Here’s an entertaining and timely video from the Sunlight Foundation:

Readthe​bill​.org is where you can learn more about H. Res. 554.

Have a transparent Halloween everybody!

I have been reluctant to engage in the squabbling over the accuracy of the stimulus job “creation” figures because I believe it is more important to focus attention on the underlying “rob Peter to pay Paul” reality of Washington’s endeavor. As I mentioned yesterday, the government cannot “create” anything without also inflicting economic damage because the money ultimately comes at the expense of the private sector via taxation. There are countless other problems with government job “creation” efforts, including economic miscalculation, inefficiency, waste, etc. — not to mention the immorality of robbing poor Peter.

Yesterday, the White House issued a defense in response to an Associated Press finding that previously released numbers were overstated. The following sentence raised my eyebrow:

The reports are not from the government, but from the very people putting Recovery Act funds to work — governors, mayors, county executives, private businesses and community organizations across the country.

Today the federal government is supposed to release new job creation figures. I believe most of the numbers will originate with state government officials tasked with collecting and reporting jobs “created” with the stimulus dollars that passed through their state. Based on my own experience as an ex–state government employee responsible for collecting and reporting data purporting to show how well state programs were performing, I feel compelled to comment on the accuracy of today’s release.

Not only will today’s state-reported numbers be impossible to prove, they will be flush with erroneous, deceptive, and as Reason’s Sam Staley says, bogus claims. As Sam notes:

The numbers of jobs created or “saved” are simply counts provided by state agencies spending stimulus money. They simply record the number of people hired under the contract or for the project. They are not the result of investigative follow up, or a consistent methodology for identifying real jobs created or saved. (Indeed, these methodological problems have plagued economic development program evaluations for decades as states have claimed jobs were created by various tax incentive programs but no real way to verify the accuracy of the numbers.)

When I worked in Indiana’s state Office of Management and Budget, part of my job was to collect “performance measures” from state agencies. The idea was to offer Indiana taxpayers the appearance that the governor was holding state agencies accountable for how they spent money. In reality, we had no idea if the numbers state agencies gave us were accurate. There were no audits, and once the agencies figured out the whole effort was really a political gimmick, they often just gave us self-serving nonsense. Nonetheless, the numbers were pawned off on the public because it served political ends.

The Obama administration will continue to trumpet the number of jobs the stimulus package “created.” It will brag that the government’s efforts were not only successful, but that they were conducted with unprecedented transparency and accountability. But taxpayers and citizens should not buy into these claims. The stimulus jobs report is simply political theater: a charade intended to maintain public support for, or acquiescence to, Washington’s multiplying encroachments.

Law professors James Jacobs and Kimberly Potter make an interesting point:

Laws do not spring forth from a groundswell of public opinion, but rather are the product of lobbying by interested (“interest”) groups that must mobilize support among politicians. The hate crime laws are passed because of the lobbying efforts of organizations that advocate on behalf of blacks, Jews, gays, and lesbians, a few other ethnic and nationality groups, and in some cases, women. …Regardless of what it accomplishes, the passage of legislation boosts morale and the status of the organizations and their constituencies.

That’s from their excellent book on the subject, Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 66. 

If liberals write laws to “send messages,” can social conservatives do the same thing if they control the legislative assembly? Perhaps enact a criminal law against, say, adultery. Note that the point is not necessarily that the law be actually enforced or have any impact as far as reducing adultery in the jurisdiction. If the point is simply to “send a message,” liberals are going to be hard-pressed to lodge objections to conservative symbolic lawmaking.

For more on hate crimes, go here and here.

One argument in favor of a government overhaul of the health care system is that the free market had its chance, and failed when it comes to providing the best possible care. But as David Goldhill discovered while researching for the September cover article in The Atlantic, the United States has anything but a free-market health care system.

He explains his findings below:

For real market-based reform, see Cato’s new Policy Analysis, “Yes, Mr. President: A Free Market Can Fix Health Care.”

I watched with interest the J Street debate between Matt Yglesias and The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait over the question “what it means to be pro-Israel.” Matt’s a very efficient thinker, and Chait’s a particularly sharp debater. I witnessed him slug it out at length in a debate with David Boaz a while back, not something I’d like to do.

Chait made a straightforward argument: to be pro-Israel, someone has to accept two premises. First, one has to believe that historically, Israel is the more sympathetic party in the Middle East. Second, one has to believe that the U.S. should not be even-handed in the Middle East, but rather should be on Israel’s side.

But what was most interesting about his argument was his accusation of guilt by association against J Street. It was a problem, Chait argued, that J Street had been embraced by people who did not meet his definition of pro-Israel. Chait rang the alarum that “The American Conservative magazine, which was founded by Pat Buchanan, …has been saying nice things about J Street.” In addition, “the famous Walt and Mearsheimer have been saying extremely nice things about J Street — embracing J Street.”

This is a pretty straightforward guilt-by-association argument: The American Conservative doesn’t meet Chait’s definition of pro-Israel, therefore, for that magazine to praise J Street tarnishes its pro-Israel bona fides. Same story with John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt.

First, the person at TAC who’s been praising J Street has a name: Scott McConnell. Scott has a PhD in history from Columbia, and is the current editor-at-large (previously the editor) of the magazine. I don’t know in great detail Scott’s views on Israel, but I think it’s fair to say that he thinks it’s very important for America, for Israel, and for the Palestinians to get a two-state solution set up, and sooner rather than later. He also believes, I think, that in order for this to happen, Washington will have to put pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians to give up things they don’t want to give up. The same view is held by Mearsheimer and Walt. So the allegedly guilty parties’ view is certainly less zero-sum than Chait’s (would Chait characterize himself as “anti-Palestinian,” I wonder?), maybe even positive-sum. But I don’t think that receiving praise from a person with such views on the matter necessarily should serve to taint J Street’s pro-Israel bona fides.

But beyond this, is guilt-by-association really something that Chait wants to engage in at all? For instance, Chait’s boss at The New Republic, Martin Peretz, wrote last March that Mexican people suffer from “congenital corruption” and possess “near-tropical work habits.” (The piece is no longer available on TNR’swebsite, but the passage in question can be found here.) Should we be asking what Chait’s views on Mexicans are, since he is a writer at TNR under Mr. Peretz? When Peretz suggested two days ago that President Obama’s views on foreign policy are infused with an ideological narrative, and “Obama’s narrative is assumedly third world, maybe just by dint of his skin complexion,” should we be asking Chait to clarify his views on African-Americans? Finally, although I’m no expert on Mr. Peretz’s views on Arab people, those who’ve paid closer attention make a good case that he has said some reasonably provocative things about them, as well. Should Chait be brought in for questioning on these matters?

If people only wrote for magazines every word of which they agreed with, few people would write for magazines. Even if people took the much more modest step of steering clear of writing for magazines that regularly publish offensive material like the above, consumers of magazines like The New Republic would suffer. But the fact that Chait doesn’t feel the need to distance himself from Mr. Peretz’s various racial foibles ought to raise either questions about his views on Mexicans, blacks, and Arabs, or else questions about his standing to level charges of guilt by association.

Everybody reads the Federalist Papers. (I hope!) Written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, they are generally regarded as the most profound collection of political theory ever written in America. And since they deeply inform our understanding of our fundamental law, they are essential to understanding the American version of limited, constitutional government. But the ratification of the Constitution was a close thing in 1787–89, and the Anti-Federalists (who said that actually they were the federalists, while their opponents were nationalists) also had some insightful things to say about liberty and limited government.

Now the invaluable Liberty Fund has made available a collection of anti-federalist writings, The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle. The publisher says:

The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle makes available for the first time a one-volume collection of Anti-Federalist writings that are commensurate in scope, significance, political brilliance, and depth with those in The Federalist. Included in this volume as an appendix is a computational and contextual analysis that addresses the question of the authorship of two of the most well-known pseudonymous Anti-Federalist writings, namely, Essays of a Federal Farmer and Essays of Brutus. Also included are the records of Smith’s important speeches at the New York Ratifying Convention, some shorter writings of Smith’s from the ratification debate, and a set of private letters Smith wrote on constitutional subjects at the time of the ratification struggle.

One reason it’s important to study the ideas of the Anti-Federalists was offered by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism:

Most of the Amendments comprising the Bill of Rights restricted the national government’s direct authority over its citizens. Only one section dealt with the relationship between the state and central governments; the 10th Amendment “reserved” to the states or the people all powers not “delegated to the United States by the Constitution.” Nothing better illustrates that, whereas the Anti-Federalists had lost on the ratification issue, they had won on the question of how the Constitution would operate. The Constitution had not established a consolidated national system of government as most Federalists had at first intended, but a truly federal system, which is what the Anti-Federalists had wanted. In simpler terms, the Federalists got their Constitution, but the Anti-Federalists determined how it would be interpreted.

In a world where it’s easy to find a “Dirty Dozen” of Supreme Court decisions that have expanded government and eroded freedom, that may be hard to believe. But it’s important to read both halves of early American debate over the Constitution in order to understand the foundations of our system.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released third-quarter gross domestic product numbers yesterday, and overall real growth at 3.5 percent was pretty good.

But examining the components of GDP reveals a more disturbing picture. While consumption, exports, and the government sector were up, private investment has fallen through the floor.

Figure 1 reveals a dramatic collapse of private investment over the last two years. In nominal dollars, private investment in 2009 has only been at about the same level as the bottom of the last recession eight years ago (BEA Table 1.1.5).

Figure 2 has the same data in real 2005 dollars (BEA Table 1.1.6). It shows that private investment is stuck in a rut at about 17 percent below the lowest level reached at the bottom of the last recession.

The third quarter GDP numbers show that the economy is only starting to “recover” because of growing government and expanding consumption, which has been artificially inflated by large government transfers.

Business investment continues to be in a deep recession. Companies are simply not building factories or buying new machines and equipment.

Why not? I suspect that many firms are scared to death of higher taxes, inflation, health care mandates, increased labor regulation, and other profit-killers coming down the road from Washington. That is speculation, but I haven’t heard a better explanation of the death of private investment in America.

Data note: the measure of “government” here is government production as a share of GDP, not total government spending, which includes transfers.