Last month, I wrote on this site about a Republican who genuinely believed in limited government. The bad news is that my example was not from this year’s campaign, but instead came from a 1920s-era video featuring Calvin Coolidge. After further research, I’ve discovered a more recent video that captures the words of someone who is getting a lot of attention in this year’s GOP campaign. Sadly, this high-profile Republican uses class-warfare rhetoric to condemn tax cuts. He urges more income distribution and a bigger role for the federal government. He even claims that corporate profits cause inflation. Would you vote for someone who gave this speech?

The New York Times has a fascinating article explaining how bail bondsmen are a uniquely American, quasi-private element of the criminal justice system:

…posting bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee…is all but unknown in the rest of the world. In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant’s bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror — a form of obstruction of justice. …Other countries almost universally reject and condemn Mr. Spath’s trade, in which defendants who are presumed innocent but cannot make bail on their own pay an outsider a nonrefundable fee for their freedom. “It’s a very American invention,” John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. “It’s really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.” …Bail is meant to make sure defendants show up for trial. It has ancient roots in English common law, which relied on sworn promises and on pledges of land or property from the defendants or their relatives to make sure they did not flee. America’s open frontier and entrepreneurial spirit injected an innovation into the process: by the early 1800s, private businesses were allowed to post bail in exchange for payments from the defendants and the promise that they would hunt down the defendants and return them if they failed to appear. …The system costs taxpayers nothing, Mr. Kreins said, and it is exceptionally effective at ensuring that defendants appear for court. …According to the Justice Department and academic studies, the clients of commercial bail bond agencies are more likely to appear for court in the first place and more likely to be captured if they flee than those released under other forms of supervision.

Libertarians sometimes get accused of being utopians because of occasional debates about the degree to which things such as roads, defense, and law enforcement can be handled by the private sector. But this article is a great introduction to a thought experiment: Imagine if America’s private bail system did not exist and one of Cato’s legal experts proposed privatization of whatever system the government had created instead. That proposal doubtlessly would be condemned as utopian, unrealistic, impractical, and unworkable. Fortunately, that impossible idea has been successfully in place for about two hundred years. Just something to keep in mind the next time a statist tells you that something only can be done by government.

John McCain has a campaign finance problem. When his campaign was down and out, he agreed to take public funding for the primaries. Public funding comes with spending limits overall and by state. Also, a candidate who accepts funding cannot raise money from private sources. Now that it is possible he will be the nominee, McCain will want to be free of those fundraising and spending limits, but he cannot withdraw from the public system. Or perhaps he could but only with the approval of the FEC, which is not operating because of a struggle over its nominees. The FEC does not now have a quorum to meet and regulate. (The lack of a quorum was caused by Barack Obama’s hold on a nominee to the FEC, but never mind).

McCain will want out of the public system because he is probably close to hitting the limit, and he could not get more money for his campaign until he received public funding after the GOP convention during the summer. His “dark period” would thus be a period without campaign funding that would run from spring until after the GOP convention. During that “dark period” Obama or Hillary, both of whom have not accepted public funding for the primaries, would be able to continue spending money; some of that spending would be directed against McCain after Obama or Hillary has secured the party’s nomination.

So McCain needs to get out of the public system and fast. One way would be to refuse public funding for the fall campaign; he could then start raising money privately now; however, he pledged to accept public funding for the general election if his opponent did so. Obama has taken a similar pledge. Also, McCain would get around some of this by using “outside groups” (527 groups and others ) to fund his effort, but he has been a fierce critic of such groups and tactics.

I have often noticed that people whom you would expect to support campaign finance regulation (e.g. liberal Democrats) often are strident critics of the system if they have had some personal contact with the web of regulation. McCain is in a mess fostered in part by his own self-righteousness. Somehow I do not expect his personal contact with the system will make him a critic of it in 2009.

See also Mark Schmitt’s concise and informative report.

Joanne Jacobs highlights a piece in Salon by Garrison Keillor in which he criticizes Democrats for opposing systematic phonics instruction just because it is associated with political and social conservatives.

But Jacobs is right when she says that “phonics instruction is not inherently the property of the GOP or George W. Bush.” Keillor isn’t familiar with the history of the U.S. reading wars if he thinks that “progressive” opposition to structured phonics is a recent or merely political phenomenon.

After attacking phonics in his annual report of 1843, Horace Mann (godfather of U.S. public schooling) got into an email flame war a tense exchange of pamphlets with 31 Boston schoolmasters. Mann was advocating the “word” or “look-say” method of early reading instruction, which has since morphed into “whole language.” He thought children shouldn’t be taught to systematically sound out and combine letters and syllables, but rather to simply look at words as wholes and know how to say them out loud, as if by magic. The schoolmasters told him he was nuts. (The original sources are cited here, for the curious.)

Education was still too decentralized and market driven in this country in the early 1840s for nutty pedagogical methods to displace ones that had proven themselves effective. It was not until the 1920s, when modern state school systems and teachers’ colleges had become well established, that progressive educators were able to impose their philosophical and pedagogical predilections on teachers-in-training and the public schools as a whole.

The issue here has never fundamentally been a political one. It has always been philosophical. Progressive education philosophers and practitioners generally object to highly structured systematic teaching methods, in any subject, because those methods do not comport with how they believe learning should take place.

The fact that structured methods work, and for many children work far better than the magical osmosis processes of “whole language,” confers no competitive advantage within a monopoly school system that has no real competition. Do public school districts go out of business if they adopt lousy methods or materials? No. That’s why lousy methods have survived for so long in the public school monopoly, and that is why those same lousy methods (and Horace Mann) were laughed at by schoolmasters at a time when educators actually had to show results in order to make a living.

That’s how Len Nichols of the New America Foundation described market prices for health insurance 41 minutes into this this webcast:

“We stopped child labor. We stopped slavery. We ought to stop extreme risk selection, too.”

I imagine more than a few actuaries and twentysomethings would be offended by the comparison.

Thanks to alert viewer Terry Holman for catching what I missed as I sat there listening to Nichols.

That’s what Sherry Glied (Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health), Len Nichols (New America Foundation) and I discuss with Larry Levitt in this Kaiser Family Foundation webcast. 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch issues a stirring editorial call today for free-enterprise insurance reform. It’s worth quoting in full:

In a state that ostensibly is a bastion of capitalism, government intervention in the marketplace turns up surprisingly often. Two parties who are negotiating a contract for a good or service often find a third party — the commonwealth — sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong.

For decades, Virginia law prevented insurance companies and policyholders from deciding who could receive health coverage. Not until three years ago did the General Assembly pass legislation allowing group accident and sickness policies to cover any class of persons mutually agreed upon by the insurance company and the policyholder.

Before then, health-insurance coverage was limited to spouses and dependent children. If a worker wanted to include someone else in his or her coverage, the law said he couldn’t — even if the worker’s employer and the insurance company both were happy to fulfill the request.

This year Del. Adam Ebbin is sponsoring legislation (HB 865) that would open up life-insurance coverage in much the same way: It would allow insurance companies to offer group coverage to anyone policyholders wished to cover — brother or sister, elderly parent, life partner, or third cousin twice removed — not just spouses and children.

Note well what this bill is not: a mandate. Insurance companies would not be required to cover anybody they did not wish to. They would remain free to reject coverage they did not care to offer. They simply would not be prohibited from covering persons they are willing to cover.

In a free market, that is precisely how insurance ought to work: The buyer and the seller of the policy work out the terms between themselves. The state’s job is merely to enforce the contract — not to write it. Ebbin’s bill deserves a resounding and unanimous aye.

The Times-Dispatch is well known as a conservative editorial page, so it’s gratifying to see them endorsing this pro-free enterprise, pro-business bill — even though some conservatives might object to it on the grounds that it will allow, though not compel, businesses to offer group life insurance to employees with same-sex partners. The Times-Dispatch commendably wants such issues worked out within companies, not by a state legislative ban.