Category: Government

Libertarian Law Professor Defends Free Choice in Health Care

BarnettRandyLibertarianLawProfessor2012-03-31.jpg

“Randy E. Barnett has argued against the health care law.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional.
. . .
. . . over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law’s constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.
. . .
. . . the challenge championed by Professor Barnett: that Congress’s power to set rules for commerce does not extend to regulating “inactivity,” like choosing not to be insured.
. . .
(p. A14) He is a fierce advocate of economic freedom who is accustomed to being a legal underdog. In 2004, in his first (and, he says, probably his last) appearance before the Supreme Court, he argued that Congress could not criminalize the production of home-grown marijuana for personal medical use. There again, critics said he would lose 8 to 1. He did lose, but took satisfaction in the actual vote, 6 to 3.
. . .
Professor Barnett’s work on the health care law fits into a much broader intellectual project, his defense of economic freedom. He has long argued that the Supreme Court went too far in upholding New Deal economic laws — a position that concerns his liberal critics.
Even a close friend and fellow Georgetown law professor, Lawrence B. Solum, says that Professor Barnett is aware of the “big divide between his views and the views of lots of other people,” and that his political philosophy is “much more radical” than his legal argument in the health care case. Professor Barnett, for his part, insists that if the health law is struck down, it will not “threaten the foundation of the New Deal.” But, he allowed, it would be “a huge symbolic victory for limited government.”

For the full story, see:
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CHARLIE SAVAGE. “Libertarian’s Pet Cause Reaches Supreme Court.” The New York Times (Tues., March 27, 2012): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 26, 2012 and has the title “Vindication for Challenger of Health Care Law.”)

Benefits of Driverless Cars Justify Changing Liability Laws

DriverlessCar2012-03-26.jpg “The car is driven by a computer that steers, starts and stops itself. A 360 degrees laser scanner on top of the car, a GPS system and other sensors monitor the surrounding traffic.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p A13) Expect innovations that change the nature of driving more than anything since the end of the hand-crank engine–so long as the legal and regulatory systems don’t strangle new digital technologies before they can roll off the assembly line.
. . .
Mr. Ford outlined a future of what the auto industry calls “semiautonomous driving technology,” meaning increasingly self-driving cars. Over the next few years, cars will automatically be able to maintain safe distances, using networks of sensors, V-to-V (vehicle-to-vehicle) communications and real-time tracking of driving conditions fed into each car’s navigation system.
This will limit the human error that accounts for 90% of accidents. Radar-based cruise control will stop cars from hitting each other, with cars by 2025 driving themselves in tight formations Mr. Ford describes as “platoons,” cutting congestion as the space between cars is reduced safely.
. . .
Over the next decade, cars could finally become true automobiles. Our laws will have to be updated for a new relationship between people and cars, but the benefits will be significant: fewer traffic accidents and fewer gridlocked roads–and, perhaps best of all, young people will be in self-driving cars, not teenager-driven cars.

For the full commentary, see:
L. GORDON CROVITZ. “INFORMATION AGE; The Car of the Future Will Drive You; A truly auto-mobile is coming if liability laws don’t stop it.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 5, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Web Sites Expose Petty Corruption

RamanathanSwatiBribeSite2012-03-07.jpg “Swati Ramanathan, a founder of the site I Paid a Bribe, in India.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.

The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.
The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.
Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls “retail corruption,” the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world.
Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.
About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.
“I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter,” someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. “The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ ” — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.
Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE STROM. “Web Sites Shine Light on Petty Bribery Worldwide.” The New York Times (Weds., March 7, 2012): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date March 6, 2012.)

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“Antony Ragui started an I Paid a Bribe site in Kenya.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Freedom Grew from the Greek Agora

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Source of book image: http://images.borders.com.au/images/bau/97801997/9780199747405/0/0/plain/a-culture-of-freedom-ancient-greece-and-the-origins-of-europe.jpg

(p. C9) A city’s central space reveals much about the society that built it. In the middle of the typical Greek city-state, or polis, stood neither a palace nor a temple–the dominant centering structures of Asian and Egyptian cities–but an open public square, an agora, useful for gatherings and the conduct of business. When Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, first encountered Greeks on his western boundaries, he sneered at the race of shopkeepers who hung about the agora cheating one another all day. Yet that same race would later defeat his descendants, Darius and Xerxes, in two of the most consequential battles the Western world has seen, at Marathon in 490 B.C. and at Salamis 10 years later.
. . .
Mr. Meier’s approach runs counter to a tendency in recent classical scholarship to trace Greek ideas to non-Greek sources or to seek common ground on which East and West once met. The polis itself has been claimed in the past few decades as a Near Eastern, or Phoenician, invention; Carthage too, it seems, had an agora at its hub. But Mr. Meier takes pains to dismiss this claim. Relying on expertise amassed in his long academic career, he reasserts the uniqueness of Greek political evolution, the mysterious and somewhat miraculous process that culminates, at the end of this account, in the emergence of Athenian democracy.
. . .
After surveying the crucial reforms of the Athenian leader Cleisthenes, the foundation stones of the world’s first democratic constitution, Mr. Meier asks: “Was it just a matter of time before the Attic citizenry was reorganized–so that Cleisthenes did something that would have happened sooner or later anyway? Or were Cleisthenes’ achievements beyond the scope of men less able and daring?”

For the full review, see:
JAMES ROMM. “The Greeks’ Daring Experiment.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., FEBRUARY 11, 2012): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Meier, Christian. A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Carnegie and Twain Opposed Roosevelt’s Imperialism

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Source of book image: http://www.chinarhyming.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/51Hr-aIgESL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Marxists and others on the left often claim that big business is the main force behind U.S. imperialism. Is it not ironic that the most imperialistic U.S. President was the anti-big-business “progressive” Teddy Roosevelt who was vehemently opposed by big businessman Andrew Carnegie?
Mark Twain is sometimes accused of insufficient sympathy with the downtrodden. Those who so accuse, misunderstand his message. He too opposed Roosevelt’s war on the Filipinos.
(Carnegie and Twain’s friendship is discussed in David Nasaw’s biography of Carnegie.)

(p. 13) There was within the United States a strong and vocal anti-imperialist movement, which included former President Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, but it struggled to tamp down the country’s growing expansionist zeal, and to compete with the energy, tenacity and bulldog ambition of one man in particular: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who in just six years rose meteorically from New York City police commissioner to president, nurtured a deep and unshakable contempt for what he called the “unintelligent, cowardly chatter for ‘peace at any price.’ ” Not only had the “clamor of the peace faction” left him unmoved, Roosevelt wrote, it had served to strengthen his conviction that “this country needs a war.”
. . .
Although Roosevelt moves in and out of Jones’s narrative, disappearing for long stretches, he still manages to steal the spotlight, just as he does in every book in which he appears. When McKinley dragged his feet before sending troops to Cuba, Roosevelt sneered that the president had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” In the Department of the Navy, Roosevelt gleefully took over while his boss was on summer vacation, anointing himself the “hot weather secretary” and crowing to a friend that he was having “immense fun running the Navy.” In Cuba, after choosing his regiment of Rough Riders from 23,000 applicants, he ordered his famous charge up Kettle Hill wearing a custom-made fawn-colored Brooks Brothers uniform with canary-yellow trim.

For the full review, see:
CANDICE MILLARD. “Looking for a Fight; At the Turn of the 20th Century, Theodore Roosevelt Set Out to Transform the United States into a Major World Power.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., February 19, 2012): 13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2012 and has the title “Looking for a Fight; A New History of the Philippine-American War.”)

The book under review is:
Jones, Gregg. Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream. New York: New American Library, 2012.

The Nasaw book on Carnegie mentioned in my initial comments is:
Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
(Note: the pagination of the hardback and paperback editions of Nasaw’s book are the same.)

In China the Rich and Creative Prepare to Vote with Their Feet

ShiKangBeijingMillionaire2012-02-22.jpg “Shi Kang, a millionaire writer living in Beijing, started thinking about emigrating after a long road trip last year around the U.S.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) BEIJING–This time last year, Shi Kang considered himself a happy man.

Writing 15 novels had made him a millionaire. He owned a luxury apartment and a new silver Mercedes. He was so content with his carefree life in Beijing that he never even traveled overseas.
Today, a year later, Mr. Shi is considering emigrating to the U.S.–one of a growing number of rich Chinese either contemplating leaving their homeland or already arranging to do it.
. . .
(p. A12) A survey published in November found that 60% of about 960,000 Chinese people with assets over 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) were either thinking about emigrating or taking steps to do so. The U.S. was the top destination, followed by Canada, Singapore and Europe, according to the survey by the state-run Bank of China and Hurun Report, which analyzes trends among China’s wealthy.
. . .
Mr. Su was no dissident, though. Like many of his generation, he turned his attention to getting rich. Today, at 46, Mr. Su runs his own aerospace technology company and estimates his own net worth, including the various properties he owns, at around 80 million yuan, or close to $13 million.
His main reason for leaving, he says, is the business environment. “The government has too much power,” he says. “Regulations here mean that businessmen have to do a lot of illegal things. That gives people a real sense of insecurity.” He said four of his distributors have also applied for investment immigration to Canada.
. . .
“The problem is that government power is too great,” Mr. Su says. “When the economy is going up, they think that everything they are doing is right.” If they don’t change, he worries, “another revolution will come soon.”
. . .
The current migrant wave is different in that they are escaping neither poverty nor political unrest–and many say they are leaving for good. The Hurun survey showed that the average respondent had 60 million yuan in assets and was 42, old enough to remember the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, but young enough to have learned how to prosper in a market economy.
Deng Jie fits the profile. Twenty-seven years ago, in the fledgling years of China’s market reforms, he began his career in a state-run ceramics factory in Beijing, sharing a cramped dormitory with colleagues and earning 50 yuan a month (about $13 in those days).
Today, at 48, he runs his own chemical pigments business and lives with his wife and daughter in one of the three luxury apartments he owns. In dollar terms, he is a millionaire several times over. His properties alone have appreciated by 800% in a decade.
Yet the hope he felt for his country in the 1980s, he says, has “been doused with bucket after bucket of cold water.” He cited a host of concerns, including rampant corruption among the officials he deals with, and new labor regulations that he says have made his work force too costly and demanding.
“I’m representing a lot of other people like me,” he says. “We used to want to contribute to the nation. But now we just feel so disappointed. China cannot continue like this. It has to change.”

For the full story, see:

JEREMY PAGE. “Plan B for China’s Wealthy: Moving to the U.S., Europe.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., FEBRUARY 22, 2012): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)

ChineseEB5visaApplicationGraph.jpg

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

“The Government Is a Crappy Venture Capitalist”

(p. A13) Like the mythical monster Hydra–who grew two heads every time Hercules cut one off–President Obama, in both his State of the Union address and his new budget, has defiantly doubled down on his brand of industrial policy, the usually ill-advised attempt by governments to promote particular industries, companies and technologies at the expense of broad, evenhanded competition.
Despite his record of picking losers–witness the failed “clean energy” projects Solyndra, Ener1 and Beacon Power–Mr. Obama appears determined to continue pushing his brew of federal spending, regulations, mandates, special waivers, loan guarantees, subsidies and tax breaks for companies he deems worthy.
Favoring key constituencies with taxpayer money appeals to politicians, who can claim to be helping the overall economy, but it usually does far more harm than good. It crowds out valuable competing investment efforts financed by private investors, and it warps decisions by bureaucratic diktats susceptible to political cronyism. Former Obama adviser Larry Summers echoed most economists’ view when he warned the administration against federal loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that “the government is a crappy venture capitalist.”

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL J. BOSKIN. “OPINION; Washington’s Knack for Picking Losers; Former Obama adviser Larry Summers warned the administration against federal loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that ‘the government is a crappy venture capitalist’.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., FEBRUARY 15, 2012): A13.

Economic Freedom and Growth Depend on Protecting the Right to Rise

(p. A19) Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: “The right to rise.”
Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn’t seem like something we should have to protect.
But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.
That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. . . .
. . .
But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.
. . .
. . . , we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

For the full commentary, see:
JEB BUSH. “OPINION; Capitalism and the Right to Rise; In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., December 19, 2011): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Euro Haiku

Welfare states’ debt due
Ratings downgrades, states default
Euro muddles through

Arthur Diamond

The haiku above was my entry in response to the haiku challenge in the Kauffman Foundation’s First Quarter 2012 survey “of top economics bloggers.” The haiku challenge was: “The euro is troubled, so what is its fate in 2012 and/or what should policymakers do?”

The results of the Q1 2012 survey can be found at: http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/econ_bloggers_outlook_q1_2012.pdf

How to Slow Down Creative Destruction

(p. 356) This catallaxy will not go smoothly, or without resistance. Natural and unnatural disasters will still happen. Governments will bail out big corporations and big bureaucracies, hand them special favours such as subsidies or carbon rations and regulate them in such a way as to create barriers to entry, slowing down creative destruction. Chiefs, priests, thieves, financiers, consultants and others will appear on all sides, feeding off the surplus (p. 357) generated by exchange and specialisation, diverting the life-blood of the catallaxy into their own reactionary lives. It happened in the past. Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the price of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

“Just What Ailments Are Pylos Tablets Supposed to Alleviate?”

LinearBscript2012-01-14.jpg

“Professor Bennett’s work opened a window to deciphering tablets written in Linear B, a Bronze Age Aegean script.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. 22) Deciphering an ancient script is like cracking a secret code from the past, and the unraveling of Linear B is widely considered one of the most challenging archaeological decipherments of all time, if not the most challenging.
. . .
Linear B recorded the administrative workings of Mycenaean palatial centers on Crete and the Greek mainland 3,000 years ago: accounts of crops harvested, flocks tended, goods manufactured (including furniture, chariots and perfume), preparations for religious feasts and preparations for war.
It was deciphered at last in 1952, not by a scholar but by an obsessed amateur, a young English architect named Michael Ventris. The decipherment made him world famous before his death in an automobile accident in 1956.
As Mr. Ventris had acknowledged, he was deeply guided by Professor Bennett’s work, which helped impose much-needed order on the roiling mass of strange, ancient symbols.
In his seminal monograph “The Pylos Tablets” (1951), Professor Bennett published the first definitive list of the signs of Linear B. Compiling such a list is the essential first step in deciphering any unknown script, and it is no mean feat.
. . .
“We know how much Ventris admired Bennett, because he immediately adopted Bennett’s sign list of Linear B for his own work before the decipherment,” said Mr. Robinson, whose book “The Man Who Deciphered Linear B” (2002) is a biography of Mr. Ventris. “He openly said, ‘This is a wonderful piece of work.’ ”
. . .
As meticulous as Professor Bennett’s work was, it once engendered great confusion. In 1951, after he sent Mr. Ventris a copy of his monograph, a grateful Ventris went to the post office to pick it up. As Mr. Robinson’s biography recounts, a suspicious official, eyeing the package, asked him: “I see the contents are listed as Pylos Tablets. Now, just what ailments are pylos tablets supposed to alleviate?”

For the full obituary, see:
MARGALIT FOX. “Emmett L. Bennett Jr., Ancient Script Expert, Dies at 93.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., January 1, 2012,): 22.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated December 31, 2011, and has the title: “Emmett L. Bennett Jr., Expert on Ancient Script, Dies at 93.”)

The book on the amateur, uncredentialed Ventris is:
Robinson, Andrew. The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris. London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

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“Emmett L. Bennett Jr.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited above.