed world.

Wow, people in the United States are so generous that their voluntary giving amounts to 10.2 percent of gross domestic product. The only other nations that even crack 5 percent of GDP are the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Most of the supposedly compassionate welfare states have dismal levels of charitable giving. Voluntary social expenditure in major European nations such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain averages less than 2 percent of GDP.

It’s also worth noting that these numbers actually understate the charity gap between Americans and folks from other nations. Economic output in the United States is about 30 percent higher than it is in the rest of the developed world, so charitable giving by Americans actually represents a much bigger slice of a much bigger pie.

Statists might respond by asserting that Europeans express their generosity through the public sector. I reject that comparison since — as I explained when criticizing a Michael Gerson column — it’s wrong to equate government coercion with private charity.

But even if you have the European mindset that government should be a vehicle for redistribution, the OECD numbers show that there’s not much difference between the United States and other developed nations. According to the OECD data, government redistributes 20 percent of GDP in America compared to an average of 21.9 percent of GDP for all OECD nations. And since there’s strong evidence that government redistribution undermines progress in the fight against poverty, I actually wish there was a big gap between America and other nations!

And don’t forget, by the way, that 20 percent of U.S. GDP is a lot more money than 21.9 percent of GDP in other nations, so government in the United States spends more on redistribution, on average, than other OECD governments. Indeed, I’ve already shared healthcare numbers making that same point.

P.S. It’s also worth sharing the data showing that proponents of small government in the United States are far more generous than those who favor a big welfare state.

National politicians and commentators are once again worrying that “political gridlock” is preventing government from “fixing the nation’s problems.”

President Obama began this lament’s latest chorus last week during his economy snoozer speech at Knox College in Illinois. “[O]ver the last six months, this gridlock has gotten worse,” he said, vowing, “I will not allow gridlock, or inaction, or willful indifference to get in our way.” Earlier this week the New York Times asked Obama, “Do you worry that [a stalled agenda] could end up being your legacy because of the obstruction … and the gridlock that doesn’t seem to end?” That prompted National Journal writer Ron Fournier to claim that the current gridlock is the result of a lack of will by political leaders: “At the White House and in Congress, most Democrats and Republicans have abandoned hope of fixing the nation’s problems.”

Many Republicans may be asking, “What gridlock?” After all, President Obama has had little trouble advancing his agenda, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the subsequent series of fiscal stimulus and “jobs” bills, to the Dodd-Frank Act and creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), to tax increases. The GOPers would argue that the president’s setbacks have been few, temporary, and/​or small. As evidence that he doesn’t feel too fettered by gridlock, they might point to his “compromise offer” to raise corporate taxes in exchange for increasing government spending.

But the Republicans are wrong. Washington is severely constrained by gridlock, and that is harming Americans’ standard of living, health, and financial security, and exacerbating unemployment, income equality, and our children’s education and future well-being. Right now, political obstructionism is blocking numerous policy ideas and legislative proposals that would greatly benefit Americans. Among them:

• Repeal Obamacare and adopt true comprehensive health care reform that would expand access to care, improve efficiency, and increase care quality.
• Modernize Social Security so that it better provides for people’s retirement needs, or else end Social Security taxes so that people can better afford to prepare for retirement (and other life needs) on their own.
• Replace Medicare with health care for seniors that won’t financially cripple future generations.
• Overhaul public education and enable American children to attend better, more effective schools.
• Reduce the size and cost of the federal government, so that people can use more of their money to improve their lives.
• Rationalize regulation so that the markets better serve consumers.
• Reaffirm civil liberties, instead of eroding them.
• Adopt a more rational foreign policy and national security strategy.

And many, many more.

But maybe you disagree with those proposals and are pleased that they’re gridlocked (though I tell you sincerely that people would be much better off if they were implemented). That’s the thing: there are a lot of Americans who agree with me, and a lot who agree with President Obama’s proposals, and a lot who support other policy ideas. (And no, these different groups aren’t “1‑percenters” on one side and “working Americans” on the other.)

Evidence and analysis don’t demonstrate clearly that just one set of proposals is “right” and all others are “wrong,” nor does morality show that just one set is virtuous and all others are wicked. Rather, the many unknowns of human existence, the individual preferences and concerns of different people, and the diversity of specific circumstances across the United States result in individuals favoring different policies and opposing different policies.

In such a world, “political gridlock” is not a problem—rather, it’s the natural and appropriate result of a representative government that foolishly tries to impose national solutions for private, local, and regional problems in an incredibly diverse and large nation of 315+ million people.

Hopefully, our gridlock hand-wringers will one day abandon the naïve, provincial idea that a few congressional votes can “fix the nation’s problems,” and instead appreciate the genius of individual liberty and subsidiarity.

Ryan T. Anderson, one of the most articulate advocates for the “traditional” view of marriage, points out at NRO that extending marriage to same-sex couples potentially endangers the religious liberty of those who disagree with such a policy. Particularly given a Supreme Court ruling stating that the only purpose and effect of differing treatment of same-sex relationships is to “degrade,” “demean,” “disparage,” and “injure” them, those who believe in “traditional” marriage–let alone those who think homosexuality is morally wrong–may rightly fear legal marginalization.

While I obviously disagree with Anderson’s views on gay marriage, his concerns about a slippery slope from equal protection to an enforced political correctness are not unfounded. It wouldn’t be the first time that overzealous “equality” advocates invaded individual liberty. Senator Ted Cruz recently alluded to severe consequences from other countries’ thought police. “Christian pastors who decline to perform gay marriages,” he warned, “who speak out and preach Biblical truths on marriage” may be prosecuted for hate speech. We don’t have to look far to see such trends; take Canada’s human rights commissions (please!).

And even in these United States, Anderson notes:

The New Mexico Human Rights Commission prosecuted a photographer for declining to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony.” Doctors in California were successfully sued for declining to perform an artificial insemination on a woman in a same-sex relationship. Owners of a bed-and-breakfast in Illinois who declined to rent their facility for a same-sex civil-union ceremony and reception were sued for violating the state nondiscrimination law.

This is absurd. Neither the federal nor state governments have any business punishing or rewarding Americans based on their beliefs, and private individuals should not be forced to behave in a way that violates their constitutional rights — or to have to choose between, say, their medical license and their conscience. Even if you hold, as I do, that states, if they’re involved in the marriage business, should be required to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, not only should clergymen not be required to perform same-sex marriages but private businesses shouldn’t be forced to be involved in them either.

Along with religious institutions, businesses that require expressive activity on the part of the service provider are easy cases–as Cato argued in its amicus brief in the case of that New Mexico wedding photographer. But “non-expressive” organizations don’t check their religious (or other) liberties at the for-profit door–as we’re finding with Obamacare’s contraceptive-mandate litigation.

Now, it’s a different case where the government is involved: as with marriage itself, the government (and its agents) has to treat all citizens equally under the law. It can’t refuse contracts or employment to people who are opposed to same-sex marriage, but it can require its contractors not to discriminate against gay couples in the services that they provide. That is, if a private organization, even one with an explicitly religious mission, voluntarily takes public money to serve the public at large, the government doesn’t violate its religious freedom when it requires that they provide those services in an egalitarian manner. This is similar to the idea that the government can indeed limit the speech rights of policemen or soldiers or other public employees.

That does lead to some unfortunate results, like the CDC-funded wellness counselor who was fired after she referred someone in a same-sex relationship to another counselor–or, more famously, Catholic Charities of Boston getting out of the adoption business because the state of Massachusetts required it to place children with gay couples. (There seems to be some factual controversy on the latter; my point relates to taxpayer funding: if Catholic Charities could’ve operated its adoption program without government funding, it should’ve been allowed to, and indeed Massachusetts should encourage a plethora of private adoption agencies.)

Of course, that brings us to the ever-present concern about the government creating problems by growing too large and crowding out civil society. As I wrote about the contraceptive-mandate cases earlier this year:

This is just the latest example of the difficulties in turning health care — or increasing parts of our economy more broadly — over to the government. As my colleague Roger Pilon has written, when health care (or anything) is socialized or treated as a public utility, we’re forced to fight for every “carve-out” of liberty.…

The more government controls — whether health care, education, or even marriage — the greater the battles over conflicting values. With certain things, such as national defense, basic infrastructure, clean air and water and other “public goods,” we largely agree, at least inside reasonable margins. But we have vast disagreements about social programs, economic regulation and so much else that government now dominates at the expense of individual liberty. 

But whether government is big or small, individuals and private organizations who aren’t at its trough should never be limited in how they express their beliefs–no matter how much Justice Kennedy (or Cato, or anyone else) disagrees with them.