To Mitt Romney, $10,000 is no big deal.

To be blunt, I’m not a big fan of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But my animosity isn’t because OECD bureaucrats threatened to have me arrested and thrown in a Mexican jail.

Instead, I don’t like the Paris-based bureaucracy because it pushes a statist agenda of bigger government. This Center for Freedom and Prosperity study has all the gory details, revealing that OECD bureaucrats endorsed Obamacare, supported the failed stimulus, and are big advocates of a value-added tax for America.

And I am very upset that the OECD gets a giant $100 million-plus subsidy every year from American taxpayers. For all intents and purposes, we’re paying for a bunch of left-wing bureaucrats so they can recommend that the United States adopt that policies that have caused so much misery in Europe. And to add insult to injury, these socialist pencil pushers receive tax-free salaries.

And now, just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, the OECD has opened a new front in its battle against free markets. The bureaucrats from Paris have climbed into bed with the hard left at the AFL-CIO and are pushing a class-warfare agenda. Next Wednesday, the two organizations will be at the union’s headquarters for a panel on “Divided We Stand — Tackling Growing Inequality Now.”

Co-sponsoring a panel at the AFL-CIO’s offices, it should be noted, doesn’t necessarily make an organization guilty of left-wing activism and misuse of American tax dollars. But when you look at other information on the OECD’s website, it quickly becomes apparent that the Paris-based bureaucracy has launched a new project to promote class-warfare.

For instance, the OECD’s corruption-tainted Secretary-General spoke at the release of a new report on inequality and was favorable not only to higher income tax rates, but also expressed support for punitive and destructive wealth taxes.

Over the last two decades, there was a move away from highly progressive income tax rates and net wealth taxes in many countries. As top earners now have a greater capacity to pay taxes than before, some governments are re-examining their tax systems to ensure that wealthier individuals contribute their fair share of the tax burden. This aim can be achieved in several different ways. They include not only the possibility of raising marginal tax rates on the rich but also…reassessing the role of taxes on all forms of property and wealth.

And here’s some of what the OECD stated in its press release on income differences.

The OECD underlines the need for governments to review their tax systems to ensure that wealthier individuals contribute their fair share of the tax burden. This can be achieved by raising marginal tax rates on the rich.

Like Obama, the folks at the OECD like to talk about “fair share.” These passages sounds like they could have been taken from one of Obama’s hate-and-envy speeches on class warfare.

But the fact that a bunch of Europeans support Obama’s efforts to Europeanize America is not a surprise. The point of this post is that the OECD shouldn’t be using American tax dollars to promote Obama’s class-warfare agenda.

Here’s a video showing some of the other assaults against free markets by the OECD. This is why I’ve written that the $100 million-plus that American taxpayers send to Paris may be — on a per dollar basis — the most destructively wasteful part of the entire federal budget.

One last point is that the video was produced more than one year ago, which was not only before this new class-warfare campaign, but also before the OECD began promoting a global tax organization designed to undermine national sovereignty and promote higher taxes and bigger government.

In other words, the OECD is far more destructive and pernicious than you think.

And remember, all this is happening thanks to your tax dollars being sent to Paris to subsidize these anti-capitalism statists.

Here’s a podcast on how states can shut down ObamaCare.

And here are links to additional material, including an op-ed that provides an overview, a blog post about Sen. Orrin Hatch (R‑UT) getting involved, a blog post on how presidential candidates could get involved, and finally a blog post on what the Obama administration has to say about all this.

There’s a very disturbing tendency among academics — though many people in policy fights do it — to dodge substantive debate by declaring, basically, “the other side is full of garbage so just ignore them.” You probably see it most glaringly about climate change — no one credible disagrees with Al Gore! — but I see it far too frequently regarding the possibility that government student aid, the bulk of which comes from Washington, is a significant factor behind college price inflation. 

Today, we are treated to this lame dodge in a letter to the Washington Post from Terry Hartle, Senior Vice President at the American Council on Education, arguably the most powerful of Ivory Tower advocacy groups. He writes:

Second, we must do away with one of the most persistent and pernicious myths of higher education: that increases in federal aid drive up the cost of college. Several studies, including two by the Education Department, show there is no link between federal student aid and tuition increases. But there are still those who would have people believe that modest increases in student aid programs are the driving force behind institutions’ decisions about tuition and fees.

I would love to put this “myth” myth to rest. Yes, as I discuss in my recent policy analysis, there are serious challenges in trying to prove that aid fuels price inflation. Lots of variables affect what colleges charge; you need to study long time frames encompassing several business cycles; and you have to account for the fact that aid automatically rises when prices do. So while there is tremendous logical reason to think aid has enabled price inflation — former college presidents acknowledge as much, basic economics says subsidies drive up demand, etc. — like any social science there is no definitive proof.

That sure as heck doesn’t mean, though, that there isn’t any research showing government aid driving price inflation, even if it doesn’t prove it. In addition to the incredibly powerful rational reasons to strongly suspect aid plays a big role in out-of-control college pricing, there is, indeed, empirical evidence. For the benefit of the whole debate I offer a smattering of it below, hopefully putting an end to the disturbing denial tactic employed by Hartle and others. Hopefully, but not likely.…

John D. Singell, Jr., and Joe A. Stone, “For Whom the Pell Tolls: The Response of University Tuition to Federal Grants-in-Aid,” Economics of Education Review 26, no. 3 (2006): 285–95.

Bridget Terry Long, “How Do Financial Aid Policies Affect Colleges? The Institutional Impact of Georgia Hope Scholarships,” Journal of Human Resources 30, no. 4 (2004): 1045–66.

Bradley A. Curs and Luciana Dar, “Do Institutions Respond Assymetrically to Changes in State Need- and Merit-Based Aid? ” Working Paper, November 1, 2010.

Rebecca J. Acosta, “How Do Colleges Respond to Changes in Federal Student Aid,” Working Paper, October 2001.

Michael Rizzo and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, “Resident and Nonresident Tuition and Enrollment at Flagship State Universities,” in College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay for It, edited by Caroline M. Hoxby, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Writing in today’s Washington Post, Charles Lane posits that the time is now for the U.S. Treasury to divest of its remaining 500 million shares of General Motors stock. I agree with that conclusion, but not with Lane’s rationale or his recommendation for a heavy-handed, government-imposed exit strategy.

Just to recap: the Treasury recouped $23 billion of taxpayers’ $50 billion outlay when it sold GM shares to the public in an IPO in November 2010; the outstanding 500 million shares in government coffers must be sold at an average price of $54 to recover the remaining $27 billion; the IPO price was $33; today’s price is $21.69. If all 500 million shares could be sold at today’s price, the Treasury would raise $10.8 billion, leaving taxpayers at a loss of just over $16 billion. (Of course, the sale of such a large number of shares would drive the average selling price way below today’s price, resulting in a much larger taxpayer loss.)

Lane is correct to conclude that GM’s immediate future isn’t looking quite so rosy. Demand is tanking in Europe. Concerns remain about whether GM will continue to be able to fund its $128 billion pension plan. And sales of the “game-changing” Chevy Volt have been lagging since the vehicle’s commercial introduction some 13 months ago—well before its engines demonstrated an annoying propensity to spontaneously combust. (Not to worry, says GM’s public relations team: the engines don’t seem to catch fire while being driven, only an hour or two after they’ve been parked in the garage.) Recognizing that that qualifier hasn’t been reassuring enough, GM is now offering to buy back any Chevy Volt it has ever sold, which doesn’t bode well for the bottom line, but also affirms how few of these Government Motors show pieces have even sold.

That grim analysis is the basis for Lane’s preference for government divestment now. There is more downside risk than upside potential. It is an argument based on market-timing, rather than on the principle that bad things happen when the government has a stake in the outcome of a race that it can influence. Sure, the administration would love to divest of GM at a profit to taxpayers. But the longer it is allowed to wait for that train to arrive, the greater the temptation to grease the skids.

The government should divest now. It should have divested in June, when it was first legally permissible to do so. But the administration (following, by logic, what would have been Lane’s advice at the time) rolled the dice, expecting the stock value to rise. Instead it fell. And then there was this.

But my bigger problem is with Lane’s proposal for a managed divestment. He writes:

It’s time to cut our losses. Treasury should start selling its stake in GM.

And I know just the buyer: GM. The company is sitting on more than $33 billion in cash, about triple the market value of Treasury’s 500 million shares, which is roughly $10.8 billion.

Though GM wants to dedicate much of its cash to shoring up its pension plan, it could still absorb most or all of Treasury’s shares, even if Treasury charges a modest premium over the current market price, as it should.

Lane proposes this under the guise of some perverse fealty to a “free-enterprise economy,” as it would spare shareholders from the stock price-depressing impact of an unnatural 500 million share dump. But those shareholders knew the risks they were taking when they purchased GM stock in the first place. They certainly knew that the largest single shareholder didn’t intend to hold its position for very long. Lane’s argument for protecting those shareholders in the name of free-enterprise in unconvincing, if not misplaced.

Furthermore, Lane’s zeal for sticking it to GM seems to eclipse any real commitment to free markets. Forcing GM to divert resources from where management wants to commit them in order to achieve some favorable political outcome (a smaller taxpayer loss) is just as coercive as some of the administration’s actions on the road to GM’s nationalization in the first place.

GM should not be entitled to any favors or exceptional treatment by virtue of its ownership structure. To be certain of that, it should be 100 privatized yesterday. But likewise, GM should not be subject to compensatory or otherwise countervailing policies designed to punish or remove any perceived advantage. For starters, it is impossible to measure the benefits received or the penalties suffered with any precision. Demanding that GM not be exposed to special treatment goes in both directions.

Today AEI’s Rick Hess and Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond—two folks who don’t always see eye to eye—have a New York Times op-ed that decries federal micromanagement in education, then lays out four things they think Washington should do.

If only they’d stopped at lamenting micromanagement.

Let’s take their four should-do’s in order:

First is encouraging transparency for school performance and spending. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind’s main contribution is that it pushed states to measure and report achievement for all students annually.…To track achievement, states should be required to link their assessments to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or to adopt a similar multistate assessment). To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending…

This sounds great, but the key is in the doing, and there is precious little evidence Washington can force real transparency. NCLB is exhibit A: Yes, the law required states to break out data for all students and numerous subgroups, but the underlying information was essentially a lie, with states setting very low performance thresholds and calling it “proficiency.” And despite what many NCLB supporters will tell you, when you break down NAEP data—as I have done—there is little support for the notion that traditionally underperforming groups, or anyone else, have done better with NCLB than without it.

How about requiring common standards, both for academics and spending?

Even if you started with excellent, challenging academic standards, they would quickly be gutted at the behest of teacher unions, administrator associations, and probably even parents if many kids and schools didn’t meet them and were punished as a result. We’ve seen it many times, and there’s nothing about being federal that inoculates government against concentrated benefits and diffuse costs; the people most directly effected by a policy having the greatest political power over it. And financial data? As Adam Schaeffer has found, there are countless ways to hide the truth about district finances, and there’s little reason to believe that Washington will be either willing or able to sustainably force clarity.

One last thing: Where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to demand “transparency”? Nowhere.

Second is ensuring that basic constitutional protections are respected. No Child Left Behind required states to “disaggregate” assessment results to illuminate how disadvantaged or vulnerable populations…were doing. Enforcing civil rights laws and ensuring that dollars intended for low-income students and students with disabilities are spent accordingly have been parts of the Education Department’s mandate since its creation in 1979.

Here there’s a slight connection to the Constitution: under the Fourteenth Amendment Washington has the duty to ensure that states and districts do not discriminate. But the presumption underlying what Darling-Hammond and Hess argue—that test data can reveal discrimination—is dubious. Can and should disparities in group scores really be laid exclusively at the feet of schools, districts, and states? Aren’t myriad factors involved in academic outcomes, many of which are outside the control of government?

Third is supporting basic research. While the private market can produce applied research that can be put to profitable use, it tends to underinvest in research that asks fundamental questions. When it comes to brain science, language acquisition or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring, federal financing for reliable research is essential.

We hear this one a lot, and in theory it makes some sense: people won’t risk their money on research that has no discernable payoff. The problem is few people ever contemplate the full cost of government funding “basic” research, or the unintended consequences.

The main concern is that putting money into things with no discernable payoff might yield just that—no payoff. So we hear about successes—government got us to the moon!—but rarely about how much has been lost in failed efforts. People don’t shy away from funding basic research just because they’re shortsighted. It’s also because they factor in risk.

Then there’s this: while we would like to think that all scientists are superhumanly selfless, they are not. They are as self-interested as the rest of us. Perhaps that’s why Austan Goolsbee—yes, Obama administration Austan Goolsbee—found in 1998 that much government R&D funding translated not into more breakthroughs, but higher wages for researchers.

What about the presumption that private markets wouldn’t put money into “brain science” or new tutoring techniques? Highly dubious. Education companies would have strong incentives to invest in research that could make them more efficient and effective because that would increase their profit margins. The problem is, it is almost impossible to run for-profit schools in the United States, which can’t meaningfully compete against “free” government schools. In Chile, however, we see burgeoning evidence that profit can lead to greater scale—which is crucial for research—and better outcomes.

Of course, there’s nothing in the Constitution authorizing the feds to finance research.

Finally, there is value in voluntary, competitive federal grants that support innovation while providing political cover for school boards, union leaders and others to throw off anachronistic routines.

Again, sounds good, but as Hess and Darling-Hammond themselves admit:

The Obama administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition tried to do some of this, but it ended up demanding that winning states hire consultants to comply with a 19-point federal agenda, rather than truly innovate.

It’s easy to say that Washington should enable district and union leaders to ignore political concerns, but federal policy is as much government policy as state and local, and government at all levels is a creature of politics. Government and politics cannot be separated, and to expect one governmental level to be above politics while the others are below it is, to say the least, extremely optimistic. And again, there’s no constitutional authority to issue education grants.

Darling-Hammond and Hess are right that Washington has meddled far too much in education. They are on thin ice in asserting that different meddling will work much better.

It’s gotten surprisingly little media attention thus far, but late last week the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence approved a bill to facilitate sharing and pooling of “cyber threat information” between private companies and government intelligence agencies—in particular, the übergeeks at the National Security Agency. It’s actually not a bad idea in principle. But the original draft was so broad that that the White House felt compelled to express concerns about the lack of privacy safeguards—which should give you pause, considering how seamlessly President Obama has shifted from thundering against the Patriot Act to quietly embracing the ongoing kudzu growth of our surveillance state. A few encouraging tweaks were hastily added before the committee approved it, but the bill’s current incarnation still punches an enormous hole in the wiretapping laws that have, for decades, been a primary guarantor of our electronic privacy.

First, a bit of context. Whenever you send an e‑mail, start an IM chat, place a VoIP call, visit a web page, or download a file, your traffic passes through many intermediary networks, starting with your own broadband or wireless provider. While savvy users will protect their sensitive communications with encryption, our expectation of privacy when we use the Internet is also safeguarded by federal law, which generally prohibits network owners providing transit services to the general public from intercepting, using, or disclosing the contents of other people’s communications in any way beyond what’s needed to get the traffic from sender to recipient in the ordinary course of business. There are exceptions, of course: for law enforcement monitoring subject to a warrant, for emergencies, for consensual interceptions, and for monitoring that’s necessary to the protection of a provider’s own network. But the presumption against interception is strong and typically hard to overcome. (Non-public networks, like a corporation’s private intranet, are another story, of course.) Communications metadata—the information about who is talking to whom, and by what route—is less stringently regulated, but carriers are still barred from sharing that information with the government absent some form of legal process. The motivation for all of this is the understanding that heavily regulated carriers, which also often compete for lucrative government contracts, would be subject to government pressure to “voluntarily” share their customers’ data (especially if the sharing could be done secretly). Thus, the law ensures that the government will have to observe the niceties of judicial process before digging through citizens’ private communications, rather than relying on the “informal cooperation” of intermediaries.

This generally salutary arrangement does, however, create some difficulties in the cybersecurity context. Carriers and cybersecurity providers who have visibility on multiple private networks will often be in an optimal position to detect a wide array of attack patterns, involving both metadata (where are apparent attacks coming from? what timing patterns do they exhibit) and contents (what characteristic “signatures” indicate the presence of viruses, malware, or mass phishing emails). This is information it’s highly valuable to have shared among providers—and, yes, the government too—and which generally doesn’t implicate the kinds of privacy interests wiretap law is supposed to protect. But legislators (or rather, the staffers who actually draft these bills) are generally keen to craft “tech neutral” laws that aren’t bound too tightly to current technologies and vulnerabilities, and therefore won’t be obsolete in the face of new tech or new threats. Unfortunately, this often entails erring on the side of breadth, which in this case means creating a massive loophole to remove a minor obstruction—the legislative equivalent of blowing your nose with C‑4.

The bill provides that, “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” a company that provides cybersecurity services for its own networks or others may use “cybersecurity systems” to acquire “cyber threat information,” and share such information with any other entity, including the government. (One of the amendments introduced last week stipulates that the government may use and share that information only when one “significant purpose” of such use is the protection of national security or cybersecurity.) The crucial question, of course, is what counts as “cyber threat information.” That term is defined to encompass:

information directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from—

(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or

(B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.

The intention here is to cover the sort of information I talked about earlier—intrusion patterns and malware fingerprints. On a literal reading, though, it might also include Julian Assange’s personal IM conversations (assuming he ever had an unencrypted one), or e‑mails between security researchers. Moreover, one important purpose of this information sharing is to be able to distinguish malicious from benign traffic—which may mean combing through a big chunk of traffic logs surrounding a suspected or confirmed penetration attempt (and comparing those logs to others) in order to extract the hostile “signal” from the background noise. That makes it extremely likely that a substantial amount of wholly innocent, and potentially sensitive, information about ordinary Americans’ Internet activities will end up in the sharing pool. Many attacks will appear to originate from computers conscripted into malicious botnets by malware, unbeknownst to owners whose legitimate personal traffic could easily be swept in and shared as “cyber threat information” as well. The current proposal doesn’t require minimization or anonymization of personal information unless the companies sharing the information impose such conditions themselves. Finally, “cybersecurity systems” is sufficiently vaguely defined that one could even imagine a sysadmin with a vigilante streak reading it to include aggressive countermeasures, like spyware targeting suspected attackers. After all, “notwithstanding any other provision of law” includes provisions of (say) the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would place such tactics out of bounds.

Intelligence agencies are also empowered to share classified cyberintelligence with designated companies—and heaven help the firm that’s starved of that security information while their competitors have access to it. Another of the amendments added last week expressly bars conditioning such intelligence sharing on any particular company’s level of “voluntary” cooperation, and clarifies that the intelligence companies may not “task” private companies with obtaining specific types of information for them. Which is nice, but seems awfully hard to enforce in practice. What we’ve already seen, unfortunately, is that cozy long term collaborative relationships between carriers and intelligence agencies are breeding grounds for abuse, even when the law actually does prohibit the carriers from sharing information without legal process. It’s desirable to create legal space for limited cyberthreat information sharing—but it has to be done without creating a large and tempting backdoor through which government might seek to use “voluntary information sharing” as a way to avoid getting a warrant or court order.