I try on this blog to criticize the ideas and policies of my adversaries, instead of the people themselves. I don’t always succeed, but that is one of my goals. But for Harry Reid I make an exception and don’t even try. He continues to demonstrate that he is one of the most loathsome people in the DC cesspool, and cares about nothing other than the accumulation of his own power. He runs the Senate like a dictatorship, abusing his authority in ways that do direct harm to political process and the American people. He is a cancer desperately in need of removal from the body politic.
His latest assault on good government is taking place as a crusade against the filibuster. He claims that the problem is his adversaries, who are abusing it to block his agenda. As usual he has twisted reality on its head, as it is Harry Reid who has long abused Senate rules to prevent votes on issues he considers politically dangerous to himself or his party, and who is seeking to solidify his ability to do so going forward. Mark Calabria of Cato explains:
First, let’s remember that the objective of every majority leader is to stay majority leader. To do so means members of his party must win re-election. One of the important ways a majority leader can facilitate such is to protect his members from tough votes. For instance, witness Reid’s current attempts to stop a vote on Rand Paul’s (R-KY) amendment to limit indefinite detention. You’d think that since many liberal voters and groups oppose indefinite detention, Reid would welcome such a vote. But such a vote would put Democrats and President Obama at odds. So Reid’s favored course of action is to avoid such a vote.
How does this relate to the filibuster? Well after cloture is invoked (see Senate Rule XXII), the only amendments that can be voted on are those that are both pending and germane. And an amendment only gets pending if there’s no objection. All Reid needs to do is oppose amendments for 30 hours, then the curtain comes down and he can force a vote, and this assumes he hasn’t already filled the amendment tree (I’ve witnessed such a process too many times to count). So when Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) claims, “[w]e’ve had over 300 filibusters in the last six years,” he fails to mention that few of these were actual filibusters. The vast majority were attempts by the Majority to limit amendments by pre-emptively filing cloture.
He goes on to look at the ratio of roll call votes to measures passed as a proxy for how frequently a Majority Leader uses this obstructionist practice, and lo-and-behold, Harry Reid is worse than the average. Harry Reid does not want filibuster reform to enhance the workers of the Senate, he wants filibuster reform to enhance his iron grip on the legislative agenda and further constrain the ability of anyone not named Harry Reid to have a say.
You can’t make this stuff up. Last week a liberal majority ruled that a provision of the Michigan state constitution passed in 2006 that prohibited racial preferences in college admissions was unconstitutional. Their logic? It created an unequal burden on minorities who wished to change the law by requiring them to amend the state’s constitution to do so.
You. Can’t. Make. This. Up.
By this logic, any constitutional provision creates an unconstitutional burden on groups that may wish to repeal it. In other words, it’s completely absurd.
The court voted 8-7 that making people more equal under the law violates the constitutional provision that requires people to be treated equally under the law!
The Sixth Circuit’s “logic” would similarly prevent Congress from outlawing racial preferences under federal law.
Fortunately, this crazy ruling will not long survive. The California-based Ninth Circuit has (remarkably) ruled the other way; conflict between the lower courts virtually ensures that the Supreme Court will take the case.
And don’t forget that the Court this term is already considering the propriety of racial preferences in UT-Austin’s admissions program. If the Court finds racial preferences themselves to be unconstitutional—that’s my view—then the Sixth Circuit’s ruling has no practical effect anyway.
Private markets can be their own worst enemy. Rather than force people to deal with the consequences of bad policy choices, they provide a relief valve for ill-considered socialist schemes. Such is the case in Canada right now, as patients are increasingly forced to seek refuge from their “universal” health care debacle.
Surgery wait times for deadly ovarian, cervical and breast cancers in Quebec are three times longer than government benchmarks, leading some desperate patients to shop around for an operating room.
But that’s a waste of time, doctors say, since the problem is spread across Quebec hospitals. And doctors are refusing to accept new patients quickly because they can’t treat them, health advocates say.
…The worst cases are gynecological cancers, experts say, because usually such a cancer has already spread by the time it is detected. Instead of four weeks from diagnosis to surgery, patients are waiting as long as three months to have cancerous growths removed.
“It’s a crisis for Quebec women,” said Lucy Gilbert, director of gynecological oncology and the gynecologic cancer multi-disciplinary team at the McGill University Health Centre. Her team has had access to operating rooms only two days a week for the past year, with dozens of patients having surgeries postponed week after week.
…One worried patient, a mother of five children who waited three months for surgery for invasive breast cancer, said she is worried about the effects of such a long wait. After surgery, she paid $800 for a bone scan in a private clinic rather than wait five months for a scan at the Jewish General Hospital.
There are always costs. You cannot legislate them away. Trying to do so through price controls just forces them to manifest elsewhere. In this case, the cost is increased wait times, which when it comes to health equates to increased mortality rates. The reason is simple: when you remove the market signals generated by free floating prices, you lose the most effective means known to man for allocating resources. A bunch of government bureaucrats cannot anticipate demand and allocate the appropriate resources to meet it as well as the invisible hand.
The LA City Council has declared the observance of “Meatless Mondays“:
The Los Angeles City Council is urging all residents to observe “meatless Mondays” from now on.
A resolution adopted on Oct. 24 reads: “Be it resolved, that the Council of the City of Los Angeles hereby declares all Mondays as ‘Meatless Mondays’ in support of comprehensive sustainability efforts as well as to further encourage residents to eat a more varied plant-based diet to protect their health and protect animals.”
Councilwoman Jan Perry, who introduced the resolution, also wants to ban new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles.
While I suppose that freedom lovers can take solace in the “symbolic” nature of the dictate, you just know it would be backed by the force of government if they thought they could get away with it. Even such a “symbolic” gesture can only come from the mind of person who loves the power of controlling the lives of their fellow citizens and, as we see, the resolution’s author indeed has designs on more than just symbolic demonstrations of nannyism, but also wants to ban new fast-food restaurants.
But perhaps there is a precedent here of which we can one day take advantage. In the distant (or not so distant) future when Jan Perry and all the other petty tyrants have encumbered our existence with so many rules and dictates, we might wish to symbolically declare a “Freedom Friday” in support of maintaining the illusion that choice and free will still exist in American society.
The public voted for status quo. President Obama was reelected, joining only Woodrow Wilson on the list of President’s elected to a second term with a lower electoral college total than their first. The Senate stayed Democratic, the House Republican, and both by very similar margins as before. In other words, nothing changed. And Hester Peirce of the Mercatus Center points out, even a party flip for either branch still would have left much of the policy-making apparatus on auto pilot and unresponsive to public input – that of the bureaucracy. But I digress. The point is that the public decidedly rejected changing course, despite mostly believing that things are “seriously off on the wrong track.”
In terms of America’s great fiscal challenges, no real solutions will be in the offing. More than likely we can expect more temporary extensions of most current tax rates, with Republicans caving and foolishing offering more “revenue” through ill-conceived class-warfare tax hikes. And let’s be clear, class warfare was a big winner of the election. It sustained the President’s campaign and elected far left radical Elizabeth Warren to the Senate. Exit polls further show an electorate that has bought the class warfare rhetoric, with 47% wanting to increase taxes on those with incomes over $250,000 (plus 13% wanting to raise them on everyone), 55% believing the US economic system “favors the wealthy,” and 53% saying that Romney’s policies would generally favor the “rich.”
These numbers suggest failure on Romney’s part to win the key arguments of the campaign. In a bit of good news, 51% says that “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals,” which represents a change from 2008 when a majority wanted government to do more. But 24% of those who think government is doing too much voted for Obama, which is a massive failure of the Romney campaign and the Republican party. That they still cannot more easily and decisively separate themselves in the eyes of voters from the Democrats on the size of government question is inexcusable. Romney’s inability to sufficiently connect with the electorate was also confirmed by the degree to which his voters expressed their support: Obama won more voters who said they strongly favored their candidate, while Romney won more of those who had reservations, or simply disliked the other candidates. Romney voters, in other words, were more against Obama than they were for Romney.
It’s worth pointing out that, despite a majority at one point saying that want to raise taxes either on everyone or just the wealthy, 63% also said that taxes should not be raised to help cut the budget deficit. This apparent contradiction in the numbers indicates that some of the tax hiking support cited earlier is “soft,” and is certainly welcome news for those of us seeking to limit the growth of government.
All of this suggests two things: 1) Advocates for limited government have a lot of work to do in combating leftist class warfare attacks and educating the public, 2) The Republican party has work left to do when it comes to convincing small government voters that the GOP is a welcome home again, and furthermore in identifying candidates capable of accomplishing number 1.
With the President likely to renew pursuit of his economically destructive agenda, the 2016 landscape should favor Republicans. It would be both to their benefit, and those who support limited government, to nominate someone capable of connecting where Romney failed, and educating where Romney could not. In other words, it should be Marco Rubio’s election to lose.
You know your record as President is abysmal when supporters are reduced to touting how much better you’ve done than Herbert Hoover. But that’s where Obama is at, apparently, as historian Robert McElvaine took to the New York Times a few days ago to make exactly that case. Seeking to combat unfavorable comparisons to the pace of recovery under Obama with that of other Presidents, such as Reagan or Clinton, McElvaine dismissed them all us irrelevant and asserted that the only comparison that matters is between Obama and Hoover. And on that measure, we are told that Obama passes with flying colors!
He makes two points that I dispute: 1) That the only meaningful comparison for the recession that preceded Obama’s tenure is the crash that lead to the Great Depression, and 2) That the comparison proves Obama has done a good job on the economy. Neither is true.
McElvaine asserts that, “the most appropriate presidential term to use as a benchmark is Herbert Hoover’s. He was the last president to face an economic crisis on a scale similar to the one that confronted Obama when he took office.” But while he makes a case for comparing the two, he doesn’t explain what makes the other comparisons less valid. In particular, there is a lot that can be learned by comparing the current recovery, such that it is, to that seen under Reagan, because a case can equally be made that the early 80’s recession was as bad or worse than 2008-2009.
Both the 2008 and early 80’s recession were financially caused. Unemployment was also similar when each president took office, at 7.5% under Reagan versus 7.8% under Obama, though joblessness peaked higher in 1982 than 2009, and Reagan had the added challenge of dealing with double digit inflation. Yet despite this Reagan did a much better job turning things around, and the economy grew an average of 5.6 percent for the first three years following the bottom of the recession he inherited, versus only 2.2 percent growth under Obama in the same time frame.
The similarity between these recessions makes the comparison valid.
But even if we accept the Hoover comparison as decisive, it doesn’t prove what McElvaine suggests. No where in his argument does he point to specific policy choices and explain how they produced the results he highlights. Sure, he mentions the stimulus bill, but doesn’t provide any actual evidence that it helped. It didn’t, as explained in this video. In other words, his argument fails to account for the very plausible explanation that Obama was merely less bad than Hoover. That Obama’s policies might not have done quite as much damage as Hoover, another big spending government interventionist, does not suggest he should be praised, merely that we could have done worse, if ever so slightly. But surely we can still do better.
It’s that time of year again – when a major natural disaster is dominating the news cycle, and every economic, scientific and political snake oil salesman or huckster comes out of the woodwork to peddle their magical wares. Here are three myths with which the disaster opportunists are trying to swindle you:
1) There’s an economic silver lining to all this destruction because it will spur economic activity. This one isn’t so much trying to sell you anything as it is cheer you up, but its widespread acceptance nevertheless can have devastating policy consequences – like passage of foolish economic “stimulus” bills. This myth is basically just Bastiat’s broken window fallacy:
Paul Krugman is rather infamous for his love of destruction as economic catalyst, crediting as he does the destruction of WWII for ending the Great Depression and having noted the economic good that could come from the 9/11 attacks. And then there’s his belief that what the economy really needs to get turned around is an alien invasion. Krugman is utterly fixated on what is seen – such as the making of bombs or the rebuilding of homes – while he ignores what is unseen – like everything not built so that resources can be used instead to fight little green men.
Krugman is not the only one to fall for this myth. Commentators are quick to highlight the expected economic gains from Hurricane Sandy, with some only concerned that Sandy won’t cause enough destruction, and that hurricanes like it don’t happen regularly enough, to really get the economy rolling.
2) Hurricane Sandy (or whatever the disaster de jour may be) proves that Global Warming is real! In the minds of some, anything that happens today must be more severe than anything that came before, if for no other reason than that it affects them. That sort of narcissism is almost certainly behind the blathering of Meghan McCain, who thinks the wandering of a mere Category 1 hurricane into her northern enclave is proof positive that Republicans are Neanderthal deniers.
The images of Sandy’s flooding brought back memories of a similar–albeit smaller scale– event in Nashville just two years ago. There, unprecedented rainfall caused widespread flooding, wreaking havoc and submerging sections of my hometown. For me, the Nashville flood was a milestone. For many, Hurricane Sandy may prove to be a similar event: a time when the climate crisis—which is often sequestered to the far reaches of our everyday awareness became a reality.
While the storm that drenched Nashville was not a tropical cyclone like Hurricane Sandy, both storms were strengthened by the climate crisis.
…Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis.
Every major weather event these days is proffered as anecdotal proof of global warming (or “climate change”). But anecdotes are not evidence, and major storms are nothing new. In fact, global hurricane frequency is trending down, and as Patrick Michaels points out, we’re setting records for the longest drought of Cat 3+ hurricanes hitting shore:
It’s been 2,535 days since the last Category 3 storm, Wilma in 2005, hit the beach. That’s the longest period—by far—in the record that goes back to 1900.
But don’t expect any of these facts to stop the reflexive blaming of global warming for all natural disasters.
3) Only Big Government can save us from chaos and natural destruction. Any time destruction lurks, statists can be counted on to furiously construct strawmen for public whipping to placate the frightened masses. The most ridiculous example comes, naturally, from the ever dependable shills of big government at the New York Times, which editorializes that “A Big Storm Requires Big Government,” before going on to outline a list of government functions that comprise probably less than a percent of the federal budget. Good job, New York Times, I’m now convinced that we need a massive welfare state, pointless “green energy” loans, wasteful stimulus bills and a cumbersome and counter productive regulatory structure, all because of a Category 1 hurricane. Well done.
Reason appropriately takes them to task, noting that not only has big government failed, and miserably so, at disaster response in the past, but it actually stood in the way of private action. That’s right, big government – being the angry and jealous God that it is – actively prevented help from other sources during Katrina:
Even as they fumbled their own responses to the disaster, government officials found time to block private relief efforts. The Salvation Army was initially forbidden to send boats to rescue refugees sheltered in one of its facilities, one of the group’s officials told the press. It seems the private relief organization’s efforts didn’t fit the government’s schedule. Likewise, the American Red Cross said. Days after the storm hit, “The state Homeland Security Department had requested — and continues to request — that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane.”
Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish president, put it best when he told interviewers, “Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today.”
But in the eyes of some, any failure of government is just proof that it needs more money (success, meanwhile, is proof that it needs more money), and so we get hand wringing over potential, hypothetical or imagined FEMA cuts from the same people who blamed FEMA for everything wrong that happened during Katrina.
The Reason post also notes, as I have here in the past, that there are in fact alternative and better sources of disaster response. This is not to say that government has no role or purpose, as the statist strawman would imply, but that it might be better to only leave government in charge of monitoring, analyzing and disseminating information, while bringing in those who know what they are doing and have actual experience to handle the logistics of rapidly moving goods and services into devastated communities.
Whatever their miracle cure of choice, consumers should cast a wary eye on those who see disaster coming and can only think to lick their chops at the opportunity to advance their agenda.
George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee who lost handily to Richard Nixon, passed away this morning at the age of 90. The media is celebrating him as a universally respected and genuinely nice politician, as well as a liberal icon. These things are true, but tell only part of the story. McGovern was also the rare politician capable of rethinking his positions as he acquired new information and experiences (not to be confused with the many more politicians who change positions out of convenience).
Was he a liberal? Undoubtedly. But he also came, once out of office, to respect the importance of economic freedom and the practical costs and burdens placed on business by the same liberal policies he supported while in office.
McGovern is well known for his opposition to Vietnam and idealist push for a vast collection of liberal policies. With his passing today, the media is quick to celebrate his devotion to liberalism, and he should be celebrated in so far as he fought vigorously for what he truly believed, but less likely to be mentioned in the media coverage is the degree to which he came to challenge liberal orthodoxy, specifically its brand of economic paternalism.
In 1988, I invested most of the earnings from this lecture circuit acquiring the leasehold on Connecticut’s Stratford Inn. Hotels, inns and restaurants have always held a special fascination for me. The Stratford Inn promised the realization of a longtime dream to own a combination hotel, restaurant and public conference facility–complete with an experienced manager and staff.
In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn’s 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.
…My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn., with an especially difficult lease and a severe recession. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.
For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonably way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.
Some of the escalation in the cost of health care is attributed to patients suing doctors. While one cannot assess the merit of all these claims, I’ve also witnessed firsthand the explosion in blame-shifting and scapegoating for every negative experience in life.
Today, despite bankruptcy, we are still dealing with litigation from individuals who fell in or near our restaurant. Despite these injuries, not every misstep is the fault of someone else. Not every such incident should be viewed as a lawsuit instead of an unfortunate accident. And while the business owner may prevail in the end, the endless exposure to frivolous claims and high legal fees is frightening.
…In short, `one-size-fits-all’ rules for business ignore the reality of the market place. And setting thresholds for regulatory guidelines at artificial levels–e.g., 50 employees or more, $500,000 in sales–takes no account of other realities, such as profit margins, labor intensive vs. capital intensive businesses, and local market economics.
The problem we face as legislators is: Where do we set the bar so that it is not too high to clear? I don’t have the answer. I do know that we need to start raising these questions more often.
His policy advice is important, and I would urge liberals to take it to heart. But I found particularly interesting the hints at a greater need for personal responsibility – a realization that sometimes bad things happen and that there are not always other people to blame or who need to be made to pay for your misfortune or poor choices.
Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal economics…
Since leaving office I’ve written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.
Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don’t take away cars because we don’t like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don’t operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.
The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.
A conservative or Republican making this exact statement today would be condemned by modern liberals as a heartless extremist and free market zealot, but McGovern was none of those things. He was simply willing to observe how liberal policies worked in practice, and in some cases this caused him to rethink his policies. He didn’t stop being a liberal or abandon his principles, he just continued to learn throughout his life. His is an example that the rest of us could learn from.
Technology has made information more accessible than ever. It is also providing potential answers to the problem of exploding tuition costs and student loan debt. Which is to say, alternative education models are in the nascent stages. An example is Coursera, which offers free online courses from top universities. Who could object to that? Government, of course (Hat-tip: Reason):
Coursera offers free, online courses to people around the world, but if you live in Minnesota, company officials are urging you to log off or head for the border.
The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there.
George Roedler, manager of institutional registration and licensing at the Minnesota Office of Higher education, clarifies that his office’s issue isn’t with Coursera per se, but with the universities that offer classes through its website. State law prohibits degree-granting institutions from offering instruction in Minnesota without obtaining permission from the office and paying a registration fee. (The fee can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, plus a $1,200 annual renewal.) That means that it’s Stanford, Columbia, Michigan, the University of Melbourne, et al. that are violating Minnesota law by partnering with Coursera to offer courses that Minnesota residents can take for free.
“It’s not like we’re sending the police out if somebody signs up online,” Roedler adds. “It’s just that the school is operating contrary to state law.”
The law’s intent is to protect Minnesota students from wasting their money on degrees from substandard institutions, Roedler says. As such, he suspects that Coursera’s partner institutions would have little trouble obtaining the registration. He says he had hoped to work with Coursera to achieve that, and was surprised when they responded with the terms-of-service change notifying Minnesota residents of the law.
Setting aside that free courses still don’t fall within the scope of this argument, Minnesota apparently regards its citizens as morons. The plebes are simply too stupid to evaluate the quality of institutions without guidance from their government betters.
But what makes anyone think government knows how to evaluate institutions for quality better than potential customers? As is so often the case with licensing and registration schemes, the government is serving the role of protector of established business interests at the expense of industry newcomers. The side effect of this approach is the suppression of innovation.
A global effort to prevent all future species extinctions would cost about $80 billion a year, or $11.42 annually from every person on the planet, according to a study published last week in Science.
The study, released in conjunction with the 11th meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) currently underway in Hyderabad, India, is intended to support goals and commitments to halting extinctions and preserving nature by the year 2020 that the world’s governments have agreed to under the convention.
I don’t need to see their methodology to know that this is absurd. It simply doesn’t pass the laugh test. If such a global program were to be established, I guarantee the costs would balloon and far surpass the $80 billion estimate. They always do.
But even if it could be done for a reasonable price, why in the world would we want to? What hubris it is to presume that we should take a snapshot of nature just as it exists today and keep it that way for all time!
Species have come and gone for as long as life has existed on this planet. What drives us to turn this dynamic process into a static one, and why do people believe that would be an improvement?
It reminds me of the folks who bemoan job losses to technological change that increases productivity, such as the President’s blaming of ATMs, as if a static economy is in any way desirable to a dynamic one.
I serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.
I serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.