BrianGarst.com

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

Liberty & Limited Government Archive

Friday

13

January 2017

0

COMMENTS

Three Cheers for Process Reform

Written by , Posted in Legislation, Liberty & Limited Government, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

Outside of election season, few people really pay attention to what happens in Washington DC. Start talking about “process reform” and the average citizen completely tunes out. That’s unfortunate because the how of policymaking is often more important than the who.

Public choice teaches us to look at the incentives and institutional constraints placed on elected (and unelected) officials in order to understand how they are likely to behave. This is of practical import. If we want to compel government to live within its means, for instance, then applying public choice theory we know to direct our efforts toward the creation of a debt break or other spending cap, rather than naively thinking it is sufficient simply to elect politicians claiming they will be more responsible. The reason the latter doesn’t work is because politicians are incentivized to seek reelection, and showering various constituencies with taxpayer dollars remains the best way to go about it (we could drill down deeper, if we desired, into things like the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs to further understand why electoral mechanisms are unlikely to enforce spending restraint).

There are a great many reforms that are needed if the nation’s many policy-related problems are ever to be solved. Thankfully, there seems to be enough awareness of this fact that some key process reforms are moving forward. One of them is the REINS Act, which was passed by the House last week, and attempts to solve the issue of excessively expensive and numerous regulations. Recognizing the fact that career bureaucrats have an incentive to grow their power and to ignore the costs imposed on society by doing so, the REINS Act requires Congress and the president to approve regulations with significant economic impact before they are finalized.

It understandably has the left freaking out, as the REINS Act would return to Congress a bit of the lawmaking power that has long been delegated to unaccountable regulators–power which the left has exploited to insert government into every aspect of our lives. And while Congress carries its own set of perverse incentives, looping legislators into the rule-making process adds an obstacle to the promulgation of new regulations that should hopefully prevent some of the more onerous and destructive rules from ever coming to fruition.

The REINS Act reforms Congress as much as it does regulatory agencies. Under the current system, legislators can hide from electoral accountability by delegating more and more of their responsibilities to unelected bureaucrats, who they then campaign against. By restoring the role of Congress in filling in the details for new laws, legislators cannot as easily duck electoral responsibility for agency actions.

Other regulatory reform efforts are also proceeding concurrently. But there are other areas that can improve from process reforms as well.

One of those is the electoral system. There’s been renewed interest in the topic post-election, though most of it is motivated by the particular partisan circumstance of recent elections and directed in unhelpful ways.

Hillary supporters are focused on the fact that she won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college. Ignoring that we don’t actually know how the campaign would have unfolded were the goal different from the beginning, they are focused on the wrong reform. The real tragedy of 2016 is that despite two major party candidates with historic unfavorables, and an electorate in which a plurality of 43% choose not to belong to either major party, the major party nominees still secured 94.3% of the vote.

Why did this happen? Because the voting system we have chosen compels it to. See Duverger’s law for the full explanation, but the short of it is that our first-past-the-post voting system (pick one, winner take all) incentives voters to vote against their most hated candidate instead of for their most liked one.

Interestingly, this same election also produced a tiny step toward a new (and I’d argue better) system. Maine passed a ballot initiative to implement ranked-choice voting for all statewide elections (though not federal House, Senate, or presidential campaigns). It works by having voters rank their top choices in order. If no candidate breaks 50 percent, the candidate with the least first choice votes is dropped and the ballots recounted. This continues to happen until a candidate reaches a majority. If such an approach had been used in the presidential election, as an example, voters could have supported a candidate outside the Republican-Democrat duopoly without fear that they were inadvertently supporting Hillary or Trump depending on which they loathed more.

But that’s not our voting system, and so we are left with the most unpopular president ever elected. Process is destiny.

 

Wednesday

13

April 2016

0

COMMENTS

Most Common Media Myths About the Panama Papers

Written by , Posted in Liberty & Limited Government, Media Bias, Taxes

The media has breathlessly reported on the massive data breach of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Much of that coverage has involved the politicians and other figures whose activities revealed corruption, ethical lapses, or dishonesty and wrongdoing. That includes Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, who has “stepped aside” for an unspecified period of time after his ownership of a holding company established by Mossack in the British Virgin Islands was discovered. There’s been no indication so far that there was anything legally wrong with the company or its activities, or that he pursued favoritism on behalf of his financial interests while in office. However, he failed to disclose his assets in Iceland’s parliamentary register of MPs’ financial interests and was not forthcoming with his constituency.

In other words, like most of the stories from the Panama Papers that are dominating the news, Gunnlaugsson’s is one of only tangential relation to the actual business of Mossack Fonseca. Had he been a private citizen with the exact same legal and business arrangements, no one would care. Where he erred was on his responsibility to disclose his holdings and maintain the trust of his citizens.

Nevertheless, his and other similar stories have been framed as proof that something must be done about “shady” offshore dealings. In fact, the entire media coverage from start to finish has been littered, either directly or through implication, with myths.

Here are a few areas where the media, and the public discussion surrounding the Panama Papers, has more often than not gotten it wrong:

Myth 1: Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion Are Both Wrong

On the tax front (the instances of corruption representing a different matter entirely), most all of the media and political hand-wringing surrounding the Panama Papers has been due to a willful blurring of the lines between tax evasion and avoidance. Yet in reality there are significant legal and ethical differences between the two.

Tax evasion is a crime, and involves the deliberate disregard of tax obligations. Evasion can be committed by lying about assets or engaging in fraud. Banking in jurisdictions that respect privacy rights can be used by unscrupulous individuals as part of a strategy to commit tax evasion. But so can using cash. Both also have legitimate functions, making it unfair to treat everyone who uses privacy respecting services (or cash) as suspect and unwise to create rules on that assumption.

Tax avoidance is not a crime. It is, in fact, simply obedience to the law as it is written. Lawmakers bemoan those who seek to minimize their tax burdens when doing so shines a negative light on the quality of the laws they have written. But in other instances they encourage it. When politicians provide tax credits, for instance, it is with the understanding that those who use them are doing so to avoid paying more tax than they have to. And when they seek to discourage other activities through excise taxes, they are counting on people changing their behavior to avoid the tax. Politicians understand and even expect tax avoidance when it suits them, and decry it when it does not.

Most of what the media directly claims or indirectly implies to be tax evasion is merely legal avoidance. It is individuals choosing to do business in jurisdictions with less onerous tax codes. Not only is this legal, but it has concomitant positive benefits. Tax competition between jurisdictions serves as a check on political greed, and pressures governments to adopt tax policies designed to grow economies instead of just treasuries.

Myth 2: Offshore Financial Services Are Only Used for Wrongdoing

Opportunists who have long despised the ability of individuals to legally flee from confiscatory tax rates want to make the Panama Papers story about financial privacy. It’s not. That makes no more sense than if the story of Congressman William Jefferson, found with a stash of ill-gotten money in his freezer, had been spun as one primarily about cash or kitchen appliances.

Yes, bad people also use legal and financial services. Sometimes they even do so to help them conduct their illicit activity. They also sometimes use airplanes to meet with co-conspirators, or cash to conduct black market sales. That’s not an argument for depriving law abiding citizens of then use of either of those. The fact that corrupt politicians made use of the legal services of Mossack Fonseca does not mean that something must be done about Mossack Fonseca and similar firms. It suggests, if anything, that something must be done about political corruption.

The idea that anyone benefiting from the legal services of Mossack Fonseca, and others who specialize in meeting the needs of international clientele in establishing new businesses and trusts, simply does not match reality. They file incorporation papers. What is then done with those companies is on the people who actually manage them.

Myth 3: Indiscriminate Leaking of Private Financial and Legal Information, Especially of the Rich, Serves a Public Good 

While exposing potential corruption of politicians who might be looting their national treasuries or hiding potential conflicts of interest likely serves a public good, massive data leaks that include innocents are still a massive violation of privacy. The Panama Papers leak consists of confidential and legally protected communications, including those of the vast majority of innocent Mossack Fonseca clients caught up in the data for no other reason than that they used ordinary legal and tax planning services that a small number of elites may have been simultaneously misusing.

Whether or not the individuals who did nothing wrong but were exposed anyway are wealthy or not shouldn’t matter. They have the same expectation of privacy as the rest of us. Moreover, the implication that they are “hiding” their wealth even when all tax laws have been followed presumes a public right to individual financial information that does not exist. No one accuses an individual with an ordinary savings account who chooses not to broadcast their account balance as “hiding” their money. That information is simply their business and their business alone.

Sunday

20

March 2016

0

COMMENTS

Garland SCOTUS Pick Good Politics, Bad Substance

Written by , Posted in Liberty & Limited Government, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

President Obama made the relatively obvious strategic choice by nominating a “moderate” judge to fill the late Judge Antonin Scalia’s seat. Although it disappointed the hard left, in particular the race and gender obsessed identity politics crowd, Merrick Garland’s nomination will challenge Republicans’ resolve to deny Obama opportunity to fill the seat before he leaves office.

Had Obama simply appointed another die-hard leftist, Republicans would have risked nothing by waiting him out and seeing what happened during the election. If Hillary won they’d be no worse off, but if a Republican (not named Trump) won they’d get someone more to their liking. And the idea put forth by Democrats that stalling would spark an electoral backlash against the GOP is wishful thinking at best.

But now it’s trickier. Hillary will almost certainly appoint someone to the left of Garland, who Orrin Hatch in 2010 pushed Obama to nominate to the seat eventually filled by Elena Kagan. He and some other Senate Republicans have suggested they might take up Garland’s nomination during the lame duck session after the election. However, if a Democrat wins Obama will likely withdraw the nomination (which Sanders has already publicly asked him to do in the unlikely scenario that he is elected) and allow his predecessor to put forth a Progressive ideologue. That puts pressure on them to

A wildcard is Trump’s populist insurgency. If he is the nominee, Republicans can go ahead and assume Hillary will win – baring the increasingly unlikely scenario that she is indicted – and act accordingly.

Long story short, Obama has forced Republicans to weigh the risks and rewards of accepting his nominee instead of the no-risk position they’d have faced against a more hardline pick.

But while his nomination is good politics, what might the “moderate” Garland mean for liberty if confirmed? Sure, he has some level of bipartisan appeal, but they are mostly on issues in which the parties are both wrong.

As Ilya Shapiro explains, he is simply too deferential to government.

Garland has shown an alarming amount of deference to the government in his years on the important D.C. Circuit, which handles appeals from administrative agencies. I also fear that he won’t represent the check on ever-expanding federal power and executive actions to the same extent as Scalia. And if you’re a civil libertarian, his solicitude for law enforcement makes him much less appealing than other judges who had been under consideration.

Reason’s Damon Root made a similar case:

While Garland is undoubtedly a legal liberal, his record reflects a version of legal liberalism that tends to line up in favor of broad judicial deference to law enforcement and wartime executive power.

In the area of criminal law, for example, Garland’s votes have frequently come down on the side of prosecutors and police. In 2010, when Garland was reported to be under consideration to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein observed that “Judge Garland rarely votes in favor of criminal defendants’ appeals of their convictions.”

Likewise, Garland voted in support of the George W. Bush administration’s controversial war on terrorism policies in the Guantanamo detainee case Al Odah v. United States, in which Garland joined the majority opinion holding that enemy combatants held as detainees at the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay were not entitled to habeus corpus protections. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately overruled that decision, holding in the landmark caseBoumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees do enjoy habeus corpus rights.

Nevertheless, there is at least one issue likely to prove a major obstacle to Garland’s finding broad Republican support, and that is gun control.

Overall, however, deference to government is a common trap for Republicans, who fear “judicial activism” to the point that they would rather Congress and the Executive operate without significant judicial constraints. As such, they might see Garland as a real move in their direction from Obama, when in fact he’s more likely to be another ally of big government and a disappointment for civil liberties.

Tuesday

30

June 2015

0

COMMENTS

Don’t Cry Wolf on Religious Liberty Infringements

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Liberty & Limited Government

Respect for religious freedom has deep roots in American society. Many of those who came to America did so to escape religious persecution, and they brought with them a profound understanding of the importance of protecting such personal rights from oppressive rule, be it by the hand of monarchy or democratic majority. Thus why Constitutional protections for religious freedom were included in the First Amendment.

Yet many areas where religious freedom is said to be under attack are actually examples of a different sort of problem. No one should be forced to make a gay wedding cake, for instance, simply because they make their living as a baker (assuming they are their own employer). The idea that one must sell to all in order to sell to any contradicts basic Constitutional tenets, yet is an idea that has wormed its way into Constitutional doctrine thanks to the misguided idea of “public accommodations” in non-discrimination law, and long eviscerated protections for economic liberty. Focusing on the subset of cases where objections are made on the grounds of religious sensibilities misses the larger issue, which is that the freedom of association and basic liberty should allow all the right to choose with whom they do or do not engage in commercial exchange – for any reason, be it religiously motivated or not, that the individual sees fit.

But there are also ways in which religious freedoms are actually in danger of being undermined today. Under the direction of Houston’s first openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, the city last year subpoenaed sermons and other pastoral communication from local churches. They were ordered to turn over any communication relating to a contentious local non-discrimination law, as well as “all speeches and sermons related to Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality and gender identity.” She backed down after national uproar over the flagrant abuse of power, but the episode is both illuminating and disturbing.

Religious concerns from the fallout of Obergefell are also not without merit, as admitted by U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrili when he acknowledged during oral arguments that tax-exempt status “is going to be an issue” with the Court’s potential (and now real) ruling that the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage (rightly) violates Constitutional protections. The ACLU has also decided that it’s no longer on board with the whole religious freedom thing now that Christians might be the ones in need of legal protections. And given the proven vindictiveness of today’s cultural winners, more attacks ought to be expected.

Which is all the more reason why it’s a shame that some Republicans, along with the Texas Attorney General, are insisting that county clerks in Texas or elsewhere ought to be able to be able to “opt out” of issuing same-sex marriage licenses if they have religious objections. This is a misapplication of religious liberty.

Look, we’re not talking about clergy or non-state wedding officiators here, who like bakers ought to be able to decide whether they wish to take part in a same-sex wedding or not. These are people whose job it is to process paperwork and issue wedding licenses. County Clerks are municipal employees, be they elected or appointed, and therefore agents of the state. And agents of the state don’t get to dictate actions of the state based on personal whims. If they won’t or can’t do the job required of them and fulfill their duties as public servants then they ought to resign.

Individuals have every right to not work at a place that requires issuing same-sex marriage licenses, but what they don’t have is the right to insist that they not be replaced by someone who will do the entire job and not just part of it. Anyone with true convictions should understand that sometimes upholding those beliefs means making sacrifices, including not working at places that as a fundamental part of the job necessitate violating those beliefs.

There are real threats to religious freedoms, and those who might wish to meet those threats with robust Constitutional protections shouldn’t try to expand the concept to its breaking point. I’m sure it’s not easy to have to choose between honoring ones principles or performing a duty that one currently under obligation to perform, but there’s no Constitutional right to not have to make tough choices.

Friday

6

March 2015

0

COMMENTS

Rule of Law on Trial in King v. Burwell

Written by , Posted in Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements, Liberty & Limited Government, Taxes, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

You might think King v. Burwell is just about Obamacare. To be sure, the ruling could profoundly impact the law if nothing else is done. Though depending on how legislators react, even a finding in favor of the challengers could be made to have no real impact at all.

But what will certainly have an impact is a finding in favor of the government. Endorsing their position would be a huge blow against a most basic tenet of our representative system. I wrote about this in my latest column for EveryJoe.

…If the court rules in favor of the government, it will mean that the executive branch is free to rewrite legislation despite the clear meaning of a law if they can plausibly argue that the consequences for not doing so would be negative. It is, at its core, a case about who gets to write the law.

It’s true that Congress typically gives the Treasury department more latitude than typical because of the complexity of the tax code. But where Congress has not said to fill in the blanks, Treasury must follow the law, as must any other agency within the executive branch. To allow otherwise would undermine a fundamental principle of our government: that we are a nation of laws, which are created by elected representatives.

As an example of what to expect if the court allows for erosion of the separation of powers, consider the current call by Sen. Bernie Sanders – self-described socialist – for the White House to rewrite the tax code without Congress.

He wants Obama to declare by fiat the elimination of certain “loopholes.” But what are commonly referred to as “loopholes” are really just particular policy choices made by elected leaders. They can be either good, such as those which alleviate double taxation, or bad, such as those which provide special handouts for politically favored businesses. Regardless, they are part of the tax code which Congress has created, as is their legal prerogative. If they don’t like it they should legislate a new tax code, and if we don’t like it we can vote them out of office.

…This White House has been open about its desire and willingness to rewrite the law as Obama sees fit in order to advance his agenda. And his spokesman responded favorably to Sen. Sanders suggestion, saying that Obama is “very interested” in unilaterally hiking taxes. If the court rejects the latest challenge to Obamacare and finds in favor of the government, it will only serve to embolden his efforts to unconstitutionally transform the nation.

The whole piece is available here.

Wednesday

21

January 2015

0

COMMENTS

Celebrating Gridlock

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Liberty & Limited Government, Waste & Government Reform

There was, predictably, a lot of end-of-year handwringing about Congressional gridlock and a lack of legislative productivity. In my recent column at EveryJoe, I explain why we should be celebrating gridlock instead of whining about it.

Chastising a session of Congress as “unproductive” due to gridlock has become a sort of tradition for statist media. Whenever a new year roles around, columnists and editorial boards begin wagging their figurative fingers at Congress for failing to meet some arbitrary threshold of activity, before sagely calling on the next session to do better.

…These arguments are not new. The same stories were written last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. They are also fallacious, suffering from flaws both logical and methodological.

…The whole exercise comes off as little more than poorly disguised concern trolling, where those with ideological axes to grind seek to discredit opponents without having to engage in the messiness of debating what policies are right or wrong.

You can read it all here.

Monday

5

January 2015

0

COMMENTS

Who Wants an Internet Running at the Speed of Government?

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Government Meddling, Liberty & Limited Government

My most recent column for EveryJoe explains why the most recent proposals in the name of “net neutrality” are a bad idea.

Most agree that it would be bad for the internet if the service providers (ISPs) that connect users to the internet arbitrarily blocked or throttled access to certain sites. The internet has thrived as a bastion of freedom, and no one who appreciates the vast economic and social benefits derived from its emergence wants that to change. Yet due to their misunderstanding of both the architecture of the internet and the government’s interest in it, it is those who claim most loudly to want to save the internet that have put it in jeopardy.

By seeking to make the government arbiter of the net, agitators for regulation to enforce net neutrality would put responsibility for the net’s protection in the hands of those least capable of dealing with its complex and continuously evolving nature. To make matters worse, they would do so to fight off a largely imagined problem…

Read the rest here. I should add, because I may not have done a good enough job of this in the piece, that specific legislative proposals are not the same thing as ideas. You can get the warm and fuzzies over net neutrality (though as I argue in the piece there’s a lot of misunderstanding over even existing internet rules), and still not believe that government regulation is the way to go.

I also want to direct anyone looking for more info to TechFreedom.

Saturday

27

December 2014

0

COMMENTS

Perhaps the Most Important Issue for the New Congress to Get Right

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Economics & the Economy, Liberty & Limited Government, Taxes, Waste & Government Reform

My column this week at EveryJoe argues the need for reform at CBO and JCT. It may seem like inside baseball type stuff, but it is critically important if we ever want to be able to shrink government.

Imagine you were participating for years in a high stakes contest that was consistently rigged in favor of your opponent. Specifically, the contest hinges heavily on the verdict of third-party judges that claim neutrality, but in fact choose to interpret the rules in a way that tilts the field in favor of the opposition.

Now, image you have the opportunity to replace those judges with new ones, as well as to make their deliberations more transparent and accountable. Would you take advantage and replace the judges, even if the opposition cried foul? The answer to this question may seem obvious, but for Congressional Republicans it’s not just a hypothetical, and they are pondering once again making the stupid choice to accept the status quo.

The organizations represented by the biased judges in this scenario are the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which score policy proposals and predict the impact of legislation on the economy. They’ve typically held tremendous power over what does and does not make it into law, and for years have been actively hostile to the limited government agenda.

With current CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf’s term about to expire, Republicans not only have the power to name a better replacement, but also the opportunity to make some much needed rule changes that will ensure a fairer, more accurate, and more accountable legislative scoring system.

You can read the rest here.

Since I wrote the piece, news has leaked that Republicans intend to replace Elmendorf. This is good news, but it’s only a start. As the article explains, much more needs to be changed than just the man at the top. This Washington Examiner editorial also makes the case for moving toward accurate scoring.

Friday

21

November 2014

0

COMMENTS

Ignoring the President is Healthy for the Republic

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Liberty & Limited Government, Media Bias

President Obama’s immigration speech wasn’t carried live on the four major networks – NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox. He never officially requested the time from the networks because initial inquiries suggested the requests would all be denied. The White House is peeved, and its freelance propagandists in the media are none too happy either.

John Nichols of The Nation, for instance, is livid that networks didn’t jump at the opportunity to upend their schedules and force the President’s speechifying down their viewers throats. Inexcusably, networks chose “relentless profiteering” over being dutiful agents of the President’s political apparatus. That, he says, is “one important part of why this great democracy is not working as well as it could.”

Balderdash. The fact that private life goes on largely undistributed by the political machinations of a self-indulgent President is a sign of a restoring vitality in our republic.

A king might expect citizens to drop whatever they are doing to attend to every egotistic whim of the crown. An American president not only needs no such luxury, but ought not seek it. Except in the most serious of emergencies, the proper role of the president is to attend to enforcement of the law. Outside military affairs he is simply a chief executive, a glorified bureaucrat putting the ideas of Congress into practice. Certainly, he has a role in crafting law as well, but more so by exercise of political power than granted authority. But that political power has limits, as President Obama has experienced.

Americans should not have much tolerance for a President who seeks to grab society by the horns and steer it wherever he pleases. That has never been the American way, where individual rights and preferences are held in reverence.

Nichols ties the decision of the networks into what he sees as a broader battle for civic engagement:

Former Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps has repeatedly warned in recent years of the threat posed to democracy by the “diminished and too often dumbed-down civic dialogue” that emerges when those who broadcast on the people’s airwaves fail to serve the people’s interest.

Copps explains, “Our country confronts challenges to its viability in some ways reminiscent of the 1930s, making it a national imperative that every American be empowered with the news and information essential for knowledgeable decision-making. Without that, the challenges go misunderstood, untended, unresolved. When our media, our press and our journalism catch cold, democracy catches pneumonia.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, sees the network neglect of a particular presidential address as just one measure of a broader crisis for democracy that results when media are no longer “educating the American people so that we’re debating the real issues.”

When these elites worry that Americans are no longer being educated about the “real issues,” what they mean is that they are no longer having their thinking done for them by those who know better. There is more information available than ever before, and it is no longer filtered through a regimented point of view. In a world of cable television and 24/7 news stations, the “network” distinction is all but irrelevant. Those who cared to see the speech easily could do so. What troubles Nichols and his ilk is that there were other choices available at all.

What they see as evidence of some crisis in political engagement, I see as a healthy awareness of the limited importance of collective action. What has always made America great is recognition that the everyday decisions of millions of free and productive people outweigh the preferences of a tiny, centralized few. The private must maintain supremacy over the public. The more that people tune out Washington’s self-indulgent and excessively frequent demands for attention, the more time is available for them to live their lives, exercise their liberty, and pursue their own happiness.

Tuesday

14

October 2014

0

COMMENTS

← Older Entries

About Me

profileI 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.

Search Site

Categories

Archives