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Rhode Island Senators on UN Reform - ???

Carroll Andrew Morse

I�ve put calls into both Senator Reed�s and Senator�s Chafee�s office inquiring about their positions on the UN reform proposals in Congress. There are basically 3 possible positions�

1. The �Hyde-Pence� position � Congress should pass a list of objective reform criteria and automatically cut some portion of UN funding if the criteria are not met.
2. The �Coleman-Lugar� position � Congress should pass a list of reform criteria, then leave it to the discretion of the President if funding is to be cut if the criteria are not met.
3. The position that tying funding cuts to reform is too harsh a position to be considered.

I will let you know our Senate delegation's position on this matter as soon as it becomes available to me.

6:32 PM

Public Sector Issues
Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest
Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
RI Public Pension Problems
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
The Union's Solution for the Future: Get More People in Unions
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense
Public and Private Unions
Rhode Island Unions Again Resist True Pension Reform
"Shut Up & Teach"

Upheaval at the AFL-CIO: Nobody has a Vision for Competing in a Global Economy

An editorial entitled Very Old Labor: Unions need a vision for the new global economy discusses the underlying reason for the breakup of the AFL-CIO:

The AFL-CIO, the giant union consortium formed in 1955 by George Meany and Walter Reuther, is breaking apart this week in a dispute over how to revive labor's lagging fortunes. The tragedy is that neither faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy.
Instead, we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement...

...Mr. Sweeney promised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into electoral politics to stop the Gingrich revolution. He staffed AFL-CIO headquarters with activists from the political left...and made the union consortium a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

A decade later we can see how that turned out. Democrats remain in the House and Senate minority, and union membership continues to decline across the American economy. The unionized share of the total U.S. work force has been sliding steadily for years, and was down again last year to 12.5%...In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label.

Service workers President Andy Stern wants to arrest this decline by diverting more labor resources into union organizing, especially at such large employers as Wal-Mart. One of his rebel allies, Terence O'Sullivan of the Laborers International Union, wants to more aggressively use union pension funds and financial assets to influence corporate decisions and gain seats on corporate boards. Mr. Sweeney doesn't oppose either idea, but he also wants to pour cash into Congressional lobbying and Democratic coffers. Mr. Stern replies that this money will largely be wasted until unions increase their member ranks, and for our non-union money he's probably right.

What's missing on both sides, however, is a vision of economic opportunity that might actually make workers want to join a union in the first place. Tactics aside, both factions continue to believe in the idea of unions that arose in the Industrial Age: Greedy management versus the exploited working man, seniority over flexibility, fixed benefits and strike threats over working with management to keep a U.S.-based company profitable and innovative in a world of growing competition. On the political front, both factions favor trade protection, higher taxes and government help to enforce restrictive work rules. This is the agenda of Old Europe, where jobless rates are above 10%, and it merely offers more economic insecurity in the U.S. as well.

What the labor movement really needs is a new generation of leaders who understand the emerging competition to U.S. workers from the likes of India and China. Rather than oppose imports to protect textile jobs that can't be saved, such leaders would work to reform education so future Americans can compete in the knowledge industries that will grow the fastest. They'd also work to make pensions and health insurance transportable from company to company, so a worker wouldn't be trapped by benefits in a job or industry he didn't like. They'd be partners with management, not antagonists.

Without such a new vision, Big Labor will only continue its slide. All the more so given new Labor Department rules, recently upheld in court after an AFL-CIO challenge, requiring that unions disclose more details about how they spend hard-earned member dues. Some of the nation's largest unions will now have to disclose their spending by specific categories, such as political donations, grievance proceedings, or organizing. This sunshine will expose just how much labor money is being wasted on political activities that have little to do with improving workers' lives...

...their real obstacle is the reality of the modern global economy. Until they offer workers something more than class warfare, circa 1955, they will continue to decline.

Other stories on the breakup can be read here and here.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Bankrupt pensions, extraordinary healthcare insurance benefits, outrageous demands by private and public sector unions, hidden union spending on politics, lousy decision-making by some management teams as well as misguided incentives and marketplace meddling by government have been discussed previously on Anchor Rising:

Union Political Activity
Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent
Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities
Now Here is a Good Idea
Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies

Private Sector Issues
Government Meddling Creates Marketplace Distortions, Increasing Long-Term Costs
If You Won't Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You
Underfunding Pensions, Public and Private, can Hurt Taxpayers
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?
Why the Big Three Auto Companies Could Easily Fail
Airline Industry: How Government Meddling in Marketplace Costs Taxpayers & Consumers
The Ongoing Squabble Between General Motors & the United Auto Workers Union
It Won't Work
Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die

9:48 AM

Site-Related Announcements

Andrew at TCS

Marc Comtois

Over at Tech Central Station, Andrew has some suggestions at to The Right Way to Reform the UN.

8:00 AM

July 25, 2005

Liberalism

How Rank Partisanship Can Cloud the Sense of Common Decency

Marc Comtois

From Pennsylvania:

The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying "our government" is against the war.

Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pa., said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich, 32.

She said he "died bravely and courageously in Iraq on July 10, serving his country."

In a phone interview, Goodrich said the funeral service was packed with people "who wanted to tell his family how Joe had impacted their lives."

Then, suddenly, "one uninvited guest made an appearance, Catherine Baker Knoll."

She sat down next to a Goodrich family member and, during the distribution of communion, said, "Who are you?" Then she handed the family member one of her business cards, which Goodrich said she still has.

"Knoll felt this was an appropriate time to campaign and impose her will on us," Goodrich said. "I am amazed and disgusted Knoll finds a Marine funeral a prime place to campaign."

Goodrich said she is positive that Knoll was not invited to the funeral, which was jammed with Marines in dress uniform and police officers, because the fallen Marine had been a policeman in McKeesport and Indiana County.

"Our family deserves an apology," Rhonda Goodrich said. "Here you have a soldier who was killed -- dying for his country -- in a church full of grieving family members and she shows up uninvited. It made a mockery of Joey's death."

What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, 'I want you to know our government is against this war,' " Goodrich said.

She said she is going to seek an answer from Gov. Ed Rendell's administration if it opposes the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, this is an extreme case, but it is illustrative of what can happen when one begins to view everything through partisan glasses. When we allow our political selves to be ginned up to the point where we begin to hate domestic political opponents to such a degree, we lose focus on the real enemies to our society. Of course, to too many liberals, the real enemy is not terrorists or belligerent nations: to them the enemy is President Bush and the Republican Party. To these, Michael Barrone's comments should be both read and heeded:

This summer, one big story is replaced by another--the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media--the New York Times, etc., etc.--to delegitimize yet another Republican administration. . .

. . . for the past five years, the same folks have been trying to undermine the presidency of George W. Bush. The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was denounced as an outrage, and Democrats noted, accurately, that Bush did not win a plurality of the popular vote in 2000. The nation rallied to his support after September 11, but Democrats held up his judicial and other nominations even if they had to violate Senate tradition to do so. Coverage of Bush during the 2004 campaign was heavily negative; for months the mainstream media mostly ignored the swift boat vets' charges against John Kerry and broadcast accusations against Bush based on forged documents eight weeks before the election. News of economic recovery in 2003 and 2004 was pitched far more negatively than it had been when Bill Clinton was president in 1995 and 1996.

Now the unsupported charges that "Bush lied" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been rekindled via criticism of Karl Rove. A key witness for the Democrats and mainstream media was former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Unfortunately for his advocates, he turned out to be a liar. A year after his famous article appeared in the New York Times in July 2003 accusing Bush of "twisting" intelligence, the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan report, concluded that Wilson lied when he said his wife had nothing to do with his dispatch to Niger and Chairman Pat Roberts said that his report bolstered rather than refuted the case that Saddam Hussein's Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. So despite the continuing credulousness of much of the press, it appears inconceivable at this point that Karl Rove will be charged with violating the law prohibiting disclosure of the names of undercover agents. The case against Rove--ballyhooed by recent Time and Newsweek cover stories that paid little heed to the discrediting of Wilson--seems likely to end not with a bang but a whimper. . .

The bombings and attempted bombings in London have brought home to the American public that we face implacable enemies unwilling to be appeased by even the most emollient diplomacy. Yet, mainstream media coverage of Iraq has been mostly negative. But mainstream media no longer have a monopoly; Americans have other sources in talk radio, Fox News, and the blogosphere. Bush's presidency is still regarded as illegitimate by perhaps 20 percent of the electorate. But among the rest, the attempt to delegitimize him seems to be collapsing.

Democrats have to get off of their hell-bent-for-leather attempt to "get" Bush et al aka Nixon. This hyper-politicization of all things only exposes the dearth of ideas on the left. In fact, what has occurred is that those who purport to be "liberal" are actually conservative in their theory of government: they wish to extend or preserve the same failed programs of the past half-century: those started by Roosevelt and expanded by LBJ. They continue to criticize without solutions. This country needs two viable parties so that the best ideas can emerge. Right now, we don't. But at the bare minimum, would it be too much to ask of the opponents of the President that they discontinue the hyperbolic rhetoric concerning foreign affairs? Apparently, the answer is "yes."

2:15 PM | Comments (2)

July 22, 2005

Judiciary

Playing the Religious Bigotry Card, Again

As an American citizen who happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic, I am deeply offended by the Left's willingness to engage in anti-Catholic religious bigotry.

Hugh Hewitt tells the latest story in a Friday, July 22, at 7:50 a.m. posting entitled Preparing to play the "deeply held beliefs" card: Charles Schumer's New Test Act:

...But declarations of victory [about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts] are very premature given the obvious signs that the left is getting ready to mount a two-part campaign against [him].
Part I will be the conventional "give us the documents or we won't vote" blather that currently blocks Bolton and in the past was used to block Miguel Estrada. This is a delaying tactic, and nothing more. [See Power Line for more on this topic.]

The real assault is coming on Roberts --and his wife's-- Roman Catholicism.

It will be carefully coded, but there is no mistaking the set-up work underway to get the Demcrats' version of the Test Act established.

Four articles have appeared in two days that set-up the nominee's religious beliefs as a subject for conversation.

[Read the posting to get the particulars in each article.]

Robert Novak's column from August 11, 2003 provides the key history to the expected assault on John Roberts:

On May 1 in a Senate Judiciary Committee session, Schumer raised religious questions in connection with the nomination of lawyer J. Leon Holmes as district judge from Arkansas. Holmes has the support of his state's two Democratic senators, but not Chuck Schumer. The New Yorker argued that the conservative religious views of Holmes, a devout Catholic, disqualified him because of disagreements interpreting the separation of church and state. Schumer contended that 'religious beliefs cannot dictate government policy, even though they can infuse our values.'
That was preparation for Schumer's opposition to Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor for the appellate bench, another conservative Catholic who is the most recent of the filibustered Bush nominees. In the Judiciary Committee June 11, Schumer said Pryor's beliefs 'are so well known, so deeply held that it's very hard to believe that they're not going to influence' him on the bench. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, another Judiciary member, also has cited the 'deeply held beliefs' standard.

It is going to get ugly, and how ugly depends upon how desperate the left is, and it looks pretty desperate.

Let's call this behavior by its real name: It is another form of religion called Liberal Fundamentalism.

And it reeks of intolerance, best explained by Richard John Neuhaus:

The conflict in American public life today then is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate...

And here is the full counter-argument to their attempts to enslave us with their intolerant secular religion.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Power Line continues the conversation here, a posting which highlights this editorial by Jonathan Turley and which led to discovering an updated editorial by Robert Novak.

Power Line has more as Senator Durbin, a man known in recent times for speaking only the truth! about the American military, denies what Turley wrote about in his editorial. Power Line has more here.

And be sure to check out Justin's thoughtful comment (#3) to this posting, a comment that inspires awe as he once again shows off his remarkable gift for clarity in written communication.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
The Ginsburg Precedent
Senator Schumer's Double Standard
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

3:58 PM | Comments (4)

Politically Correct Suicide

Paul Sperry has written an article entitled Politically Correct Suicide: Still No Subway Profiling, in which he says:

After a new series of subway bomb attacks in London, the mayor of New York announced yesterday that police will search backpacks and other bags carried by people boarding city subways.
But the passengers they single out will be picked at random without regard for their race or religion. There will be absolutely no profiling, Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed.

Talk about politically correct exercises in futility.

Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked Bloomberg's own city with planes nearly four years earlier. Statistically, they fit the profile of the terrorist targeting the American transportation system.

And yet, still no profiling.

Authorities instead will single out people for special security screening as they do at the nation's airports. That means stopping Girl Scouts and grannies in a procedure that has more to do with demonstrating tolerance for young Muslim men than protecting citizens from them.

At the same time, the NYPD is advising subway riders to be alert for "people" with bulky clothes or fiddling nervously with bags. Could they be more general in describing the traits of an Islamic suicide bomber? They're too PC to narrow it to a level where it can actually be useful to Americans trying to protect themselves and their loved ones...

Don't expect the feds to be any more serious about screening Muslim suicide bombers on Amtrak, which pulls into two of the biggest commuter train depots in the country: Penn Station and Union Station.

Asked after the London bombings if the fed-run trains were safe, White House terror czar Fran Townsend claimed: "They're safer than they were after 9/11, they're safer after the Madrid bombings ... It's a lot safer."

What a crock. Not only is there no passenger profiling on Amtrak, there's no bag screening -- even after Madrid. The only restrictions on bags are a 50-pound weight limit, and that's no comfort at all. The London bombers used plastic explosives weighing less than 50 pounds.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and his Muslim-sensitive civil-rights team act as a bulwark against profiling at airports and train stations. One of Mineta's top aides is the son of a Wahhabi mosque leader who raised money for Osama bin Laden's No. 2 in Santa Clara, Calif.

So don't hold your breath for any policy changes there -- even if, as experts predict, as many as 20,000 casualties result from London-type bombs detonated in the New York MTA.

And that's not the only al-Qaida threat to mass transit that authorities are worried about. According to a closely held DHS security advisory I obtained, the "terrorists have designed a crude chemical dispersal device fabricated from commonly available materials, which is designed to asphyxiate its victims."

"The device produces cyanogens chloride (CLCN) gas and/or hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas," continues the five-page document, first issued Nov. 21, 2003. "These gases are most effective when released in confined spaces such as subways."

And they are extremely deadly, experts say.

By not allowing police to profile the most suspicious train passengers, Bloomberg, Mineta and other leaders are not only unnecessarily inconveniencing millions of commuters, but unwittingly giving Muslim terrorists political cover to carry out their plans. Call it politically correct suicide.

Power Line writes:

Apparently lots of London Muslims think it's odd that people are looking at them funny:
[A spokesman for the Council] said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner.

Gosh, why would that be? Maybe I'm being unfair here, but it seems to me that a great many Muslims are refusing to face reality. For their sake as well as everyone else's, they need to get serious about helping the authorities root out terrorism, in England and elsewhere.

3:12 PM | Comments (1)

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
The Ginsburg Precedent
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Aussie Prime Minister Howard: Challenging Fanciful Thinking About Global War on Terror

Australian Prime Minister John Howard cuts through all the nonsensical, politically correct talk about the global war on terror with these words:

Could I start by saying the prime minister [Tony Blair] and I were having a discussion when we heard about it [July 7 attacks in London]. My first reaction was to get some more information. And I really don't want to add to what the prime minister has said. It's a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here.
Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

12:28 PM | Comments (1)

Interviews

Lance Armstrong

As the Tour de France comes to its end in the next few days and it looks like Lance Armstrong has a good chance to win his seventh straight race, I found the following excerpts from this older New Yorker profile article of Armstrong to contain many interesting insights into him:

Lance Armstrong's heart is almost a third larger than that of an average man. During those rare moments when he is at rest, it beats about thirty-two times a minute-slowly enough so that a doctor who knew nothing about him would call a hospital as soon as he heard it. (When Armstrong is exerting himself, his heart rate can edge up above two hundred beats a minute.) Physically, he was a prodigy...
Armstrong was an outstanding young swimmer, and as an adolescent he began to enter triathlons. By 1987, when he was sixteen, he was also winning bicycle races. That year, he was invited to the Cooper Institute, in Dallas, which was one of the first centers to recognize the relationship between fitness and aerobic conditioning. Everyone uses oxygen to break down food into the components that provide energy; the more oxygen you are able to use, the more energy you will produce, and the faster you can run, ride, or swim. Armstrong was given a test called the VO2 Max, which is commonly used to assess an athlete's aerobic ability: it measures the maximum amount of oxygen the lungs can consume during exercise. His levels were the highest ever recorded at the clinic. (Currently, they are about eighty-five millilitres per kilogram of body weight; a healthy man might have a VO2 Max of forty.)

Chris Carmichael, who became his coach when Armstrong was still a teen-ager, told me that even then Armstrong was among the most remarkable athletes he had ever seen. Not only has his cardiovascular strength always been exceptional; his body seems specially constructed for cycling. His thigh bones are unusually long, for example, which permits him to apply just the right amount of torque to the pedals...

Within a week, Armstrong had surgery to remove the cancerous testicle. By then, the disease had spread to his lungs, abdomen, and brain. He needed brain surgery and the most aggressive type of chemotherapy. "At that point, he had a minority chance of living another year," Craig Nichols, who was Armstrong's principal oncologist, told me. "We cure at most a third of the people in situations like that." A professor at Oregon Health Sciences University who specializes in testicular cancer, Nichols has remained a friend and is an adviser to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which supports cancer research. Nichols described Armstrong as the "most willful person I have ever met." And, he said, "he wasn't willing to die." Armstrong underwent four rounds of chemotherapy so powerful that the chemicals destroyed his musculature and caused permanent kidney damage; in the final treatments, the chemicals left burns on his skin from the inside out. Cofidis, convinced that Armstrong's career (and perhaps his life) was over, told his agent while he was still in the hospital that it wanted to reconsider the terms of his contract. That may have turned out to be the worst bet in the history of sports...

Armstrong now says that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him. Before becoming ill, he didn't care about strategy or tactics or teamwork-and nobody (no matter what his abilities) becomes a great cyclist without mastering those aspects of the sport. Despite Armstrong's brilliant early start in the 1993 Tour, for example, he didn't even finish the race; he dropped out when the teams entered the most difficult mountain phase, in the Alps. (He also failed to finish in 1994 and 1996.)

As Carmichael pointed out to me, Armstrong had always been gifted, but "genetically he is not alone. He is near the top but not at the top. I have seen people better than Lance that never go anywhere. Before Lance had cancer, we argued all the time. He never trained right. He just relied on his gift. He would do what you asked for two weeks, then flake off and do his own thing for a month or two. And then a big race would be coming up and he would call me up, all tense, telling me, 'God, I have got to start training, and you guys better start sending me some programs.' I would say, 'Lance, you don't just start preparing things four weeks before a race. This is a long process.' "

Cycling is, above all, a team sport, and the tactics involved are as complicated as those of baseball or basketball. "Ever try to explain the infield-fly rule to somebody?" Armstrong asked me when we were in Texas, where he lives when he is not racing or training in Europe. "You have to watch it to get it. As soon as you pay some attention to the tactics, cycling makes a lot of sense."...

The physical demands on competitive cyclists are immense. One day, they will have to ride two hundred kilometres through the mountains; the next day there might be a long, flat sprint lasting seven hours. Because cyclists have such a low percentage of body fat, they are more susceptible to infections than other people. (At the beginning of the Tour, Armstrong's body fat is around four or five per cent; this season, Shaquille O'Neal, the most powerful player in the N.B.A., boasted that his body-fat level was sixteen per cent.)

The Tour de France has been described as the equivalent of running twenty marathons in twenty days...

Looking at a wide range of physical activities, Saris and his colleagues measured the metabolic demands made on people engaged in each of them. "On average, the cyclists expend sixty-five hundred calories a day for three weeks, with peak days of ten thousand calories," he said. "If you are sedentary, you are burning perhaps twenty-five hundred calories a day. Active people might burn as many as thirty-five hundred."

Saris compared the metabolic rates of professional cyclists while they were riding with those of a variety of animal species, and he created a kind of energy index-dividing daily expenditure of energy by resting metabolic rate. This figure turned out to range from one to seven. An active male rates about two on Saris's index and an average professional cyclist four and a half. Almost no species can survive with a number that is greater than five. For example, the effort made by birds foraging for food sometimes kills them, and they scored a little more than five. In fact, only four species are known to have higher rates on Saris's energy index than the professional cyclists in his study: a small Australian possum, a macaroni penguin, a large seabird called a gannet, and one species of marsupial mouse...

Every ounce of fat, bone, and muscle on Armstrong's body is regularly inventoried, analyzed, and accounted for. I asked him if he felt it was necessary to endure the daily prodding and poking required to provide all this information, and to adhere so rigidly to his training schedules. "Depends whether you want to win," he replied. "I do. The Tour is a two-thousand-mile race, and people sometimes win by one minute. Or less. One minute in nearly a month of suffering isn't that much. So the people who win are the ones willing to suffer the most." Suffering is to cyclists what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well they are doing their job. Like many of his competitors in the peloton, Armstrong seems to love pain, and even to crave it...

10:59 AM | Comments (1)

Judiciary

Senator Schumer's Double Standard

Richard Epstein's editorial entitled Who Will Judge the Inquisitors? notes that Senator Schumer's behavior toward Supreme Court nominee John Roberts is hypocritical:

�Hence I should like to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Sen. Schumer to identify three recent Supreme Court cases that I disagree with�
�I think we have to play by a different set of ground rules. Hard debate is a two-way street. Every time I defend my views, I am rightly at risk for criticism and refutation. But Sen. Schumer thinks his views set the gold standard for constitutional interpretation. But he, too, should be at risk to questions about his deeply held beliefs. Here is how I would start.

From the get-go, I would insist that we view with suspicion the oft-hurled epithet of "judicial activism." Judicial review, which allows the Court to strike down federal and state legislation, is an indisputable part of the Constitution. The structural and substantive prohibitions the Constitution contains are large. One can be a "strict constructionist" and still believe that major legislative initiatives, executive orders, and administrative rules are unconstitutional. By the same token, the government should be accorded a wider degree of discretion in running its own affairs -- the military, courts, schools, etc. -- a view that is largely permissive of government affirmative action programs that parallel those which comparable private institutions adopt on a voluntary basis. In these cases the private benchmark offers a useful measuring rod for state discretion.

But for Sen. Schumer my questions address the coercive use of government power. What presumption should attach to the constitutionality of the use of state force? This vexed question of the "standard of review" is nowhere stated in the Constitution, and thus ultimately derives from a sense of its basic purposes, which I take to be the preservation of "ordered liberty" -- with a state strong enough to rule, but not so strong as to snuff out the liberties of ordinary people to own property, enter contracts, worship, and speak as they please.

Given that view, the proper response to all forms of state regulation of private activities should be to subject them to serious judicial scrutiny, in order to see that they achieve their legitimate objectives. Judged by this twin standard, many decisions come out badly...

[Epstein then goes on to comment about three specific cases, comments which are worth reading in detail for the full impact of his argument.]

Note that my three cases all involve situations in which responsible constitutional interpretation requires some strong acts of judicial intervention [which Sen. Schumer would oppose in the three cases]. Liberals like Sen. Schumer think that this presumption [of judicial intervention] works in cases like gay marriage (where they have a strong case) and abortion (where their case is far weaker, owing to the interest of the unborn child).

�My main point here is that Sen. Schumer's own views are subject to powerful intellectual counterattack, so that before he and his allies cast stones on John Roberts, he should recognize that he and his ilk also live in a glass house.

But, then again, we know what Senator Schumer's agenda has always been - even before John Roberts was nominated.

For the Left, this nomination battle is a raw power struggle focused on sustaining the recent practice of the Supreme Court to legislate on policy issues from the bench in ways that would never be endorsed by the public in state and local legislative bodies.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

10:22 AM | Comments (2)

Judiciary

The Ginsburg Precedent

In a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled Who Will Judge the Inquisitors?, Richard Epstein discusses Supreme Court nominee John Roberts and Democratic Senator Schumer's initial comments:

...I have never met Judge Roberts, nor, for that matter, read a single one of his opinions. But I knew that he enjoyed the reputation as one of the keenest intellects and best Supreme Court advocates in the highly competitive Washington legal market. A glance at his gilt-edged resume -- his 1979-80 clerkship with the late Judge Henry Friendly on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals leaps out -- only increased my confidence in his nomination. His familiarity with complex business matters counts as a big added plus. Well done, I thought. This should be a cakewalk.
Then I heard Senator Charles Schumer, somber and self-righteous, reach, as he so often does, for the microphone, to announce that gilt-edged credentials are not enough. In his view, all nominees must be vetted for the soundness of their ideological positions. More pointedly, he observed that when John Roberts was up for a Circuit Court judge position, he refused, under questioning, to identify three Supreme Court decisions that he disagreed with. This time round, Sen. Schumer warned, that evasion will not work...

Now, if you want to see a double standard at work, consider this posting from Hugh Hewitt entitled The Ginsburg Precedent:

"I prefer not to answer questions like that; again, to talk in grand terms about principles that have to be applied in concrete cases. I like to reason from the specific case," was the response of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Patrick Leahy's 1993 question to then nominee Judge Ginsburg on which of the two religion clauses of the First Amendment was subordinate to the other.
Judge Roberts will no doubt be spending a lot of time with the transcripts of the confirmation hearings, especially that part where Senator Leahy says "I understand. Just trying, Judge, just trying" in response to Justice Ginsburg refusal to engage in great debate over constitutional principles.

This article by Jay T. Jorgensen explains in detail the importance of the precedents established by the Ginsburg hearings. One of his many key findings:

"Justice Ginsburg declined to answer questions about her views on both prospective and many historical Supreme Court cases. She also declined to answer questions (or gave non-responsive answers to questions) involving a number of controversial issues, hypothetical facts, or areas in which she is not an expert."

Nothing has changed in 12 years, except that the president nominating the justice is George W. Bush and not Bill Clinton. The MSM will attempt to prop up the wild claims of Senators Leahy and Schumer about the duties of nominees, as the New York Times editorialists did this morning when they wrote "[t]he Senate has a duty to scrutinize his background and to question him closely at his confirmation hearings about substantive areas of the law." But when biased papers invent such "duties," or when Ted Kennedy makes the statement that "[n]o nominee, especially a nominee who is well known to have argued ideological positions on issues important to the American people, should be confirmed without full and candid disclosure and discussion of those positions and their importance to him," the Ginsburg precedent must be close at hand.

Useful activism: The Jorgensen article is easily linked and e-mailed. Bloggers should feature it prominently on their blogs, and activists should e-mail it to columnists and editorial writers at every level of the media. It will especially be useful if hundreds of activists e-mail it to D.C. talking heads so that they have no excuse for indulging the Schumers and the Leahys who hold forth on the duty of nominees to answer loaded questions...

Here is the list of questions Senator Schumer has for Judge Roberts.

Mark Levin comments:

Justice Scalia gave a speech about the Pledge of Allegiance, in which he took a position on the words "under God." As a result he was compelled ethically to recuse himself from the case. A nominee for the Court, giving answers under oath, is under a similar obligation. It would be irresponsible to give direct answers to inappropriate questions.

Robert Alt explains further:

During recent confirmation hearings, Senate Democrats have taken to asking candidates very specific questions about legal issues which are likely to come before their prospective courts. Such questions have presented the nominees with a Catch-22: If the nominees answer the questions, then they risk running afoul of the codes of judicial ethics, and may be required to take no part in cases raising that issue coming before the court. If, however, the nominees choose to point out that judicial cannons prohibit them from answering the question, then they face rejection by Senate Democrats for not being sufficiently forthcoming.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

9:35 AM

July 21, 2005

Culture

The Social Engineering Beyond Challenge

Justin Katz

"Breaking the Glass Taboo," my latest column for TheFactIs.org, responds to Providence Journal editorialist M.J. Anderson's nostalgia for the days of the Baby Boomers' youth and to recent research finding that removing men from the home can be part of a recipe for creating "exceptional" boys.

I didn't go into this in my column, but have you ever noticed that "progress" increasingly seems like a bend around the cultural track back to our primal days? Well, consider what it would imply for men's behavior if society accepted the notion that fathers needn't be bound to the children whom they beget.

6:27 AM

July 19, 2005

Judiciary

"Restoration of Judicial Restraint Assists the Restoration of Good Will, Because Democratic Governance Gives Everyone Their Say"

The following words are written in a new Wall Street Journal editorial entitled No More Souters:

...the record across recent decades is that justices who join the High Court without a clear and confident jurisprudence eventually become part of what has been a longstanding liberal majority...
By "liberal majority," by the way, we aren't merely referring to such issues as abortion or gay rights. Our objection to Roe and to Lawrence, the Texas sodomy case, isn't on the underlying policy. It is that the Court has hijacked those social disputes from democratic debate, preventing the kind of legislative compromises that would allow a social and political consensus to form. As federal appeals court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson put it recently in an address at Duke University Law School, "In this sense, a restoration of [judicial] restraint assists the restoration of good will, because democratic governance gives everyone their say."

But there are many other issues on which the post-Warren justices have arrogated to themselves an almost legislative authority: overturning voter-passed Congressional term limits by 5-4, dictating racial and gender preferences in law, extending the Commerce Clause to encompass virtually any federal authority as in last term's Raich medical-marijuana decision, or expanding eminent domain in Kelo.

This is the history...

But the larger goal should be to pick someone who has the intellectual conviction and firepower to help restore the High Court to its more restrained historical role. In a phrase, this means putting an end at last to the judicial legislating that was unleashed in the Warren era and that has slowed only on occasion ever since.

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are other postings on this site about the related issue of the judicial filibuster debate:

12:18 PM | Comments (1)

July 18, 2005

Judiciary

Senator Santorum: Judicial Activism is Destroying Traditional Morality

In the first of five excerpts from It Takes a Family, Senator Rick Santorum has this to say about the debate regarding the proper role for the Supreme Court in our society:

The village elders (a.k.a. left-wing members of Congress) introduce very few bills � almost none that attract more than one or two cosponsors. There are no hearings where Congress and the public can hear arguments about the merits to society of changing its moral fabric. Did Congress pass a law that said it was illegal to display a Christmas cr�che on public property, tell us we could not recite the pledge that we are "one nation under God" in schools, or legislate away displays of the Ten Commandments from public buildings? Did we pass a constitutional amendment that gave anyone a right to marry as many people of whatever gender they want? Did we pass an amendment that gave women the right to abort their children at any time, for any reason, during pregnancy? Did we pass a law that minors could undergo the surgical procedure of abortion without parental consent or notification? The answer to all of these questions is: No! Not in one state legislature, much less in the U.S. Congress, did the democratic branches of government, the people�s branches, pass such amendments or enact such laws. How could the moral fabric of America be so torn apart without so much as a single act of Congress duly signed by the president?
The answer is, of course, the courts � most particularly, the federal courts. A generation ago, liberals figured out something that most conservatives couldn�t have dreamed of in their worst nightmare. A few well-positioned autocrats can do what most Americans thought, and the Constitution says, takes two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures to do: namely, change the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean. The plan was simple. Put justices on the Supreme Court, backed up by lower court judges, to "modernize" our Constitution by fiat...

How often do we hear that our founding compact needs to be a living, breathing document whose meaning changes with the times? Never mind what the words of our Constitution actually say; never mind the clear intent of the Constitution�s writers and signers; never mind two hundred years of judicial interpretation; never mind the centuries-old wisdom of the common law: We are much wiser today than our predecessors. Or so goes the liberal boast...

I have been referring to the Left as the "village elders." Well, when it comes to the Court and its activist decisions, we have come to the high oligarchy of the village elders: accountable to no one, deciding the most important and troubling issues of our time, issues that speak to our very identity as a people and even as human beings. And all of this has been done undemocratically � even anti-democratically.

With Congress, if the people decide its representatives have made a mistake, the people can throw them out and bring in different ones to correct with new laws any errors perpetrated by the old. But the Supreme Court almost never has second thoughts: It certainly has not had second thoughts about its fundamental project of the past generation, the project of moral revolution enshrined in law. In fact, in the infamous Casey decision in 1992, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade and the abortion license, the Court�s majority opinion actually said that widespread popular opposition to Roe was an important reason for the Court to stick to its pro-abortion decision: To do otherwise would "subvert" the Court�s "legitimacy." In other words, the village elders have spoken, and it is up to the American people to shut up and obey.

...Could our founders...ever have imagined such judicial arrogance? Actually, some eventually did. Thomas Jefferson said in 1821:

The germ of destruction of our nation is in the power of the judiciary, an irresponsible body � working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall render powerless the checks of one branch over the other and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

I often use the extended metaphor of various kinds of "capital." When it comes to what has happened to our moral capital in the past generation or two, I am stymied for a verb to use. It wasn�t "squandered" or "spent down"; it didn�t "trickle away." The verbs that come to mind are destroyed and replaced. Traditional morality is being destroyed, and being replaced by something that claims to be morality, but ultimately has little social benefit or ability to sustain the democratic experiment...What we Americans did with our moral capital over the last generation is...On government orders � in our case, on Court orders � we melted it down, for nothing.

Here are the subsequent excerpts from Senator Santorum:

The Constitutional Wrecking Ball - It all started with Griswold
Enter "Neutrality"- From accommodating separationism to Everson
A Perfect Storm: Privacy. Neutrality. Free Expression.
Mending Morality: Where do we stand? What comes next?

Here are some previous postings which contain further suggestions for the proper role of the judiciary:

Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"
Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America
Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning

Here are two examples of how the Left views the same issues:

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

7:30 PM

Education

NEA in Damage Control Mode, Per Kaus

Thanks to Andrew for the heads-up about a posting in today's kausfiles:

Test Scores Improving, NEA In Full Damage-Control Mode! Want to know what to make of those recent encouraging NAEP test score results, which the Bush Administration promptly hailed as "proof that No Child Left Behind is working." As usual, Eduwonk is the place to start. ... Anti-NCLB groups (e.g. the National Education Association) argue that since the NCLB had only been in effect for a year prior to the test, it can't be credited with the results. But as Education Week noted:
...many states had already begun making such changes and focusing intensely on improving reading and math instruction after the 1999 national assessment and prior to the federal law's implementation.

There's a similar argument in the welfare debate: Why did all sorts of indicators (e.g., teen pregnancy, caseloads) start to improve in the years before the enactment of the 1996 federal reform? President Clinton attributed the results to state reform efforts that preceded the federal law. The case for a similar effect in education seems at least as strong, if not stronger. Weren't pre-NCLB state efforts to require more testing and accountability far more pervasive than pre-1996 state efforts to require more welfare recipients to work? ...

P.S.: The good news in education, of course, may in itself also be good news for welfare reform. One of the dreamier welfare reform theories, remember, was that kids whose parents worked (and who lived in neighborhoods in which more other kids' parents worked) would do better in school. Liberal writers have made big splashes by noting individual cases in which this dynamic did not seem to be at work, in part because welfare reform pushed poor single mothers to hold down jobs that took them away from their kids. All welfare reformers could say, in effect, was "Let's wait until we see how these big changes in neighborhoods play out across the whole population over many years." Well .... Certainly results like the NAEP's (which showed especially big gains for black 9-year-olds) make it harder to argue that the 1996 welfare law, by requiring mothers to take jobs and leave their kids, has had a negative overall effect on kids' school performance.

7:21 PM

The Pacifist's Double Standard

Carroll Andrew Morse

The headline on today's Financial Times article about Iraq suffers from a double standard all too common in MSM reporting.

Weekend of slaughter propels Iraq towards all-out civil war.

For some reason, continuing violence directed against a population does not constitute a state of war. Only once the population fights back in a systematic way do the evils of war attach. So to avoid war, all you have to do is not fight back against organized killers.

7:43 AM

July 17, 2005

A Brutal Fight to the Death Against Rabid Ideologues

Gordon Cucullu of Democracy Project writes about the recent London bombing, making these comments:

...Recite the dismal laundry list of terrorist attacks that have taken place globally since the late 1990s. We have read the names so many times that we have almost become jaded to them but we can�t let that happen. We need to remind ourselves of Lebanon, the Achille Lauro, Munich, Israel, the World Trade Center, Iraq, Oklahoma City, East Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Bali, Madrid, Holland, the USS Cole, Lockerbie, Philippines, Egypt, Libya, Teheran, Pakistan, India, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Now we can add London to that sad list. We must recognize a stark fact that too many of the self-styled intelligentsia seem not to comprehend: regardless of what we do the terrorists are coming after us. They are coming not to negotiate, not to seek accommodation or understanding, not to learn how to work together: they are coming to kill and destroy.
Unless we grasp the enormity of that fact, accept it, and hold it close we will lose this war. For war it is. Not crime, not misunderstanding, not something than can be resolved on a psychiatrist�s couch or with an anti-depressant medication. From time to time we drift away from our purpose, forget what started this war in the first place...

Worst of all, we pretend that this war is somehow a war against �terror� rather than a brutal war to the death against rabid ideologues who have declared the war against us and intend to destroy us and our way of life. This is not a war against Islam per se, but as Paul Marshall notes �the root of this wave of terrorism is extremist religion.� These terror leaders have said that they intend to impose their twisted version of Islam upon us. We need to listen to what these people say and be candid in our own thoughts and speech. No longer can we go to ridiculous lengths to avoid offense, or to deceive ourselves that we are dealing with a �religion of peace.� Ayatollah Khomeini said, back when all this began in earnest, �we did not create a revolution to lower the price of melon.� More recently Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, made terrorist intentions clear: �We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.�

The wave of attacks in London ought to have been a wake up call � again! How many of these will we require before we act against the root cause?...

...But how many wake up calls do we need to galvanize our will? Will it require a nuclear, poison gas, or biological attack before we at last have the moral courage to recognize our enemy for who and what he is? If the London attack can produce that result then the lives will not have been spent in vain.

Marc quotes Lee Harris in an earlier posting, with this additional perspective:

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.
In the blood feud, the orientation is not to the future, as in war, but to the past...

In the blood feud, unlike war, you have no interest in bringing your enemy to his knees. You are not looking for your enemy to surrender to you; you are simply interested in killing some of his people in revenge for past injuries, real or imaginary -- nor does it matter in the least whether the people you kill today were the ones guilty of the past injuries that you claim to be avenging. In a blood feud, every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge. What is important is that some of their guys must be killed -- not necessarily anyone of any standing in their community. Just kill someone on the other side, and you have done what the logic of the blood feud commands you to do.

In the blood feud there is no concept of decisive victory because there is no desire to end the blood feud. Rather the blood feud functions as a permanent "ethical" institution -- it is the way of life for those who participate in it; it is how they keep score and how they maintain their own rights and privileges. You don't feud to win, you feud to keep your enemy from winning -- and that is why the anthropologist of the Bedouin feud, Emrys Peters, has written the disturbing words: The feud is eternal...

Contemporary Islamic terrorism has permitted the ancient practitioners of the blood feud to introduce its brutal and primeval logic into a world of modern technology and parliamentary politics. The sooner we grasp this fact, the sooner we will be in a position to know our enemy for who he really is. Until then we will be as dazed and confused as those who, while peacefully riding a commuter train, suddenly find themselves bloodied and blackened, in the midst of maimed corpses and twisted steel, whispering to themselves over and over, "Why? Why?"

11:12 PM

Casino Gambling is Destructive, Serving No Positive Social Purpose

Thanks to Chuck over at The Senescent Man, check out this website entitled Kay Coalition Against Casino Gambling (KAYCO), which is a statewide coordinating body helping local community groups to resist the spread of the gambling industry in their neighborhoods.

Casino gambling serves no positive social purpose. We must continue to oppose all attempts to impose it any further on our state.

12:02 PM | Comments (2)

Judiciary

Viewing the Supreme Court Nomination Battle From the Far Left

Here is how MoveOn.org describes the upcoming Supreme Court nomination process:

Just days after Justice O'Connor's resignation, the fight to protect our rights is in full swing. By all accounts, this will be a long, fierce campaign. The radical right is already pouring millions of dollars in large, secret contributions into the right wing spin machine, determined to ram through whomever Bush puts forward...
If Bush announces an extremist nominee we'll to need respond fast and hard with ads on the airwaves and in major newspapers that get our message out�and none of it comes cheap. So today we're launching our Emergency Fund to Protect our Rights with an initial goal of $500,000. If you can help us get there now, we can leap straight into action the moment we hear the news.

If keeping an extremist off the Supreme Court is important to you, this is a great time to chip in...

The national press is already reporting that this will be the most expensive, ruthless Supreme Court nomination ever. They're calling this the "Presidential election of 2005" and estimating as much as $100 million will be spent in the fight.

Why are far-right leaders like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson determined to spend so much? Because even with Republican control of Congress and the White House, our independent courts (not to mention the Constitution) still interfere with their drive to impose a narrow, far right agenda on the rest of America. After more than 10 years without an opening on the Supreme Court, this is the chance they've been waiting for to seize complete control...

Look again at the words they use: Radical right. Secret contributions. Right wing spin machine. Ram through. Extremist nominee. Ruthless. Impose a narrow, far right agenda on the rest of America. Seize complete control.

Now contrast those words with the words and substantive content of these previous postings:

It is worth repeating: The use of extreme language by the far left is an attempt to turn the nomination process into a raw power struggle that distracts everyone from having a truly open, public debate about the core question of whether judicial activism (i.e., legislating from the bench) or judicial restraint (i.e., legislatures, not courts, legislate) is the proper role for the judicial branch of our government.

9:34 AM

Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die

Donald B. Hawthorne

Nothing is more unjust to the working families and retirees of America than to over-pay for under-performance. In other words, not to get fair value for our hard-earned monies.

It is in that context where this blogsite has been appropriately critical of both public sector unions and private sector unions. Follow all the links at the bottom of postings here and here for concrete examples. In some of the latter postings, the imbecilic actions of certain management teams have also been criticized.

No less of a problem in our society are the corporate welfare queens who exist like parasites living off their manipulation of a bloated federal government, thereby reducing many Americans' standard of living through hidden and completely unnecessary taxes.

The article entitled Sugar Daddies: How sugar interests rip off America and harm the national interest provides a classic example of a corporate welfare queen:

In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole...
The program allows sugar processors to take out loans from the USDA by pledging sugar as collateral. The loan rates - 18 cents per pound for cane sugar, 22.9 cents per pound for beet sugar - are significantly higher than average world sugar prices. These loans must be repaid within nine months, but processors also have the option of forfeiting their sugar to the government in lieu of repaying their debt.

This arrangement effectively guarantees that the processors receive a price for their sugar that is no lower than the loan value: If prices fell below that level, they would simply forfeit their sugar and keep the government's money. In order to avoid that scenario, the USDA must prop up the domestic price of sugar. It does this by controlling supply through two mechanisms. First, it sets quotas on how much foreign sugar can be imported without facing prohibitive tariffs; second, it regulates the amount of sugar that domestic processors can sell.

The consequence is that sugar in the U.S. has, over the past decade, cost two to three times the average world price. The sugar industry likes to point out that the program requires no government outlays, since processors repay their loans each year (assuming the government keeps sugar prices sufficiently high). This argument is sound if one regards the sugar program as a question of federal bookkeeping, but that is only because, in this case, the government does an uncharacteristically efficient job of plundering taxpayers to pay off a special interest: It simply cuts itself out as middleman. Each time you buy sugar or a product made with sugar, the difference between the price you pay and the lower price you would pay absent the sugar program's dirigisme can be thought of as a sugar tax. Unlike most taxes, this tax never finds its way to government accounts. Instead, it passes directly from your pocket to the sugar industry's profit statements.

A GAO study found that, between 1989 and 1991, the sugar tax cost American consumers an average of $1.4 billion per year. By 1998, that number had risen to $1.9 billion. Other costs are borne by manufacturers who use sugar as an input. Faced with high domestic prices, some confectioners have moved to countries without sugar price supports, such as Canada. Others have simply shut down...Without the program, resources currently devoted to sugar production would shift to more efficient sectors of the economy and create new jobs.

The sugar program is a case study in how small, concentrated interests can trump larger but more diffuse ones. By any measure, the U.S. sugar industry is minuscule. It employs only 62,000 people and comprises less than 0.5 percent of U.S. farms. But because it profits so richly from the current protectionist scheme, it has a powerful incentive to keep that scheme in place.

It does so by donating extravagantly to political candidates. One lobbyist who works with trade issues says, "[The sugar industry] is collecting monopoly rents. Any industry in a position of collecting monopoly rents will spend back a significant portion of those rents to maintain those monopolies." Although sugar accounts for just 1 percent of U.S. farm receipts, 17 percent of all campaign contributions from the agricultural sector between 1990 and 2004 came from the sugar lobby.

Perhaps no political investment has brought a higher return. The GAO report found that sugar producers gain around $1 billion a year from the artificially high prices that the sugar program guarantees. Some growers have gotten exceedingly rich...

Nowhere does the sugar lobby pursue its interests more ferociously than in debates on free trade. Having successfully lobbied the Bush administration to exclude sugar from the recently ratified free-trade agreement with Australia, sugar producers are now determined to kill the Central American Free Trade Agreement, on which Congress will vote sometime this summer.

CAFTA, which would eliminate most trade barriers between the U.S. and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, is, if anything, embarrassingly deferential toward the sugar lobby. After its full implementation over a 15-year period, it would allow participating states to increase their sugar exports to the U.S. by only 1.7 percent of current U.S. sugar production. The sugar industry is nevertheless intransigently opposed to the pact, and has rejected every suggested compromise.

If the sugar lobby derails CAFTA, its success will, once again, represent the triumph of the few at the expense of the many. CAFTA would bring modest but not insignificant economic gains to both the U.S. and Central America. Perhaps more important, it would advance efforts to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and would strengthen the Central American middle class while making the economic and legal systems of participating states more open and transparent...

It is deeply exasperating that a tiny sector on which CAFTA's effect would be almost negligible is within striking distance of scuttling the agreement. The obstinacy of sugar producers looks especially unreasonable when one considers that protectionism has increased their share of the domestic market from 55 percent in the late 1970s to 89 percent in 2002, and when one notes that population growth over the next decade is likely to increase demand for sugar, thereby offsetting any lost income to the industry...

...The United States has no reason to grow sugar, and every reason not to. It is a simple question of comparative advantage, as Dennis Avery, a former agriculture analyst for the Department of State, explains: "Yields of sugar in the tropics are twice as high and the costs half as high as growing sugar in temperate regions." The U.S. sugar program thus defies both nature and economics; in guaranteeing an artificially high price for sugar, it encourages American farmers to plant sugar instead of crops they could grow more efficiently. Ending the domestic sugar program would require them to switch to the crops they should have been growing all along.

While liberalizing world farm trade would probably put a stop to domestic sugar production, it would also, according to Avery, mean that U.S. farmers who now grow sugar beets...could sell wheat to China and India, and make far more money than they do from this sugar...Cane growers in Florida and Louisiana would have a somewhat harder time of it, since little else could grow on their lands...Smaller farmers could be compensated for their loss, and their transition eased by a gradual phase-out of the sugar program.

The benefits of ending domestic sugar production would not be merely economic; Avery sees liberalized farm trade as...both the leading environmental issue and the leading trade issue in the world...Given long-term population trends, countries will have to specialize in crops for which they have a comparative advantage...or else undertake policies with disastrous environmental consequences...

...domestic producers will not acquiesce in the removal of their government-mandated profit margins...

The real test will come in 2007, when the next farm bill is negotiated. Reformers should seek nothing less than the total dismantling of the sugar program...

These sweetheart deals - that benefit a few to the detriment of the many - are economically wrong and morally wrong. They must end.

To conclude, ask yourself why such sweetheart deals like the one described above exist in the first place. The answer is part of a much broader issue, which was addressed in an indepth posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest. I would encourage you to read that posting carefully.

8:46 AM | TrackBack (0)

Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die

Nothing is more unjust to the working families and retirees of America than to over-pay for under-performance. In other words, not to get fair value for our hard-earned monies.

The article entitled Sugar Daddies: How sugar interests rip off America and harm the national interest provides a classic example of a corporate welfare queen:

In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole�
The program allows sugar processors to take out loans from the USDA by pledging sugar as collateral. The loan rates � 18 cents per pound for cane sugar, 22.9 cents per pound for beet sugar � are significantly higher than average world sugar prices. These loans must be repaid within nine months, but processors also have the option of forfeiting their sugar to the government in lieu of repaying their debt.

This arrangement effectively guarantees that the processors receive a price for their sugar that is no lower than the loan value: If prices fell below that level, they would simply forfeit their sugar and keep the government�s money. In order to avoid that scenario, the USDA must prop up the domestic price of sugar. It does this by controlling supply through two mechanisms. First, it sets quotas on how much foreign sugar can be imported without facing prohibitive tariffs; second, it regulates the amount of sugar that domestic processors can sell.

The consequence is that sugar in the U.S. has, over the past decade, cost two to three times the average world price. The sugar industry likes to point out that the program requires no government outlays, since processors repay their loans each year (assuming the government keeps sugar prices sufficiently high). This argument is sound if one regards the sugar program as a question of federal bookkeeping, but that is only because, in this case, the government does an uncharacteristically efficient job of plundering taxpayers to pay off a special interest: It simply cuts itself out as middleman. Each time you buy sugar or a product made with sugar, the difference between the price you pay and the lower price you would pay absent the sugar program�s dirigisme can be thought of as a sugar tax. Unlike most taxes, this tax never finds its way to government accounts. Instead, it passes directly from your pocket to the sugar industry�s profit statements.

A GAO study found that, between 1989 and 1991, the sugar tax cost American consumers an average of $1.4 billion per year. By 1998, that number had risen to $1.9 billion. Other costs are borne by manufacturers who use sugar as an input. Faced with high domestic prices, some confectioners have moved to countries without sugar price supports, such as Canada. Others have simply shut down�Without the program, resources currently devoted to sugar production would shift to more efficient sectors of the economy and create new jobs.

The sugar program is a case study in how small, concentrated interests can trump larger but more diffuse ones. By any measure, the U.S. sugar industry is minuscule. It employs only 62,000 people and comprises less than 0.5 percent of U.S. farms. But because it profits so richly from the current protectionist scheme, it has a powerful incentive to keep that scheme in place.

It does so by donating extravagantly to political candidates. One lobbyist who works with trade issues says, �[The sugar industry] is collecting monopoly rents. Any industry in a position of collecting monopoly rents will spend back a significant portion of those rents to maintain those monopolies.� Although sugar accounts for just 1 percent of U.S. farm receipts, 17 percent of all campaign contributions from the agricultural sector between 1990 and 2004 came from the sugar lobby.

Perhaps no political investment has brought a higher return. The GAO report found that sugar producers gain around $1 billion a year from the artificially high prices that the sugar program guarantees. Some growers have gotten exceedingly rich�

Nowhere does the sugar lobby pursue its interests more ferociously than in debates on free trade. Having successfully lobbied the Bush administration to exclude sugar from the recently ratified free-trade agreement with Australia, sugar producers are now determined to kill the Central American Free Trade Agreement, on which Congress will vote sometime this summer.

CAFTA, which would eliminate most trade barriers between the U.S. and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, is, if anything, embarrassingly deferential toward the sugar lobby. After its full implementation over a 15-year period, it would allow participating states to increase their sugar exports to the U.S. by only 1.7 percent of current U.S. sugar production. The sugar industry is nevertheless intransigently opposed to the pact, and has rejected every suggested compromise.

If the sugar lobby derails CAFTA, its success will, once again, represent the triumph of the few at the expense of the many. CAFTA would bring modest but not insignificant economic gains to both the U.S. and Central America. Perhaps more important, it would advance efforts to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and would strengthen the Central American middle class while making the economic and legal systems of participating states more open and transparent�

It is deeply exasperating that a tiny sector on which CAFTA�s effect would be almost negligible is within striking distance of scuttling the agreement. The obstinacy of sugar producers looks especially unreasonable when one considers that protectionism has increased their share of the domestic market from 55 percent in the late 1970s to 89 percent in 2002, and when one notes that population growth over the next decade is likely to increase demand for sugar, thereby offsetting any lost income to the industry�

�The United States has no reason to grow sugar, and every reason not to. It is a simple question of comparative advantage, as Dennis Avery, a former agriculture analyst for the Department of State, explains: �Yields of sugar in the tropics are twice as high and the costs half as high as growing sugar in temperate regions.� The U.S. sugar program thus defies both nature and economics; in guaranteeing an artificially high price for sugar, it encourages American farmers to plant sugar instead of crops they could grow more efficiently. Ending the domestic sugar program would require them to switch to the crops they should have been growing all along.

While liberalizing world farm trade would probably put a stop to domestic sugar production, it would also, according to Avery, mean that U.S. farmers who now grow sugar beets �could sell wheat to China and India, and make far more money than they do from this sugar.� Cane growers in Florida and Louisiana would have a somewhat harder time of it, since little else could grow on their lands�Smaller farmers could be compensated for their loss, and their transition eased by a gradual phase-out of the sugar program.

The benefits of ending domestic sugar production would not be merely economic; Avery sees liberalized farm trade as �both the leading environmental issue and the leading trade issue in the world.� Given long-term population trends, countries will have to specialize in crops for which they have a comparative advantage � or else undertake policies with disastrous environmental consequences�

�domestic producers will not acquiesce in the removal of their government-mandated profit margins�

The real test will come in 2007, when the next farm bill is negotiated. Reformers should seek nothing less than the total dismantling of the sugar program�

These sweetheart deals - that benefit a few to the detriment of the many - are economically wrong and morally wrong. They must end.

8:46 AM

Public Sector Issues
Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest
Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
RI Public Pension Problems
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
The Union's Solution for the Future: Get More People in Unions
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense
Public and Private Unions
Now Here is a Good Idea
Rhode Island Unions Again Resist True Pension Reform
"Shut Up & Teach"
Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies

It Won't Work

I am the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers. Dad was active and outspoken in the civil rights movement in the 1960's, a truly noble cause that rightfully sought to extend the principles of America to all citizens.

In contrast, an article entitled Labor and Religion Reunite: The AFL-CIO is sending forth seminary students to shore up the waning clout of unions by reviving the connection with a traditional ally highlights a pale imitation of that historical effort in what is nothing more than a phony attempt to pretty up the self-interest of labor unions and masquerade it as a noble cause:

The office manager pressed forward, glowering, his muscles straining the seams of his pinstriped suit. "I'm asking you to step outside," he said.
The nine men and women who had taken over the lobby of AlliedBarton Security Services did not budge.

Rabbinical student clasped hands with Islamic scholar and Methodist seminarian. Heads bowed, eyes closed, they sang "Amazing Grace." And prayed that the security guards employed here would join the Service Employees International Union.

Struggling to regain power and prestige for the sagging labor movement, the AFL-CIO has hired more than three dozen aspiring ministers, imams, priests and rabbis to spread the gospel of union organizing across the nation this summer.

The program seeks to recreate the historic partnership between faith and labor, an alliance that for nearly a century gave union leaders an aura of moral authority � and their cause the stamp of divine righteousness.

As it prepares for a national convention next week in Chicago, the AFL-CIO faces stark challenges: Less than 8% of private-sector workers belong to unions, compared with more than 35% in the 1950s...

Labor leaders are responding with programs to overhaul their image. They want unions to be seen as a dynamic force for social justice, not as a stodgy special interest.

That's where the seminary students come in.

For $300 a week, they're organizing security guards in metropolitan Washington, carpenters in Boston, hotel maids in Chicago, meatpackers in Los Angeles. Some spend their days with the workers, trying to give them courage to mobilize. Others visit local congregations to urge solidarity with the union cause...

Most of the interns can readily quote the religious text that moved them to apply for the labor internship, which is cosponsored by Interfaith Worker Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group...

Historically, religious leaders have been among labor's most steadfast partners...

...the AFL-CIO hopes will spring from the internships, which have been in place for six summers. If quoting the Bible can persuade a fearful maid to join the union, great. But the real goal is to inspire a generation of pastors to put economic justice � and, in particular, union-building � at the center of their ministry...

The last paragraph defines the key underlying assumption in this effort: It could only work if there was a tangible link between economic justice and union-building.

But, while there will always be some examples of inappropriate management behavior in a sinful world, most people realize this is no longer the 1930's when labor unions served a valuable role in our society.

Now, the labor unions are just another big business albeit with one important difference: They add no economic value and only serve to raise costs, putting certain companies at risk of becoming uncompetitive in an increasingly competitive global economy. That is a strategy for job losses and the reduction in many people's standard of living over time.

Happy talk aside, it won't work. And it won't because either you deal with economic reality or it will deal with you - on its own terms.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Bankrupt pensions, extraordinary healthcare insurance benefits, outrageous demands by private and public sector unions, lousy decision-making by some management teams as well as misguided incentives and marketplace meddling by government have been discussed previously on Anchor Rising:

7:50 AM

July 15, 2005

This is America

Carroll Andrew Morse

From the Army Times, via the Drudge Report

During a routine patrol in Baghdad June 2, Army Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, hiding in a van just 75 yards away. The incident was filmed by the insurgents....After tracking down the now-wounded sniper with a team from B Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Iraqi Army Brigade, Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs and gave medical aid to the terrorist who�d tried to kill him just minutes before.

5:48 PM

Other postings include:
Background Information on the East Greenwich NEA Labor Dispute
The NEA's Disinformation Campaign
East Greenwich Salary & Benefits Data
More Bad Faith Behavior by the NEA
The Debate About Retroactive Pay
Would You Hurt Our Children Just To Win Better Contract Terms?
The Question Remains Open & Unanswered: Are We/They Doing Right By Our Children?
Will The East Greenwich Teachers' Union Stop Their Attempts to Legally Extort Residents?
You Have To Read This Posting To Believe It! The Delusional World of the NEA Teachers' Union
So What Else is New? Teachers' Union Continues Non-Productive Behaviors in East Greenwich Labor Talks
"Bargaining Rights are Civil Rights"
The NEA-Rhode Island's Pathetic Attempts to Manipulate East Greenwich Residents
What's Wrong With This Picture: 800 Applicants for 14 Teaching Jobs & the NEA Says There is a Problem

The Governor on Beacon Mutual

Marc Comtois

Governor Carcieri has put forth his case against the privatization of Beacon Mutual in today's ProJo. First, there are risks:

Rhode Island employers should worry about this expansion because Beacon is not just any insurer. Beacon has two statutory duties that no other insurer has: First, Beacon must offer insurance at the lowest possible cost to Rhode Island employers; it cannot raise rates just to fatten profits. Second, Beacon is the "insurer of last resort" in Rhode Island.

Other workers'-comp insurers may decline to cover an employer for a variety of reasons, but Beacon may not. This obligation is the bedrock on which our entire workers'-comp system is founded. The governor's appointments to the board are designed to ensure that Beacon fulfills its public mission.

If Beacon is permitted to expand outside Rhode Island and its management is not as successful in competing in those new markets as it predicts, the out-of-state losses could affect our own workers'-comp market. A failure by Beacon to profit in other states could drive up rates for Rhode Island businesses. Why should Rhode Island employers place at risk the reserves that they have built up at Beacon to pay losses from out-of-state businesses?

Then, the rush to push the legislation through doesn't pass the smell test.

Instead of a well-studied proposal that would benefit the people and businesses of this state, we seem to have on our hands another example of the Rhode Island insider network plying its trade at the State House. Did we learn nothing from the scandals involving the insiders at Blue Cross? Did the General Assembly miss the national debate over corporate-governance standards?

We don't need another out-of-control nonprofit insurer. We've seen this story before.

Instead of weakening public scrutiny over this public corporation, we should be increasing Beacon's corporate-governance standards. I will introduce legislation in the next General Assembly to do just that.

Finally, there are the questions about the money Beacon is spending and taking in. How are they spending what they're taking in?

Instead of acceding to the demands of Beacon's well-paid management team, let's start asking it hard questions: Why did Beacon rack up travel expenses of more than $600,000 in 2004 to operate a company that insures only Rhode Island businesses? Is it appropriate for board members of a nonprofit company to profit from their public service? And, most important, why does Beacon need to continually add to its surplus, when the surplus already stands at $115 million, on top of its $274 million in loss reserves?

Shouldn't more of Beacon's $6.4 million profit in 2004 be returned to the policyholders?

Instead of falling over itself to approve this insider legislation at record speed, the General Assembly should be holding hearings to get to the bottom of these questions.

Yes, they should. I would say we are going to be seeing another veto pretty soon.

9:00 AM

Education

Two Local Examples Reinforce Why Today's Public Education System Will Never Achieve Excellence

The North East Independent and the East Greenwich Pendulum, our two local newspapers, carried two stories this week that reinforce, yet again, why public schools are structured in a way where neither teachers nor bureaucrats act in ways that lead to a level of excellence necessary to provide our children with a superb education and the ability as adults to compete successfully in a global economy:

The first had to do with the hiring of a high school chemistry teacher who twice - yes, twice - failed beginning chemistry courses. Here is an excerpt from the Independent:

The School Committee approved the appointment of a teacher Tuesday night that some board members fear may be unqualified.
In a 4-3 vote the board appointed Lesley A. Fastovsky as chemistry teacher at the high school even though Fastovsky's transcripts from the University of Rhode Island show that she failed numerous chemistry courses as an undergraduate. The appointment is for one year only...

Committee member Sue Cienki, who carries an undergraduate degree in chemistry herself, said she is furious that a person who had so much trouble with chemistry will be responsible for teaching the subject to students in East Greenwich.

"I am absolutely infuriated by this," she said. "I have a little trouble in having someone who could not pass a general chemistry class teaching in our district."

Fastovsky's transcripts drew ire from a number of members on the board. As an undergraduate, she twice failed Chemistry 101, the general chemistry lecture offered by the university, in 1989 and 1990. In fact, Fastovsky did not even complete the course at the university, instead taking the class at the Community College of Rhode Island in 1992 and transferring the credits to URI.

Fastovsky once again had problems with the subject in 1993, failing Chemistry 112, the second level offered at URI. She would take the class again the next semester, passing with a D.

Committee member Merrill Friedemann, who joined with Cienki and committee member Steven Gregson in dissenting on the vote, said she could not believe what she saw in the transcripts. With the committee making a number of appointments for the upcoming school year, she said many of the applicants had graduated with honors, making this hiring strange.

"All of the other applicants [for other appointments] came very highly recommended," she said. "This one seemed like an anomaly."

Faculty and administration members came to the defense of Fastovsky, asking committee members to look at the classes she took as a graduate student and how she has improved over the years...

Peter McLaren, the science department chair for the district, said that emphasis should not be placed on early grades, admitting that he has an F on his transcript as well. He noted that Fastovsky is certified to teach chemistry, having taken more than 24 credits in the subject after achieving her bachelor's degree...

...Cienki was not swayed by these arguments. Looking at her transcripts, Cienki said Fastovsky may be qualified to teach other subjects, like geology, a subject in which she performed well in at URI, but maintains that she is not what the district should be striving for in its search for a chemistry teacher.

Despite Fastovsky's achievements in her master's work, Cienki said many of those subjects will not come up in a high school course.

"This woman couldn't get the basics, which is what she is responsible for teaching to the students," she said. "Now I want to sit in that class next year and see what she can get across."

The second was presented in a story carried by the Pendulum that showed, yet again, how the teachers' union contract allows manipulation of the system by teachers for their own benefits - regardless of whether that is best for our children:

...School Committee members Marilyn Freidemann and Sue Cienki were alarmed by the contractual policy which allows teachers on a leave of absence or sabbatical to bid on jobs opening up while they're on leave. "It was my understanding, that we granted teachers sabbatical with the expectation that they come back to their original position," said Freidemann.
Freidemann and Cienki were concerned over Cole Middle School science teacher Andrew Longo's bid for East Greenwich High School biology teacher Tom Collin's old job for the 2006-2007 school year, which means hiring a teacher to fill that position for one year until Longo's leave of absence ends and he can take over. The head of the high school science department, Peter McLaren, recommended hiring Christopher Wren for a one-year biology position at the high school and Marcia Wicker for a 1.0 science position at Cole. This would allow Longo the high school biology position, starting August 30, 2006.

Freidemann and Cienki felt their hands were tied. "We're trapped," said Freidemann. "Supposedly, Christopher Wren is a wonderful candidate. Too bad we can only hire him for one year."...

The committee could not approve Wicker and Wren without approving Longo. "If these people are not approved, there will be a collapse in the science department," said McLaren...

According to McLaren, Longo, who is representing the East Greenwich school district at a widely recognized national science program, has gained "professional development, and a raised awareness of science, skills he can utilize in the classroom." But Freidemann wasn't having it. "It has nothing to do with what they're bringing back to a different classroom. After being given sabbatical, they should come back to teach the grades they were teaching."

Freidemann went on to condemn the purpose of asking for sabbatical. "Well, now we know why they want one. Clearly, it's just for their own professional development."

Longo, who was actually granted a two year leave of absence, has the right, according to union contract, to bid on any position while he's on leave because of his seniority. As Cienki and Freidemann browsed through the contract, Ross was quick to understand how it works. "The contract is more protective of his right to return [not his obligation to]. And, as it's constructed in protection of teachers' rights, it allows them the means to bid on any position while on leave." Freidemann agreed. "You're right. And we need to change it."

But there could be no changing of the contract that evening. So the heated discussion railed on...

Thanks for the School Committee members for speaking out and protesting this tolerance within the public school system for mediocrity and manipulation.

And that begs the ongoing question: Why does our society tolerate this ongoing and actively defended mediocrity by public school teachers and bureaucrats?

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON EDUCATIONAL ISSUES:

EAST GREENWICH NEA TEACHERS' UNION CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS
In a nutshell, here is what I think the negotiating position of the East Greenwich School Committee should be on some of the key financial terms of the contract.

OTHER RHODE ISLAND PUBLIC EDUCATION/UNION ISSUES
In addition to financial issues, management rights are the other big teachers' union contract issue. "Work-to-rule" or "contract compliance" only can become an issue because of how management rights are defined in union contracts. The best reading on this subject is the recent report by The Education Partnership. It is must reading.

Other editorials and postings include:
ProJo editorial: Derailing the R.I. gravy train
ProJo editorial: RI public unions work to reduce your family's quality of life
ProJo editorial: Breaking the taxpayer: How R.I. teachers get 12% pay hikes
Selfish Focus of Teachers Unions: Everything But What Is Good For Our Kids
Tom Coyne - RI Schools: Big Bucks Have Not Brought Good Results
The NEA: There They Go, Again!
A Response: Why Teachers' Unions (Not Teachers!) Are Bad For Education
"A Girl From The Projects" Gets an Opportunity to Live the American Dream
Doing Right By Our Children in Public Education Requires Thinking Outside The Box
Debating Rhode Island Public Education Issues
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
Are Teachers Fairly Compensated?
Warwick Teachers' Union Throws Public Tantrum
Blocking More Charter Schools Means Hurting Our Children
RI Educational Establishment: Your Days of No Vigorous Public Oversight & No Accountability Are Ending

BROADER PUBLIC EDUCATION ISSUES
The Deep Performance Problems with American Public Education
Freedom, Hard Work & Quality Education: Making The American Dream Possible For ALL Americans
Parents or Government/Unions: Who Should Control Our Children's Educational Decisions?
Now Here is a Good Idea
Milton Friedman on School Choice
Issuing a Call for a Higher Quality Public Debate About Education
Is Merit Pay for Teachers a 'Crazy Idea'?
Reporting False Performance Data Under No Child Left Behind: Why Are We Surprised At Dishonest Behavior By The Educational Bureaucracy?
Lack of Merit Pay Reduces the Quality of Teachers & Our Schools
Will We Measure Educational Performance by Inputs or Outputs?
Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies
"Shut Up & Teach"

8:31 AM

John Derbyshire's Question

Carroll Andrew Morse

National Review Online�s John Derbyshire asks the following question about the relationship between democracy and terrorism:

Given that the four London suicide bombers were all raised -- in at least one case, born and raised -- in Britain, the quintessential liberal democracy; and given that the entire premise of current U.S. policy is that we can end suicide bombing and other terrorism by bringing liberal democracy to the Middle East; shouldn't we be re-thinking our policy?

Let me give my answer by proposing another question: is the following question as poignant as Mr. Derbyshire�s question. If not, why not�

In theory, the Westphalian nation-state system exists to control the use of violence by limiting its legitimate use to the appropriate sovereign authority. But the Westphalian system failed to stop the September 11 attacks on the United States by foreign nationals. As a result, should we not be re-thinking the usefulness of conducting foreign policy according to Westphalian rules?

12:19 AM

July 14, 2005

Are You an Originalist?
How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism
"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"
"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"
Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning

Gambling Pie

Marc Comtois

The BLB bid to purchase and expand Lincoln Park continues its passage through the House and will probably be approved by the House and Senate within the next few days. On the face of it, it seems like a pragmatic piece of legislation that has a little something for everyone.

...the legislation would provide millions of dollars in promised tax relief -- including the elimination of the car tax -- through an expansion of gambling in the state...

Unlike previous versions, the legislation approved last night by the House Finance Committee extends a similar tax-rate guarantee to Newport Grand to spur its owners into adding 800 slots there as part of a $20-million expansion, which includes a new 90-room hotel.

The bill, which puts the imprint of House leaders on a bill that passed the Senate in late May, also places a new caveat on the revenue share promised to the state's Narragansett Indians.

The Narragansetts would still get 5 percent of the revenue from the new slots at Lincoln Park, up to $10 million annually, but their share would evaporate upon the opening of the proposed West Warwick casino or any other gambling facility from which they receive money.

Other highlights include a new requirement that BLB Investors, the consortium seeking to buy Lincoln Park, pay for all road improvements on and to Route 146. Earlier versions had the state paying the first $5 million.

In addition to all the other tax promises in the bill, the new version commits $5 million to a municipal aid program that benefits all 39 of the state's cities and towns.

The commitment was added in response to complaints -- aired again last night -- that $20 million of the new money was committed to a handful of so-called distressed communities, including the home districts House Speaker William J. Murphy and Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano.

"We're all Rhode Islanders. We just want a piece of the pie," said Rep. Jan Malik, D-Warren.

For the citizens of Rhode Island, it gets rid of the much-despised "temporary" car tax. For the Governor, it will make the Narragansett's think a bit more about wanting a casino all their own. For the legislators, it offers a veritable bounty of trickle-down revenue that they can use to further entrench themselves. The only losers appear to be the citizens of Lincoln.

A public hearing earlier in the day elicited complaints from several Lincoln residents that the legislature was again poised to foist more gambling on them without a statewide or local vote.

"We have had a casino incrementally, starting with the horsetrack back in 1946, and then the dogtrack . . . simulcast, a few slots. How did this ever happen?" asked John Cullen, of Lincoln. "We have a creeping little casino that's getting bigger and bigger . . . without the people having a say."

He and others from Lincoln also urged the lawmakers to stop "deluding yourselves" and acknowledge that adding 1,750 slots to the 3,002 already authorized is an expansion of gambling that requires a public referendum.

But the House sponsor of the BLB bill, Rep. William San Bento, D-Pawtucket, insisted that more of the same is not an expansion of gambling. "We have not gone from VLTs to dice to blackjack."

. . . Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano, D-North Providence, was also generally "on board."

However, there was one change that came as a surprise to Montalbano.

The town of Lincoln, part of which he represents, currently gets 1.25 percent of all slot revenue at the track. Montalbano's version of the bill had increased that cut to 1.5 percent on the new machines. Murphy struck that language, keeping the town's share at 1.25 percent.

Montalbano said that increased money for Lincoln "is supposed to be in there" and he wanted to review the bill before commenting further.

So, for the most part, everyone is happy. Except me.

I'd like to return to the comment made by Rep. Malik that so fittingly, and unwittingly, summed up the root cause of the fiscal insanity, centered at the State House with spidery tendrils throughout Rhode Island, that runs rampant here in the Ocean State: "We're all Rhode Islanders. We just want a piece of the pie." Exactly, and that's the problem. Rhode Island legislators, and by extension we, their constituents who continue to vote the same old bunch in, are addicted to government programs. In that light, anything that promises to expand the available pool of cash from which the State Government can draw is perceived as a good thing. "We just want a piece of the pie."

While gambling can be addictive for the individual, government can become just as addicted to the revenue that gambling generates. History has shown that the appetite of the RI State government increases faster than the revenue �pie� can be enlarged. Remember the windfall of the tobacco settlement? The future can almost be predicted. The legislature will inevitably earmark all of this new gambling revenue for �necessary� programs on which many citizens will come to rely. Eventually, another budget shortfall will occur and, rather than rein in government spending, another quick fix (like a Narragansett Casino) will be sought. But there are only so many magic bullets in the gambling gun. We have to deal with the root cause, too much government spending, in a realistic way or the false promise that gambling offers could end up hitting us all right in the wallet.

9:30 AM

Judiciary

Orrin Hatch: Don't Overstate "Advise and Consent"

Marc Comtois

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch writes in National Review Online about the proper method of "advise and consent" that should be exercised by the Senate with regards to the process of nominating a Supreme Court Justice.

The fact that the president and the Senate each has a role, however, does not make those roles co-equal. The Founders' view that the president is the "principal agent" and this new theory that the president and Senate are "co-equal partners" cannot both be true. The purpose of this novel theory is obvious, and it is to change the Constitution's assignment of judicial selection roles in order to appoint different judges. As Senator Edward Kennedy said on the Senate floor on July 12, the consultation Democrats demand "is more than a process, it's about an outcome." That outcome is a "consensus" nominee who will win "widespread bipartisan support," whether or not it is whom the president wants to appoint.

In other words, this scheme aims at forcing the president who did win the election to nominate someone acceptable to his opponents who did not. It seeks to turn consultation into co-nomination. Not content to exercise the role the Constitution does assign to the Senate by vigorously debating and then voting on a nominee, these senators and their left-wing enablers want to create a role the Constitution does not assign to the Senate, by manipulating the president's choice of a nominee.

This invented arrangement may serve their political agenda, but it is radically different from what the Constitution prescribes. Especially where the judicial branch is concerned, we should prefer the Constitution over politics. And the Constitution allows the President to decide how best to fulfill his constitutional responsibility of nomination.

He also notes the sudden increase in citation of his book, Square Peg, by Senate Democrats demanding a role in picking President Bush's Supreme Court nominees. He warns them to not take his words out of context.

In 1993, President Clinton sought my input when considering a replacement for the retiring Justice Byron White. Some senators are today fond of waving my book Square Peg, in which I described cautioning President Clinton that confirming some candidates he was considering, such as then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, would be difficult. President Clinton instead nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she was easily confirmed.

President Clinton sought my input without my demanding it because he believed it would help him fulfill his constitutional responsibility for making judicial nominations. He did so not because Senate Republicans threatened filibusters or demanded some kind of veto power over his nominations. We did not try to impose a "consensus" standard or insist that a nominee meet some super-majority "widespread support" threshold.

Instead, President Clinton sought my input because I had established a cooperative relationship with him, because he knew his nominees would be treated fairly. Senators demanding consultation and threatening filibusters today might instead consider taking the same approach. Perhaps earning consultation will work better than demanding it.

While I appreciate publicity for my book, I have yet to hear a Democratic senator who holds it up also quote from page 126, where I write: "One of the consequences of a presidential election...is that the winner has the right to appoint nominees to the court." In fact, at the same time I was giving President Clinton the input he sought, I also said on the Senate floor: "The President won the election. He ought to have the right to appoint the judges he wants to." Some who today demand consultation appear to have rejected that notion altogether.

In the end, the constitutional principle is simple. The president, not the Senate, makes judicial nominations. The Senate's role is a check on appointment, not a veto on nomination. Every president must decide for himself what will help him fulfill his constitutional responsibility. President Bush has chosen to reach out to more than 60 senators for input, including more than half of the Democratic Caucus and every member of the Judiciary Committee. Such consultation, as well as his eventual nomination, are his choice.

Shortly after President Bush took office in 2001, the Senate Democratic leadership vowed to use "whatever means necessary" to defeat undesirable judicial nominees. That spring, Democrats huddled with left-wing strategists to "change the ground rules" for the judicial-confirmation process. The filibusters that followed and the current demand for "consultation" and "consensus" nominees is part of that strategy. As Senator Kennedy put it, this is not about a fair process but a desirable outcome. The Senate's integrity and the judiciary's independence, however, requires rejecting political gimmicks and sticking with constitutional principle.

9:00 AM

Education

"Shut Up & Teach"

Michelle Malkin has a wonderfully effective way of being quite direct. Consider this posting entitled Shut Up and Teach:

The National Education Association recently had its annual convention, where it called for President Bush to withdraw our troops from Iraq, vowed to defeat the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and resolved to educate about the need for debt cancellation in underdeveloped countries.
And you wonder why Johnny can't read.

A left-wing political agenda that has nothing to do with educating our children well. That insists on no changes to their rich pension benefits while insisting there be no competitive alternatives for educating our children.

And to think we have given them the unilateral right to legally extort communities across America so we then have to overpay for their underperformance.

Wonderful, isn't it?

8:46 AM

July 13, 2005

Judiciary

Judicial Activism: Commandeering the Public Debate & Violating the Founding Principles of America

Here is an excerpt about judicial activism from an earlier posting entitled Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse:

Many of these aggressive attempts by liberal fundamentalists to redirect societal practices have been done through a hyperactive judiciary. It has been going on for enough decades now and, with our weak knowledge of history, many Americans do not appreciate how judicial activism is a relatively recent phenomenon, it violates the governmental principles upon which our nation was founded, and it has an insidious effect on the relationship between the government and the governed.

Chief Justice Warren Burger elaborated on this in the 1982 case of Plyler v. Doe:

The Constitution does not constitute us as "Platonic Guardians" nor does it vest in this Court the authority to strike down laws because they do not meet our standards of desirable social policy, 'wisdom,' or 'common sense.'...We trespass on the assigned function of the political branches under our structure of limited and separated powers when we assume a policy-making role.

Subsequently, Justice Antonin Scalia reinforced this point in his dissent in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas:

The Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed.

In the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette nearly 70 years ago, Justice Felix Frankfurter also emphasized how judicial activism is contrary to American principles of government:

As a member of this Court, I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard. The duty of a judge who must decide which of two claims before the Court should prevail, that of a State to enact and enforce laws within its general competence or that of an individual to refuse obedience because of the demands of his conscience, is not that of the ordinary person. It can never be emphasized too much that one's own opinion about the wisdom or evil of a law should be excluded altogether when one is doing one's duty on the bench. The only opinion of our own even looking in that direction that is material is our opinion whether legislators could in reason have enacted such a law...
When Mr. Justice Holmes, speaking for this Court, wrote that "it must be remembered that legislatures are ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts..." he went to the very essence of our constitutional system and the democratic conception of our society. He did not mean that for only some phase of civil government this Court was not to supplant legislatures and sit in judgment upon the right or wrong of a challenged measure. He was stating the comprehensive judicial duty and role of this Court in our constitutional scheme whenever legislation is sought to be nullified on any ground, namely, that responsibility for legislation lies with legislatures, answerable as they are directly to the people, and this Court's only and very narrow function is to determine whether within the broad grant of authority vested in legislatures they have exercised a judgment for which reasonable justification can be offered...

This is no dry, technical matter. It cuts deep into one's conception of the democratic process...

In his book entitled The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying our Democracy, David Lebedoff offers an explanation about the intent underlying the push for judicial activism:

Many who loudly insist on the appointment of activist judges describe themselves as political "activists," as well. But how can one possibly endorse both judicial and political activism, unless, of course, political activism has come to mean something different from what the label implies? One who believes in judicial activism can be a political activist only if he or she no longer views political activity as directed toward the achievement of majority support. If one believes that the point of politics is to see that society does what is "right," regardless of what the public thinks or wants, only then can these two forms of activism indeed be reconciled.

Lebedoff then discusses the eventual consequences of judicial activism:

As those of one political philosophy or another seek to write their own notions into law, with no restraint from themselves or the public, the immigrant wisdom of Justice Frankfurter may be recognized at last for what it really is: a timeless warning that if consent of the governed is not our goal, it will become our memory.

In their book entitled Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government, Ross Sandler and David Schoenbrod note how judicial activism undermines government accountability to the citizenry:

Democracy by decree undermines accountability of government to the voters. Democratic accountability is, in our constitutional scheme, not an unalloyed good. The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that a democratically accountable government may reflect bigotry or be inattentive to the people's needs or rights that they should have. For that reason, the Constitution includes rights and authorizes Congress to enact statutes necessary to ensure that state and local government honor them. These are rights, not aspirational goals dressed up as rights.
As long as rights are honored, everything else, including how the rights are honored, is a question of policy to be left to elected officials. The Constitution and its state and local counterparts set up the ground rules for how policy should be made. These ground rules are designed with careful attention to the potential faults of people and those they elect. The guiding principles are division of power and accountability.

Division of power is required because of distrust of both the people and those whom the people elect. Power is divided, first of all, between those who are empowered to govern and those who are governed. Those who are governed retain the power to vote the elected out of office. The power of those who govern is further divided many ways - between the federal government and the states, and within each level of government among the legislature, the executive, and the courts. Inherent in the whole scheme is that elected officials should bear the responsibility for the key policy choices and must retain the power to change policy.

Although the system is far from perfect, democracy by decree makes it worse. It does not substitute the dispassionate rule of judges for the rule of politicians. Decisions by controlling groups are politics in a different form. By hiding ordinary politics behind the robes of judges, democracy by decree makes government less accountable and therefore less responsive. Judicial reason does not supplant politics. Instead, the courts become political.

It is only through the "messiness" of a reasoned public discourse that a broad societal consensus can be achieved on major issues. Judicial activism short-circuits that process, to the detriment of our democratic institutions and habits.

This issue has been discussed in previous postings:

1:29 PM

Judiciary

Are You an Originalist?

Due to the complete lack of focus on the deeper, underlying issues about constitutional law, certain groups across the political spectrum will be spending their time, energy, and money to develop the necessary political power to frame the debate and create a victory for their side in the upcoming Supreme court nomination battle.

As noted in a previous posting, that exercise of raw power completely misses the important issue missing in the public debate: What is the proper role for the Supreme Court? Therefore, this posting is part of a continuing series of postings that attempt to clarify the core issues that are ignored when the focus is solely on the show of raw political power.

Edward Whelan has offered some valuable perspective on the topic of Are You an Originalist?:

President Bush's promise to appoint originalist justices like Scalia and Thomas invites the question: What is this peculiar creature, the originalist?
The term "originalism" identifies the traditional, common-sense principle that the meaning of various provisions of the Constitution (and of other laws) is to be determined in accordance with the meaning they bore at the time they were promulgated. The status of originalism as the only legitimate method (or class of methods) of constitutional interpretation inheres in the very nature of the Constitution as law. As Chief Justice Marshall explained in his landmark 1803 opinion in Marbury v. Madison, the Constitution is "committed to writing" so that its "limits may not be mistaken or forgotten." To disregard its limits is to "reduce[] to nothing what we have deemed the greatest improvement on political institutions � a written constitution."

It is significant that the term "originalism" appears to be of relatively recent vintage. The reason for this is not that there is anything novel about originalism. Precisely the opposite. Until recent years, originalism had been so unchallenged as constitutional orthodoxy that there was no reason to develop a term that would distinguish it from any rival. As Justice Scalia has put it, "in the past, nonoriginalist opinions have almost always had the decency to lie, or at least to dissemble, about what they were doing." But the rise of the "living Constitution" � the Orwellian euphemism that liberal activists have used to pretend that the Constitution has somehow "grown" to entrench forever their own policy preferences � made necessary a label for what everyone had previously recognized as elementary.

An analogous semantic development might illustrate this point. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "heterosexual" came into usage barely a century ago. This is obviously not because heterosexuals did not previously exist, but rather precisely because what we now call heterosexuality had been widely understood to be normative...

This issue has been discussed in previous postings entitled How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism, "The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One", and Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning.

1:14 PM

July 12, 2005

Iraq: Terrorist Flypaper or Terrorism's "Cassus beli"?

Marc Comtois

I've thought that there was some credence to be given to the flypaper theory--fight the terrorists there so we won't have to fight them here--as applied to Iraq. With the recent London bombings as background, Gregory Scoblete convincingly argues that Iraq-as-flypaper is a flawed theory.

The strategy of aggressively preempting terrorists and terror-threats, the essence of the administration's counter-terrorism policy, is fundamentally sound. The problem begins when the pitched battle between Jihadists and U.S. forces in Iraq is framed as an either/or equation -- either we fight terrorists in Iraq or we fight them here -- because the reality, as London, Madrid, Turkey and the entire tragic litany demonstrates, is that we're fighting them everywhere. That Iraq has attracted the flies is both true and largely irrelevant; the flies continue to murderously alight elsewhere, despite our presence in Iraq. . .

The idea that Iraq is an irresistible magnet for jihad, diverting the radicals' attention from U.S. domestic targets, assumes that there is a hard-and-fast number of holy warriors and that once they enter the killing fields of Iraq in sufficient numbers our troubles will be over. It also ignores the still open question of whether the conflict is motivating Muslims who would otherwise have demurred from martyrdom to join the fight and thus constitute a seemingly limitless suicide assembly line. [emphasis in original]

I concur. It really isn't an either/or choice, as London and Madrid have reminded us. Thus, Scoblete is accurate when he further explains that Al-Qaeda is too decentralized and "that the 'central battlefield' on the war on terror is wherever a suitably fanatical Muslim is prepared to blow him/herself up. That U.S. forces are decamped enticingly in Iraq does not mean that terrorists will forsake Western targets." Iraq is the biggest front, but not the only front.

Yet, this leads me to a criticism of Scoblete's belief that there is still an "open question" regarding the War in Iraq as the centerpiece of jihadist motivation. He should know better. It is more than mere mantra to say such things as "9/11 happened before Iraq." And as the blogger Callimachus reminds us:

But wait, weren't we told not too long ago it was all about Israel? And that they were all on fire over the defiling presence of U.S. military boots way on the other side of the Land of the Two Holy Mosques?

Face it: there's a simmering stew of resentment among a vast pool of Muslims over a broad swath of the earth. Many sticks can stir the pot. If a more potent one comes along, the stirrers will use it till they find an even better.

In essence, while Scoblete is correct that Al-Qaeda is too decentralized for us to think that all of their jihadist eggs will be broken in the Iraq basket, he shouldn't buy into the belief that Iraq is a unique, or even the primary source of jihadist fertilizer. In fact, why Iraq and not Afghanistan?

The answer is because, unlike the War in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq has caused a rift in the West which Al-Qaeda has sought to exploit. In this, they have succeeded. They have picked up on the Western rhetoric espousing the illigitimacy of the "War for oil" and used it to add a kind of warped legitimacy to their terrorism. As such, their own rhetoric is both derivative of, and buttressed by, that of Western critics of the War in Iraq. (This does not mean that Western critics are conscious, or even unconscious or subconscious, supporters of terrorism. Nonetheless, like it or not, their words are being used by those who commit terrorism). In a society already predisposed to have a strong dislike for the Western "other," stories that support these predispositions, especially when accompanied by the "confessions" of those from the West, are extremely attractive. The result is a strengthening of both the appeal and apparent legitimacy of the ideology of radical Islam, particularly Al-Qaeda's strain, among those ready to receive it.

Scoblete touches upon the inherent strength of organizational decentralization, but he doesn't really say why it is effective. The reason decentralization is so effective for Al-Qaeda is because the organization of Al-QAeda has succeeded in installing the ideology of Al-Qaeda as preeminent throughout radical Islam. In essence, the ideology has superseded the organization itself. As such, while Iraq has been used effectively as a recruiting tool and rhetorical touchstone, there were, and will be other, perceived "insults" to Islam that will be used as legitimization for jihad. There is still Israel, after all. It is correct to say that Iraq is not the only front in the War on Terror. It also isn't the only reason for it.

UPDATE: Greg Scoblete has responded and believes that I misinterpreted his postion on Iraq.

I manifestly don't buy the argument that Iraq is "causing more terrorism" in the broad sense of Islamic terrorism - bin Laden's group, and those flying planes into buildings, are motivated by a fundamentalist religious zeal and not a political grievance. They can't be appeased. Nor should they.

That doesn't change the basic though murky question: are Muslims entering Iraq and committing acts of terrorism who would have otherwise not embraced terrorism? If that question is answered affirmatively, our job is immeasurably harder. If the answer is no, then our prospects improve.

My apologies to Greg for the misunderstanding. So, we agree that Iraq isn't a conspicuous root cause for terrorism.

Greg's main concern is whether our job in Iraq is made tougher because more terror-minded individuals are able to enter the fray there. As Greg mentions, the geographical convenience of Iraq facilitates greater "participation" in jihad. Perhaps, then, the answer is this: the number of potential terrorists has not increased, but the number of both potential terrorists able to actively participate in jihad (facilitated by their proximity of Iraq) as well as the rate at which these potential terrorists have actually decided to take action (and die) has increased. The easier something is to do, the more likely it is that more people will do it.

Iraq is not a conspicuous motivator for more terror, it is just another piece of the ideological template. Thus, I don't think that more people are being "converted" to terrorism because of Iraq. But the practical affect of a larger battlefield that is closer to the terrorist nexus has been an increase in the rate at which passive consumers of terrorist ideology are able to become proactive jihadists. But remember, the location of the terrorists is more important than their number: 100 terrorists in Fallujah facing down a battalion of Soldiers or Marines is less of a threat than 100 terrorists dispersed throughout the U.S. ready to self-detonate.

[Cross-posted at both Spinning Clio and OSB]

10:00 AM | Comments (1)

Judiciary

How Original Intent Does Not Equal Conservative Judicial Activism

Implicit in the public debate about the upcoming Supreme Court nomination is the assumption by many on the left that any nominee by President Bush is going to be an activist from the right who will seek to undo the aggressive legislating done by the Court in recent years with an equally aggressive counter response. Such a belief reduces the debate to nothing more than a raw power struggle between competing interests. And it completely misses the real point of the judicial activism debate.

Power Line, which is run by lawyers, offers all of us an insightful look at the question of judicial activism and how original intent leads to judicial restraint, not conservative judicial activism, and most certainly does not equal liberal activism:

...The fallacy here is in defining judicial activism and restraint as willingness to vote, respectively, to overturn and uphold legislation. If one accepts this definitional framework, then the moral equivalency argument sounds plausible. But if one defines activism and restraint more sensibly, based on the way judges interpret the Constitution, the argument collapses.
The key distinction here is that conservative judges tend to determine what the Constitution does and doesn't protect and prohibit based on a careful reading of what the Constitution says and how it originally was understood. Liberal judges tend to determine the meaning of the Constitution based on their policy preferences, and because those preferences often bear little relation to those of the Constitution's drafters, they rely on whatever they can get their hands on. It may be true that conservative judges often vote in support of their policy preferences too. But, as conservatives, their policy preferences are likely to reflect the traditional preferences and values that the authors of the Constitution believed in and set forth in the document...

...Policy preferences that aren't rooted firmly in that document should be for legislatures, not courts, to impose.

Those of us who believe in an original intent approach to judicial behavior believe that legislatures are the place where democratic processes should play out in order to build a public consensus on important policy matters. It takes time and it frequently seems like a messy, inefficient process. But, consider the horrible alternative we now live with: When the Supreme Court legislates on policy matters, it immediately stops any public debate before there has been sufficient time to develop a public consensus. As a result, their action immediately yields a polarization on the topic which, as the abortion issue has shown, makes reasoned debate and building a public consensus practically impossible. We have become a more divided society due to judges legislating from the bench.

This issue has been discussed in previous postings entitled "The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One" and Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning.

8:37 AM | Comments (2)

July 11, 2005

Education

To Nurture Greater Ethical Awareness, Students Need Practice in Moral Discernment

In offering his comments on an article entitled The Corrosion of Ethics in Higher Education, Joseph Knippenberg of No Left Turns quotes one excerpt from the article:

We would argue that, like elementary schools, universities have an obligation to ethically nurture undergraduate and graduate students. Although the earliest years of life are most important for the formation of ethical habits, universities can influence ethics as well. Like the Greek polis, universities become ethical when they become communities of virtue that foster and demonstrate ethical excellence...

Knippenberg then offers his own commentary on the article:

The authors indeed identify some campus practices that may corrupt all members of the community, students, faculty, and staff alike. But there�s more to it than that...either to promote virtue or to avoid its corruption.
...Students come to us not quite fully formed, but nevertheless pretty far down the moral path they�re going to take...We can do our darndest to undermine the commitments and character our students bring to campus. Or we can strengthen them at the margins...

Let me state this...in both secular and religious ways. The secular way of putting is that, the authors to the contrary notwithstanding, philosophy is indeed necessary, not in order logically to derive moral principles, but rather to defend them against relativist and nihilist doubts. Aristotle himself works within a moral horizon, offering the most systematic possible account of gentlemanly virtue, but not deducing it from non-moral first principles. A latter-day Aristotelian can offer a defense of sound common sense against the inventions of theory.

From a religious point of view, the college and university experience can help students become more articulate and thoughtful defenders of their faith, open to the larger world, but not vulnerable and defenseless in the face of its challenges.

...the two things most needful for ethics in higher education are religion and philosophy, the one not mentioned in the column, the other more or less dismissed. Campus practices can indeed avoid undermining and reinforce the common decency a good number of our students bring with them, but our students do need practice in moral discernment, whether offered in explicitly religious terms or in the language of natural law...

2:44 AM | Comments (1)

Conservatism

"It Is Liberalism That Is Now Bookless And Dying"

Charles Kesler has published an editorial entitled Bookless in America, where he says:

Half a century ago, in liberalism's heyday, American conservatism seemed a contradiction in terms. Men of genuine and liberal learning (was there any other kind?) assured one another that the United States is, was, and ever would be a liberal society. They defined liberalism in an easy-going, open-ended way, connecting the New Deal to the American Revolution by a more-or-less straight line, defined less by philosophy than by temperament: the readiness to change, to experiment, to reinvent�both the government and the self.
In various ways, Louis Hartz, Lionel Trilling, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others drove this lesson home...Conservatism was at best liberalism�s shadow...American conservatism was inarticulate�"bookless," John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked acidulously�because it had nothing to say either about or to America.

With his usual acuity, Galbraith�s pronouncement came in the midst of the century�s greatest outpouring of conservative books. The 1950s and 1960s saw the publication of classic works by (to name a few) Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, Edward C. Banfield, Whittaker Chambers, and William F. Buckley, Jr. Subsequent decades added luster, with James Buchanan, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, James Q. Wilson, Allan Bloom, Walter Berns, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and others joining the fray.

So, who�s bookless now? The publisher of The New Republic, no less, admitted recently: "It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying."

"Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture?" Martin Peretz asked. "Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire?... There�s no one, really. What�s left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs�that Republicans aren�t funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country."

In fact, the exhaustion of liberal ideas started long ago: modern liberalism peaked intellectually in the first half of the last century. By the century�s end, so many progressive ideas had been written into law, with such mixed results, that liberals remain bewildered and even to a degree disillusioned by their own successes, not to mention their multiplying electoral defeats. Their glory days seem behind them. If "the era of big government is over," after all, where do liberals go from here?

Think twice before gloating, however. After victory in the Cold War and the death of many of conservatism�s founding fathers (especially Ronald Reagan), one senses on the Right not only a generational shift but also a growing distraction or inattentiveness, as though the campfires are burning down.

The two developments are related, in part...

This decline is visible in conservatism at large, too. It is one thing (a blessing, I can tell you) to grow up reading and watching Bill Buckley; another to grow up reading and watching Bill O�Reilly...

Nonetheless, the danger of taking our precepts for granted�of forgetting the thinkers and arguments that made possible the epic confrontation with liberalism�grows greater as American conservatism moves farther away from its own founding age. We need to recur to first principles if we are not to lose sight of our purposes.

But then one of the spiritual advantages of conservatism is the confidence that all is never completely lost�or won. There is no such thing as saving civilization, once and for all. It is a never-ending challenge. Though the finest books may fade and be forgotten, truth endures, awaiting rediscovery. Most liberals, by contrast, believe fervently in mankind�s evolution, in every sense of the term. Once shake their faith that history is necessarily on their side, and they are left unmanned�and bookless.

Therein lies the structural deficiency of liberalism and an appropriate word of caution for conservatives.

2:18 AM

July 10, 2005

Did the Rhode Island Legislature Make the Right Decisions?

Two political issues, important to concerned citizens here in Rhode Island, arose at the end of the legislative session here in Rhode Island.

The first issue, as reported in this ProJo article, is about lobbyist spending disclosure requirements:

...Fending off cries from Common Cause of Rhode Island and Secretary of State Matt Brown that their actions would gut the state's spending disclosure requirements for lobbyists, the House voted 41 to 20 in favor of exempting what could be a vast swath of sales and purchases made by people and companies seeking to influence the General Assembly.
Brown has interpreted the law, made stricter in the wake of conflict-of-interest charges against key senators, to mean that lobbyists must reveal anything of value they sell to or buy from a lawmaker -- whether it be home telephone service supplied, a slice of pizza bought at a lawmaker's restaurant, or something larger.

The bill, from House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox, D-Providence, would exempt the disclosure of the sale or purchase of goods and services "in the ordinary course of business and for fair market value."

"Employment and consulting contracts" and "fees" still would have to be reported.

The change was supported by lawmakers such as Crowley, a restaurant owner; and Rep. Carol Mumford, D-Scituate, who has a family Christmas tree farm.

House Finance Committee Chairman Steven M. Costantino, D-Providence, said requiring the disclosure of everyday sales and purchases "just doesn't seem practical in the world that we are in, especially a part-time legislature where we all have businesses."

But many argued in favor of a proposal from Rep. John Savage, R-East Providence, to put a cap in the bill. Savage initially proposed requiring a lobbyist to disclose anything purchased from a lawmaker worth $250 or more; he later agreed to raise the figure to $1,000.

Said Rep. Al Gemma, D-Warwick, in support of a cap: "You can't make a crook out of an honest man . . . however, it's perception, it's transparency."

But Crowley said the information, once disclosed, would be used against lawmakers -- in a newspaper story or by an opponent in a campaign. He said a truly crooked lawmaker would still do backroom deals that wouldn't be disclosed, but someone like himself, who might get paid a large tab for a wedding or a company party, would lose business or suffer from the perception that there was "some kind of shady exchange."

Savage's amendment failed on a rare tie vote, 31 to 31, before the bill was approved.

Later, the Senate also approved the measure, after defeating an effort by Senate Committee on Government Oversight Chairman J. Michael Lenihan, D-East Greenwich, to add the same $1,000 cap debated in the House. The amendment failed by a vote of 22 to 10, and the proposal then passed by a vote of 24 to 7.

A second issue involved electronic filing of campaign contribution reports:

The House also passed a Senate bill that retroactively exempts candidates from filing their campaign finance reports electronically. Lawmakers called the requirement too onerous and agreed to delay its effect until 2007; the bill needed one final Senate vote before it hit the governor's desk.

I find this exemption to be offensive. Since when has government ever retroactively waived regulatory requirements on businesses and citizens or paused to consider how they might create onerous demands on any of us?

Yet, the Rhode Island legislators - which have given us ample evidence of questionable ethics - vote to exempt themselves from the most basic of disclosure regulations necessary to bring transparency to important financial contributions that can drive votes on key issues.

You can read Common Cause's viewpoint in opposition to both of these two bills here.

9:19 PM

Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies

What would you say if someone forcibly took a portion of your hard-earned monies and spent it on political actions that violated your personal beliefs? You would say you belonged to an American labor union.

Building on this previous posting entitled Now Here is a Good Idea, a new editorial entitled Big Labor Taking a Beating notes:

...They call it a perfect storm�a confluence of events creating a crisis of major proportions�and organized labor may have one on its hands...
There is good reason for labor�s concern: union membership is in a 50-year tailspin. In 1952, 36 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today, that figure is less than 8 percent. Unions are failing to organize those entering the workforce, which is perhaps the most important age group for it�s future survival. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 4.7 percent of workers between the ages of 16 and 24 belonged to a union in 2004, down from 5.2 percent in 2002.

Unions are so desperate for members they are attempting to organize unique sectors of the workforce such as babysitters and Ivy League student teaching assistants. As a sign of labor�s shrinking power, the AFL-CIO is tightening its belt, laying off over 160 employees (about 40 percent of its staff) in May.

And then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for a special election in California this November...

Lew Uhler of the Coalition for Employee Rights may become the common enemy against which labor leaders can rally. He is sponsoring an initiative on California�s ballot that would require public employee unions to get permission from individual members before using dues for politics�a measure known as "paycheck protection."

Labor organizations annually dump tens of millions of dollars into state and national politics. Unfortunately, workers often have no say in how the money is to be used. While paycheck protection does not take away a union�s right to spend dues on politics, it does something almost as bad in the eyes of union officials: it requires the union to get a member�s written permission before using his or her dues for political activity.

The first paycheck protection law was adopted by Washington state in 1992. Since then, five other states have enacted various forms of the law. The measure is based on the common sense idea that no one should be forced to support political causes against his or her will.

By qualifying for the California ballot, this measure�once known only to policy wonks and a few union members�will be given a national platform and a compelling spokesman, should Schwarzenegger decide to endorse the initiative.

This worries union officials because they know that workers, when given a choice, overwhelmingly refuse to support union political activity.

After Washington state passed paycheck protection, contributions to the Washington Education Association political committee dropped from over 80 percent of teachers down to 6 percent. Utah adopted paycheck protection in 2001 and now nearly 95 percent of Utah Education Association members refuse to contribute to the union�s political fund.

Workers refuse to support their union�s politicking because the spending is usually at odds with individual member preferences. For example, although at least 30 percent of California Teachers Association members are Republican, the CTA just approved a $60 per-member dues increase in order to raise $50 million to fight paycheck protection and a Republican governor�s education proposals.

This spending discrepancy is consistent with a national trend. The AFL-CIO and affiliate SEIU spent a combined $100 million to mobilize union household voters against President Bush in 2004, but surveys indicate that at least one-third of union voters cast their vote for Bush in the last election.

Forcing a politically diverse workforce to fund organized labor�s single-party devotion is fundamentally unfair. Paycheck protection is a common sense measure that requires unions to raise political capital one individual at a time�just like any other political player�but union officials can be expected to fight the encroachment on their monopoly over California public employees for all they�re worth.

A storm is brewing, given the unrest within organized labor�s leadership and the dissatisfaction among rank-and-file members.

It may be time for Big Labor to invest in umbrellas.

Indeed it is. It is only fair and just that unions not be able to unilaterally take people's hard-earned monies against their will.

Here are two more related postings entitled Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent and Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities.

In summary, think about it: You earned the money. It's your money. You deserve to spend it the way you want to spend it. What could be more American than that?

And that is exactly the point of Paycheck Protection.

8:29 PM | Comments (1)

July 9, 2005

Comments From the Left on the London Bombings

James Taranto, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, offers this commentary on various editorials from the left about the bombings in London:

So what does the New York Times have to say about yesterday's terrorist murders in London of more than 50 people at last count? Here's a quote from the paper's lead editorial of today:
That fear has already led to questions about why the British security agencies did not anticipate the attacks, why the wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism and why Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden continue to function after almost four years of the so-called war on terrorism. Many will wonder why the United States is mired in Iraq while Al Qaeda's leader still roams free.
There are no easy answers to these questions.

That's right, the Times is complaining that "wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism"! Now granted, one can talk of the root causes of terrorism without slipping into liberal weeniedom. This column has long endorsed the theory that terrorism springs from the tyrannical and fanatical political culture that prevails in most of the Arab and Muslim worlds. The Bush administration subscribes to this theory too, which is why it has embarked upon a strategy of democratization, a key element of which was regime change in Iraq.

Do the editorialists at the Times disagree with this theory? No, apparently they are completely oblivious to it. First they complain about the failure to deal with "root causes," then they scratch their collective head over why we're "mired in Iraq."

So what does the Times think are the "root causes" of terrorism? Well, the paper addresses that question in another editorial:

As the leaders of the richest nations carry on their annual conference despite the bombings in London, they have a chance to embrace what should be an essential element of any long-term global strategy against terrorism. By adopting a coherent plan to tackle the extreme poverty of Africa, the leaders of the G-8 countries will also take on the civil wars, governmental breakdowns and illicit financial flows of one of the world's most troubled regions.

The idea that poverty in Africa contributes to terrorism is not as ridiculous as it sounds. As the Times notes:

American military forces fought what may have been their first encounter with the new international terrorism in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, a dozen years ago. . . . Failed states that cannot provide jobs and food for their people, that have lost chunks of territory to warlords, and that can no longer track or control their borders send an invitation to terrorists.

It's worth noting that a dozen years ago, when President Clinton decided to pull out of Somalia, a Times editorial praised this "wise stand-down." In any case, we don't disagree with the Times that misrule in Africa is a moral outrage and in some cases a security threat. But how dense do you have to be not to acknowledge that the same is true to an even greater degree in the heart of the Middle East, the place where terrorists actually come from?

At least the Times doesn't go so far as to say terrorism is America's fault. Others do. Here's columnist Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe:

The world, of course, shares the sympathies of Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who said the London bombings were a ''despicable, cowardly act." Yet every invoking of the innocents also reminds us of our despicable, cowardly killing of innocent Iraqi civilians. . . .
The innocents in the so-called war on terror are always ''our" citizens or the citizens of our allies. The only innocent Iraqis are those killed by ''insurgents." Our soldiers clearly did not intend to kill innocents. But this posturing of America as the great innocent, when everyone knows we kill innocents ourselves, is likely only to make us look more like the devil in the eyes of a suicide bomber.

And here's someone with the unlikely name of Jann Wenner, on the Huffington Post:

If the London bombings are the work of an Al Qaeda offshoot, then you have to fairly say, in the same way we condemn other's [sic] terror, this is in part the result of Bush's War on Iraq.

To Jackson, there is no moral distinction between deliberately targeting civilians and accidentally killing civilians in a war of liberation. To Wenner, it is America's fault that terrorists deliberately target civilians. And note that the Times and Jackson both sneer at the "so-called war" on terrorism.

This has been a brief tour of the mindset of some American liberals. Folks, Karl Rove is not making this stuff up.

One liberal who makes sense, though, is Slate's William Saletan:

Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down. He doesn't understand that this flexibility--and this trust--are why democracies will live, while he will die. Many of us didn't vote for Bush's government or Blair's. But we're loyal to them, in part because we were given a voice in choosing them. And if we don't like our governments, we can vote them out. We can't vote out terrorists. We can only kill them.

America needs more voices like this on the left.

Cliff May offers additional analysis of the left's viewpoints:

On the BBC today one British official was quite puzzled that the terrorists would strike during the G8, a time when world leaders were addressing �poverty, inequality and injustice.�
That presupposes that the terrorists care about �poverty, inequality and injustice.� How stupid do you have to be to believe that someone who takes money from a Saudi billionaire to buy bombs cares about �poverty and inequality�? How ignorant do you have to be to believe that to Radical Islamists �justice� means anything other than infidels choking on their own blood, their civilization burning and a glorious, renewed caliphate arising from the ashes?

Similarly, a German official lamented that the G8 was about alleviating poverty in Africa and, she suggested, alleviating poverty is imperative because otherwise we have to expect more terrorism.

First, though the sub-Saharan regions are mired in poverty, there has been very little terrorism out of Africa. Most Africans do not appear to be of the view that one can murder one�s way into the middle classes.

Second, in a very real sense, the German official was legitimizing terrorism, implicitly arguing that poverty is sufficient justification for killing other people�s children.

CONTRASTING INFORMATION:

Now go read President George W. Bush's major speeches on terrorism and the spreading of freedom - here and here.

8:12 AM | Comments (1)

July 8, 2005

Education

Will We Measure Educational Performance by Inputs or Outputs?

The following comments were made in a Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee) entitled Jayhawk Judgment:

...[In Kansas] the state Supreme Court has commanded that the legislature must increase spending on the schools, as well as the taxes to pay for it, by precisely $853 million over the next two years.
This week the legislature has been called into special session in Topeka by Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius (who also craves more spending) to comply with this court order. If the legislators do, they will essentially have handed the power of the purse and the power to tax over to six unelected and unaccountable judges.

Thankfully, some of the Republicans in the state legislature are not inclined to be bullied by the court. One of them is Senator Tim Huelskamp who describes the court decision as a "judicial shakedown of the citizens of Kansas for higher taxes." The court counters that it is simply enforcing a provision of the Kansas Constitution that requires that the state provide "suitable provisions" for financing the schools.

But just what is a "suitable" amount? Kansas already spends a shade under $10,000 per student in the public schools -- the most in the region and above the national average even though Kansas is a low cost-of-living state. Also ignored by the courts were the volumes of scientific evidence that the link between school spending and educational achievement is close to nonexistent. Perhaps one reason schools in Kansas aren't as good as they might be is that the state ranks 47 out of 50 in education money that actually finds its way inside the classroom.

We should add that several other states -- including Texas, New Jersey, Arkansas and New York -- are now operating under court orders for more financing. The travesty of all these court interventions is that they promulgate the fundamental logical fallacy that has long undermined the U.S. public education system: that we should measure performance by inputs, not outputs. Every other industry in America is obliged to cut costs and get more for less; in education, parents and kids keep getting less for more...

The Kansas media are describing the hullabaloo in Topeka this week as a state constitutional crisis. And they are right. The legislature is sworn to abide by the Kansas Constitution, but that doesn't mean abandoning its own powers of the purse to an unelected judiciary. This is a showdown between the branches of government, and the legislature has every right to protect its own constitutional prerogatives from judicial intrusion...

Adjusted for inflation, school spending per pupil has tripled over the last forty years and we have nothing to show for it. In the meantime, the performance of American public schools has continued to deterioriate to the point that we are putting the economic future of our country at risk.

And who is whining for more money while they continue to deliver lousy results? The public education bureaucrats and teachers' unions. Consider the facts:

They spend billions of dollars of our hard earned monies each year across America and NEVER deliver.

They resist setting performance metrics for educational outputs.

They resist merit-based incentive pay for the best teachers.

They insist on giving the same salaries and salary increases to the best and worst teachers, just for showing up.

They make it nearly impossible to fire the lousy teachers.

They insist that seniority, not merit, determine who gets which teaching jobs.

They block or attack charter schools.

They attack any attempts at educational choice, including for children stuck in our worst, inner-city public schools.

The list could go on and on. And you know what boggles the mind? We listen to these people and pay attention to their drivel!

There is only one viable solution: school choice which puts creates an education marketplace where parents can make the right decisions for their children so all children can have a fair shot at living the American Dream.

The public education bureaucracy and teachers' union will always continue to resist doing right by our children. The only way public education will ever get better is if we take away their ability to continue doing damage to our children's future. For the sake of our kids, we have no other choice.

We must begin to measure educational performance by outputs, not inputs.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON EDUCATIONAL ISSUES:

2:58 PM

Thoughts Spurred by London

Marc Comtois

Here is a summary of some of the main themes emerging in reaction to the London bombing. (For a compilation of some of the diverse Arab reactions, go here. My own thoughts are at the end of this post). There are many, like Mark Steyn and Christopher Hitchens, who point to the bombing as evidence that we in the West have let our vigilence slip. Victor Hanson and Wretchard at the Belmont Club agree, but Wretchard reminds that, though tragic, London should help us to refocus our attention.

The first and most important hard fact to grasp is that this Al Qaeda strike, their first against an Anglosphere city since 9/11, has caused much less damage than that on New York. This despite the fact that Al Qaeda has had nearly four years to brood on its humiliations and losses and to plot its revenge. The reasons for this are simple: the enemy is now operating in a much more hostile environment. The accessible methods of mass destruction, such as wide body aircraft, have been secured; not perfectly, but for a defense to work it must only be sufficient to blunt the onslaught of the enemy. Increased surveillance, tighter controls on movement, etc have all played their part. The second reason the enemy is weaker is Iraq. It is widely accepted that thousands of Al Qaeda fighters, the cream of their rancid crop, is fighting to expel the American infidel from the Land Between the Rivers. A moment's reflection will show that if they are there they cannot be elsewhere -- in London, Paris, Rome or Boston -- sowing bombs on buses and trains. Furthermore, fear in formerly smug circles within Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Libya at sharing the fate of Saddam have left terrorists have fewer powerful confederates. Thirdly, allied forces are in contact with the enemy all over the world, buying intelligence with their blood, just as a SEAL team in Afghanistan did. Nothing yields as much information as the act of grappling with the enemy. Liberals often talk about the need to improve intelligence capability without admitting that you can't gather it without being in action against the enemy.

The Al Qaeda have characterized the attack on London as 'punishment' for Britain's temerity to resist the inevitability of Islam. It is the kind of punishment these self-ordained masters of the universe are accustomed to meting out against harem women and insolent slaves. A few administered licks, and no doubt the cowardly kuffar will crawl back to his place. The tragedy is that Al Qaeda's perception is perfectly correct when applied to the Left, for whom no position is too supine, no degradation too shameful to endure; but incorrect for the vast majority of humans, in whom the instinct for self-preservation has not yet been extinguished. It will result in history's greatest case of mistaken identity; the mismatch that should never have happened. The enemy is even now dying at our feet, where we should kick him and kick him again.

Frank Gaffney, Jr. also offers some corrective actions and Andrew McCarthy (as mentioned by Don) focuses in on the missteps made by Tony Blair's government.

Despite this sort of reasoning, there are plenty of people, like Tariq Ali, who inevitably blame the Western involvement in Iraq as the acute cause of the London and Madrid attacks. This map reminds us that there was indeed terrorism before Iraq. Of course, that won't matter to those who share George Galloway's worldview. Others, like Josh Marshall, think Iraq is a mistake and waste of resources. Marshall also believes that the notion that fighting the terrorists in Iraq will preclude having to fight them in our own backyard has now been proven false. To this sort of "un-nuanced" thinking, Stephen Green offers a reminder to Marshall et al that sometimes "the bad guys shoot back."

Even in a cause as noble as the D-Day landings, the bad guys shot back. So effectively, in fact, that we suffered 10,000 casualties that day. Let me repeat: We suffered 10,000 casualties that day. The bad guys shot back in North Korea, too � to the tune of 36,000 dead Americans. They shot back in Vietnam for twelve years, until we finally got sick of the whole mess and let the bad guys take over.

(Joe Gandelman also offers a good defense of the Iraq-as-fly-paper theory). Marshall has recommendations, essentially defensive in nature:

The immediate answer to this is to hunt down the people immediately responsible, root out the primarily-non-state terror networks that support, plan and make these attacks possible and start getting about serious homeland defense -- port security, rail security, nuclear power plant security.

This common complaint implies that we can't both fight abroad and protect ourselves at home adequately and to my mind seems to echo the sort of zero-sum game economic thought that prevails on the Left. Green offers this corrective

The Army is in Iraq, not our local police forces. The CIA is focused on Iraq, not the FBI. The Air Force is patrolling Iraqi skies, not the Department of Homeland Security...

I'm going to repeat myself here, because it's a point I cannot repeat enough: Sometimes the bad guys shoot back. We're at war, and getting shot at is half of what war entails. And who says we aren't serious about homeland defense? Britain suffered an attack yesterday. Spain suffered an attack last year, and Indonesia before them. All bad jokes aside, we've been doing pretty well here at home since 9/11. I don't mean to preclude another massive attack on our soil, but events the last three years have shown that al Qaeda thinks other nations are easier marks than ours. By that measure, has the Bush Administration really been such a failure?

Finally, while this has indeed reminded us all that we are at war, Lee Harris thinks we may need to reevaluate the very nature of the conflict: we may be in error when we view this as a war. Instead, we are involved in a blood fued.

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.

In the blood feud, the orientation is not to the future, as in war, but to the past. In the feud you are avenging yourself on your enemy for something that he did in the past. Al Qaeda justified the attack on New York and Washington as revenge against the USA for having defiled the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia by its military presence during the First Gulf War. In the attack on London, the English were being punished for their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the blood feud, unlike war, you have no interest in bringing your enemy to his knees. You are not looking for your enemy to surrender to you; you are simply interested in killing some of his people in revenge for past injuries, real or imaginary -- nor does it matter in the least whether the people you kill today were the ones guilty of the past injuries that you claim to be avenging. In a blood feud, every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge. What is important is that some of their guys must be killed -- not necessarily anyone of any standing in their community. Just kill someone on the other side, and you have done what the logic of the blood feud commands you to do.

In the blood feud there is no concept of decisive victory because there is no desire to end the blood feud. Rather the blood feud functions as a permanent "ethical" institution -- it is the way of life for those who participate in it; it is how they keep score and how they maintain their own rights and privileges. You don't feud to win, you feud to keep your enemy from winning -- and that is why the anthropologist of the Bedouin feud, Emrys Peters, has written the disturbing words: The feud is eternal...

Contemporary Islamic terrorism has permitted the ancient practitioners of the blood feud to introduce its brutal and primeval logic into a world of modern technology and parliamentary politics. The sooner we grasp this fact, the sooner we will be in a position to know our enemy for who he really is. Until then we will be as dazed and confused as those who, while peacefully riding a commuter train, suddenly find themselves bloodied and blackened, in the midst of maimed corpses and twisted steel, whispering to themselves over and over, "Why? Why?"

In the end, regardless of whether we call this a war or a blood feud, we must realize that Western Civilization is under attack. The first step is that we in the West have to be confident that our civilization is better than others in accomodating the beliefs and social practices of those who come from other "civilizations." Yes, we make mistakes, but Western Civilization continues to stand and strive for ideals and is uniquely willing to admit and navel-gaze when we fall short. As a result, the openness of our society and the tendency to engage in deep self-criticism has been used by the jihadists to expose and exploit political rifts, which I need not recount.

What is the answer? We have to presume that "our side" is in the right and rid ourselves of the one-way cynicism that correctly measures our actions against a Western "ideal" but does not hold our opponents to the same ideal. We must tone down the rhetoric and hyper-criticism that implies that the perfect war with no deaths, mistakes or miscalculations can be fought. We must resist the temptation to acquire short-term political advantage by engaging in hyperbole that not only weakens political opponents but weakens the moral standing of Western Civilization and the war effort in general. We must stop presuming conspiracies for oil, empire, etc. and be more willing to accept the genuiness of the actions and statements of our leaders: they are acting in what they believe to be the best interest of our respective nations and Western Civilizaton as a whole. We must not stop questioning our leaders when mistakes are made, but we also must be willing to accept their answers and not resort to yelling "You Lie!" and persist in a fantasy world of conspiracy in which we are in a "War for Oil" or bent on world empire or "hegemony."

We should not inflate the importance of the unfortunate instances where we fall short of our moral ideals to the point that the thus enlarged footprints of our failings stamp out the multitudinous, if softer, footprints made by our generous and tolerant society. Such instances, enhanced by hyperbole and charges of Western hypocrisy, are gleefully picked up and used as propaganda by our enemy. In fact, the moral relativists among us would do well to apply some relativistic thought in a comparison of the standing of the average men, women and children in Western society to those in the type of ideal Islamic society being championed by our enemy. Finally, while Western ideals, particularly the "ideology of Freedom," are worth spreading, we should be pragmatic in our analysis of the "what, where and how" of how best to accomplish a broader baseline of freedom. While it is unfortunate that freedom sometimes can only be nurtured after a regime is toppled via armed intervention, this should not be taken as an indication of the normal Western way of spreading freedom. Freedom can also be propogated through gradual reform in autocratic or oligarchic regimes. It shows a lack of nuance to think otherwise.

I still have a bumper sticker on my car that I purchased shortly after 9/11. It reads, "United We Stand." Though it's words are a bit faded, they are as important now as they were when they were printed. They are so simple and so plain and yet they convey such an important message. Who would have thought it would be so difficult for so many to heed them.

10:00 AM

Is It a War, or Isn't It?

Andrew McCarthy has written a thought-provoking editorial entitled Is It a War, or Isn�t It? The London bombings and different approaches to terror where he notes:

Unfortunately, points like these are best made when terror strikes and the collective public mind is focused. So it is worth pausing today to consider that British law and government have many features that critics both here and in the "international community" contend the United States should adopt. It's times like these when such claims appear most starkly dubious...
Amid the carnage today, Home Secretary Charles Clarke is talking about the people who carried out "these terrible criminal acts." That's an understandable reaction � and we shouldn't quibble too much over a choice of words by people who have been stellar allies, who are in the middle of a rescue effort, and who are unsure the bombing has actually stopped. But it is worth repeating that what happened today is not mere crime.

This is war. It can't sensibly be separated from Bali or Mombassa or Istanbul or Madrid or Baghdad or Virginia or lower Manhattan � or any of the other places where the enemy has attacked.

The only security � and an imperfect security it is � is to acknowledge that this is a war and fight it like a one. Prime Minister Blair has been a staunch ally after 9/11, but many in his country, and throughout Europe, have not grasped what we are up against.

9:37 AM

Education

What's Wrong With This Picture: 800 Applicants for 14 Teaching Jobs & the NEA Says There is a Problem

The NEA teachers' union has been repeating the mantra all year that the lack of a contract in East Greenwich was somehow damaging the school system and that nobody would want to teach in our town.

The rest of us have said hogwash to their propaganda because we knew their comments were simply another pathetic attempt to mislead and manipulate public opinion.

Today, the empirical data is in and the NEA's argument has completely collapsed. Here's the story:

"We have more than 800 applicants for 14 teaching positions," School Committee member Steven W. Gregson said this week. "There is no lack of applicants."

East Greenwich is fortunate to have many professionally successful parents � who value education, speak English as a first language, and ensure their kids do their homework and come to school with food in their stomachs. We provide a better than average working environment and teachers around the state know it. It's another reason why we are fond of our wonderful town and people around the state recognize it is a quality place to live and work.

By the way, here is another foolish argument from the NEA: When informed about the high number of applicants, school leaders told me that the NEA's response was to say that many of the applicants weren't qualified. Now stop and think about that argument for a minute. These applicants are coming largely from other teaching jobs in Rhode Island, which means they are members of either the NEA or AFT teachers' union. In other words, that means the NEA is calling their own members unqualified. Oh that's a bright one, boys and girls.

In summary: First, the NEA knowingly misleads the residents of East Greenwich. Next, they insult the residents of East Greenwich. Then, they put out a report card flyer that backfires when residents jokingly call it juvenile - at best. And that doesn't even count the funniest part about the flyer: 2 of the 7 School Committee member phone numbers listed on the flyer were wrong. Now, they put forth bogus arguments that insult their own membership.

It's hard to legally extort a community when your actions are so consistently incompetent.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON EDUCATIONAL ISSUES:

8:51 AM | Comments (1)

Not a Gulf in Every Sense

Justin Katz

A debatable comment from the Providence Journal's editorial about the London bombings:

Thursday's attacks seemed clearly timed to coincide with the opening of the G-8 summit meeting in Scotland, where efforts to help Africa (home of almost 350 million Muslims) have been high on the agenda. Quite a gulf between that and Islamic terrorists' agenda of establishing a religious totalitarianism in as wide a swath of the world as possible.

Perhaps there's a "gulf" between opposing sides in the same fight, but Islamicists have every reason to resist economic improvement in Africa. A Dark Age ideology will fester better on a continent that's kept in the dark.

Otherwise, apart from its ending with a vague and gratuitous reference to "our suicidal oil habit" (isn't there oil in Africa?), the editorial is dead on.

6:12 AM

July 7, 2005

Culture

A Reason for Tradition

Justin Katz

My latest column for TheFactIs.org — "Reasoning with the Id" — responds to a recent piece by Lee Harris. To summarize too drastically, Harris seeks to find a place for tradition in a world of reason. Me, I think is more accurate to stress that rationality already exists in a world of tradition.

9:52 PM

Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?

As we say here in the US: These colors don't run

Carroll Andrew Morse

9:43 AM

July 6, 2005

Judiciary

"We Are Going To Go To War Over This"

Senate Judiciary Committee member Charles Schumer (D-NY) was overheard on his cell phone aboard an Amtrak train making the following comments about the upcoming Supreme Court nomination battle:

...Schumer promised a fight over whoever the President�s nominee was: "It's not about an individual judge� It's about how it affects the overall makeup of the court."...
Schumer proudly declared: "We are contemplating how we are going to go to war over this."...

Schumer later went on to mock the "Gang of 14" judicial filibuster deal and said it wasn�t relevant in the Supreme Court debate.

"A Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown style appointment may not have been extraordinary to the appellate court but may be extraordinary to the Supreme Court."...

Such reasonable people, aren't they?

Here is more.

2:23 PM

Judiciary

"The Supreme Court Has Converted Itself From a Legal Institution to a Political One"

If you ever wanted further evidence of how political the Supreme Court nomination process has become, consider this 1981 quote from none other than Senator Ted Kennedy during the Sandra Day O'Connor confirmation hearings:

It is offensive to suggest that a potential justice of the Supreme Court must pass some presumed test of judicial philosophy. It is even more offensive to suggest that a potential justice must pass the litmus test of any single-issue interest group. The disturbing tactics of division and distortion and discrimination practiced by the extremists of the new right have no place in these hearings and no place in the nation's democracy.

To explain what has changed and the consequences from those unfortunate changes over the years, here is Robert Bork in a Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee) entitled Their Will Be Done:

...until recently Americans did possess a large body of common moral assumptions rooted in our original Anglo-Protestant culture, and expressed in law. Now, however, a variety of disintegrating influences are undermining that unanimity, not least among them is the capture of constitutional law by an extreme liberationist philosophy. America is becoming a cacophony of voices proclaiming different, or no, truths.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that "If each undertook himself to form all his opinions and to pursue the truth in isolation down paths cleared by him alone, it is not probable that a great number of men would ever unite in any common belief. . . . [W]ithout common ideas there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not."

Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted "'moral fact' that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole." Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that "At the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution and neither has any definable meaning other than that a common morality may not be sustained by law if a majority of justices prefer that each individual follow his own desires.

Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the Court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal.

The Court's philosophy reflects, or rather embodies and advances, the liberationist spirit of our times. In moral matters, each man is a separate sovereignty. In its insistence on radical personal autonomy, the Court assaults what remains of our stock of common moral beliefs. That is all the more insidious because the public and the media take these spurious constitutional rulings as not merely legal conclusions but moral teachings supposedly incarnate in our most sacred civic document...ever-expanding rights continually deplete America's bank of common morality...

Democratic senators' filibusters of the president's previous judicial nominees demonstrate liberals' determination to retain the court as their political weapon. They claim that conservative critics of the Court threaten the independence of the judiciary, as though independence is a warrant to abandon the Constitution for personal predilection. The Court's critics are not angry without cause; they have been provoked. The Court has converted itself from a legal institution to a political one, and has made so many basic and unsettling changes in American government, life, and culture that a counterattack was inevitable, and long overdue. If the critics' rhetoric is sometimes overheated, it is less so than that of some Democratic senators and their interest-group allies. The leaders of the Democratic Party in the Senate are making it the party of moral anarchy, and they will fight to keep the Court activist and liberal. The struggle over the Supreme Court is not just about law: it is about the future of our culture...

...the stakes are the legitimate scope of self-government and an end to judicially imposed moral disorder.

That is why Shannen Coffin writes about this upcoming nomination battle in the following way:

...Within minutes of the announcement of O'Connor's retirement, the dinosaurs of the Left took to the airwaves to attempt to frame the debate. Planned Parenthood cried that "women's health and safety [are] on the line." People for the American Way shrieked that our "very national identity hangs in the balance." Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, declared "a state of emergency for women's rights." Nan Aron, of left wing Alliance for Justice, spelled out what was to come: "a fight that will shape our lives for decades."
All of the breathless talk was evidence of just how far the Far Left have slipped...

So what is left for the Left? The Court. More than any other time in our history, the gears of liberal social activism no longer turn beneath the dome of the United States Capitol, but have moved a few hundred yards across the street to the United States Supreme Court. Liberal groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the National Abortion Federation, well aware that the electorate is not solidly (if at all) behind their agenda, have turned to the Courts to advance their mission. Every time the people of the country speak through their legislatures on the hot-button issues of the day � abortion, homosexual rights, affirmative action, you name it � the army of lawyers of the Left line up at the courthouse steps to put a stop to the will of the people...Unlike the conservative movement that seeks to limit the now pervasive influence of the Supreme Court in our daily lives, liberal activist groups need the Court. Their success in changing social norms, their access to bank accounts in the Hamptons and Hollywood, their very existence � all depend on their ability to control its makeup.

It should come as no surprise that this summer will be a liberal political jihad...

Nothing is more telling about the desperation of the Left in modern politics than their warm embrace of Justice O'Connor over the last few days...

...she was a far cry from a Justice Brennan or Thurgood Marshall, the former standard bearers for the Left. For Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid to be embracing O'Connor as the model of a perfect judge speaks volumes to how far they have slipped in the American political debate.

...Despite their empty words of praise, leading Democrats in the Senate know that the best they can do is fight to the death on the president's nominee, demonizing that person no matter how esteemed or qualified. Anyone short of Ted Kennedy himself might not appease desperate liberals. So be prepared for judicial Armageddon. It may be the Left's last stand.

On an important philosophical level, here is a related posting entitled Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning which uses a recent case to talk about the meaning of "original intent" in contrast to judicial activism.

10:55 AM

July 4, 2005

Economy

The Ongoing Squabble Between General Motors & the United Auto Workers Union

This posting continues a discussion about General Motors and the UAW union covered in three previous postings:

If You Won't Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You (includes heavy dose of United Airlines information, too)

Why the Big Three Auto Companies Could Easily Fail

In a mid-June article in the Wall Street Journal entitled GM Warns UAW on Health Benefits (available for a fee), the following was reported:

General Motors Corp. has warned the United Auto Workers that the auto maker could unilaterally reduce health benefits for UAW retirees unless the union agrees to various cost-cutting concessions before its contract expires in 2007.
GM has set a goal of reducing the burden of its annual health-care costs by $1 billion in 2005 and another $1 billion in 2006, from a current estimated annual rate of $5.6 billion. The company also is aiming to reduce its long-term retiree health-care liabilities, an obligation that it carries on its balance sheet, by $20 billion from about $77 billion. But UAW leaders, who have conducted their own analysis, claim that GM's targets are unrealistic, according to UAW officials.

GM is pressing the UAW to agree to concessions by the end of this month, according to people familiar with the situation. UAW officials have largely discounted that deadline, and there are growing signs that the UAW and GM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner could be headed for a clash.

At a UAW meeting June 9, according to two people present, UAW Vice President Richard Shoemaker told officials of union locals: "If GM does anything unilaterally, they'll have a very hard time making automobiles in this country. You can go back and tell your membership that."...

National UAW leaders informed local union presidents and other UAW officials at last week's meeting that GM believes it has legal standing to reduce the health care of its retirees. Whereas the current labor contract provides specific benefits the company gives its current workers, the contract is less clear about benefits for retirees, according to some industry analysts. The UAW disputes that position.

People familiar with the situation say GM has implied in meetings with UAW officials that it could reduce the retiree benefits if the union doesn't agree to several concessions that could help the company save billions of dollars over the next few years.

GM provides health insurance for about 1.1 million people in the U.S., of whom about 700,000 are covered under plans negotiated under the GM-UAW master agreement that expires in 2007. UAW members on average pay 7% of their health-care costs under those plans, compared with about 27% paid by GM salaried workers, according to figures provided by GM management. In March, the former head of GM's North American operations, Gary Cowger, suggested in a speech that hourly and salaried workers should be covered by the same plan. UAW officials have publicly rebuffed that suggestion...

...[S]aid Rob Betts, president of UAW 2151, in Coopersville, Mich., a Delphi plant that makes fuel injectors: "We believe that they don't have the right to do this. This money has already been earned. They can't take it from us. They owe it to us."...

The last time the UAW launched a major strike against GM, in 1998, GM production was crippled for nearly eight weeks and the disruption cost the company an estimated $2 billion...

...with GM's North American operations facing their worst financial crisis since the early 1990s and GM's debt rated at junk levels by two major credit rating agencies, Mr. Wagoner is under increased pressure to accelerate cost-cutting in GM's U.S. auto business. At GM's annual meeting earlier this month, Mr. Wagoner indicated GM will close more North American factories and continue to shed hourly workers through attrition...

In another Wall Street Journal article the next day entitled UAW Asks GM For More Time on Health Talks (available also for a fee), the following statements were made:

...In a joint statement, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and UAW-GM Vice President Richard Shoemaker reiterated recent comments that the union won't agree to reopen its current contract with GM before it expires in 2007 in order to accommodate GM management proposals to slash the company's estimated $5.6 billion annual U.S. health-care bill.
But Mr. Gettelfinger and Mr. Shoemaker stressed a desire to maintain the spirit of cooperative labor-management relations that has largely characterized the UAW and GM management's dealings since a costly eight-week strike in 1998.

It "is in the best interests of all GM stakeholders for the UAW and GM to work together on these issues -- and to maintain the solid working relationship that we have worked so hard to build since 1998," the UAW leaders said in their statement.

"By working together, the UAW and GM have done a lot of important things over the past several years, including making dramatic improvements in workplace safety, productivity and product quality. It would be a huge mistake for GM to throw all that away by taking any unilateral action on health care benefits or other matters covered by our national agreement," the UAW leaders said...

One issue that could complicate talks between the company and the union is rank-and-file UAW displeasure at being asked to sacrifice benefits when Mr. Wagoner and other senior GM executives received bonuses for last year, and stockholders are still receiving dividends.

These people in Detroit are economic fools. 7% co-pays for union employees are an outdated historical artifact, especially when salaried employees are paying 27% - but the UAW won't talk about it until 2007 "because they owe it to us." Even if the payment of such benefits makes the company non-competitive in a global industry. No less outlandish is the continuing payment of bonuses to GM executives while they threaten to unilaterally reduce unionized worker healthcare benefits. As I have said before, these buffoons all deserve each other.

While the fools in GM management and the UAW union re-arrange the chairs on their economic Titanic, the competition is not waiting until 2007 to move ahead smartly. E.g., check out the newly built Hyundai plant in Alabama with its lack of healthcare legacy costs.

Here is another simple way to look at the issues here: Suppose you were a financial investor. Would you place your incremental investment dollar in the rigid, high-cost producer or the flexible, low-cost producer? Not a hard question to answer is it? And that's why GM's debt rating has been lowered recently to "junk" status, which means it is NOT investment grade debt.

If you won't deal with economic reality, then it will deal with you - on its own terms. In other words, GM and the UAW will either adjust their cost structure to be globally competitive and do it in a timely manner or they will die a well-deserved economic death.

Of course there is one other alternative for the more cynically minded: GM and the UAW can do little-to-nothing and then turn to the meddlesome U.S. government for a bailout like the airline industry has done.

But be very clear about the consequences of such a bailout - it won't make the underlying economic problem of being a high-cost producer go away and it will result in the working families and retirees of America paying what amounts to an extra tax so GM and the UAW can avoid making the kind of hard decisions American families make every day of the year to live within their budgets. Such a tax is neither fair nor just. And it makes no economic sense.

They need to get real in Detroit - all of them. And do it now.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Public Sector Issues
Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest
Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
RI Public Pension Problems
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
The Union's Solution for the Future: Get More People in Unions
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense
Public and Private Unions
Now Here is a Good Idea
Be Watchful
Rhode Island Unions Again Resist True Pension Reform

7:42 PM | Comments (1)

Economy

Airline Industry: How Government Meddling in Marketplace Costs Taxpayers & Consumers

Good economic outcomes typically happen when the government does not directly meddle in the marketplace but, instead, acts only to ensure the existence of the rule of law and property rights so third parties can enter into viable contracts as well as count on a level playing field for all participants in the market.

Bad economic outcomes typically happen when the government meddles in the marketplace. E.g., see this posting about the impact of government meddling in the healthcare marketplace.

The meddling typically creates new (and often unforeseen) behaviorial incentives for market participants to act in economically inefficient ways. As the cost of those inefficiencies grow, the government most often then further meddles in the marketplace and only compounds the problems they helped create in the first place.

The travails of the U.S. airline industry show how one bad government meddling begets more government meddling and creates incentives for avoiding dealing with economic reality - all at a greater long-term economic cost to taxpayers and/or consumers.

For example, consider the news in this WSJ article entitled Global Airlines Rise Above Crisis As U.S. Carriers Struggle (available for a fee):

At a time when many U.S. carriers are still struggling to survive, much of the rest of the global airline industry appears to have pulled out of crisis and is entering the summer travel season in its best shape in five years.
Carriers in Asia and Europe are starting to see cost savings from several years of difficult restructuring. Passenger demand is ballooning in many markets...That means some airlines are able to stanch their losses by raising fares -- and some are even strongly profitable.

The big exception is in North America, where several giant carriers are operating either in or near bankruptcy-court protection. U.S. airlines have been filling planes to record levels recently, surpassing demand seen before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Still, much of that traffic has been stoked by aggressively slashing fares.

The U.S. airline market is lagging behind the rest of the global industry for a variety of reasons. After reaching unprecedented heights in the economic boom of the 1990s, U.S. carriers were hurt worse by the Sept. 11 attacks. And the U.S. industry remains an uncomfortable mix of rabid competition and government intervention -- such as loan guarantees and pension-obligation relief -- that allows weak carriers to limp along far longer than ailing businesses do in other industries.

Outside the U.S., where Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection doesn't exist and many governments lack funds to prop up airlines, carriers have been faced since 9/11 with restructuring or going out of business -- and many have. Aiding the survivors, airlines outside the U.S. generally don't face labor unions as strong as in the U.S., and few face the sort of free-for-all competition that U.S. carriers do...

"Operating fundamentals are probably as good as they've ever been" in the U.S., thanks to deep restructuring, "although balance sheets are not," says John Heimlich, chief economist at the International Air Transport Association...

This nascent global pickup remains tenuous and could quickly disappear...

In Asia and the Middle East, airlines actually are growing, posting big profits, and appear to have shaken the crisis. The giant markets of China and India are deregulating and growing quickly. Carriers in the more mature markets of Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia-New Zealand also are expanding operations and renewing their fleets.

Airlines in the Asia-Pacific region started restructuring earlier than their peers in America and Europe...

"In Asia, we've got lower cost bases, tighter capacity and a much stronger demand recovery" than in the U.S. or Europe, says Kevin O'Connor, an analyst with investment bank CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets in Hong Kong...

In Europe, several large, traditional airlines and budget newcomers are reporting solid results...

"The results show that established carriers are able to deal with the cyclical crisis," said Ulrich Schulte-Strathaus, secretary-general of the Association of European Airlines in Brussels...

But for most airlines in the U.S., which for years had some of the world's strongest airline labor unions, slashing overhead remains a way simply to avoid insolvency. Rising jet-fuel prices have far outstripped most airlines' ability to reduce overhead expenses such as labor...

Underfunded pension plans are another big drag on airlines. US Airways and UAL Corp.'s United Airlines, both of which are operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection, were able to escape their obligations through bankruptcy proceedings...

The two carriers' escape from their pensions has increased pressure on rivals to seek relief from their own burdens...

This attempt to help U.S. carriers is raising trade tensions within the inherently international industry, however...

"The U.S. government is subsidizing the airline industry," charged Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, chief operating officer of Air France-KLM. In Europe, "where no subsidies are possible, market strength forces the industry to adapt."

European Union officials have been strict since 2001 in limiting state money to airlines, and EU governments resisted paying for services such as airport security that politicians in the U.S. and some other countries have moved to underwrite...

Think about it: Government loan guarantees enabled inefficient airlines to survive without having to deal rigorously with their bloated, non-competitive cost structures. The problems were then only compounded by governmental policies that allowed United Airlines and USAirways to throw off their pension obligations. Which, predictably, is creating a reaction by the airlines which are still obligated to their pension liabilities as this next WSJ article entitled Delta, Northwest Seek Pension Aid; Senators Critical (available for a fee) shows:

The chief executives of two major airlines warned Congress their companies will likely seek bankruptcy protection if lawmakers don't make it easier to fund their employee-pension plans...
"Without changes in the pension-funding rules, all of our efforts to transform ourselves out of [bankruptcy] court could be to no avail," Delta Air Lines Chief Executive Gerald Grinstein told the panel, at a hearing on proposals for shoring up corporate-pension programs.

Northwest Airlines President and Chief Executive Officer Douglas Steenland said that without swift congressional action, "the defined-benefit plans at Northwest and at other carriers may very well suffer the same fate" as airlines already operating under bankruptcy-court protection...

...Mr. Grassley indicated he might be willing to add legislation to a comprehensive pension-reform bill he is working on to help the airlines catch up on pension payments. Mr. Grassley is considering "whether that broad bill includes something for airlines," an aide said.

To avert more bankruptcies, the airline executives called on Congress to quickly approve legislation offered by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.,) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) that would allow carriers to freeze pension plans and extend their current obligations over 25 years.

Mr. Grassley made clear he favors a more comprehensive bill covering all companies with defined-benefit plans, which pay retirees fixed benefits.

The PBGC said yesterday that companies had a record $353.7 billion shortfall in their defined-benefit pension plans at the end of 2004, a 27% jump over 2003.

The shortfall has worsened, agency officials said, because investment returns have been flat and more companies are experiencing financial difficulties and are letting pension contributions slip. Also, the officials said, pension obligations are increasing as more beneficiaries retire and interest rates used to calculate long-term pension payouts have fallen, meaning companies must put more money in their pension funds now to make up the difference.

Mr. Grassley said he hopes to approve a measure this year. But lumping other industries together in one bill could slow the process on Capitol Hill. If a broader bill gets bogged down, "then we need to do a bill tailored to the aviation industry," Sen. Isakson said.

The pension problem is acute in the aviation industry...At the end of 2004, the airlines held just $30 billion in the bank to cover $50.6 billion in potential pension payments...

Do you have any doubt that any new legislation will really fix the core economic problem? Of course it won't - which is why this next article forecasts that the Pension Agency's Gap Is Expected To Balloon to $71 Billion in Decade (available for a fee):

The Congressional Budget Office told a House panel today that the federal agency insuring private pension plans has a deficit that will likely more than triple to $71 billion in the next decade, creating more urgency for Congress to consider pension-overhaul legislation.
At a House Budget Committee hearing, CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin said that under the current weak condition of many single-employer, defined-benefit plans, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. will experience a deficit that would require a fivefold increase in premiums paid by companies in order to wipe it out.

Such an extreme premium boost is considered politically unfeasible, partly because it would cause many companies to seek to unload pension plans on the PBGC through bankruptcy proceedings...

Last year, the PBGC had $62.3 billion in long-term obligations to pay workers' pensions, but only $39 billion in assets taken over from failed employer plans. The $23.3 billion shortfall was double the previous year's gap.

The CBO has spent the past 18 months working on a new model to measure the funding of companies' pension plans -- and the future effect on the PBGC. Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the model shows the PBGC's deficit growing to $71 billion in 10 years and $91 billion within 20 years...

Don't you find it interesting that the very process of fixing problem via more legislation could lead to further defaults on pension obligations to the PBGC pension agency? And this next WSJ article entitled Pension Agency Faces a New Front: Multiemployer Plans Saw Deficits Jump 50% in '04; Industry, Unions Are Split (available for a fee) notes how there are even further structural problems, all of which are created by previous government meddling in the marketplace:

As the government wrestles with strategies to deal with failed pension plans sponsored by troubled companies such as UAL Corp.'s United Airlines, big problems in many multiemployer plans have been largely overlooked.
Lawmakers say they recognized only recently that Congress also must address financial turmoil in this separate segment of government-backed pension plans, which covers about 10 million workers in several industries.

Meanwhile, industry and union coalitions pushing Congress to take action are fighting among themselves over how far lawmakers should go to shore up the plans...

Of growing concern, however, are multiemployer retirement plans underfunded by $150 billion in 2004, a 50% jump in the deficit from the year before, the federal insurer reported.

Multiemployer plans were set up so that workers who tend to move from employer to employer within various unionized industries could maintain retirement-benefit plans negotiated under a common union contract. A total of 1,600 multiemployer plans are paid for by 65,000 mostly small companies with 10 million unionized workers in such industries as trucking, construction and grocery-store chains.

As old-line industries like trucking companies consolidated, many multiemployer plans have gone into the red. The reason: fewer surviving employers with a declining number of active workers are responsible for the plans' growing rolls of retirees...

If a multiemployer plan becomes insolvent both the surviving companies and PBGC share in the financial burden of paying benefits that in many cases would be cut by 66%. "Everyone gets hurt," says Michael Mathis, Teamsters' director of government affairs in Washington.

So what would help fix these problems? One step in the right direction is argued in this WSJ editorial (available for a fee) by Holman Jenkins, Jr. who says we should Send United to the Great Hangar in the Sky:

What's wrong with this picture? A federal government agency is getting stuck with United Airlines' pension obligations, and in return for this favor United is going to keep flying. By now, shouldn't the price be that United do the decent thing and disappear, vanish into the night, so the industry can begin to work off the problem of too many companies chasing too few passengers?
Federal bankruptcy law and the post 9/11 airline bailout have already done enough damage. US Airways and America West, both recipients of federal bailout loans, are merging mainly to make sure they will be "too big to fail" and thus entitled to a United-style cosseting next time they get in trouble.

Now United itself will dump its pensions on a taxpayer-backed government agency, a step that may well provoke other airlines to do the same. United even gave the government a stake in seeing this outcome come to pass -- in the form of $1.5 billion in convertible notes held by the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The PBGC now finds itself in the weird position of cheering for United's success at the expense of carriers whose pension obligations it might have to assume next.

Let's dry our eyes. We've had two weeks for grieving over the pension plans of United Airlines; maybe we can have a few minutes of realism. What was lost, really? United's plans still hold $7 billion in assets, which could have been divvied up among retirees and employees by seniority. But this option was never considered -- it would have meant giving up the opportunity to collect, at government expense, an additional $6.6 billion in benefits promised by United but never backed by real money.

Be mindful of how these vapor benefits came into being. Until bankruptcy wiped out its vaunted experiment in worker empowerment, United was 55% owned by its employees and virtually dominated by the pilots union and machinists union.

From 1994 on, they controlled two seats on the board, held sway over a majority of others, and effectively hired and fired the CEO. To boot, labor didn't hesitate to reinforce its clout by threatening strikes and engaging in illegal work slowdowns -- a process that eventually led to the highest wages in the industry. As Rick Dubinsky, head of the pilots union, told management in 2000: "We don't want to kill the golden goose. We just want to choke it by the neck until it gives us every last egg."

Well, the goose is on government life-support now. But labor could always have used its clout to steer more eggs to the pension basket rather than the paycheck basket. A dirty little secret, however, is that it would have been crazy to do so. Pension underfunding (really, benefit overpromising) is too good a bargain to pass up -- a cheap option on government-paid pension benefits in the event of bankruptcy.

We specify "cheap" rather than "free," because the PBGC does charge a premium for insuring private pension plans, just not enough to make it uneconomic for troubled employers to engage in such flimflam. Look at the agency's main offenders: steel, autos, airlines -- companies with little hope of long-term prosperity and large, unionized work forces to keep placated in the meantime.

The pilots at United were in a particularly odd position, since many of the most senior were nominally entitled to pension benefits far in excess of the $46k-a-year the PBGC was willing to guarantee. No wonder their union was quick to propose a bankruptcy workout that would have given them a big new ownership stake in the carrier in return for dumping their plan -- oh yes, and on the condition that United also terminate the plans of lesser-paid employees.

But the larger point here is that defined-benefit pension plans aren't going out of style because they're structurally defective. They're going out of style because of a government-created incentive for weak companies to award more benefits than they have any hope or intention of funding.

In the wake of United's pension default, those worried about too much risk being placed on employees to manage their own savings might consider a solution: Abolish or privatize the PBGC...

In the meantime, the whole purpose of trying to legislate away some of capitalism's hard edges for workers and companies has come sadly unstuck in the airline business. Somehow the industry has to reduce itself to a smaller handful of more efficient network carriers that can maintain service to smaller markets even in the face of cherry-picking by Southwest, Jet Blue and their low-cost brethren. And if ever a company has earned the fate of being the odd man out, United is it.

It's spent nearly three years in bankruptcy, shucking off labor contracts, debts and now employee pensions, but still loses money...

...An orderly liquidation of United is an even better idea now that the federal government and taxpayers face an urgent need to get off the hook for a potential industry-wide airline pension default.

Jenkins makes the point well: The unions wanted to choke the golden goose by the neck to get every last egg. Thanks to government regulations, management and the unions of financially weak companies then knew neither would pay any price for overpromising and underfunding benefits. And who is left holding the bag - the taxpayers and consumers - while Washington officials run around talking righteously. Rather pathetic, isn't it?

For an alternative world view, consider this: Most families, who don't have lawyers or MBA's in their midst, somehow find a way to live within their family budgets. Why can they do what companies cannot do consistently well? The answer begins with the family knowing it must survive on its budget and live within its means - because there is no other alternative. That increasing spending in one area means reducing spending elsewhere, tapping the savings account or going into debt. That there is nobody waiting to bail out families who spend with reckless abandon.

Don't forget the lesson here: A big, meddling government does not have the public interest in mind, as they have become servants to the large corporations and unions who curry favor with them - all at the expense of working families and retirees. All of us pay quite a price for government meddling, don't we?

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Public Sector Issues
Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest
Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
RI Public Pension Problems
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
The Union's Solution for the Future: Get More People in Unions
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense
Public and Private Unions
Now Here is a Good Idea
Be Watchful
Rhode Island Unions Again Resist True Pension Reform

Private Sector Issues
If You Won't Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You
Underfunding Pensions, Public and Private, can Hurt Taxpayers
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?
Why the Big Three Auto Companies Could Easily Fail

5:53 PM

Taxation

Economics 101: Never Underestimate the Incentive Power of Marginal Tax Cuts

In the June 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore wrote an editorial entitled Real Tax Cuts Have Curves (available for a fee):

...The Laffer Curve helped launch the Reaganomics Revolution here at home and a frenzy of tax rate cutting around the globe that continues to this day.
The theory is really one of the simplest concepts in economics. Yet its logic continues to elude the class-warfare lobby whose disbelief is unburdened by the multiple real-life examples which validate its conclusions. The idea is that lowering the tax rate on production, work, investment, and risk-taking will spur more of these activities and thereby will often lead to more tax revenue collections for the government rather than less.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan chopped the highest personal income tax rate from the confiscatory 70% rate that he inherited when he entered office to 28% when he left office and the resulting economic burst caused federal tax receipts to almost precisely double: from $517 billion to $1,032 billion. [Remember these numbers the next time someone tries to tell you the deficits under Reaganomics were a revenue problem and not a spending a problem!]

Now we have overpowering confirming evidence from the Bush tax cuts of May 2003. The jewel of the Bush economic plan was the reduction in tax rates on dividends from 39.6% to 15% and on capital gains from 20% to 15%. These sharp cuts in the double tax on capital investment were intended to reverse the 2000-01 stock market crash, which had liquidated some $6 trillion in American household wealth, and to inspire a revival in business capital investment, which had also collapsed during the recession. The tax cuts were narrowly enacted despite the usual indignant primal screams from the greed and envy lobby about "tax cuts for the super rich."

Last week the Congressional Budget Office released its latest report on tax revenue collections. The numbers are an eye-popping vindication of the Laffer Curve and the Bush tax cut's real economic value. Federal tax revenues have surged in the first eight months of this fiscal year by $187 billion. This represents a 15.4% rise in federal tax receipts over 2004. Individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded like a cap let off a geyser, up 30% in the two years since the tax cut. Once again, tax rate cuts have created a virtuous chain reaction of higher economic growth, more jobs, higher corporate profits, and finally more tax receipts.

This Laffer Curve effect has also created a revenue windfall for states and cities. As the economic expansion has plowed forward, and in some regions of the country accelerated, state tax receipts have climbed 7.5% this year already...Many of President Bush's critics foolishly predicted that states and localities would be victims of the Bush tax cut gamble.

Alas, all of the fiscal news is not celebratory. The CBO also reports that federal expenditures are up $110 billion, or 7.2%, so far this year as the congressional Republican spending spree rolls on. Nonetheless, it now appears that the budget deficit will be at least $60 billion lower than last year and states and cities, led by California, which a few years ago were awash in debt themselves, will enjoy net surpluses of at least $50 billion. This means that total government borrowing will come in at below 2.5% of national output, which is hardly a crisis level of debt...

On the private-sector side of the ledger, what we are now witnessing is a broad-based investment boom. The lower capital gains and dividends taxes have been capitalized into higher stock values, and that in part explains why the Dow is up 24% since May of 2003 while the Nasdaq has risen 39%. Dan Clifton of the American Shareholder Association estimates that this rise in stock values has translated into roughly $3 trillion in added wealth holdings of American households. The severe slump in business capital spending in 2001 and 2002 has now taken the shape of a U-turn, with spending on capital purchases up an enormous 22% since 2003. Because higher wages and new job creation are highly dependent on business capital investment, the mislabeled "Bush tax cut for the rich" has in reality enormously benefited middle-income workers.

...Thanks to inane budget rules in Congress the capital gains and dividend tax cuts are currently set to expire in 2008. (When was the last time a spending program in Washington expired?) One thing would seem certain: Raising the tax rates on capital gains and dividends would be a formula for choking off the expansion and reversing the stock market climb. Until now, the Democrats in Congress have in unison sanctimoniously charged that the government can't afford the price tag of making the tax cut permanent. But, of course, all this new fiscal evidence points to precisely the opposite conclusion: that we can't afford not to make the tax cuts permanent.

Whether Mr. Bush's critics' ideological blinders make them capable of being persuaded by facts and evidence is an altogether different issue.

If you want even more empirical data, read this excellent article by Arthur Laffer, in which he presents historical data on the effects of marginal tax cuts from the Harding-Coolidge (1920's), Kennedy (1960's) and Reagan (1980's) eras - which also turn out to be the three times of greatest economic growth in the last 100 years. In the article, Laffer explains the drivers which provide the underlying logic for the Curve:

The Laffer Curve illustrates the basic idea that changes in tax rates have two effects on tax revenues: the arithmetic effect and the economic effect. The arithmetic effect is simply that if tax rates are lowered, tax revenues (per dollar of tax base) will be lowered by the amount of the decrease in the rate. The reverse is true for an increase in tax rates. The economic effect, however, recognizes the positive impact that lower tax rates have on work, output, and employment--and thereby the tax base--by providing incentives to increase these activities. Raising tax rates has the opposite economic effect by penalizing participation in the taxed activities. The arithmetic effect always works in the opposite direction from the economic effect. Therefore, when the economic and the arithmetic effects of tax-rate changes are combined, the consequences of the change in tax rates on total tax revenues are no longer quite so obvious.

It is important to note that, in evaluating the effects of tax cuts, many opponents of such cuts (including the "pay as you go" budget deficit hawks as well as the methodology used by the Congressional Budget Office) only present a calculation of the arithmetic effect - called a "static analysis" - thereby assigning a zero value to the economic effect. Yet the empirical data from the three eras of tax cuts clearly show the error of that approach. That is why it is crucial that a "dynamic scoring" methodology be used, incorporating both arithmetic and economic effects. It is no less important to note that cash refunds from government, which do not change marginal tax rates, will have no lasting economic effect because they create no incentive to change human behavior and create new economic value.

Never underestimate the incentive power of marginal tax cuts. It's Economics 101, after all.

4:24 PM | Comments (1)

Healthcare

Employees are Paying an Ever-Increasing Portion of Health Insurance Costs

A Wall Street Journal article entitled Drug Co-Pays Hit $100 (available for a fee) notes the following:

Get ready for the $100 co-pay. That is how much state workers in Georgia will soon pay for certain brand-name drugs, in what may be the highest drug co-payment anywhere in the country.
It is the starkest demonstration yet of employers' aggressive efforts to rein in the rising cost of prescription-drug benefits by driving employees to lower-cost medicines. Employer drug costs rose 83.4% over the past five years, an average of 16.7% each year, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting, New York. And some estimates predict these costs will continue to rise at an 11% to 12% annual pace over the next several years.

As a result, consumers are seeing a variety of changes in their prescription-drug benefits. The most popular is tinkering with co-pays -- a set portion of the pharmacy bill that patients pay out of their own pockets -- to give patients a financial stake in what drugs they and their doctors choose. Just a few years ago, co-pays were rarely higher than $30, and most were much lower. Now, raising co-pays is a commonly used stick to discourage high-cost drug use. There also is a new carrot: making generic drugs free to patients by eliminating the co-pays altogether. Some plans divide drugs into two and three tiers, with less-expensive drugs requiring lower co-pays.

Also gaining steam is the use of "co-insurance," whereby the patient pays a percentage of the pharmacy bill rather than a flat amount. A few are experimenting with something called reference pricing, where patients typically pay extra if a prescription price exceeds a set "reference" level for the drug's category. And increasingly, plans are refusing to pay for a costly medicine unless patients first try less expensive alternatives or the doctors gets prior authorization from the health plan...

Employers and health plans say they have little choice but to find ways to reduce their ever-rising outlays for prescription drugs...

Co-pays have been rising steadily in recent years. According to Hewitt Associates, consultants to employers, nearly 40% of employers had co-pays of more than $30 this year, up from fewer than 10% 2001.

"Many employers have increased co-pays to the point where it actually equates to employees paying about 35% of the cost of drugs," says Debbie Martin, a consultant to major employers at Mercer. "That's about as high as they can go" and still have a competitive benefit that will attract employees...

Another increasingly popular approach to making patients more aware of drug costs has been to require "co-insurance," where a patient would pay 10% or 20%, even 50% of a drug's cost rather than a flat co-pay.

"We really want to impart to our employees that drugs cost a lot of money and you have to be aware of what you're taking and ask a lot of questions," said Nancy Tostanoski, senior vice president of global compensation and benefits at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. of White Plains, N.Y., which did away with flat co-pays for its employees in 2004. For most generic drugs, the co-insurance now is 25% and for brands 35%...

The article also contained this table:

CARROTS AND STICKS
How health plans are encouraging the use of cheaper drugs:

� Raising co-payments.

� Using co-insurance, where patients pay a percentage of cost, rather than a flat amount.

� Requiring doctors to get permission before prescribing an expensive drug.

� Refusing to pay for a costly drug until a less-expensive medicine is tried first.

� Cutting co-pays for generics.

� Offering discount coupons for over-the-counter medicines.

4:19 PM

Education

Lack of Merit Pay Reduces the Quality of Teachers & Our Schools

An earlier posting asked Is Merit Pay a Crazy Idea?

An article in the Spring 2005 issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal entitled Cheating Great Teachers: It's past time for merit pay for Gotham's public school teachers tells quite a story - about determined educators and children as well as yet another example of counterproductive behavior by the teachers' union.

Here are excerpts from the article which discusses the specific developments in New York City:

Student test scores rose in New York City this year�and in some classrooms and schools, kids made truly significant gains. Consider Region Five, a poor district of eastern Brooklyn and Queens. As Julia Levy reported in the New York Sun, the district was an "educational wasteland for decades," with two-thirds of the schoolchildren failing at everything. But this year, the district�s elementary- and middle-school students pulled off testing gains of 17 percentage points in English and 10 percentage points in math, outpacing the city�s average gains in both areas. At P.S. and I.S. 41 in the district, 48 percent of fifth-graders met reading standards this year, up from 32 percent last year, while 37 percent of the seventh graders did okay or well this year, more than double last year�s figure.
It�s no mystery why scores are going up: a gifted, determined manager who motivated teachers to succeed. The district�s leader, Kathleen Cashin, established clear expectations for principals and teachers, and pushed the schools in the district to meet them. P.S./I.S. 41 principal Myron Rock enthuses that his teachers worked evenings, Saturdays, and vacations to push students.

The teachers must be glowing with pride from the praise they�ve garnered. But they won�t see more money for their feat, unless every New York public school teacher also sees it. In mid-June, the United Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten, released its latest pay demands, and rewarding the best teachers is no part of them. Instead, the union wants a 19 percent pay hike for teachers across the board, raising top salaries to nearly $100,000 within three years...

But the UFT remains hostile to any merit pay for individual teachers. Striking a Marxoid note a little while back, Weingarten declared that merit-pay plans �pit teachers against each other instead of encouraging a collaborative school culture.� What Weingarten and the union do not see�as the rest of America fervently believes�is that competition is healthy...Until Weingarten budges, though, virtue will have to be its own reward for New York�s teachers.

Yet, even more interestingly, the article contains some information on a study which shows how the lack of merit pay in teachers' union contracts over the last 40 years has systematically reduced the overall quality of teachers across America:

...But without the introduction of merit-based pay, new money won�t do much to build upon this year�s rising scores, as a recent study, conducted by Harvard economics professor Caroline Hoxby and Andrew Leigh of the National Bureau of Economic Research, makes clear. The study examined worker aptitude (native smarts, basically) as it relates to worker pay. In most professions, the best workers usually receive the top pay�a situation that once held in teaching, before the unions arrived on the scene and began to mandate lockstep salaries. Hoxby and Leigh found that smart women (the study looked only at females), frustrated by the absence of reward for ability in the public schools, have looked elsewhere for more rewarding career paths, as you�d expect.
Forty years ago, as unions were just gaining control in public schools, Hoxby and Leigh report, 16 percent of American female teachers were of low aptitude in relation to other college graduates (determined by mean SAT scores at their respective universities). By 2000, a full 36 percent of women teachers were of low aptitude. In 1963, 5 percent of women teachers came from the highest aptitude group; by 2000, that figure had plummeted to 1 percent. The primary reason for this startling decline in teacher quality, Hoxby and Leigh conclude, is the elimination of financial rewards for talent. Back in 1963, the smartest teachers earned more money than average teachers, while the lowest aptitude teachers earned less; by 2000, all teachers earned pretty much the same for the same level of experience, regardless of talent.

If New York wants to attract and keep the best teachers, then, the solution isn�t to increase teacher pay across the board. That might attract more people to teaching, but not necessarily smarter or harder-working people...

The more you know, the more clear it becomes that public education in America will NEVER improve in any material way as long as the teachers' unions control everything and dumb down the system.

Why do we tolerate this?

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON EDUCATIONAL ISSUES:

3:50 PM | Comments (1)

Happy Birthday, America!

In celebration of America's birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country - brought together in one posting:

President Calvin Coolidge gave a powerful speech in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you want to rediscover some of the majesty of the principles underlying our Founding, read Coolidge's entire speech. Here are some key excerpts:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.
It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

This Power Line posting elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American creed:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.
What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.

Anchor Rising's own Mac Owens gave a speech entitled Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights, published on this blog site, which elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American Experiment:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."...
The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

...the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government...

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.
But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision � the method by which we justify our political order � liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

�that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness � That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government � indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish � to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights � provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract � its principles rooted in "right reason" � the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

The powerful words from and about our Founding appeal to timeless moral principles grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that preceded our Founding. It is these principles that make America unique and inspire us to be proud, engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.

Happy Birthday, America!

12:25 AM

Liberty & American Founding

Happy Birthday, America!

Donald B. Hawthorne

In celebration of America's birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country - brought together in one posting:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.
It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

This Power Line posting elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American creed:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.
What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.

Anchor Rising's own Mac Owens gave a speech entitled Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights, published on this blog site, which elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American Experiment:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."...
The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

...the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government...

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.
But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision...the method by which we justify our political order...liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government - indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

Happy Birthday, America!

12:25 AM | TrackBack (0)

July 3, 2005

Conservatism

Relinking Constitutional Law & Jurisprudence to the Constitution

William Kristol, in an article entitled Reversing the Bork Defeat, makes this observation:

On October 23, 1987--a day that lives in conservative infamy--Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by a Democratic Senate. Now, 18 years later, George W. Bush has the chance to reverse this defeat, and to begin to fulfill what has always been one of the core themes of modern American conservatism: the relinking of constitutional law and constitutional jurisprudence to the Constitution.
The restoration of constitutional government has been the one area in which modern conservatism has had the least success. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, conservative economic policies have been (more or less) pursued, and, when pursued, have been vindicated. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, conservative foreign policies based on American strength and American principles have been--when pursued--remarkably successful. One might even say that, in both economics and foreign policy, the degree of conservative success has been far greater than anyone would have imagined in 1980.

But in the area of constitutionalism, conservative goals have been thwarted, and the key moment of failure, from which conservative constitutionalism has never recovered, was the Bork defeat in 1987. For the last 18 years constitutional jurisprudence has continued to drift away from a sound constitutionalism based on the written Constitution and a proper deference to popular self-government in many areas of public life. Bork's defeat was both a cause and a symbol of this continued downward drift...

10:43 AM | Comments (1)

July 2, 2005

The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest

Donald B. Hawthorne

In the book entitled Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, Arthur Seldon writes:

Many economics writers and teachers still present economic systems of exchange between private individuals or firms as "imperfect" and requiring "correction" by government. Most teachers of politics, politicians, and political journalists still present government as well-meaning and able to remove such "imperfections."

In spite of this view of government, Seldon notes:

Economic systems based on exchange between individuals and on selling and buying between firms usually correct themselves in time if they are free to adapt themselves to changing conditions of supply and demand. Government "cures" usually do more harm than good in the long run because of three stubborn and too-long neglected excesses of government: their "cures" are begun too soon, they do too much, and they are continued for too long.

So, the question arises regarding whether American citizens should continue to assume the actions of government are well-meaning and focused primarily on the public interest. The answer is no.

Why this claim? Just think about it. Most American citizens have personal stories about how various public sector players (politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other parties with an economic stake in government actions like corporations and unions) act in their own self interest and not in the public interest. In fact, the bottom of this posting contains numerous previous postings which provide examples of such behavior.

The balance of this posting will elaborate on public choice theory, which explains why we cannot assume government is either well-meaning or focused primarily on the public interest. The posting then concludes with specific recommendations in a Call to Action.

Gordon Tullock, writing in the same book, explains the evolution of public choice theory:

Public choice is a scientific analysis of government behavior and, in particular, the behavior of individuals with respect to government. Strictly speaking, it has no policy implications...
Until the days of Adam Smith, most social discussion was essentially moral...

David Hume was the first to make significant cracks in this monolithic approach. He took the rather obvious view that most people pursued their own interest in their behavior rather than a broadly based public interest...Adam Smith developed modern economics by assuming that individuals were very largely self-interested and by working out the consequences of that assumption in the realm of economics...

From the time of Plato...[t]here was no formal theory of how government works outside such moral and ethical foundations.

Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, economists assumed that individuals were primarily concerned with their own interest and worked out the consequences of that assumption. In contrast, during this same period political science largely assumed that political actors are mainly concerned with the public interest. Thus individuals who enter a supermarket and purchase items of their choice are assumed, when they enter the voting booth, to vote not for the politicians and laws that will benefit themselves, but for politicians and laws that will benefit the nation as a whole. People in the supermarket mainly buy the food and other goods that are, granted the price, found to benefit themselves and their families. However, when individuals become politicians, a transformation is assumed to occur so that a broader perspective guides them to make morally correct decisions rather than follow the course of behavior that pleases the interest groups that supported them or the policies that may lead to reelection.

Economists changed this bifurcated view of human behavior by developing the theory of public choice...

This bifurcation of the individual psyche is particularly impressive when it is remembered that the economic system based upon self-interest assumptions can be demonstrated to produce a result not totally out of accord with the classical ideas of the public interest...

We must accept that in government, as in any form of commerce, people will pursue their private interests, and they will achieve goals reasonably closely related to those of company stockholders or of citizens only if it is in their private interest to do so. The primacy of private interest is not inconsistent with the observation that most people, in addition to pursuing their private interests, have some charitable instincts, some tendency to help others and to engage in various morally correct activities.

However, the evidence seems fairly strong that motives other than the pursuit of private interests are not ones on which we can depend for the achievement of long-continued efficient performance...

Jane Shaw, in her article entitled Public Choice Theory, offers a more detailed explanation of how there is such a mismatch between our expectations of government and the actual performance by government:

Public choice theory...emerged in the fifties and received widespread public attention in 1986, when James Buchanan, one of its two leading architects...was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics...
...Economists who study behavior in the private marketplace assume that people are motivated mainly by self-interest...Public choice economists make the same assumption�that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. In Buchanan's words the theory "replaces... romantic and illusory... notions about the workings of governments [with]... notions that embody more skepticism."

In the past many economists have argued that the way to rein in "market failures" such as monopolies is to introduce government action. But public choice economists point out that there also is such a thing as "government failure."...

One of the chief underpinnings of public choice theory is the lack of incentives for voters to monitor government effectively...the voter is largely ignorant of political issues and that this ignorance is rational. Even though the result of an election may be very important, an individual's vote rarely decides an election. Thus, the direct impact of casting a well-informed vote is almost nil; the voter has virtually no chance to determine the outcome of the election. So spending time following the issues is not personally worthwhile for the voter...

Public choice economists point out that this incentive to be ignorant is rare in the private sector...he or she pays only for the [purchased item] chosen. If the choice is wise, the buyer will benefit; if it is unwise, the buyer will suffer directly. Voting lacks that kind of direct result...Except for a few highly publicized issues, they do not pay a lot of attention to what legislative bodies do, and even when they do pay attention, they have little incentive to gain the background knowledge and analytic skill needed to understand the issues.

Public choice economists also examine the actions of legislators. Although legislators are expected to pursue the "public interest," they make decisions on how to use other people's resources, not their own. Furthermore, these resources must be provided by taxpayers and by those hurt by regulations whether they want to provide them or not...Efficient decisions, however, will neither save their own money nor give them any proportion of the wealth they save for citizens. There is no direct reward for fighting powerful interest groups in order to confer benefits on a public that is not even aware of the benefits or of who conferred them. Thus, the incentives for good management in the public interest are weak. In contrast, interest groups are organized by people with very strong gains to be made from governmental action. They provide politicians with campaign funds and campaign workers. In return they receive at least the "ear" of the politician and often gain support for their goals.

In other words, because legislators have the power to tax and to extract resources in other coercive ways, and because voters monitor their behavior poorly, legislators behave in ways that are costly to citizens. One technique analyzed by public choice is log rolling, or vote trading. An urban legislator votes to subsidize a rural water project in order to win another legislator's vote for a city housing subsidy. The two projects may be part of a single spending bill. Through such log rolling both legislators get what they want. And even though neither project uses resources efficiently, local voters know that their representative got something for them. They may not know that they are paying a pro-rata share of a bundle of inefficient projects! And the total expenditures may well be more than individual taxpayers would be willing to authorize if they were fully aware of what is going on.

...bureaucrats in government...incentives explain why many regulatory agencies appear to be "captured" by special interests...Capture occurs because bureaucrats do not have a profit goal to guide their behavior. Instead, they usually are in government because they have a goal or mission. They rely on Congress for their budgets, and often the people who will benefit from their mission can influence Congress to provide more funds. Thus interest groups...become important to them. Such interrelationships can lead to bureaucrats being captured by interest groups.

Although public choice economists have focused mostly on analyzing government failure, they also have suggested ways to correct problems. For example, they argue that if government action is required, it should take place at the local level whenever possible. Because there are many local governments, and because people "vote with their feet," there is competition among local governments, as well as some experimentation. To streamline bureaucracies, Gordon Tullock and William Niskanen have recommended allowing several bureaus to supply the same service on the grounds that the resulting competition will improve efficiency...

...The emergence of public choice economics reflects dissatisfaction with the implicit assumption, held by Keynesians, among others, that government effectively corrects market failures...

From the previously mentioned book, Tullock continues by explaining how public choice theory impacts public policy expectations and the broad question of what role should be played by government:

But the different attitude toward government that arises from public choice does have major effects on our views of what policies government should undertake or can carry out. In particular, it makes us much less ambitious about relying on government to provide certain services...
A deep-seated feeling that government is imperfect carries with it two consequences. The first is that imperfections in the market process do not necessarily call for government intervention; the second is a desire to see if we cannot do something about government processes that might conceivably improve their efficiency.

Public choice students are more likely than students of older approaches to political matters to be in favor of shifting reliance from the government sector to the market sector. However, we must not make a mistake that is the converse of the one criticized above: that the government performs certain functions poorly does not, in and of itself, prove that the market would do better...

A final area where knowledge of public choice has an effect on people's views about policy concerns the behavior of government officials. The student of public choice is unlikely to believe that government officials are overly concerned with the public interest. Because they operate in an area where information is very poor (and the proof that the voters' information on political issues would be poor was one of the first achievements of the public choice theory), deception is much more likely to be a worthwhile tactic than it is in the marketplace. Therefore, one would anticipate much more dishonesty in government. Indeed, granted that government officials are the only people who can check on the dishonesty of government officials, the problem of curing dishonesty in government involves an infinite regression. Private businesspeople, who deal with better-informed consumers than do politicians, are also subject to surveillance by public officials who, dishonest though some may be, very commonly have no personal motive to protect a particular private businessperson. The amount of dishonesty that has turned up in private business in spite of these inspections gives a rough idea of the almost complete uniformity of dishonesty in politics.

Having little confidence in politicians and depending upon the electoral process to discipline them, in so far as they are disciplined, is the appropriate attitude and it leads to some feelings of cynicism about election campaigns...

...the...attitude toward the professional bureaucracy is equally cool but technically more complex. The view that the individual bureaucrat is not attempting to maximize the public interest very vigorously but is attempting to maximize his or her own utility just as vigorously as you and I has been held for a very long time by most people in the backs of their minds. But bringing it into formal theory is a public choice accomplishment. So far this revelation has not had much impact on any real-world government...One particular conclusion is the feeling that monopolistic government bureaus are undesirable...

Much traditional reasoning has turned on totally unrealistic ideas about the efficiency of government...much previous analysis has implicitly assumed that perfection was obtained in the government sector. The public choice students know that it is not, and that insight affects their policy views.

In a policy piece entitled Uncompetitive Elections and the American Political System, Patrick Basham and Dennis Polhill of the Cato Institute write about an increasingly significant structural problem with American politics that only magnifies the problems defined by public choice theory:

American representative government suffers from the handicap of a largely uncompetitive political system...
Current redistricting practices and campaign finance regulations, in tandem with publicly financed careerism, have significantly negative consequences for the health of the political system. This study analyzes several of the major instruments of campaign finance regulation, such as contribution limits, public financing, and the ban on soft money, in terms of their relationship to political competition. Simply put, campaign finance regulation and public financing have not improved political competition.

In the past, campaign finance restrictions and taxpayer-subsidized elections have generated unintended consequences. The most recent regulatory round is no exception to that rule. This study also looks at other reforms, namely, term limits and improvements to the redistricting process, in light of their comparatively successful record regarding political competition.

Changes in the manner in which districts are designed, campaigns are funded, and politicians are tenured require immediate implementation. In short, elected officials should be disconnected from campaign and election rule making and regulation. There will not be an improvement in political competition until the incumbent fox ends his tenure as guardian of the democratic henhouse.

The pervasive belief that government can solve any imperfection in our society has led to an ever increasing presence of government in our society. That has magnified another problem which Ilya Somin of the Cato Institue discusses in his policy piece entitled When Ignorance Isn't Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy:

Democracy demands an informed electorate. Voters who lack adequate knowledge about politics will find it difficult to control public policy. Inadequate voter knowledge prevents government from reflecting the will of the people in any meaningful way. Such ignorance also raises doubts about democracy as a means of serving the interests of a majority. Voters who lack sufficient knowledge may be manipulated by elites. They may also demand policies that contravene their own interests...
The size of modern government is often so great that it is impossible for voters--even the most knowledgeable among them--to be adequately informed about its operations. Smaller government may actually be more democratic than that which we have now: voters would be more likely to exercise informed control over policy. Voter ignorance also suggests the value of decentralized federalism. In a decentralized federal system, citizens may "vote with their feet" by moving out of jurisdictions with policies they dislike and into those that have more favorable ones. Because each person decides whether or not to move, there is a much greater incentive to acquire relevant information with "foot voting" than with traditional voting at the polls.

So what are citizens across America supposed to do in response to this largely pessimistic view? The blunt answer is that is an uphill battle where the probability of success for victories which restore our historical freedoms are far from certain.

Where to begin? Here are some specifics we can incorporate into this Call to Action:

Let's continue to resist turning to government to fix all societal problems, recognizing Government's Misguided Incentives. For example, we need to be conscious of the difference between Coerced Charity vs. Voluntary Charity and how the behaviorial incentives arising from coerced charity are not positive.

No less important, we must ask those pushing for an ever-increasing role for government, What Does "Social Justice" Mean?

When there is an appropriate role for government, let's push to have it be at the local level where citizens can better control and change its behaviors.

We need a TABOR (taxpayers' bill of rights) implemented in each state and at the federal level, such as what was implemented in Colorado (read here, here, and here), in order to place limits on government actions - while recognizing that those limits will be under constant attack like they have been in Colorado.

We need to increase government accountability by using the Internet to make the actions of government as transparently obvious to citizens as possible and educate them on more reasons why government cannot effectively solve most problems.

That means, among other things, fighting the FEC proposed limits on blogging.

We need competitive elections so there is a real threat that moderates incumbent politicians' behavior. That means stopping the gerrymandering which is nothing but an incumbent protection racket.

We need less campaign finance reform of the type passed recently by legislators and more that allows true opposition to be funded.

We need term limits across the country so public service is an interim contribution to our society, not a career. Term limits will lessen the politician behavior problems highlighted by public choice theory because satisfying interest groups in order to win reelection will become far less important.

We need to be Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning, stopping judicial activism and returning the legislating function to the legislature.

We need competitive alternatives to government services in order to reduce the power of the unelected, unaccountable government bureaucracy.

Finally, we need to constantly reread Lawrence Reed's Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy as we evaluate actions proposed by government.

There is also a moral basis for this Call to Action and it is based on principles embodied in our Declaration of Independence.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

There are endless examples of how actions by government or by parties interested in manipulating government actions do not even come close to matching the erroneous view that government is solely focused on the public interest. Here are some examples which have been written about on this blogsite:

Government Meddling Creates Marketplace Distortions, Increasing Long-Term Costs

How Government Makes Us Pay Higher Gasoline Prices

Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
RI Pension Problems
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense

Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities
Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent
Now Here's a Good Idea

The Deep Performance Problems With American Public Education
RE: Why Teachers' Unions (Not Teachers!) Are Bad For Education
Reporting False Performance Data Under No Child Left Behind: Why Are We Surprised At Dishonest Behavior By The Educational Bureaucracy?

Social Security Reform Debate: Hypocrisy, Misinformation & Why Change is Necessary

Separation of Powers I: Unprincipled, Undemocratic Behavior
Separation of Powers II: They Just Don't Get It
Separation of Powers III: Wake Up, Speaker Murphy!
Separation of Powers IV
"Citizens for Representative Government's" Deceitful Manipulation of the Constitutional Convention Vote
How Speaker Murphy's Changing of the Rules of the House Reduces Your Freedom
RI House Leaders Show No Respect for Rule of Law
Will Financial Disclosure Requirements Be Dropped?

Pigs at the Public Trough
Pigs at the Public Trough, Revisited
The Highway Bill: Another Example of Unacceptable Government Spending
Big Government Corrupts, Regardless of Party

More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector

8:08 PM | TrackBack (0)

The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest

In the book entitled Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, Arthur Seldon writes:

Many economics writers and teachers still present economic systems of exchange between private individuals or firms as "imperfect" and requiring "correction" by government. Most teachers of politics, politicians, and political journalists still present government as well-meaning and able to remove such "imperfections."

In spite of this view of government, Seldon notes:

Economic systems based on exchange between individuals and on selling and buying between firms usually correct themselves in time if they are free to adapt themselves to changing conditions of supply and demand. Government "cures" usually do more harm than good in the long run because of three stubborn and too-long neglected excesses of government: their "cures" are begun too soon, they do too much, and they are continued for too long.

So, the question arises regarding whether American citizens should continue to assume the actions of government are well-meaning and focused primarily on the public interest. The answer is no.

Gordon Tullock, writing in the same book, explains the evolution of public choice theory:

Public choice is a scientific analysis of government behavior and, in particular, the behavior of individuals with respect to government. Strictly speaking, it has no policy implications...
Until the days of Adam Smith, most social discussion was essentially moral...

David Hume was the first to make significant cracks in this monolithic approach. He took the rather obvious view that most people pursued their own interest in their behavior rather than a broadly based public interest...Adam Smith developed modern economics by assuming that individuals were very largely self-interested and by working out the consequences of that assumption in the realm of economics...

From the time of Plato...[t]here was no formal theory of how government works outside such moral and ethical foundations.

Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, economists assumed that individuals were primarily concerned with their own interest and worked out the consequences of that assumption. In contrast, during this same period political science largely assumed that political actors are mainly concerned with the public interest. Thus individuals who enter a supermarket and purchase items of their choice are assumed, when they enter the voting booth, to vote not for the politicians and laws that will benefit themselves, but for politicians and laws that will benefit the nation as a whole. People in the supermarket mainly buy the food and other goods that are, granted the price, found to benefit themselves and their families. However, when individuals become politicians, a transformation is assumed to occur so that a broader perspective guides them to make morally correct decisions rather than follow the course of behavior that pleases the interest groups that supported them or the policies that may lead to reelection.

Economists changed this bifurcated view of human behavior by developing the theory of public choice...

This bifurcation of the individual psyche is particularly impressive when it is remembered that the economic system based upon self-interest assumptions can be demonstrated to produce a result not totally out of accord with the classical ideas of the public interest...

We must accept that in government, as in any form of commerce, people will pursue their private interests, and they will achieve goals reasonably closely related to those of company stockholders or of citizens only if it is in their private interest to do so. The primacy of private interest is not inconsistent with the observation that most people, in addition to pursuing their private interests, have some charitable instincts, some tendency to help others and to engage in various morally correct activities.

However, the evidence seems fairly strong that motives other than the pursuit of private interests are not ones on which we can depend for the achievement of long-continued efficient performance...

Public choice theory...emerged in the fifties and received widespread public attention in 1986, when James Buchanan, one of its two leading architects...was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics...
...Economists who study behavior in the private marketplace assume that people are motivated mainly by self-interest...Public choice economists make the same assumption�that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. In Buchanan's words the theory "replaces... romantic and illusory... notions about the workings of governments [with]... notions that embody more skepticism."

In the past many economists have argued that the way to rein in "market failures" such as monopolies is to introduce government action. But public choice economists point out that there also is such a thing as "government failure."...

One of the chief underpinnings of public choice theory is the lack of incentives for voters to monitor government effectively...the voter is largely ignorant of political issues and that this ignorance is rational. Even though the result of an election may be very important, an individual's vote rarely decides an election. Thus, the direct impact of casting a well-informed vote is almost nil; the voter has virtually no chance to determine the outcome of the election. So spending time following the issues is not personally worthwhile for the voter...

Public choice economists point out that this incentive to be ignorant is rare in the private sector...he or she pays only for the [purchased item] chosen. If the choice is wise, the buyer will benefit; if it is unwise, the buyer will suffer directly. Voting lacks that kind of direct result...Except for a few highly publicized issues, they do not pay a lot of attention to what legislative bodies do, and even when they do pay attention, they have little incentive to gain the background knowledge and analytic skill needed to understand the issues.

Public choice economists also examine the actions of legislators. Although legislators are expected to pursue the "public interest," they make decisions on how to use other people's resources, not their own. Furthermore, these resources must be provided by taxpayers and by those hurt by regulations whether they want to provide them or not...Efficient decisions, however, will neither save their own money nor give them any proportion of the wealth they save for citizens. There is no direct reward for fighting powerful interest groups in order to confer benefits on a public that is not even aware of the benefits or of who conferred them. Thus, the incentives for good management in the public interest are weak. In contrast, interest groups are organized by people with very strong gains to be made from governmental action. They provide politicians with campaign funds and campaign workers. In return they receive at least the "ear" of the politician and often gain support for their goals.

In other words, because legislators have the power to tax and to extract resources in other coercive ways, and because voters monitor their behavior poorly, legislators behave in ways that are costly to citizens. One technique analyzed by public choice is log rolling, or vote trading. An urban legislator votes to subsidize a rural water project in order to win another legislator's vote for a city housing subsidy. The two projects may be part of a single spending bill. Through such log rolling both legislators get what they want. And even though neither project uses resources efficiently, local voters know that their representative got something for them. They may not know that they are paying a pro-rata share of a bundle of inefficient projects! And the total expenditures may well be more than individual taxpayers would be willing to authorize if they were fully aware of what is going on.

...bureaucrats in government...incentives explain why many regulatory agencies appear to be "captured" by special interests...Capture occurs because bureaucrats do not have a profit goal to guide their behavior. Instead, they usually are in government because they have a goal or mission. They rely on Congress for their budgets, and often the people who will benefit from their mission can influence Congress to provide more funds. Thus interest groups...become important to them. Such interrelationships can lead to bureaucrats being captured by interest groups.

Although public choice economists have focused mostly on analyzing government failure, they also have suggested ways to correct problems. For example, they argue that if government action is required, it should take place at the local level whenever possible. Because there are many local governments, and because people "vote with their feet," there is competition among local governments, as well as some experimentation. To streamline bureaucracies, Gordon Tullock and William Niskanen have recommended allowing several bureaus to supply the same service on the grounds that the resulting competition will improve efficiency...

...The emergence of public choice economics reflects dissatisfaction with the implicit assumption, held by Keynesians, among others, that government effectively corrects market failures...

From the previously mentioned book, Tullock continues by explaining how public choice theory impacts public policy expectations and the broad question of what role should be played by government:

But the different attitude toward government that arises from public choice does have major effects on our views of what policies government should undertake or can carry out. In particular, it makes us much less ambitious about relying on government to provide certain services...
A deep-seated feeling that government is imperfect carries with it two consequences. The first is that imperfections in the market process do not necessarily call for government intervention; the second is a desire to see if we cannot do something about government processes that might conceivably improve their efficiency.

Public choice students are more likely than students of older approaches to political matters to be in favor of shifting reliance from the government sector to the market sector. However, we must not make a mistake that is the converse of the one criticized above: that the government performs certain functions poorly does not, in and of itself, prove that the market would do better...

A final area where knowledge of public choice has an effect on people's views about policy concerns the behavior of government officials. The student of public choice is unlikely to believe that government officials are overly concerned with the public interest. Because they operate in an area where information is very poor (and the proof that the voters' information on political issues would be poor was one of the first achievements of the public choice theory), deception is much more likely to be a worthwhile tactic than it is in the marketplace. Therefore, one would anticipate much more dishonesty in government. Indeed, granted that government officials are the only people who can check on the dishonesty of government officials, the problem of curing dishonesty in government involves an infinite regression. Private businesspeople, who deal with better-informed consumers than do politicians, are also subject to surveillance by public officials who, dishonest though some may be, very commonly have no personal motive to protect a particular private businessperson. The amount of dishonesty that has turned up in private business in spite of these inspections gives a rough idea of the almost complete uniformity of dishonesty in politics.

Having little confidence in politicians and depending upon the electoral process to discipline them, in so far as they are disciplined, is the appropriate attitude and it leads to some feelings of cynicism about election campaigns...

...the...attitude toward the professional bureaucracy is equally cool but technically more complex. The view that the individual bureaucrat is not attempting to maximize the public interest very vigorously but is attempting to maximize his or her own utility just as vigorously as you and I has been held for a very long time by most people in the backs of their minds. But bringing it into formal theory is a public choice accomplishment. So far this revelation has not had much impact on any real-world government...One particular conclusion is the feeling that monopolistic government bureaus are undesirable...

Much traditional reasoning has turned on totally unrealistic ideas about the efficiency of government...much previous analysis has implicitly assumed that perfection was obtained in the government sector. The public choice students know that it is not, and that insight affects their policy views.

American representative government suffers from the handicap of a largely uncompetitive political system...
Current redistricting practices and campaign finance regulations, in tandem with publicly financed careerism, have significantly negative consequences for the health of the political system. This study analyzes several of the major instruments of campaign finance regulation, such as contribution limits, public financing, and the ban on soft money, in terms of their relationship to political competition. Simply put, campaign finance regulation and public financing have not improved political competition.

In the past, campaign finance restrictions and taxpayer-subsidized elections have generated unintended consequences. The most recent regulatory round is no exception to that rule. This study also looks at other reforms, namely, term limits and improvements to the redistricting process, in light of their comparatively successful record regarding political competition.

Changes in the manner in which districts are designed, campaigns are funded, and politicians are tenured require immediate implementation. In short, elected officials should be disconnected from campaign and election rule making and regulation. There will not be an improvement in political competition until the incumbent fox ends his tenure as guardian of the democratic henhouse.

Democracy demands an informed electorate. Voters who lack adequate knowledge about politics will find it difficult to control public policy. Inadequate voter knowledge prevents government from reflecting the will of the people in any meaningful way. Such ignorance also raises doubts about democracy as a means of serving the interests of a majority. Voters who lack sufficient knowledge may be manipulated by elites. They may also demand policies that contravene their own interests...
The size of modern government is often so great that it is impossible for voters--even the most knowledgeable among them--to be adequately informed about its operations. Smaller government may actually be more democratic than that which we have now: voters would be more likely to exercise informed control over policy. Voter ignorance also suggests the value of decentralized federalism. In a decentralized federal system, citizens may "vote with their feet" by moving out of jurisdictions with policies they dislike and into those that have more favorable ones. Because each person decides whether or not to move, there is a much greater incentive to acquire relevant information with "foot voting" than with traditional voting at the polls.

Where to begin? Here are some specifics we can incorporate into this Call to Action:

Let's continue to resist turning to government to fix all societal problems, recognizing Government's Misguided Incentives. For example, we need to be conscious of the difference between Coerced Charity vs. Voluntary Charity and how the behaviorial incentives arising from coerced charity are not positive.

No less important, we must ask those pushing for an ever-increasing role for government, What Does "Social Justice" Mean?

When there is an appropriate role for government, let's push to have it be at the local level where citizens can better control and change its behaviors.

We need a TABOR (taxpayers' bill of rights) implemented in each state and at the federal level, such as what was implemented in Colorado (read here, here, and here), in order to place limits on government actions - while recognizing that those limits will be under constant attack like they have been in Colorado.

We need to increase government accountability by using the Internet to make the actions of government as transparently obvious to citizens as possible and educate them on more reasons why government cannot effectively solve most problems.

That means, among other things, fighting the FEC proposed limits on blogging.

We need competitive elections so there is a real threat that moderates incumbent politicians' behavior. That means stopping the gerrymandering which is nothing but an incumbent protection racket.

We need less campaign finance reform of the type passed recently by legislators and more that allows true opposition to be funded.

We need term limits across the country so public service is an interim contribution to our society, not a career. Term limits will lessen the politician behavior problems highlighted by public choice theory because satisfying interest groups in order to win reelection will become far less important.

We need to be Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning, stopping judicial activism and returning the legislating function to the legislature.

We need competitive alternatives to government services in order to reduce the power of the unelected, unaccountable government bureaucracy.

Finally, we need to constantly reread Lawrence Reed's Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy as we evaluate actions proposed by government.

There is also a moral basis for this Call to Action and it is based on principles embodied in our Declaration of Independence.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Government Meddling Creates Marketplace Distortions, Increasing Long-Term Costs

How Government Makes Us Pay Higher Gasoline Prices

Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
RI Pension Problems
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense

Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities
Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent
Now Here's a Good Idea

Social Security Reform Debate: Hypocrisy, Misinformation & Why Change is Necessary

Pigs at the Public Trough
Pigs at the Public Trough, Revisited
The Highway Bill: Another Example of Unacceptable Government Spending
Big Government Corrupts, Regardless of Party

More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector

8:08 PM | Comments (4)

How Government Makes Us Pay Higher Gasoline Prices

Kimberley Strassel wrote an editorial last week in the Wall Street Journal entitled Another Reason to Love Wal-Mart (available for a fee). In that editorial, she provides another example of how misguided government behavior is forcing many working families and retirees across America to pay unnecessarily higher gasoline prices:

The Senate passed its energy bill yesterday, and is already peddling the fiction that this uninspired bit of legislation may somehow help with soaring gas prices. Yet if drivers really care about getting some immediate relief at the pump, they'd be better off putting some heat on their own state legislatures to back away from a class of anticompetitive laws that are jacking up gas prices around the country.
Known as "sales-below-cost" laws, these restrictions take different forms but all have the same purpose: to protect smaller gas stations from larger competitors who are willing to sell fuel at cut-rate prices. Some of these laws forbid retailers from selling gas below cost, while others actually force companies to mark up their prices. Many were passed back in the 1930s, relics of a bygone era when governments fretted that gas behemoths would use predatory pricing to gain a monopoly and drive out competitors. That threat, we now know, was never very likely, and in the meantime the laws have accomplished the exact opposite -- blocking new entrants to the market and preventing pro-competitive price-cutting.

The only big bad gas giants these days are the Wal-Marts and Costcos of the world, who see gasoline sales as a natural extension to their one-stop shopping philosophy. These giant retailers, while still less than 10% of the gasoline market, are ramping up gas sales in a huge way, and often can sell their fuel at up to 15 cents a gallon cheaper than many competitors. That's because they can often buy their product in bulk at a better price, or can make up for cheaper gasoline sales with profits from other products inside their stores.

But their growth has also inspired a backlash from mom-and-pop retailers and convenience stores, all of which have turned to below-cost laws as their preferred political tool for kneecapping this new competition. Some 13 states currently have below-cost laws, from Massachusetts to Alabama to Utah, and in recent years, with gas prices and drivers' tempers rising, sensible legislators had contemplated repealing the antiques. In response, the independent gas retailer lobby has geared up and made the retention and vigorous enforcement of the laws their No. 1 priority...

....A favorite argument of these smaller businesses is that the law is still necessary in order to ward off nefarious antitrust behavior...

This argument gets to the heart of the flawed logic that motivated the original passage of below-cost laws. Antitrust law, as any good economist will tell you, exists to protect consumers. As such, below-cost pricing isn't on its own an antitrust threat. It is only considered a problem if there is a reasonable likelihood that the company engaged in lower pricing is likely to become a monopoly, which would then allow that firm to later raise prices to supracompetitive levels that would harm consumers.

Over the years, economic research, legal studies and court cases have all found that below-cost pricing hardly ever leads to a monopoly, and that it is especially unlikely in the competitive market for motor fuels...

What antitrust is not about is protecting competitors from more efficient, or more aggressive companies. Yet that is clearly what laws like Wisconsin's are being used for, and nobody denies it. That's one reason why the Federal Trade Commission has felt compelled to wade into this debate, encouraging those states with below-cost laws on the books to get rid of them...

...As gas prices go up, this blatant protectionism will be all the more inexcusable.

8:01 PM

Culture

Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future

Donald B. Hawthorne

I recently read Michael Barone's book entitled Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future. It is well worth reading. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book:

For many years I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkbly competent thirty-year-olds. Americans at eighteen have for many years scored lower on standardized tests than eighteen-year-olds in other advanced countries...Half a century ago Americans leaving high school were expected to be ready to go out into the world and make their way. Today they aren't expected to be ready for that, and most of them aren't.
But by the time Americans are thirty, they are the most competent people in the world. They are part of the strongest and most vibrant private-sector economy. They produce scientific and technological advances of unmatched scope. They provide the world's best medical care. They man the strongest and most agile military the world has ever seen. And it's not just a few meritocrats on top: American talent runs wide and deep...

How do I explain this phenomenon? Because from ages six to eighteen Americans live mostly in what I call Soft America - the parts of our country where there is little competition and accountability. But from ages eighteen to thirty Americans live mostly in Hard America - the parts of American life subject to competition and accountability. Soft America coddles: our schools, seeking to instill self-esteem, ban tag and dodgeball, and promote just about anyone who shows up. Hard America plays for keeps: the private sector fires people when profits fall, and the military trains under live fire.

This book is about Hard America and Soft America. It is about schools and work, about the public sector and the private sector, about the economic marketplace and the marketplace of ideas, about the military and the universities...it is not primarily about politics: it is about how Americans live and learn and work, not about how they vote.

The book is also about how we have gotten to where we are today, and about where our society is headed - or should be headed. For no part of our society is all Hard or all Soft...Soft America expanded during much of the twentieth century, as people sought to Soften an America that seemed overly harsh and unforgiving. Government regulation eased working conditions, and welfare state measures like Social Security provided a safety net for individuals. The Hard discipline of schools was eased by progressive educators. By the 1960's and 1970's, it seemed like Soft America might eradicate Hard America entirely. Proposals were advanced for government-guaranteed incomes, increased welfare payments, and more regulation of private-sector business; criminals were punished more leniently; even the military abandoned traditional tactics, procedures, and goals and suffered as a result. But in the 1980's and 1990's, Hard America fought back. Economic entrepreneurs and political innovators Hardened many parts of American life by their example and with their ideas. This Hard counteroffensive continues today, as we battle over how Hard and Soft the different parts of our society should be in the future.

Public schools, for example, may be the most notable example of a predominantly Soft institution - which helps explain why American children are confined mostly to Soft America. But...our schools have not always been so Soft...and there are signs they are getting Harder again. The private-sector economy, with its market competition, may be predominantly Hard, but it has always contained large niches of Softness...Many public-sector bureaucracies are Soft...and bureaucrats' political masters are subject to the Hard discipline of elections.

So the boundary between Hard America and Soft America is not fixed. It is fluid, often moving back and forth. Most of us recognize that some amount of Hardness helps to maximize productivity and achievement. Yet most of us in our personal and professional lives seek zones of Softness in which we can go our own way...

I do not take the view that Softness is bad...It would be a cruel country that had no Soft niches. But it would be a weak and unproductive country that did not have enough Hardness. There will naturally be differences about how much of American life should be Hard and how much Soft - something reasonable Americans will argue about forever.

But as we consider those arguments I think we have to keep this in mind: Soft America lives off the productivity, creativity and competence of Hard America, and we have the luxury of keeping parts of our society Soft only if we keep enough of it Hard.

It is this last point that provides a frame of reference for the debates about topics such as (i) the miserable quality of our public education system; (ii) how we instill self-esteem in our children devoid of any connection to whether it is warranted by their performance; (iii) refusals by management and labor to confront bad decisions such as uncompetitive cost structures in certain industries; and, (iv) excessive health and pension benefits, especially those found in the public sector.

Or, to put it another way, our ongoing war against Islamic terrorists who want to destroy our society combined with an increasingly competitive global economy clearly suggest the importance of maintaining a vibrant Hard America core so we do not see the reduction or destruction of our country's political and economic freedoms and a reduction in our standard of living.

I would encourage you to read the book.

4:43 PM | TrackBack (0)

July 1, 2005