Benedikt Thoma recalls the moment he began to think seriously about leaving Germany. It was in 2004, at a New Year’s Day reception in nearby Frankfurt, and the guest speaker, a prominent politician, was lamenting the fact that every year thousands of educated Germans turn their backs on their homeland. …There has been a steady exodus over the years, but it has recently become Topic A in a land already saddled with one of the most rapidly aging and shrinking populations of any Western nation. With evidence that more professionals are leaving now than in past years, politicians and business executives warn about the loss of their country’s best and brightest. …The trigger for this latest bout of angst was the release last fall of new government statistics showing that 144,800 Germans emigrated in 2005, up from 109,500 in 2001. At the same time, only 128,100 Germans returned, a decline of nearly 50,000 from the year before. That made it the first year in nearly four decades that more people left than came home. Demographic experts also say the nature of the emigrants is changing. These are not just young unskilled workers like those who fled the economically blighted eastern part of Germany after the country was reunified in 1990 to work in restaurants in Austria or Switzerland. They are doctors, engineers, architects and scientists — just the sort of highly educated professionals that Germany needs to compete with economic up-and-comers like China and India. “It’s not a problem of numbers as much as brain drain,” said Reiner Klingholz, the director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “What we desperately need in the near future are talented and qualified people to replace those who will retire in 15 to 20 years.” …Germany is not the only European country losing people. Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative presidential candidate in France, recently held a rally in London, home to 300,000 French citizens living in Britain, urging them to return and “make France a great nation.” The number of French citizens living in Britain jumped 8.4 percent in 2005, according to government statistics. But the total number of French people living outside the country grew only 1.2 percent, or 15,300 people, roughly equivalent to Germany’s net loss of about 16,700 citizens. Caveats aside, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Germany has become less attractive for people in fields like medicine, academic research and engineering. Those who leave cite chronic unemployment, a rigid labor market, stifling bureaucracy, high taxes and the plodding economy — which, though better recently, still lags behind that of the United States. …While the European Union’s expansion has given Germans more options, their two favorite destinations are outside it: Switzerland and the United States.

This year has seen a lot of attention paid to teachers unions, with the Supreme Court taking up the appeal from an outrageous Washington State Supreme Court decision that gutted the First Amendment rights of teachers and gave new “rights” to unions.

But battles are being fought all over the country. There have been union revolts in Washington, California, and Iowa, and the latest comes from Illinois, where the Century Education Association (CEA), representing Century School District in Ullin, IL, voted to sever their ties with the state and national union and become “local only.” And this official step comes after they were apparently harassed and lied to by their supposed representatives:

“We really felt that the IEA and the NEA were not organizations out to represent the best interests of teachers,” said Debra Goins, President of the CEA and a teacher at Century Elementary School. “We all felt we should have the right to choose to affiliate or not, without being harassed, bullied, lied to and intimidated.”

The Association of American Educators (the largest national, non-union, professional educators’ association) will step in to provide the benefits of a national without the burdens and baggage that come with NEA affiliation.

Keep an eye on Davenport v. Washington Education Association (WEA) and Washington v. WEA, which should be decided in June. The Washington court accepted the bizarre union argument that requiring the union to get permission from non-union-members before using their mandatory dues to engage in express advocacy for or against state or local candidates or initiatives is a violation of the union’s First Amendment rights. I think this is known as uber-chutzpah.

Friends of the First Amendment should hope the court will issue a broad ruling curtailing union tyranny. And that more union locals will demand to be treated like professionals rather than the political pawns of union bosses. 

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an article highlighting accusations that our friends over at the American Enterprise Institute are trying to bribe climate scientists to take shots at a forthcoming UN report on climate change, an article which aped an earlier piece in The Guardian. Shocking stuff. Apparently, AEI scholars Ken Green and Steve Hayward commited the unpardonable sin of asking scientific experts to critique the upcoming report for a book of collected essays on the subject in return for a $10,000 honorarium. 

Although the blogosphere has gone wild, it’s unclear to me why. While the letters they sent out soliciting contributions for the book highlighted their concerns about the IPCC process overall and the spin their work products are given in the media, they apparently did not stipulate what the authors were to say or the arguments they were to make. For instance, the letter to Prof. Steve Schroeder at Texas A&M stated:

We are looking for an author who can write a well-supported but accessible discussion of which elements of climate modeling have demonstrated predictive value that might make them policy-relevant and which elements of climate modeling have less levels of predictive utility, and hence, less utility in developing climate policy.

Well, God forbid somebody write an article like that! And may God doubly forbid the possibility that one might want to be paid for writing an article like that! And may God strike down in righteous fury the scientist willing to air even a whiff of critical thought concerning the report in question.

The fact that some environmentalists are trying to characterize the Green & Hayward letters as demonic invitations to lie for profit is understandable enough. The fact that prominent reporters are willing to give these accusations column inches in crowded newspapers is not. 

Even more distressing is the emerging concensus among the intellectual elite that some UN documents are akin to holy script that cannot be challenged, criticized, or even examined critically in civilized company. Since when did scientific reports earn the status of the Hadith or the Koran? Since when did science rule critical examination of popular hypotheses (no matter how well grounded) to be out of line? And when exactly did otherwise smart people come to the conclusion that ad hominem attack was a perfectly good and reasonable line of argument?

For a more detailed examination of the issues in play — more than this story really deserves — see Jonathan Adler’s riff on the Volokh Conspiracy. 

“Bush Plan Reins in Domestic Spending” — Washington Post

“Bush budget to cut aid to Mich.” — Detroit News

“Bush budget puts pinch on domestic spending” — Boston Globe

Reality check:

Every year the headlines speak of budget cuts, and every year the federal budget rises. As I wrote two years ago:

There’s a conspiracy afoot to convince American taxpayers that President Bush has submitted a lean, mean budget for Fiscal Year 2006. The funny thing is, Democrats and Republicans are both in on it, and journalists are going along. A reality check is in order.…

Democrats, Republicans, and journalists mostly agree that President Bush has submitted a lean, tight $2.57 trillion budget. Why? I think we have what dancers call a pas de deux going on here. Or maybe in honor of our Texas president and his aversion to all things French, we should just call it a Texas Two-Step: The president pretends to cut the budget, and Democrats pretend to believe him.

Both sets of politicians appeal to their bases that way. President Bush’s voters want to hear that he’s cutting the budget and saving tax dollars. The Democrats’ base of government employees and federal grant recipients want to see Democratic senators fighting budget cuts. When Kennedy and Clinton denounce Bush’s “devastating” budget cuts, their supporters become outraged at Bush. Meanwhile, Republican voters respond to such charges by becoming more supportive of Bush. They may have had some doubts about Bush’s commitment to fiscal conservatism, but the denunciations from Pelosi and her colleagues assuage those doubts.

Spending under President Bush has risen from $1.863 trillion in fiscal 2001 to a proposed $2.901 trillion in fiscal 2008. Not since Lyndon Johnson have we seen such rapid spending increases. But most of the responses to any new budget come from special interest groups–local governments, chiefs of police, Sallie Mae, AARP, veterans, environmentalists, health care providers, subsidized farmers–and they help to shape the perception that the budget is chopping programs.

Taxpayers would be better served if newspapers would run a nice clean graph–like the one above–with every budget story.

In addition to a recent post of my own on the subject, I recommend those by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen.

…when he responds to my post thus:

I think this is because libertarians don’t believe in health insurance as a means to help people with health conditions pay their bills.

I would put it this way:

Insurance is a voluntary arrangement where consumers agree to subsidize each other. By definition, sick people have higher medical expenses. Thus, some seek to charge healthy people more than they cost to insure, so that insurers can reduce the premiums they charge to the sick.

There are lots of reasons why healthy people may agree to that. They may be very risk-averse, and so they are willing to pay more than they cost to insure. They may be altruistic, deriving satisfaction from knowing that their higher premiums are making coverage more affordable for others. Or they may precommit to such subsidies before it is known who in the insurance pool will develop a chronic illness (read: guaranteed renewable insurance).

As a libertarian, I have no problem with the healthy subsidizing the sick via private health insurance — so long as the arrangement is voluntary. But problems arise when public policy tries to get healthy consumers to provide, shall we say, “extra-voluntary” subsidies:

• The healthy people eventually figure out that they are being over-charged, and they bolt. That makes the risk pool less-healthy, premiums rise, and more healthy people leave. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you’ve got your very own adverse selection death spiral.
• The insurers realize they can’t make money off the sick people, so they avoid diabetics and such as if they had the plague. 
• And it doesn’t help the situation that forced subsidies lead to greater moral hazard among the very people who already use lots of medical care. That just fuels the first two responses.

So to tweak Paduda’s characterization, libertarians think private insurance is a wonderful vehicle for voluntary subsidies and a lousy vehicle for forced subsidies.

In a world without such forced subsidies, Paduda is correct that we would purchase a lot less health insurance. And I find this comment instructive:

[I]nsurance would not be available at any kind of affordable price for anyone who really needs it if Cannon’s prescription becomes reality” [emphasis in original].

Sick people don’t need insurance. Insurance doesn’t make sick people healthy. They need medical care. They may even need subsidies. So why not try to provide them those things, rather than wreck the markets for both health insurance and health care?

Many equate insurance with subsidy. In fact, one is a subset of the other.

Don’t miss the latest from David Kirby and me on the libertarian vote. In Cato Policy Report (pdf; less attractive HTML version here) we report the results of our Zogby International poll of 2006 voters.

In the Zogby survey, 15 percent of voters gave libertarian answers to our three questions. And those libertarian-leaning voters showed the same shift away from Republican candidates that we had identified in the 2004 election. Clearly, “two more years of war, wiretapping, and welfare-state social spending” had not brought back any of the wandering libertarians.

We did some new tests in the Zogby survey. We asked voters to identify themselves ideologically. Full results are in the article, but most respondents whom we identified as libertarian described themselves as “conservative” (41 percent) or “moderate” (31 percent). Only 9 percent called themselves “libertarian.”

But … when we asked half the respondents, “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?” we were quite surprised that fully 59 percent said yes. And when we asked the other half of the sample, “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian?” we knew the number would go down. But it only went down to 44 percent. So 44 percent of American voters are willing to label themselves as “libertarian” if it’s defined as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.”

We point out to Republican strategists:

After the 2000 election Karl Rove was convinced that 4 million Christian evangelicals had stayed home, and he was determined to get them to the polls in 2004. By our calculations, Republicans carried the libertarian vote by 5.5 million votes in the off-year election of 2002 and by only 2.9 million votes in 2006. That’s a swing of 2.6 million libertarian voters. Remember, it takes two new base voters to replace one swing voter who switches from one party to the other. Rove and his colleagues should have been watching out for the libertarian vote as well.

Read the article.

But wait, there’s more!

Since that article was written, David Kirby (whose number-crunching skills prove that you can actually learn something useful at the Kennedy School of Government) has analyzed newly released data from the American National Election Studies, the gold standard of public opinion research. ANES’s 2006 survey once again found that 16 percent of voters held libertarian values. And David found the following shifts from the 2002 midterm elections:

How Libertarians Voted

House 2002 2006 
D candidate 23 46 
R candidate 70 54 

In other words, among libertarians, the margin for Republican House candidates dropped from 47 to 8 points, a 39-point swing. (Note: ANES asked the question a slightly different way, so that votes for third-party or independent candidates were not recorded in 2006. Libertarian voters seem to vote for alternative candidates at a higher rate than other voters.)

Turning to the upper chamber,

Senate 2002 2006 

D candidate 15 48 
R candidate 74 52 

Among libertarians, the margin for Republican Senate candidates dropped from 59 to 4 points, a 54-point swing.

As we noted in the Cato Policy Report article, “To put this in perspective, front-page stories since the election have reported the dramatic 7‑point shift of white conservative evangelicals away from the Republicans. The libertarian vote is about the same size as the religious right vote measured in exit polls, and it is subject to swings more than three times as large.”

We reiterate our advice above to Karl Rove, and invite Democratic strategists to look carefully at the gift that Republicans are offering them.