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• US Spy Planes Monitoring China at Close Range: Legal, But Unwise

  Ted Galen Carpenter

  Ted Galen Carpenter

  Recent incidents in which Chinese fighter aircraft challenged U.S. surveillance planes have added a new level of tension to an already frayed bilateral relationship. It is fairly certain that the encounters took place in international airspace, although they were in the vicinity of China’s Hainan Island. From a purely legal standpoint, Washington’s surveillance flights are justified, but from a policy standpoint, they are needlessly provocative.

  There are contentious underlying issues to the latest aerial spat between Beijing and Washington. Because the United States sees itself as a global power with important interests throughout the Western Pacific and East Asia, U.S. officials are uneasy about China’s increased flexing of its geostrategic muscles. In particular, as a leading air and maritime power, Washington opposes Beijing’s attempts to establish special rights for itself in that region. Consequently, the Obama administration openly defied China’s announcement last year of an Air Defense Identification Zone in the airspace over the East China Sea.  Similarly, U.S. officials staunchly oppose Beijing’s ongoing territorial claims in the South China Sea, including an apparent bid to establish a vast exclusive economic zone. From Washington’s perspective, Beijing’s moves indicate a strategy to make regions that are now considered international airspace and international waters into de facto Chinese territory.  That ploy, the United States and its East Asian allies all agree, is utterly unacceptable.

  “Washington’s surveillance flights are justified, but from a policy standpoint, they are needlessly provocative.”

  The recent incidents involving U.S. surveillance aircraft must be viewed within that larger context. U.S. officials are adamant that the United States has a legal right to conduct such flights in all international airspace—even in areas close to the Chinese coast. Harassment of those flights by PLA fighter planes is seen as more evidence of Beijing’s belligerent campaign to narrow the rights that other countries possess under international law.  The point is a valid one, and the United States understandably resists China’s attempts to refashion longstanding aspects of international law to its advantage.

  Washington’s legal position on the matter of surveillance flights also is unassailable. But what is legal is not always prudent. It is probably not a coincidence that the latest confrontations have taken place in the airspace near Hainan Island. There is strong evidence that China maintains a vital submarine base in that area and, therefore, does not welcome U.S. snooping in the vicinity of such a sensitive installation. That is the same area in which a nasty incident took place in the spring of 2001, when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. spy plane, killing the Chinese pilot and forcing the U.S. aircraft to make an emergency landing on Hainan. That episode produced angry posturing in both countries, with American hawks pressing George W. Bush’s administration to adopt a harsh, demanding stance to get the plane and crew returned. Fortunately, cooler heads on both sides eventually prevailed, and a delicate diplomatic compromise prevented the crisis from spiraling out of control, but it was a tense, frightening period.

  Even though Washington is legally in the right regarding the latest situation, U.S. officials should adopt a more restrained posture. It would be a useful exercise for them to ask how the United States would react if the positions were reversed. Would U.S. policymakers really respond with casual indifference if Chinese military aircraft repeatedly skirted the coast of Hawaii near Pearl Harbor? Or if they constantly monitored at close range the major U.S. naval bases at San Diego, California, and Norfolk, Virginia? Even if the Chinese carefully stayed within international airspace, it is difficult to imagine U.S. officials viewing such behavior as anything other than unfriendly and provocative.

  Unfortunately, those same officials seem to unable or unwilling to engage in the intellectual exercise of viewing a situation from another country’s perspective. That is a defect in so many aspects of U.S. foreign policy. For example, policymakers in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations blindly failed to understand how Moscow would react to the expansion of NATO to the border of the Russian Federation. Yet they could have asked how the United States would have behaved if a competing great power had incorporated Mexico and the Central American countries into a transparently anti-U.S. alliance, and then flirted with making Canada a member. If they had engaged in that thought process, they might better understand Russia’s current angry behavior with respect to the attempt by the United States and the European Union to draw Ukraine into the West’s strategic orbit.

  A wise great power does not needlessly antagonize other major countries—even when its behavior is technically within the bounds of international law.  A wise great power especially does not crowd other nations in sensitive matters that they consider vital to their security. Washington needs to internalize that lesson before its spy flights lead to further deterioration in America’s relations with China—and perhaps to a dangerous military clash.

  Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of nine books and more than 550 articles and policy studies on international affairs.

  

  

  

  10/9/2014

• Nation Building Isn’t Needed to Fight ISIS

  Christopher A. Preble

  Christopher A. Preble

  In his speech to the American people tonight, President Obama aims to build support for a protracted military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 

  It doesn’t have to be a hard sell. A majority of Americans support a military response—though not U.S. troops on the ground. Very few are content with allowing ISIS to spread its influence with impunity, especially after the brutal killing of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The group has effectively declared itself an enemy of the United States, and there is growing support for action against the group before it even attempts an attack on the U.S. homeland (something that it appears only to be aspiring to, as opposed to actively planning for).

  “The president should focus upon a narrow mission, and resist calls for yet another quixotic crusade in the Middle East.”

  But taking the fight to ISIS means going back into Iraq, a country in which now four successive U.S. presidents have taken the nation to war, and the American people are understandably anxious about being sucked backed into a seemingly open-ended conflict. Thus, two questions are particularly relevant: First, how large a response is justified? And, second, what end state is acceptable?

  The bipartisan Beltway consensus offers up predictable answers to these questions: the response should be massive, and we should be seeking the complete eradication of ISIS as a military and political movement. Indeed, the harshest criticism comes from those who argue that the president isn’t doing nearly enough.

  In his appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend, President Obama twice assured Americans that he was not contemplating U.S. boots on the ground. But some believe that the president should be preparing Americans for a major operation, one involving potentially many thousands of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq for an indeterminate period of time. Outspoken neoconservative Max Boot estimates that between 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. troops might ultimately be required in Iraq.

  One should take such estimates with a large grain of salt. In 2003, Boot claimed that 60,000 to 75,000 U.S. troops could stabilize Iraq, disputing the higher number of 200,000 U.S. troops cited by military planners. A few years later, as Iraq descended into a brutal civil war that claimed over 400,000 lives, Boot was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of a larger U.S. presence there. How much larger? The U.S. troop “surge” topped out at just over 170,000, not counting the many tens of thousands of private security contractors in country. And even that wasn’t enough to stabilize Iraq. The hoped-for reconciliation between Sunnis and Shia Arabs never occurred, while the Kurds maintained their autonomy in the north, undermining what little authority the central government in Baghdad ever hoped to have.

  Troop numbers are a function of the mission at hand. Ambitious objectives require many resources, and lots of patience. The hawks on both the left and right believe that a large U.S. ground presence is required because they don’t want to limit the mission to merely hitting ISIS—they want to restore stability and order in Iraq, exclude Iranian influence from Iraqi politics, and topple Bashar Assad in Syria. In other words, they want us back in the nation-building business, but now in two countries racked by civil war and sectarian hatreds, instead of just one. Their desired end-state appears to be two friendly, liberal democracies in the heart of the Arab world.

  By contrast, most Americans support a more achievable end-state—a weakened ISIS that is contained by those who have the most to fear from it. Thus, a wider U.S. war in Iraq is unlikely, and a wider war in Syria even less so. Besides, Barack Obama doesn’t appear to want one. Perhaps he has learned from his predecessor’s bitter experiences over the past two decades?

  Simply put, a full-scale ground war with U.S. troops doing most of the fighting isn’t necessary. ISIS currently presents, at worst, a minor and manageable threat to U.S. security. The group has many enemies, and they are growing more determined to resist it by the day. If ISIS expands the territory under its control, it will acquire even more enemies. If it attempts to consolidate control in the territory it already has, it will engender resistance and opposition, as al Qaeda did in western Iraq in 2006.

  There is a military mission available—targeted air strikes against ISIS extremists, and military assistance to Kurdish and Iraqi forces taking the fight to them on the ground—that can degrade ISIS’s capabilities, and complicate its now very limited ability to attack the United States. The president should focus upon that narrow mission, and resist the calls to launch the U.S. military on yet another quixotic nation-building crusade in the Middle East.

  Christopher Preble is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

  

  

  

  10/9/2014

• President Obama's Delayed Action on Immigration Is Part of a Long Pattern

  Alex Nowrasteh

  Alex Nowrasteh

  President Obama’s much anticipated executive actions to reform immigration have been delayed, again. The president explained this by saying, “The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem [unaccompanied children].” He further said he wants to “make sure that the public understands why we’re doing this, why it’s the right thing for the American people, why it’s the right thing for the American economy.” Regardless of his reasons, the president’s decision to delay executive action has angered many of his pro-immigration supporters.

  However, those who support immigration reform should not be surprised by the president’s delay. President Obama has a long history of tightening immigration enforcement and only tepidly supporting reform.

  Even when he was a senator, Obama voted for a poison-pill amendment that killed immigration reform in 2007. His vote for the Dorgan amendment, named after then-Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D, gutted a portion of the bill and Republican support for the proposal along with it. The poison pill amendment passed 49 to 48 thanks to then-Senator Obama’s unexpected support.

  “President Obama has a long history of tightening immigration enforcement and only tepidly supporting reform.”

  Obama’s actions as president are worse. Early in his administration he appointed noted immigration enforcer Janet Napolitano, the governor of Arizona who signed the strictest state level enforcement law up to that time, as head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Under her watch, deportations skyrocketed as thousands of local communities were forced into a federal program called Secure Communities — a Bush era program to round up and deport unauthorized immigrants.

  President Obama’s record deportations continued for years until early 2012. In that year, DHS shifted emphasis from deportations to border enforcement. Deportations remained high, but now more unlawful immigrants were removed with harsh consequences — spending long periods of time in detention facilities, going through immigration court, and being flown into the interior of Mexico.

  This so-called “enforcement with consequences” policy packed immigration courts to the brim. Currently, almost 400,000 cases are waiting to be heard due to the prosecution of so many unlawful immigrants.

  His administration also pursued regulatory rule changes that increased the barriers to legal migration. Rules for work visas in the tech sector, agricultural sector, and seasonal work were all toughened under his administration despite being loosened during the Bush administration.

  To President Obama’s credit, in 2012 he pursued the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that temporarily halted the deportations of more than 600,000 unlawful immigrants who were brought here as children, allowing them to work for two years. President Obama also supported the 2013 bi-partisan immigration reform effort — albeit from the sidelines.

  When a White House official recently blamed “Republicans’ extreme politicization of this issue” for obstructing immigration reform, it should be remembered that President Obama could have emphasized immigration reform in 2009 and 2010 when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Instead his attention was focused on passing a disastrous healthcare law and a failed stimulus bill instead of bipartisan immigration reform.

  Immigration reform is almost as difficult a subject for Democrats to tackle as it is for Republicans. One core Democratic constituency is labor unions who have historically opposed immigration liberalizations and supported restrictive laws for over a century. Publicly, many unions support reform but outside of the public’s eye they undermine reform efforts. Many other Democrats support immigration reform regardless of union obstruction. President Obama no doubt feels these pressures.

  The president’s delay of minor executive actions and his harsh immigration enforcement policies are having an unexpected result. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 11 percent of Hispanic-Americans describe themselves as libertarian. Anti-immigration rhetoric from some Republicans and contradictory messages and policies from Democrats are driving some of this younger demographic affected by our restrictive immigration laws in a new ideological and political direction.

  The president’s ability to unilaterally streamline the legal immigration system and defer deportations is extremely limited by the Constitution — as it should be. His reluctance to take even those minor actions that are allowed under the law is disappointing to those who support immigration reform, but it should not be surprising.

  Alex Nowrasteh is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

  

  

  

  10/9/2014

• The Swept-Under-the-Rug costs of the Ex-Im Bank

  Daniel J. Ikenson

  Daniel J. Ikenson

  Like all federal subsidy programs, the Export-Import Bank of the United States has cultivated a loyal following of corporate patrons who have grown accustomed to Washington flipping the bill for certain routine business costs. That is why the debate over congressional reauthorization of Ex-Im’s charter, which expires on Sept. 30, will reach a fever pitch this month. In the interests of fairness, free enterprise and economic growth, the Export-Import Bank should perish.

  Ex-Im is a government-run export credit agency that arranges special financing to facilitate sales between U.S. companies and foreign customers. To many, that mission may seem benign, if not noble. Indeed, reauthorization supporters deploy the simple logic that since Ex-Im creates exports, and exports create growth and jobs, shuttering the bank will hurt the economy. But for those less easily seduced by such sleight of hand, there is more to the story. Ex-Im facilitates exports for some businesses, but at great cost to unsuspecting companies throughout the economy and across the 50 states.

  “In the interests of fairness, free enterprise and economic growth, the Export-Import Bank should perish.”

  There are opportunity costs, representing the growth that would have occurred had Ex-Im’s resources been deployed optimally — or at least more efficiently — in the private sector. The “what-would-have-happened” counterfactual is difficult to estimate, however, as it requires a variety of assumptions about economic variables and their relationships. But it is a good bet that when government agencies make financing decisions based upon non-economic criteria, resources are not being used optimally.

  There are also intra-industry costs — the relative disadvantages inflicted on direct competitors as a result of export subsidies flowing to a particular firm in the industry. If Ex-Im provides a $50 million loan to a foreign farm-equipment manufacturer to purchase steel from U.S. Steel Corporation, the transaction may benefit U.S. Steel, but it hurts firms like Nucor and the dozens of other domestic steel producers competing for the same customers at home and abroad. The $50 million “benefit” for U.S. Steel is a $50 million cost to the other steel firms. When government tilts the playing field in favor of a particular firm, it simultaneously penalizes the other firms in the industry and changes the competitive dynamics prospectively.

  The downstream industry costs are borne by U.S. producers who compete with the subsidized foreign customer or who simply require the subsidized export for their own production. Ex-Im diverts domestic supply, possibly causing prices to rise and rendering U.S. customers less important to their U.S. suppliers. This is especially likely in industries with few producers and limited substitute products.

  Consider an Ex-Im subsidy to a U.S. supplier who sells to both U.S. and foreign customers. Those customers compete in the same downstream industries in the U.S. and foreign markets. The U.S. supplier is thrilled that Ex-Im is providing his foreign customer with cheap credit, because it spares him from having to offer a lower price or from sweetening the deal in some other way to win the business. The foreign customer is happy to accept the advantageous financing for a variety of reasons, including that his capital costs are now lower relative to what they would have been and relative to the costs of his competitors.

  Delta Airlines has been vocal in its objection to Ex-Im-financed sales of Boeing jetliners to foreign carriers such as Air India. Delta rightly complains that the U.S. government, as a matter of policy, is subsidizing Delta’s foreign competition by reducing Air India’s cost of capital. That cost reduction enables Air India to offer lower prices in its bid to compete for passengers, which has a direct impact on Delta’s bottom line. This is a legitimate concern not limited to this example, but most of the time the downstream U.S. companies are unwitting victims of this gradual, silent cost-shifting.

  According to findings in a new Cato Institute study, these downstream costs exceeded the benefits of Ex-Im subsidies for 189 of 236 manufacturing industries by an aggregate total of $2.8 billion per year between 2007 and 2013. The five industries incurring the largest net costs were producers of electrical equipment, appliances and components; furniture; food; non-metallic mineral products; and chemicals. Collectively, these industries account for 50 percent or more of manufacturing gross domestic product in seven U.S. states, and the top 10 of the 16 industry victims account for two-thirds or more of manufacturing GDP in 22 states.

  Ex-Im reauthorization proponents studiously avoid discussion of these costs, but the fact of the matter is that Ex-Im financing helps two sets of companies (in the short run): U.S. firms whose export prices are subsidized by below-market rate financing and the foreign firms who purchase those subsidized exports. However, those same transactions impose costs on two different sets of companies: competing U.S. firms in the same industry who do not get Ex-Im backing, and U.S. firms in downstream industries, whose foreign competition is now benefitting from reduced capital costs courtesy of U.S. government subsidies.

  Allowing the Export-Import Bank to expire will help reduce these unfair cost impositions and encourage more companies to abide economic — rather than political — signals, which more likely will spur innovation, growth and job creation.

  Daniel J. Ikenson is director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies.

  

  

  

  10/9/2014

• Obamacare: Fewer Doctors, More Demand

  Michael D. Tanner

  Michael D. Tanner

  Obamacare, as its advocates increasingly point out, has succeeded in expanding the number of Americans with insurance. Even though this achievement came at enormous cost, still leaves millions of Americans uninsured, and dumped millions more into Medicaid, this is still one of the few “successes” that the health-care law can claim.

  However, health insurance and access to health care are not the same thing. And evidence is growing that Obamacare is likely to make it harder for us to see a doctor or otherwise obtain care.

  “The trends are not pretty if you’re a physician — or a person who needs medical care.”

  Of course, we already know that the limited network of physicians available through most Obamacare exchange-based insurance plans is making it more difficult to see the doctor of your choice. Despite efforts by state regulators to mandate that insurers include more doctors and hospitals in their networks, most Obamacare plans, especially the comparatively low-cost bronze and silver plans, continue to have restricted networks. Nationwide, roughly 70 percent of Obamacare plans offer fewer doctors and hospitals than typical pre-Obamacare plans.

  But there is an even bigger issue lurking below the surface.

  Even without Obamacare, the Association of American Medical Colleges warns us that we face a shortfall of at least 130,000 doctors by 2025. While both enrollment in medical schools and graduation are up slightly, the increase is nowhere near enough to offset expected retirements. Roughly 40 percent of current doctors are age 55 or over. Moreover, the United States already trails many other countries in the number of physicians per capita, at just 2.5 per 1,000 people. This is compared to nearly 4 per 1,000 in Germany and Switzerland.

  Medicine is simply no longer the profession that it once was. In 1970, the average income of general practitioners was $185,000 (in 2014 dollars). Today, even though doctors now see nearly twice as many patients as they did back then, average physician income has fallen to just $161,000. At the same time, the average medical-school graduate now begins his career with more than $170,000 in debt.

  Obamacare will squeeze physician incomes still further.

  Existing government programs already reimburse physicians at rates that are often less than the actual cost of treating a patient. Estimates suggest that on average physicians are reimbursed at roughly 78 percent of costs in Medicare, and just 70 percent of costs in Medicaid. Physicians generally shift some of those costs to patients who have insurance, raising prices for the rest of us, and lose money on the rest. However, under Obamacare the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is charged with reducing the growth in Medicare spending to no more than 1 percent above GDP growth. While Medicare spending certainly needs to be controlled, restrictions on the IPAB essentially limit its options to further reductions in physician reimbursement. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that if IPAB is to achieve its goal, Medicare will reimburse at a lower rate than Medicaid by 2024. And, by mid century, Medicare will be reimbursing at barely 50 cents on the dollar. After that, playing golf in Florida is going to look pretty good to a number of physicians.

  According to a 2013 Deloitte survey, nearly three-quarters of physicians (and 81 percent of specialists) think the best and brightest young people may no longer consider careers in medicine. More than half believe that physicians will retire earlier or scale back practice hours if the future of medicine seems to be changing along the lines described above.

  Doctors who remain in practice will increasingly either sign on as employees with large hospital chains or move into “concierge practices,” in which physicians do not accept insurance and limit the number of patients they see. In several states, including California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, surveys indicate that 90 percent of physicians are at least considering concierge medicine.

  At the same time that Obamacare is reducing the supply of physicians, it is also increasing the demand for their services. More insurance coverage will mean more people will see doctors. While this is good news for those who need treatment and might have forgone care if they were uninsured, it means more unnecessary visits as well. One doesn’t have to be an economic genius to realize that increasing demand while decreasing supply is likely to cause a problem.

  In some crucial areas access could be even more at risk. Take, for example, critical emergency care. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, urban and suburban areas have lost a quarter of their hospital emergency departments over the last 20 years. Yet a new study by the Colorado Hospital Association found that emergency-room visits in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare increased by 5.6 percent year over year — three times as fast as in states that did not expand Medicaid. This follows on the heels of a study in Oregon that found that expanding Medicaid increased emergency-room use by roughly 40 percent. Anyone see a problem?

  From the beginning, Obamacare has been premised on the idea that the basic laws of economics do not exist. Unfortunately, the next time we get sick, we are likely to find out that they still do.

  Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

  

  

  

  10/9/2014

• Far Too Many Black Americans Remain Separate and Unequal

  Nat Hentoff

  Nat Hentoff

  To begin with the remoteness of post-racial America, here are “14 Disturbing Stats About Racial Inequality in American Public Schools” from The Nation:

  “For the first time in history, the Education Department … examined school discipline at the pre-K level,” discovering that during the 2011-12 school year:

  “Black students accounted for 18 percent of the country’s pre-K enrollment, but made up 48 percent of preschoolers with multiple out-of-school suspensions.

  “Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students.”

  Moreover, “black students were more than three times as likely to attend schools where fewer than 60 percent of teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements” (Steven Hsieh, The Nation, March 21).

  Another grim report about racial disparities comes from Nicholas Kristof, best known for his solo discoveries of human rights abuses in dangerous parts of the globe. He gets to the economic core of this nation’s gulf between blacks and whites:

  “The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data” (“When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” Kristof, The New York Times, Aug. 31).

  “The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)”

  Dig this: “The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.”

  And then this crusher: “Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

  “Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.”

  Kristof goes on, telling a story that epitomizes hazardous black life in this land of the free and home of the brave:

  “I was shaken after a well-known black woman told me about looking out her front window and seeing that police officers had her teenage son down on the ground after he had stepped out of their upscale house because they thought he was a prowler.”

  Her response? “Thank God he didn’t run.”

  How much of this separate, black American experience will become part of the campaigns of 2016 presidential candidates? So far only Rand Paul indicates it may be part of what he has to say.

  But as for the others?

  I now turn to the pages of a black newspaper, the New York Beacon, of which I haven’t missed an issue for years. In a recent edition, Benjamin Chavis Jr. brings Martin Luther King Jr. into the conversation with an excerpt from his final book, published in 1967, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

  Said Dr. King: “The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in the North and South.”

  In his 1964 March on Washington, King directly told his followers:

  “Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”

  To which Benjamin Chavis Jr. now says:

  “With all that is going on in Missouri, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, New York, California, Louisiana, Illinois, Washington D.C. and elsewhere, we must transform our anger over police brutality, poverty and economic inequality into a massive voter turnout. We should be preparing right now in every voting precinct in every congressional district and in every state where we live to have an unprecedented high voter turnout this November. We did it in 2008, we did it in 2012, and we can do it again in 2014” (“From ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ to ‘Hands Up, Vote,’” Chavis, New York Beacon, Aug. 25).

  And, of course, in 2016 and beyond.

  Chavis continues: “Too often we live in communities where we have the potential margin of victory for local, congressional, statewide and national elections, but we simply do not go to the polls and vote, even though so many of our people died, bled, went to jail and ‘suffered’ for us to get the right to vote. Having a right to vote is not enough.

  “We all must exercise the right to vote not once but in every election. It’s extremely important that we do so this year because people expect us to, because Obama’s name will not be on the ballot and midterm voting is traditionally lower than in presidential years.”

  But I must add that it will be even more important for insistent black voters everywhere to underline that whoever is on the 2016 presidential ballot be far less directionless, uninformed and contemptuous of our constitutional liberties than Obama.

  Black Americans can indeed be pivotal in making the deep structural changes throughout our society that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned. If only he had been our first black president.

  Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

  

  

  

  10/9/2014

• The Libertarian Case for the European Union

  Dalibor Rohac

  Dalibor Rohac

  Advocates of free markets harbor a well-justified distrust of the European Union (EU). I, for example, have spent a fair amount of time criticizing  its populist overregulation, moral hazard, the damage created by the common European currency, EU structural funds or Common Agricultural Policy. Like many, I am convinced that the EU is a deeply flawed organization and that it mostly deserves much of the criticism that it receives from pro-market circles. At a more fundamental level, I also think that institutional competition and ‘voting with one’s feet’ is important, and see the thoughtless ‘harmonization’ of legal and regulatory regimes across the continent as extremely damaging.

  However, I no longer think, as I once did, that the EU is the single biggest threat to freedom and prosperity in Europe. Neither do I believe that an exit from the EU — either by the United Kingdom or some of the smaller central European states, such as my home country, Slovakia — would make these countries, or the continent as a whole, more libertarian. If a break-up were to occur, it would likely push Europe towards nationalism and protectionism, and undo some of the real benefits of European integration.

  First, whatever one thinks of the EU, it has sometimes been a force for good. It would be foolish to take the free movement of goods, capital, people, and also — to a more limited extent — of services, for granted. Vicious protectionism, not free trade, has been the historical norm. The second half of the 19th century, is often cited as a counterexample, culminating in the ‘first age of globalization’. But one should not succumb to retrospective optimism — due to measures such Germany’s ‘iron and rye’ tariff of 1879 and France’s Méline tariff of 1892, fin-de-siècle Europe was no free-trade zone. Or, for a different example, think of the transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Whether one likes the EU or not, the prospect of membership was clearly one of the engines of economic and political reforms that would have been otherwise very difficult.

  “EU break up would lead to more nationalism and protectionism.”

  Second, it is helpful to keep a perspective on the magnitude of the problem. The EU’s annual budget amounts to one percent of its GDP. Even the structural funds, which I recently blamed for the rise in corruption in some of the Central and Eastern European countries following their accession, are relatively modest, cumulatively accounting for some 4 percent of their GDP.

  What rightly bothers the critics of the EU is not the absolute size of the spending but rather its wasteful nature. Over the period of 2014-2020 the EU is planning to spend €312 billion on agricultural subsidies. And the non-fiscal side of the EU, namely the unnecessary red tape and regulation it generates every year, is a much greater problem. This of course has to do with the lack of accountability of Brussels’ mandarins and with their belief that for every European problem there is a one-size-fits-all European solution.

  These are all valid criticisms. However, it seems odd to think that the EU is acting as an external, exogenous force, dumping bad legislation on unsuspecting member states. After all, the European Council, composed of the representatives of national governments, is an integral part of the legislative process. In only a handful of areas, in which such powers have been explicitly delegated by the Council, can the European Commission (that grey, anonymous, unaccountable bureaucratic body) act alone.

  Eurosceptic groups are correct to point out that much of the legislation adopted across EU countries originates in Brussels — as does a dominant part of the regulatory burden facing European businesses. However, that is a reflection both of the institutional structures — which make the adoption of bad, EU-wide legislation, more likely — but also, quite independently, of an intellectual climate which sees all human problems as amenable to improvement by legislative action, without regard for costs and benefits. It seems plausible that bad European legislation is acting in part as a substitute for bad domestic legislation. That does not make it any better, of course, but it should shed some doubt on the notion that, if it weren’t for the EU, national policymakers would be adopting significantly better policies.

  The EU often acts in ways that are inimical to freedom and prosperity. But so do other political organizations, groups, and movements, and we need a sense of perspective to identify our key enemies. For one, I am much more afraid of the rise of Europe’s neo-reaction, of Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions in the EU’s immediate neighborhood, of the ties that connect the regime in the Kremlin with the populist nationalists within the EU, and of the damage that these can generate when in power. These are not just abstract threats. In Hungary, Viktor Orban – who wants to create a Hungarian alternative to liberal democracy, inspired by Russia and China — already nationalized the pension system, populated the board of the central bank with his political cronies, and helped elect a former skinhead as the deputy speaker of the Hungarian Parliament.

  One may say that the choice between Orban or Putin on the one hand and Jean-Claude Juncker on the other is a false one. Indeed, I have argued that the current anti-EU populism is largely a response to the heavy-handed policies and catastrophic response of European leaders to the financial crisis of 2008, which led to a six-year recession in Greece. The continent needs a compelling intellectual alternative to the way the EU is being currently run, taking into account the importance of institutional competition and trying to limit the arbitrary powers exercised by unelected bureaucrats (or sham parliamentary bodies). However, such an alternative is not going to come from Europe’s populist Right. In the meantime, taking the prevailing intellectual climate as a given, we may still face the unpleasant choice between virulent nationalism and a flawed EU.

  One reason why it is not easy to pin down the real counterfactual to EU membership comes from a famous paper by Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster, outlining the idea of the ‘second-best’, published in 1956 in Review of Economic Studies. Its idea, in simple terms, is that in a world with multiple distortions, it is far from obvious that removing one such distortion in isolation (say EU membership) will move us closer to the desired state of affairs as it is possible that the other distortions (say, petty nationalism) might then become ‘binding’.

  If this sounds too general, consider what the likely dynamics of an EU breakup might look like. First, it is fairly unlikely that it would come primarily from the hands of the pro-market critics of the EU, such as Richard Sulik in Slovakia or the Alternative for Germany – who are not even arguing for an exit — but rather from the hands of politicians like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders or Orban, who aptly combine Eurosceptic rhetoric (which may or may not sound libertarian) with an embrace of nationalism and anti-immigration scaremongering.

  Given the salience of immigration, it is difficult to imagine that a break-up of the EU would preserve the free movement of people across Europe. It would also likely result in a wave of protectionism and disruption to intra-European commerce. The possibility of a sudden dismantling of EU rules and regulations would be the perfect opportunity for lobbyists and rent-seekers in European countries to come forward and plead for special privileges, subsidies, tariffs, or quotas to shield them from European competition.

  True, all of this is just speculation. Maybe the break-up would be perfectly amicable, like in the case of Czechoslovakia in 1992, resulting in a free, economically integrated continent simply liberated of the burden of Brussels’ bureaucracy. Perhaps the individual countries would be able to get off the Euro without triggering a major financial crisis. But maybe not. Let’s keep in mind that the pro-market Eurosceptics do not get to choose the kind of break-up they want. So if there is a sizeable risk that things take an ugly turn, how wise is it to try to become a cheerleader for dismantling the EU?

  Europe’s economic and political problems — and the dangerous populist response that they elicit — are largely self-inflicted. There is also a downside risk in continuing with business as usual. But instead of feeding the fantasy of a better life outside of the EU, it is more practical to try to convince our fellow Europeans that the EU needs to shift its focus away from wasteful spending and overregulation toward providing genuine Europe-wide public goods: common market, free movement of people, goods, capital, and a real market in services. To get out of its present crisis and to prevent new ones, the EU needs to learn to manage the common currency and prevent chronic fiscal irresponsibility of its member states. And after Russia’s war against Ukraine, there is also a strong case for a common European foreign and security policy, instead of a simple reliance on America’s willingness to police the neighborhood.

  The continent clearly needs a massive, 1970s-style deregulation, as well as stronger institutional safeguards against the unchecked growth of economically destructive rules in the future. Such safeguards may include the strengthening of the role of the European Council and returning to unanimity voting on significant matters of economic policy.

  Unless more Europeans become convinced of the virtues of free markets and limited government, it is far from obvious that the EU will succeed in addressing these issues. Yet, in that case, it is equally unlikely that exit would generate an outcome appealing to libertarians. However that may be, it is worth keeping in mind that, for all the flaws in the design and execution of the European project, Europeans have been enjoying a historically unparalleled period of peace, prosperity, and freedom. It would be a shame if it all came to an end.

  Dalibor Rohac is a policy analyst at Cato Institute’s Center for Liberty and Prosperity.

  

  

  

  9/9/2014

• How the Transatlantic Alliance Makes America Less Secure

  Doug Bandow

  Doug Bandow

  Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization met in Wales in the shadow of the Ukraine war. Alliance advocates hoped to use the conflict to revive NATO, but responded, as usual, mostly with promises.

  In fact, Ukraine demonstrates how the military pact today makes Americans less secure. Expanding NATO to countries such as Georgia would multiply the risks faced by the United States for little gain.

  The transatlantic pact was created at a particular time in response to a particular threat. Washington desired to “contain” the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II, which had left Europe devastated. An American shield would allow the continent to revive economically, but U.S. leaders, like President Dwight Eisenhower, worried lest the alliance make the Europeans dependent.

  That fear turned out to be well grounded. European governments discovered that it didn’t matter how little they spent on the military or respected America’s priorities. Washington would keep them secure. NATO’s European members broke promises to devote more money to the military, built a natural-gas pipeline to the Soviet Union, aided Washington’s enemies in Latin America and blocked overflight by U.S. planes to bomb Libya. But the United States continued to defend the continent.

  At least there was a plausible case that doing so was in America’s interest. While a Soviet attack on Western Europe seemed unlikely, Washington was determined to prevent any hostile power from gaining control of Eurasia. Better safe than sorry.

  “The United States should not add new defense dependents, such as Georgia, that would bring far more security risks than geopolitical benefits.”

  But that possibility disappeared with the Cold War. Russia lost a third of the USSR’s population. The military shrunk in size and diminished in effectiveness. Even more dramatic was Europe’s economic success and political consolidation. Today, the European Union enjoys an 8-1 economic advantage and 3-1 population edge. The Europeans don’t need America’s protection.

  Yet U.S.-dominated NATO expanded through Central and Eastern Europe up to Russia’s borders. The new members added to Washington’s defense responsibilities without providing countervailing military benefits. Most notable were the Baltic States, which have troubled relations with large ethnic-Russian populations. Existing members never seriously considered the possibility that adding new members could lead to war with Russia.

  Now the newly fearful Baltics and Poland are demanding “reassurance” that they will be defended by the original members, meaning the United States. These countries want permanent garrisons, which would act as tripwires ensuring that Washington will come to their defense if Moscow attacks.

  While the alliance didn’t approve such deployments, member governments took a number of steps, which, explained Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, demonstrated that “NATO protects all allies, at all times. And it sends a clear message to any potential aggressor: should you even think of attacking one ally, you will be facing the whole alliance.” This means America is willing to risk war with a nuclear-armed power to protect countries that matter little for U.S. security.

  Yet expansion may not be over. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Georgia all want in. (Ukraine may join the parade, but until recently, both the government and public rejected the idea after a previous government applied for membership.) The first three matter little; they are small states threatened by no one and irrelevant to U.S. security. There’s no reason to induct them, but doing so likely would have little impact, positive or negative, on U.S. security.

  Far more problematic is Georgia’s candidacy. Tbilisi has long courted NATO, even providing troops for the allies’ Kosovo mission. After the “Rose Revolution” the Saakashvili government accelerated cooperation with NATO and hired an adviser to Sen. John McCain as a lobbyist. At the April 2008 NATO summit, alliance leaders agreed that Georgia would eventually become a member.

  Although the process then was derailed by the latter’s war with Russia, Tbilisi continued to press forward. Before the latest summit, Georgia’s ambassador to the United States, Archil Gegeshidze, argued that “the United States and NATO should …voice their support for Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations and provide a clear path for Georgia’s NATO membership.” Vice President Joe Biden met with Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili and issued a statement supporting “Georgia’s NATO-membership aspirations.”

  Although the allies did not approve a “membership action plan” or formal accession path for Georgia, they agreed to a “Defense Capacity Building Initiative” which, said Rasmussen, was “to reinforce our commitment to partner nations.” Citing Tbilisi’s cooperation with NATO, alliance members offered Tbilisi a promise of “Enhanced Partner” status. NATO’s “substantive package,” explained NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “will help Georgia advance in its preparations towards membership of NATO.” Rasmussen emphasized the desire to “enhance our cooperation.” The alliance intends to hold military exercises and create a training facility in Georgia.

  Moreover, the White House announced that it was “working closely with NATO to develop more robust assistance and engagement programs” for Georgia, among other nations. The administration pointed to the U.S. European Reassurance Initiative, which was intended to build Tbilisi’s capacity “to provide for their own defense and increase interoperability with Western forces.” The United States planned “to intensify security assistance over the longer term.”

  Nevertheless, NATO membership is not assured and Tbilisi remains frustrated with its slow progress. Before the summit, explained Defense Minister Irakli Alasania: “there’s a sense of disappointment in general that we’ve performed and contributed more than some NATO members.”

  Georgia’s allies also are pushing for more. For instance, argued the Heritage Foundation’s Luke Coffey, the alliance should make clear that “As long as it meets the strict criteria, Georgia’s future is in NATO.” He urged continued training exercises as “a visible sign of NATO’s support.”

  Yet no one in Washington seems to be asking the most important question: would adding Tbilisi to NATO make America more secure internationally?

  Military alliances are not social organizations or gentlemen’s clubs. Rather, military alliances are supposed to enhance the security of their members. Which means the United States should only agree to add new defense dependents if doing so would better protect America or otherwise advance significant American interests. Bringing Georgia into the alliance would not do so.

  The country is of no intrinsic strategic interest to the United States. Georgia was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Washington never saw a need to promote Tbilisi’s independence. Georgia’s recent warm embrace of the United States does not increase the country’s geopolitical importance to America. Tbilisi’s relations with Russia raise humanitarian, not strategic, issues. Having another friendly regime on the Black Sea would be convenient for Washington, but would offer few meaningful benefits.

  Gegeshidze argued that moving Georgia toward NATO membership would “increase stability and security in the region.” That would be true only if Moscow was thereby deterred from taking military action, including the asymmetrical forms of war employed in Ukraine. However, history is littered with examples of alliances that fail to deter adversaries.

  Russia’s interest in Georgia will always be several magnitudes greater than America’s interest, which means Moscow will both risk more than America and doubt Washington’s willingness to go to war. Equally important, a security commitment could embolden Georgia to challenge Moscow. And any resulting conflict would be far more likely to draw in the United States.

  Moreover, Georgia celebrates its role as America’s domestique in the latter’s misguided attempts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Tbilisi also has contributed independently to European military missions.) Bush administration aide Damon Wilson argued that it “would be incredibly shortsighted to wash our hands of” nations that backed America. Similarly, Coffey wrote: “The Georgians have earned this support.”

  But Tbilisi’s contributions—though obviously welcome—do not warrant a U.S. defense commitment. Georgia’s Afghan contingent is significant for such a small nation, but would remain of limited benefit to the United States, even if that war was worthwhile.

  Ironically, these efforts risk Tbilisi’s ability to deter Russian adventurism. Participation in war has given Georgian military personnel combat experience, but the country is configuring its forces for U.S.-oriented missions. For instance, last year, Tbilisi announced its intention to shift toward an antiterrorism workforce as part of the NATO doctrine of “Smart Defense,” leaving more conventional defense to others. Georgia should not give up defending against Russia in hopes that the United States and other members will fill the gap.

  There’s also the international pique argument. Retired Adm. James Stavridis, former military commander of NATO, contended that it’s important to “show the Russians that Russia doesn’t get a vote on who gets into NATO.” No doubt, one shouldn’t let a potential adversary dictate with whom one allies. However, the likelihood of conflict between a potential nuclear-armed adversary and a potential ally of no strategic importance should affect Washington’s assessment of the security value of an alliance. In this case, the costs would be far greater than the benefits for America.

  Georgia has offered to exclude Abkhazia and South Ossetia, separatist territories backed by Russia, from the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee and made a “non-use of force” pledge toward the two. However, having promised to defend Georgia, the United States could not easily renege based on its assessment of Tbilisi’s behavior in a complex international confrontation. One can imagine the cries of lost credibility from the war lobby if Washington left a treaty ally in the lurch.

  Yet politics in Tbilisi inflates the risks of offering Georgia a security guarantee. Some of those most enamored of confrontation with Moscow have accused Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party, which ousted former president Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement from power two years ago, of being pro-Russian. With the growth of fears of Hungary and nationalist parties in Europe acting as an effective Fifth Column, why add another possible one?

  Moreover, the United States has criticized the Georgian government for charging former president Saakashvili and several of his aides for misbehavior while in office. Apparent political motivation does not mean the charges are unjustified, but the prosecution suggests a lack of political maturity and potential for instability that are undesirable in an alliance partner.

  Anyway, we have a dramatic example of Georgian recklessness vis-à-vis Russia: the 2008 war. Who was “right” in this dispute is hard to say, since there long has been antagonism between Georgia and the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia used the dispute for its own ends, but that doesn’t justify Georgia’s actions.

  President Saakashvili evidently was determined to win back the territories with force. His own officials indicated that they discounted the likelihood of Russian intervention and expected U.S. support. Georgia’s role was affirmed by a European investigative commission after the conflict. Reported Spiegel online: “a majority of members tend to arrive at the assessment that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili started the war by attacking South Ossetia on August 7, 2008. The facts assembled … refute Saakashvili’s claim that his country became the innocent victim of ‘Russian aggression’ on that day.” Retired British Col. Christopher Langton said: “Georgia’s dream is shattered, but the country can only blame itself for that.”

  NATO apparently had its suspicions. Spiegel online reported:

  “One thing was already clear to the officers at NATO headquarters in Brussels: They thought that the Georgians had started the conflict and that their actions were more calculated than pure self-defense or a response to Russian provocation. In fact, the NATO officers believed that the Georgian attack was a calculated offensive against South Ossetian positions to create the facts on the ground.”

  Nor was the Bush administration ignorant. The panel pointed to a remark by then assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried that President Saakashvili “went out of control.” Imagine the behavior of Tbilisi had it been a member of NATO.

  There is much to admire in Georgia’s effort to forge a separate and free national existence. Given its history and location, the task was never going to be easy. But natural sympathy is no argument for bringing Tbilisi into NATO. Washington should reserve the promise to go to war for countries vital for American security. Georgia is not one of those countries.

  Why Washington continues to defend populous and prosperous allies such as the European states is not obvious. With a greater collective GDP and population, the Europeans should be defending America. In any case, the United States should not add new defense dependents, such as Georgia, that would bring far more security risks than geopolitical benefits.

  Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire (Xulon).

  

  

  

  9/9/2014

• How Self-Driving Cars Will Enable Greater School Choice

  Jason Bedrick

  Jason Bedrick

  Transportation is one of the most significant roadblocks to exercising educational choice, especially for low-income families. But a new technology promises to greatly expand the number of schools that are logistically feasible for students to attend.

  “Transportation is one of the most significant roadblocks to exercising educational choice, especially for low-income families.”

  A 2009 study by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) found that one quarter of all families and one third of low-income families in Denver and Washington D.C. “did not enroll their child in the school they preferred due to transportation difficulties.” Nearly half of private school and charter school parents in the sample reported school commutes of 20 minutes or more. Moreover, it’s likely that transportation poses an even larger obstacle in rural areas.

  Fortunately, there is a technological innovation with the potential to make transportation safer, faster, and more affordable while solving numerous logistical challenges: self-driving cars.

  The largely self-driving car is no longer just a vision, thanks to rapid advances in lasers, radar, GPS and mapping databases. If it weren’t for fear among innovators of getting too far ahead of U.S. laws and regulations, there would already be cars on the road doing almost as much driving as humans.

  Google cofounder Sergey Brin recently predicted that self-driving (or “driverless”) cars would be a reality within five years, and now GM has announced a self-driving Cadillac will be available within two years. And like power windows, climate control, and airbags, innovations that begin as luxuries for the rich soon become standard features.

  Self-driving cars will be able to respond to surroundings much faster than human reflexes, allowing for greater safety at much greater speeds. That will cut down on commute times, or allow people to work—or send their kids to school—further from home with the same commute time. Moreover, freed from the need to focus on the road, time spent commuting could be much more productive.

  With commutes shorter and more productive, the distance that parents will consider logistically feasible will significantly increase. That could exponentially expand the number of educational options that parents consider within driving distance. Using Private School Review’s search feature, I found 12 private schools within three miles of my Arizona home, 34 schools within five miles, 69 schools within ten miles, 234 schools within 25 miles, and 304 schools within 50 miles. Now that’s choice!

  Self-driving cars will also dramatically improve the mobility of people who are unable to drive (or drive safely), whether because of age, disability, or intoxication. As Dan McLaughlin described at The Federalist:

  A child old enough to ride a bicycle or take the subway unescorted could be old enough to take a driverless car trip, especially assuming […] improvements in anti-theft technologies and the impossibility of even moving the car without being tracked.

  In a recent EconTalk podcast, Professors Russ Roberts and Mike Munger discussed the potential for combining self-driving cars with “sharing economy” innovations like Uber. Uber is a smartphone app that allows users to summon a nearby driver quickly and efficiently. In the not-so-distant future, people will be able to summon a self-driving car almost instantaneously. As Roberts explained:

  When you punched into the Uber App you’d say: I need to go to the airport with my four kids and my 7 suitcases, so send the shuttle; whereas, today I’m going by myself, so bring the mini. You’d have all these different options. You’d choose which one you wanted to come. There’s no reason to own a car any more. You start thinking about that: there’s no reason to have a garage. There’s no reason to have parking lots downtown.

  With no driver and fewer accidents, these self-driving taxis will be less expensive to operate than taxis with human drivers. At some point, it will likely be less expensive to summon a self-driving car when needed than to pay for the gas, maintenance, insurance, registration fees, parking fees, etc. required to own a vehicle that sits unused for most of the day. Suddenly it will be logistically feasible for parents with three kids to send them to three different schools in three different directions.

  Unfortunately, government regulators are putting the breaks on innovations like Uber and self-driving cars. As L. Gordon Crovitz recently lamented in the Wall Street Journal: “If fast-moving technology hadn’t collided with slow-moving regulators, this might have been the last summer you’d have to drive your own car.”

  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has warned states not to allow fully self-driving cars, like the one Google is developing, except for testing purposes. The agency says it’s working on a study that will take at least until 2017. Regulators say they’ll release performance metrics for self-driving features, then run the tests, then issue regulations, and only then permit sales. Meanwhile, the agency has delayed a plan by Tesla to replace traditional side mirrors with more effective cameras.

  Every month lost to regulatory gridlock causes real harm. Human error causes more than 90% of car accidents, leading to more than 30,000 deaths in the U.S. annually. The economic cost of accidents is more than $200 billion a year, representing more than 2% of GDP.

  Every year’s delay also prevents a large number of parents from selecting the school that works best for their kids. Fortunately, while the fully autonomous cars may be another five to ten years away, semi-autonomous vehicles that can take over on the highway or in bumper-to-bumper traffic are just around the corner.

  It’s impossible to know all the ways that the advent of self-driving cars will transform society, but the great potential for saving lives, improving efficiency, and expanding educational options is cause for excitement. Combined with educational choice programs, a society in which all children have access to hundreds of educational options may soon be a reality.

  Jason Bedrick is an education-policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

  

  

  

  9/9/2014

• Hong Kong, an Aspirational Society to Emulate

  Richard W. Rahn

  Richard W. Rahn

  Why is Hong Kong succeeding while New York City is receding? They are both world-class cities with about the same per-capita income and great natural harbors. New York is about 15 percent larger in population, while Hong Kong is about one-third larger in area (but unbuildable because of the steep terrain). Both have large immigrant populations who are seeking better lives.

  In my column last week, I explained how much of Hong Kong’s success was a result of it having the freest economy in the world, with low levels of government spending, low tax rates, a minimum of government regulation and the rule of law. There is more.

  Hong Kong has a murder rate one-fourteenth that of New York (and New York is one of the safest cities in the world) and one-forty-second that of Chicago. There were only 27 murders in Hong Kong last year, while New York had slightly more than 400. Hong Kong is much cleaner than New York and virtually free of graffiti. Unlike in New York, most of the infrastructure is attractive and in good repair. By most measures of human development, Hong Kong scores higher than New York, notably life span, which is a good proxy for the quality of the health care system. Hong Kong ranks at the top for life expectancy, while the United States is well down the list.

  “Hong Kong, like Singapore, South Korea, Chile and Switzerland are aspirational societies, rather than societies consumed with envy, like France. ”

  Hong Kong, like Singapore, South Korea, Chile and Switzerland are aspirational societies, rather than societies consumed with envy, like France. Work, saving and investment are not punished in aspirational societies, and there tend to be less social conflict and a higher level of civility. The United States used to be an aspirational society, but has increasingly become an envious society. (It was U.S. venture capitalist Terry Anker who first used the term “aspirational society” to describe Hong Kong during our meetings in this glorious city this past week. It is a more inclusive term than “opportunity society” that Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp frequently used to describe their vision for the United States.)

  Per-capita spending on government in Hong Kong is less than one half of what the average New Yorker spends to support the various levels of government. If you make it big in New York, the government is going to claim about half of your income. If you make it big in Hong Kong, the government will only claim 15 percent of your income. Entrepreneurs, business risk-takers and skilled business people are not punished by the tax-and-regulatory system in Hong Kong the way they are in New York. Despite minimal economic regulation, people in Hong Kong are no more likely to suffer from dangerous or bad products than those in New York, and their financial markets arguably work better. Hong Kong is also both more functional and attractive than New York — but housing costs are higher.

  Critics point out that there is much inequality in income in Hong Kong, and that is true. However, it’s also true of New York, where the politicians seem to think the solution is to punish the rich. In Hong Kong, most people appear to think the solution is for the poor to get rich — because it is an aspirational society, not an envious society. The government in Hong Kong does not impede it citizens from getting rich. It helps them by providing the legal, structural and institutional framework so they can succeed.

  According to the leftist orthodox model, Hong Kong should have higher unemployment, more homeless and more people on the streets begging than New York because, in their view, the government is too small to provide. Yet, again, the opposite is true. Hong Kong has full employment; in fact, there is a labor shortage, and few are begging.

  The world has been amazed by the rate of economic growth in China over the past 35 years. What is often overlooked is that back in 1949, when the communists conquered China, both China and Hong Kong were equally poor, but Hong Kong was free. Despite China’s success, those in Hong Kong today enjoy an average income four to five times higher than those next door in China. China has gone from an economic system based on envy to an increasingly aspirational one, in large part because it had the example of Hong Kong’s aspirational social and economic system, which was clearly superior.

  The peaceful demonstrations this past week in Hong Kong against China’s insistence of approving the candidates for the first direct elections for head of the Hong Kong government made news around the globe. This dictum was in violation of the basic law agreed to when the United Kingdom turned over Hong Kong to China in 1997 — one country, two systems. The leaders of China understand that aspirational societies work and those based on envy do not — but an aspirational society requires both economic freedom and individual liberty. Those who seek to control the lives of others, whether they are in Beijing, Paris or Washington, fear aspirational societies and thus, seek to regulate them — out of existence.

  Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

  

  

  

  9/9/2014

• Well-Armed Turkey Aided Rise of Islamic State: Yet NATO Promises to Defend Ankara from Extremists

  Doug Bandow

  Doug Bandow

  Apparently America believes its allies to be wimps and weaklings. Why else would NATO officials promise to defend Turkey from the Islamic State? Surely this well-armed U.S. ally can hold off a few thousand Islamic irregulars. Some of whom Ankara allowed to enter Syria, where they were trained and received battlefield experience.

  The rise of the Islamic State has led to much nonsense from Washington officials who speak as if several thousand armed Islamists were capable of carrying out the group’s threat to plant its flag on the White House. ISIL is made up of dangerous fanatics, but in the form of the Islamic State they are largely powerless to harm America. Their conventional capabilities are minimal compared to those of the U.S. or its allies, and so long as the Islamists are attempting to conquer territory they cannot afford to launch terrorist attacks on America, which would bring down the full wrath of the U.S. military on the return address they had so thoughtfully provided.

  ISIL fighters threaten some Middle Eastern states, but mainly those already weakened by other factors. Syria descended into a bitter, multi-sided civil war three years ago. Sectarian governance undermined Iraq’s government and military, and spurred non-Islamist Sunni support for ISIL. Jordan has been overrun with refugees and long has enjoyed an uneasy peace between Palestinians and Hashemite monarchy. Get the Islamic State’s targets to work together and the radicals are doomed.

  Also targeted by ISIL is Turkey. This led NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen to promise to defend Ankara: “If any of our allies, and in this case of course particularly Turkey, were to be threatened from any source of threat, we won’t hesitate to take all steps necessary to ensure effective defense of Turkey or any other ally.”

  As a statement of solidarity Rasmussen’s words might offer comfort. As a guide to Western policy the statement makes no sense.

  “Turkey and other nations should be held responsible for their past policies.”

  After all, Ankara is partly to blame for ISIL’s rise. The Erdogan government long ago decided to support the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Ankara allowed opposition fighters from all sides easy access to the battlefield. None were too brutal or radical to bar passage. This included ISIL, which gained strength and resources by conquering Syrian territory. Reported the Washington Post: “eager to aid any and all enemies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey rolled out the red carpet.” The government simply looked the other way as members of the Islamic State and other Islamist groups traveled to Syria.

  Indeed, added the Post, Islamic State fighters treated the border town of Reyhanli, Turkey “as their own personal shopping mall.” Local residents acknowledged jihadis purchasing supplies and wounded fighters being treated in local hospitals. One Islamic State commander told the Post: “We used to have some fighters—even high-level members of the Islamic State—getting treated in Turkish hospitals. And also, most of the fighters who joined us in the beginning of the war came via Turkey, and so did our equipment and supplies.” A politician from Reyhanli, Tamer Apis, complained that the government “welcomed anyone against Assad, and now they are killing, spreading their disease, and we are all paying the price.” While there was a lot of blame to go around, “this is a mess of Turkey’s making,” he added.

  That Turkey might suffer some unfortunate complications from the bitter civil war next door should not surprise. Blowback is a constant of Middle Eastern policy, irrespective of government. But Ankara knowingly chose to play with fire. The Erdogan government since has changed course, confronting insurgents it once welcomed and attempting to close off what has been called the “jihadist” or “jihadi” highway. But passage for people and materiel through the 565-mile border still is available at a price.

  Moreover, the worst damage has been done. Reported Bloomberg’s Mehul Srivastava and Selcan Hacaoglu, ISIL “has already established itself firmly in Turkish society.” The group has gained control of Syrian territory and expanded into Iraq, where it grabbed 49 Turkish diplomats and family members. The Islamic State military leader explained: “Now we are getting enough weapons from Iraq, and there is enough to buy even within Syria. There is no real need to get things from outside anymore.”

  In all of this Turkey is paying the price of its own folly. There’s no reason to share the burden with 27 other NATO members. Better to hold Ankara accountable for its actions by leaving it responsible for its self-inflicted wounds.

  Especially since Turkey can well handle the fall-out. Assume ISIL is ready to launch a Blitzkrieg against Turkey. Why can’t Ankara defeat the effort?

  ISIL’s size, funding, reach, and capacity are hard to judge. Without doubt the group has created an effective fighting force, which has been enriched by its capture of U.S. military equipment along the way. Nevertheless, the number of ISIL fighters has been estimated at around 10,000. Even if you double or triple that number it is inconsequential compared to the armed forces fielded by Turkey.

  The latter has an armed forces of more than a half million. The army has some 400,000 personnel in uniform. The air force deploys two tactical air forces, including ten ground attack squadrons. The Institute for Strategic Studies reported: “The army is becoming smaller but more capable … The air force is well-equipped and well-trained … the military has ambitious procurement plans.”

  This force dwarfs anything which the Islamic State possesses, let alone could deploy against Ankara’s military. Why would NATO have to protect Turkey?

  Indeed, Ankara should be thinking offense. The Erdogan government is part of NATO’s “core coalition” targeting ISIL. Why are U.S. planes and drones striking Islamic radicals operating next door to Turkey when Ankara’s forces could take the lead? If the Islamic State consolidates its position, Turkey is likely to be a site for the group’s expanded activities. Last year ISIL troops told a captured Turkish photojournalist that Erdogan and other top officials were “infidels” and claimed that “Turkey is next.” One insurgent brigade was made up mostly of Turks.

  Political leaders in Washington and Brussels alike seem to confuse defense with welfare. If a U.S.-led NATO still has relevance today, it is to confront major threats which require a collective response. America, since NATO really stands for North America and The Others, should focus on tasks that no one else can perform, such as deterring a (currently nonexistent) hegemon.

  ISIL is evil, but that does not make it a serious military threat against America. The Islamic State is a much more significant threat against Middles Eastern states, such as Turkey. These nations also hold the key to its defeat. They have the interest and capability. They also have the credibility, as Islamic nations themselves.

  All that’s lacking is the necessity. If Washington or NATO rushes in to relieve them of responsibility, they likely won’t act. For once Turkey and other nations should be held responsible for their past policies.

  Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire. (Xulon Press).

  

  

  

  8/9/2014

• SSDI Reform: A New Benefit Structure to Encourage Work by Individuals with Disabilities

  Jagadeesh Gokhale

  Jagadeesh Gokhale

  With annual benefit payments projected to consistently exceed revenues, the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program will become insolvent in 2016. Apart from its financial problems, however, the program is structurally unsound: Its rules induce those who could work despite medical impairments to exit the labor force and apply for benefits. SSDI’s application and approval procedures are lengthy, costly, and inefficient, often allowing those with residual work capabilities into the program. SSDI’s rules trap claimants into permanently remaining idle or underemployed for fear of losing benefits and low-cost Medicare coverage. In view of the considerable and growing uncertainties involved in determining whether medical impairments imply inability to work, it would be advantageous to change SSDI’s benefit structure: We should pay beneficiaries to work, if they can, rather than remain idle.

  “The program is structurally unsound: its rules induce those who could work despite medical impairments to exit the labor force and apply for benefits.”

  Disability is rarely all-or-nothing with individuals either capable of working or not but the law requires SSDI officials to make discrete “yes or no” decisions on allowances. Hence, some analysts are proposing a “partial-benefits-for-partial-disability” system that would permit beneficiaries to work and receive benefits. But such a system will also require a bureaucratic determination of each applicant’s degree of work-disability — something inherently difficult for many types of medical impairments such as mental health, back pain, and so on. If benefit levels for disability grades are set too low or if adjudication errors abound, deserving applicants would be harmed. If benefits are too generous, yet more individuals with slight medical impairments may choose to apply. In view of SSDI’s current struggles with “policy compliance,” it’s difficult to believe that system performance would improve under a partial benefits system.

  Under current SSDI rules, benefit eligibility depends on proving that an applicant’s medical impairment prevents earning at the Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA) level of $1,070 per month for at least one year. It means applicants must exit the work force or, at least, reduce earnings to less than SGA. And continuation of benefits depends upon claimants’ medical conditions remaining consistent with inability to work at or above SGA, again compelling claimants to remain idle or underemployed. Thus, work disincentives are integral to SSDI as currently constituted. Although studies have shown that up to 40 percent of SSDI claimants are work oriented — wishing, intending, and hoping to return to work to improve their living standards — conventional wisdom holds that there is no way to achieve two goals simultaneously: Provide support to the disabled and maintain robust work incentives for claimants who are willing and able to work.

  Fortunately, that conventional wisdom is wrong. There is a way of incentivizing work among SSDI claimants if SSDI’s benefits are structured differently: Switched from paying claimants to remain idle to paying them to work. This could be accomplished simply by replacing the current trust fund (TF) benefit by a work-incentive benefit (WIB). The extent of the substitution of WIB for TF should be based on beneficiaries’ observed earnings and calibrated so that more earnings yield a stronger boost to their total income.

  The prospect of increasing incomes by more than earnings through work would induce SSDI claimants to re-enter the work force — but only if they can be assured of financial security: Those who cannot work must receive the full TF benefit and those who choose to work must be guaranteed full restoration of the TF benefit (reversing the switch to WIB) upon job separations from worsening medical conditions or deteriorating labor markets. Such a benefit substitution is likely to involve a very small budget cost — because WIB would be almost fully offset by reductions in TF and is not an additional benefit. And the cost would be positive only if beneficiaries work and contribute more to the economy.

  The key advantage of introducing such a benefit structure is to divorce support for the disabled from their incentive to work and earn, if they can, despite their medical impairments. It would help many SSDI claimants to improve their living standards and gain from the social and psychological advantages of work engagement, self-determination, and economic independence. It would also be easy to administer and would require less policing for unlawful work activity by claimants. The larger earnings of SSDI claimants would increase payroll tax revenues and also increase their future Social Security retirement benefits. GBO is unlikely to induce significant additional entry into SSDI by those with medical impairments who continue to work today because the benefit design would confer an advantage to delaying the decision to apply to SSDI. Moreover, this system is likely to reduce “hidden unemployment” and increase the nation’s productivity and output.

  Jagadeesh Gokhale is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Social Security: A Fresh Look at Policy Alternatives.

  

  

  

  8/9/2014

• Planning for the Real Future: Self-Driving Cars

  Randal O'Toole

  Randal O'Toole

  Now that the streetcar has been put on hold, San Antonio needs an informed discussion about the future of mobility in the region. That future is very different depending on whether you look through the eyes of Google or those of urban planners.

  Google and other companies are producing new technologies that will vastly increase mobility, while planners seek to reduce mobility. Google’s vision is that self-driving cars will go on the market by 2020, leading to a new transportation revolution.

  By 2030, some new cars won’t even have the option of being driven by humans. By 2040, self-driving cars will so dominate the roads that many states will close highways to human-driven cars for safety reasons. Today’s millennials will be in their 40s and 50s in 2040, and any rail project San Antonio may have spent billions to build will have long become obsolete.

  “San Antonio should reject smart-growth plans based on the immobile past and instead look to a future of vastly increased mobility.”

  By reducing congestion, self-driving cars will allow more people to live in inner cities without the hassles of parking or stop-and-go traffic. But they will also allow more people to live in distant suburbs even if it means long commutes because they’ll be able to work during those commutes.

  Self-driving cars will completely transform our society, yet planners for neither the city of San Antonio nor the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization have considered the effects of self-driving cars in any of their long-range plans. Instead, they are focused on so-called “smart-growth” policies that actually aim to reduce mobility.

  Under such policies, 8-mile-per-hour streetcars are preferred over 70-mile-per-hour freeways. Smart-growth planners in Washington state have actually set targets of reducing per capita driving by 50 percent.

  Such plans threaten the mobility that is vital to our economy and our personal freedom. The automobile gives people access to higher-paying jobs, lower-cost consumer goods, better housing and many other things that can’t be reached by transit, bicycles or walking.

  By comparison, transit is slow, inconvenient, and irrelevant to most people: only 1 percent of all trips and less than 3.5 percent of commuter trips in San Antonio are by transit. More San Antonians now telecommute than take transit.

  Although transit is often presented as a way of helping low-income people, Americans who make more than $75,000 a year are more likely to use transit than Americans who make less than $25,000 a year. Studies have found that the most cost-effective way of helping someone out of poverty is to give them access to a low-cost car, while a free transit pass provides almost no help.

  Transit is also expensive, costing four times as much per passenger mile as driving when all subsidies to transit and highways are counted. This means car-sharing of self-driving cars is likely to replace most transit in the future.

  Why stand in the heat waiting for a bus or a clunky streetcar when, for a lower overall cost, you can have a car pick you up at your door and take you straight to your destination? If we are still worried about low-income families, giving them transportation vouchers will do more for their mobility than spending hundreds of millions on streetcars or light rail.

  Nor is transit greener than driving. VIA’s buses actually use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average SUV. By 2025, the average car on the road will be more energy efficient than even the nation’s most efficient transit systems.

  Unable to predict the effects of self-driving cars on future cities, planners instead plan for the past, and try to impose that past through a combination of subsidies and regulation. San Antonio should reject smart-growth plans based on the immobile past and instead look to a future of vastly increased mobility.

  Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute and author of “Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.” Jeff Judson is a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute and a local leader of the Streetcar Vote Coalition.

  

  

  

  5/9/2014

• Religious Liberty Sprouts in China

  Doug Bandow

  Doug Bandow

  Today, China’s big cities look much like urban areas anywhere in the world. There are lots of cars.

  What I didn’t expect was to see a Christian “fish” on an auto. Religion is “on the rise,” one U.S. diplomat told me.

  It also is under attack by the Chinese government. When it comes to religious liberty in the People’s Republic of China, there’s the (surprisingly frequent) good, (not so constant) bad, and (still too often) ugly.

  China turned hostile to Christianity after the 1949 revolution. The PRC has routinely been ranked among the worst religious persecutors.

  “When it comes to religious liberty in the People’s Republic of China, there’s the (surprisingly frequent) good, (not so constant) bad, and (still too often) ugly.”

  For instance, Beijing is listed on the Hall of Shame from International Christian Concern. China makes the Open Doors World Watch List. The State Department labels the PRC a “country of particular concern.”

  In its latest report on religious liberty, State observed: “The government exercised state control over religion and restricted the activities and personal freedom of religious adherents when these were perceived, even potentially, to threaten state or Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interests, including social stability. The government harassed, assaulted, detained, arrested, or sentenced to prison a number of religious adherents.”

  Nevertheless, the experience varied geographically: “In some parts of the country, however, local authorities tacitly approved of or did not interfere with the activities of unregistered groups.”

  The group China Aid, headed by Bob Fu, a former house church pastor, compiled a list of incidents. The authorities in Zhejiang province have been particularly repressive. In April, the province destroyed a 4,000-seat facility in the city of Sanjiang.

  Provincial officials pointed to the zoning laws to justify this and similar actions elsewhere, but Renee Zia of Chinese Human Rights Defenders argued that it was just “an excuse for the current wave of clamping down on Christian churches.” The government’s real concern is Christianity’s growth. Provincial party chief Xia Baolong reportedly complained that Christian symbols were too “conspicuous.”

  Christianity and Islam, centered outside of China, are seen as particularly suspect. However, Shannon Tiezzi of the Diplomat contended that increasing government pressure should be seen in the context of the larger crackdown on liberty.

  Still, the situation in the PRC is far better than it was even a decade or two ago. Last year, China Aid concluded that 7,424 people were victimized in 143 cases. That is too many, but with tens of millions of believers, it actually is a relatively small number. The majority of persecution cases, wrote blogger Renee Riley, involved Christians who “were either engaged in activity which the government perceived as a threat, or they ran afoul of the economic or political interests of corrupt local leaders.”

  Open Doors most recently ranked Beijing at No. 37 of 50 on its World Watch List, but China was in the top 10 only a decade ago. The organization reported that the government has “chosen not to strictly control Christian activities in most regions in China,” and that the majority of churches “are not registered, but tolerated.”

  The number of Christians was estimated in 2011 by Pew Research at 67 million and likely is much higher today. There already may be more Christians than Chinese Communist Party members, and the figure could reach 247 million Christians by 2030.

  The PRC hopes to constrain Christianity by forcing it into a “patriotic” channel. For instance, Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, stated that “[t]he construction of Chinese Christian theology should adapt to China’s national condition and integrate with Chinese culture.”

  Nevertheless, the PRC may not find it easy to create a Sinicized Christianity. I attended the 800-member Beijing Chaoyang Church. There were 70 baptisms on the day I attended. The church is state-sanctioned, but the sermon seemed orthodox theologically. (Simultaneous translation was provided for foreigners.)

  My friend Phil Sheldon, who regularly attends the church with his Chinese wife, spoke positively of his experience. He earlier wrote: “I have seen and heard Christianity expressed in public. I have been in restaurants with Christian music playing. I was moved to tears the first time I heard a real Christmas carol proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord in English, coming through the background music loud and clear. I have seen people sitting out in public, witnessing over a dog-eared, well-marked Bible.”

  And then there’s that car sporting a “fish.”

  Even some CCP members recognize the challenge. Admitted Mr. Wang: “If we rush to try to push for results and want to immediately ‘liberate’ people from the influence of religion, then it will have the opposite effect.” In the PRC today, people are ever less willing to worship the false god of communism.

  Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of “Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway, 1988).

  

  

  

  5/9/2014

• My Turn: Court Decision a Victory for Parents, Students, Taxpayers

  Jason Bedrick

  Jason Bedrick

  Last week’s unanimous New Hampshire Supreme Court decision to reject the challenge against an educational choice law is a victory for Granite State families and taxpayers generally.

  The law expands educational opportunity by granting tax credits to corporations worth 85 percent of their donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations. These nonprofits, like the Network for Educational Opportunity, help low- and middle-income parents pay tuition at a private school or an out-of-district public school or cover certain home-schooling expenses.

  Anti-school choice activists contended that the law violates the New Hampshire constitution’s historically anti-Catholic “Blaine Amendment,” which bars the government from allocating public money to religious schools. A trial court judge partially agreed, upholding the law but limiting the scholarships to secular schools.

  “The court’s decision clears the way for the scholarship program to achieve its full potential, expanding educational options for New Hampshire families so they can live free and learn.”

  Last week, the state Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s ruling and threw out the challenge entirely, holding that the petitioners had no standing because they failed to show “that some right of theirs has been prejudiced or impaired as a result of the program’s implementation.”

  A few years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court likewise rejected the standing of petitioners challenging a similar scholarship tax credit law in Arizona. The court ruled that tax credits, like tax deductions and tax exemptions, are not “public money” because the funds do not “come into the tax collector’s hands.” Private corporations voluntarily donate to private nonprofits that aid private citizens — at no point does the government control or direct those funds.

  No reasonable person believes that a church is “publicly funded” because donors who support it receive a charitable tax deduction, or even because the church receives a 100 percent property tax exemption. Likewise, the aid that families receive from scholarship organizations is not “public money” just because corporate donors received a partial tax credit.

  The court’s decision means parents will have greater access to educational options, which translates into greater parental satisfaction. In a survey of scholarship recipients last year, nearly 97 percent of families reported being satisfied with their chosen learning environment, including 90 percent who were “very satisfied.”

  Parental choice also improves educational performance because schools are held directly accountable to parents. Just months into the program, more than two-thirds of parents reported seeing “measurable improvement in academic achievement.”

  One parent described crying on multiple occasions as she watched her daughter “reach new highs” with improved confidence and academic performance at her new school.

  High-quality research demonstrates that expanding access to educational options improves student outcomes. Eleven of 12 random-assignment studies — the gold standard of social science research — found that choice programs benefited all or some categories of students, especially those who were the least advantaged. Participating students performed better academically, and were more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. One study found no statistically significant difference and none found a negative impact.

  The court’s decision is a clear win for parents and students, but it’s also a win for taxpayers.

  A 2012 fiscal impact analysis by the Josiah Bartlett Center (my former employer) found that, if fully utilized, the scholarship program would save $8 million over the course of two state budgets. That’s because the law caps scholarships at $2,500 on average, which is considerably less than the state’s contribution to local public schools of roughly $4,000 per pupil, and only a small fraction of the average $15,600 per pupil spent by public schools statewide.

  Sadly, the misguided legal challenge prevented taxpayers from realizing those savings and, worse, prevented many families from receiving scholarships. The lawsuit created an uncertainty about the law’s future that scared away donors. This year, the Network for Education raised barely a quarter of the funds that they raised last year as a direct result of the lawsuit.

  The good news is that the court’s decision clears the way for the scholarship program to achieve its full potential, expanding educational options for New Hampshire families so they can live free and learn.

  Jason Bedrick is an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. Ken Ardon is assistant professor of economics at Salem State University.

  

  

  

  5/9/2014

• SimCity Progressives

  Jason Kuznicki

  Jason Kuznicki

  In 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture scrapped the Food Pyramid that it had promoted for nearly two decades. Split into six sections, the Food Pyramid rested on a hefty load of complex carbohydrates: 6–11 servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta.

  Oof.

  Whatever else one may say of it, the Food Pyramid was clear, specific, and so simple that even a child could understand it. But there was just one problem: Americans were getting fatter. Increasingly, nutritionists blamed the carbs.

  So out went the Food Pyramid, and in came MyPlate, a guide whose visual recommendations are so vague that anyone not deeply connected to the ongoing nutritional debate might have a hard time saying why it even exists or what it is trying to accomplish. Still, at least it doesn’t recommend the massive daily doses of pasta.

  Americans, being the good, obedient souls that they are, promptly started losing weight.

  GOVERNMENT-CENTRIC THINKING
  At least that’s the story told here in Washington, where all the right-thinking folks hold that every good outcome has a federal explanation. Here, it was the quite possibly improved federal nutrition guidelines, along with first lady Michelle Obama’s advocacy against childhood obesity.

  If the citizens are happy, then surely a bureaucrat is behind it, and it’s only a question of figuring out which one to thank. If they are sad, well, in this town, that’s just another word for opportunity.

  “Whatever our ideology, we all grew up playing governmentality games.”

  A more sensible take on obesity, of course, would be to note that no trend continues forever, not even American fatness. Reversion to the mean, while it hasn’t quite happened yet, ought never to surprise. Every trend continues until it can’t anymore. None go on forever.

  MyPlate serves as a good example of the sort of thinking I like to call “SimCity” progressivism. On this view, the government’s purpose is not necessarily to provide any particular goods or services, and not even (or only) the ones found in the Constitution.

  No, the government’s purpose is to carefully curate the lives of the citizens — adjusting here, pruning there, maybe not necessarily forbidding, but managing, down to the last exquisite detail. Rather like one might do in a government simulator, only in real life.

  NO ROOM FOR NON-MODEL CITIZENS
  The nanny state is nothing new, of course, but new data and new procedural tools are giving rise to new ways of thinking about government and its role in all of our lives. Gone are the big-isms of the 20th century, but in their place is the overwhelming propensity to micromanage with data.

  The goal of government would appear to be, in the words of criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield, “a world of tasteless, sanitary perfection.” Government exists to give us a life that is not merely evil-free or pain-free, but also risk-free and surprise-free as well. A managed, predictable life, rather like the life to be had inside a well-played game of “SimCity.”

  To a generation just a bit older than me, this punctiliousness may look neurotic and maybe even a little threatening. But people my age and younger might not even find it terribly surprising.

  We are a generation raised on video games. And in this new vast wasteland, not all of it terrible mind you, the genre of government simulators looms large. Whatever our ideology, we all grew up playing governmentality games:

  “SimCity,” or “Civilization,” or one of the many others like them. We learned from, and we were often persuaded by, these games.

  This is not to say that “SimCity” is the real or the only reason for the mess we’re in. Certainly not. It’s an artifact, albeit one of many, all of them speaking with nearly the same voice. Our governmentality games offer a vision of what many seemingly take for a better government than our own.

  Their biggest underlying claim is that human society is algorithmic: It can be modeled effectively with a set of mathematically defined procedures. True, computer games can hardly do otherwise, but to say that they simulate life is also in a sense to claim that life itself is algorithmic: Computers run models of citizens, and these models behave like… well, like model citizens.

  Now, mainstream economics has made great strides in understanding how societies work by assuming that humans really are algorithmic, and by trying to model their behavior accordingly. Sometimes the economists are right. But they are also very often wrong, and when they are, economists inevitably learn something interesting.

  PROCEDURAL PERSUASION
  By contrast, governmentality games’ algorithms implicitly make much, much stronger claims about how the real world works, and about the very best ways to run it. They stake these claims in large part by walking their players through procedures.

  Media studies professor Ian Bogost argues that procedural rhetoric is a key element of a well-realized video game. What’s that mean? Bogost writes:

  “[P]rocedural rhetoric is the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively. Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes… [I]ts arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, though the practice of programming.”

  Here’s the problem, one that seems to worry critics like Bogost, and that frankly worries me a bit as well: We’re all more or less aware of the tricks of verbal rhetoric. We also usually know when an image or a narrative is trying to sell us something. We’re all members of a capitalist, advertising-heavy society, and while I adore capitalism, I find that knowing how not to be persuaded is surely a survival skill in any capitalist economy (it may even be a virtue: Consumers get better at detecting baloney over time).

  We argue in words almost by nature. We do it in pictures, too: We love parodies of advertising posters, and no sketch comedy show post-“Saturday Night Live” would be complete without a few deadpanned mock-earnest commercials for horrid new products.

  But we’re a lot worse at picking apart procedural rhetorics, the very kinds found in video games. Here, the rhetoric is a thing we perform: We’re the stars of the production, the pilot in the cockpit, the all-seeing monarch who sends his troops into battle. We’re the city planners.

  Video games’ persuasive power has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the games are realistic. Right or wrong, players can still have fun, and be persuaded by, a simulation. How many of us can say for certain whether flight simulator games really simulate flight?

  The claim is at least questionable, and sometimes, the answer is clearly “no.” But it’s fair to surmise that plenty of people have been persuaded by flight simulators that they can fly.

  The same is true of the experience of managing a population. The experience, that is, of governing. Do our highly popular government simulators match reality? If not, how do they differ? And when they differ, what are they claiming about how the world should work?

  GOVERNING WITHOUT THE GOVERNED
  We know plenty of people have been drawn into urban planning by playing “SimCity.” Indeed, it’s almost a cliche of recent articles about “SimCity” to read one or more urban planners declaring, happily or sheepishly, that they came to the profession after managing “SimCity” simulations.

  To urban planners, “SimCity” is a bit of a guilty pleasure. As land use expert Ruben Duarte puts it:

  “In SimCity, as the Mayor (aka: Planning God), you have absolute dictatorial control over your city where your decisions are the correct ones. It’s a world where buildings rise and fall at your arbitrary whim. Neighbors don’t want a new commercial center downtown? Screw those NIMBYs and just demolish their buildings and put a park in their place to increase your commercial center’s land value. What planner wouldn’t want to take a bulldozer to their most ardent development hecklers? You need a city council approval to build a new airport? [Screw] that noise. I’m just going to plop one right here next to my high-speed rail station. Done.”

  The code itself, and the gameplay, both go considerably further than just making urban planning look like a whole lot of fun. Governmentality games like “SimCity” and “Civilization” also reflect norms about what government ought to be doing. They tell us how cities ought to look and how scientific and cultural advances ought to unfold. They tell us what problems the government is and is not equipped to tackle, and how nations ought to view one another and behave toward one another. They tell us how citizens should behave.

  Playing a governmentality game requires acting out these norms. Inevitably it means being rewarded for making sure the government really is the leading force in society. It often means making sure the citizens are kept in line, but more often, they stay there of their own accord. The legislator’s main job is to figure out what we the algorithm wants, and optimize.

  Playing the game also means being punished for doing the things the designers implicitly take to be incorrect in the real world: You say, as a player of the “Civilization” series, that you don’t want to spend state resources on scientific research? Bad idea! Think maybe “SimCity’s” zoning laws (and ours) are a big mistake? The game doesn’t even let you opt out of them. Want to legalize drugs — to save money, shrink the prisons, cut the violent crime rate, and make your Sims a little happier? Forget it. (You can, however, run an anti-drug campaign, which the Sims dutifully obey, quite unlike in our own world.) Legalized gambling raises the crime rate in

  “SimCity,” but in the real world, the relationship is ambiguous at best. And so on.

  A FANTASY OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL
  “SimCity” is a fantasy of control. Of government control. The procedural rhetoric of the game delivers the player a kind of control that our real controllers only salivate over.

  Here, the rulers face few limits from the liberal democratic process or the rule of law, such as we find in any tolerable real- world government. The legislature may or may not have any power to overrule your decisions. The courts can’t do much if anything to limit you. Nor can property rights, neighborhood associations, ballot initiatives, or any of the other usual checks on central power.

  The goal is to manage the population, understood as an aggregate, modeled as an algorithm, and surveilled continuously. Anything that might get in the way of that goal would take away the fun, the fun of central control.

  Note that in some games, the threat of taking away your fun is paradoxically a part of a player actually having fun. Governmentality games rarely carry out this threat simply because you govern badly. This is an eventuality that comes about very often in the real world, and that should probably come about more often still.

  Several other aspects of the governmentality genre likewise enhance the feeling of control and tone down its possibly creepy implications: Knowledge problems are few. The collection of data is easy, cost-free, error-free, privacy-free, and near-total. The Sims, note, here, that they’re not people, they’re only Sims, are pliant and uncomplaining. There is of course an entire spinoff franchise devoted to running the Sims’ lives individually, from day to day. It’s even more popular than

  “SimCity,” and the Sims appear completely fine about it. The pseudo-people in these games are maybe the very best realization to be found anywhere of what social theorist Michel Foucault called “docile bodies.” These are individuals temperamentally fit to be governed, and who comply, with their bodies and their lives, to the decrees of power. They are read by the state, according to the codes of the state, and they are passive in the face of the state. In the hopes of central planners everywhere, these docile bodies are to be monitored, explored, and transformed to suit the needs of the government. That is, the needs of the player.

  WHEN THE PLANNERS GET PLANNED
  It might be fair to ask: Is this really progress? The more and more data that can be gathered about us, and that is indeed being gathered by our governments, the more the fantasy of

  “SimCity” may start looking like the real thing. The numbers are out there, waiting to be crunched, and they will be.

  And yet the people are not an optimization problem. Their desires aren’t so easily converted into algorithms. Neat, tidy, all-encompassing government rarely ends well, and for exactly that reason. A world of sterile, sanitary perfection offers little chance for authenticity, serendipity, or fun. Gathering the data may tempt us to think otherwise, but there is very good reason to believe that it alone will not be enough. To make valid inferences, we would need not only this data, but a theory of human motivations that goes well beyond anything we have conceived so far.

  Some urban planners — quite rightly — also insist that life isn’t so simple, and that anyone taking their cues on governing from “SimCity” should probably be kept away from the profession.

  “I don’t think I ever played SimCity without the cheat code implemented,” wrote John Reinhardt, referring to the cheat code that gave his city a million-dollar budget boost.

  “Stadiums galore!” he continued. It’s a desire he appears to have in common with city governments nationwide. If only they had his means of paying for it.

  Even with the best of intentions, too much central planning can ruin all the fun of a well-lived life. Ironically, “SimCity’s” latest release was plagued with user complaints — precisely because it took away so much of the players’ own creative freedom. Gameplay initially required connecting to the Internet, and the game’s centralized servers turned out to be unreliable. The connection requirement also meant breaking one of the truly great features of the classic game, namely its extensive support for user-generated content. “Holy crap what a mess that was,” said one reviewer.

  It left fans in an odd reversal of roles: Now they were the ones subject to the inefficiencies and officiousness of central planning. And predictably, they hated it.

  Jason Kuznicki is editor of Cato Unbound.

  

  

  

  3/9/2014

• Pat Quinn's Cheap Gimmick

  Michael D. Tanner

  Michael D. Tanner

  Embattled Illinois governor Pat Quinn will be living on the minimum wage this week.

  Well, sort of. Quinn, a Democrat, won’t actually earn the minimum wage — he will continue to pull down the governor’s salary of $177,412, live in the governor’s mansion, and be chauffeured around town. But he will pretend to earn just $79 this week, the amount that activists claim is left from the state’s $8.25 per hour minimum wage after deducting housing, transportation, and taxes.

  It’s not really surprising that Quinn would be the latest politician to take up this silly stunt — polls show him running an average of 7 points behind his Republican challenger, Bruce Rauner — but he’s hardly alone these days. Others who’ve taken the “minimum-wage challenge” include Democratic representatives Tim Ryan of Ohio and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Democratic former Ohio governor Ted Strickland, and virtually the entire D.C. city council. This follows on the heels of the “food-stamp challenge,” in which otherwise-wealthy politicians ate SpaghettiOs for a week and all those Hollywood celebrities’ showing solidarity with the homeless by spending a well-photographed night on the street before heading back to their palatial homes.

  As someone who actually did earn minimum wage many years ago, right after graduating from college, I can save all these folks a lot of time and effort: It is hard to live on the minimum wage. In fact, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to try to support a family for any length of time on nothing except the minimum wage. Which is why it’s a good thing that almost no one does.

  Barely one-fifth of those earning the minimum wage are heads of households supporting a family, according to a 2012 Cato study, and they are generally very young. Only 4.7 percent of minimum-wage workers were over the age of 25, working full-time as a single earner, and trying to raise a family. And these families are seldom living on minimum wage alone: Almost all of them are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and likely other social-welfare assistance.

  “Democrats’ “live on the minimum wage for a week” stunt tells us nothing about reality.”

  The minimum wage is generally an entry-level wage for those with few skills or a limited work history. Few of those who start out earning minimum wage remain at that level for long: Nearly two-thirds will receive a raise within a year.

  This has something to do with why fewer than 3 percent of full-time workers live below the poverty line. But, of course, that applies only if they have a job.

  Economists are not as united as they once were about the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment, but the debate is really about details and degrees rather than the underlying basic economics. Virtually everyone will agree that, at some level, a higher minimum wage will result in the loss of some number of jobs. There’s a reason no one argues for a $100/hour minimum.

  A minority of economists do suggest that the value of the minimum wage has eroded over the years to the point where a small increase, carefully phased in, would result in little or no job loss. But most tend to agree with the Congressional Budget Office, which put its mid-point estimate for a national hike to $10.10 at a loss of 500,000 full-time jobs.

  Any minimum-wage hike would almost certainly have an even larger impact on employment in a state like Illinois that is already laboring under the nation’s fourth most onerous business tax burden. And across the country, Obamacare’s employer mandate is scheduled to finally go into effect next year for businesses with 100 or more employees, and the year after that for companies with 50 to 99 workers. That mandate could add at least $3,000 per year, the equivalent of $1.44/hour, to the cost of hiring a new worker.

  Most businesses that pay minimum wage are not giant ultra-profitable corporations like Walmart (which pays minimum wage to just 1 percent of its full-time workforce), but small businesses and franchises. According to a study from the Employment Policies Institute, roughly half the minimum-wage workforce is employed at businesses with fewer than 100 employees, and 40 percent by companies with fewer than 50 employees.

  And it’s not as though Illinois has jobs to spare: The state’s unemployment rate is 6.8 percent, well above the national average. Only twelve states are doing worse. Perhaps Governor Quinn should actually be trying to find ways to make it less burdensome for Illinois businesses to expand and hire more workers.

  If not, he may soon find himself joining a number of his constituents in trying the “out-of-a-job challenge.”

  Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

  

  

  

  3/9/2014

• Living Black in Ferguson before and after the Furor and Continuing Racial Divisions across This Land

  Nat Hentoff

  Nat Hentoff

  In the op-ed “Black Town, White Power” by Jeff Smith (The New York Times, Aug. 18), we learn that, since 2010, the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson is 67 percent black and 29 percent white.

  But “majority-black Ferguson has a virtually all-white power structure: a white mayor; a school board with six white members and one Hispanic; which recently suspended a young black superintendent who then resigned; a City Council with just one black member, and a 6 percent black police force.”

  And throughout St. Louis County, “with primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers far exceeding their population share, according to a recent report from Missouri’s attorney general.”

  “In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people — despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites.”

  Moreover, overlooked in the concentration on Ferguson, racial divisions and basic inequality remain common across this country.

  With President Obama apparently now being awakened to consequences of national militarization of police — although this has been going on for years within his administration — what prospects are there for a further and deep look by Congress and 2016 presidential candidates at the increasing racial power divisions in this land on many fronts even if there comes to be some meaningful change in militarizing our police?

  In view of the hollow nature of Obama’s “leadership” and the continually fractured civil war in Congress, how much meaningful change is there likely to be in either police militarization in this digital age under national executive power — or in advanced Jim Crow across the land?

  In “Under Obama, racial hope but no change” (Politico.com, Aug. 24), Edward-Isaac Dovere writes: “Six years ago, Barack Obama’s election was going to usher in a new era of racial understanding.”

  He then quotes National Urban League President Marc Morial:

  “Things got somewhat better because the country felt proud of itself for electing him. But I certainly think they’re worse than they were on Jan. 20, 2009. There was a sense that the country had turned a corner. I think today there may be a sense that the progress has been a proverbial step forward and two steps back.”

  Aside from whether police militarization significantly decreases, Dovere continues, “The economic divide, accentuated by the recession, has only widened the racial divide — the number of African-Americans who lost their own houses during the mortgage crisis, among other factors, appears to have done more to shape where race relations stand than having the first African-American in the White House.”

  Moreover, “in 1950, the workforce participation among young black men was 65.2 percent. In 2012, it was 35.7 percent.

  “That’s not helped by many neighborhoods — Ferguson included — remaining either (largely) white or black, with little interaction between them.”

  And where the sources of power are clearly mostly one-sided.

  Also quoted in the Politico column is Tom Perez, labor secretary and former Justice Department head of the Civil Rights Division:

  “There are so many communities where you still have persistent patterns of segregation. It leads to a lack of understanding and that is unfortunate and that can have ill consequences.”

  Lack of understanding often results from those in power not giving a damn for those without.

  How many 2016 presidential candidates are likely to say anything about this extensive racial segregation? During his three (!) terms as New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who prided in calling himself “the education mayor,” never once publicly mentioned the extent to which New York City’s public schools are largely racially segregated. I noted that often in my Village Voice column, but not a word from the billionaire mayor to this day.

  Moreover, the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead in “The Final Nail in the Coffin: The Death of Freedom in our Schools” (Aug. 26) underlines again (affecting many but not exclusively black students), “Zero tolerance policies, which punish all offenses severely, no matter how minor (conditioning) young people to steer clear of doing anything that might be considered out of line, whether it’s pointing their fingers like a gun, drawing on their desks or chewing their gum too loudly.”

  And, of course, in the schools, there are “metal detectors, surveillance cameras, militarized police … random searches, senseless arrests, jail time, the list goes on.” We are indeed experiencing a police state — but not entirely. We still have a First Amendment that can be aimed at our government, and we still vote. Also, as Whitehead says, “parents with kids returning to school” should say something, and, as Americans, do something!

  As Justice William Brennan often told me: “Our framers knew liberty is a fragile thing, so don’t give up!”

  Obama proudly brags: “I have a pen!” so he can do what he wants by executive order. You also have a pen (or however you vote, not only for the presidency, but for Congress and state and local offices). If you haven’t already given up, take this country back from your government and begin to bring it together in real life.

  Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

  

  

  

  3/9/2014

• The Simple Lesson We Should Learn from Global Economics

  Daniel J. Mitchell

  Daniel J. Mitchell

  I very rarely feel sorry for statists. After all, these are the people who think that their feelings of envy and inadequacy justify bigger and more coercive government.

  And I get especially irked when I think about how their authoritarian policies will hurt the most vulnerable in society.

  But I nonetheless feel sorry for statists when I see them fumble, stumble, duck, and weave when asked why global evidence contradicts them.

  In other words, it’s almost painful to watch when they are asked  why nations with varying degrees of statist policy – such as Venezuela, France, the United States (under Obama), Argentina, and Greece – suffer from economic stagnation and decline.

  And it’s equally uncomfortable to watch them struggle and squirm when they’re asked to explain why jurisdictions with more pro-market policies – such as Bermuda, Estonia, Switzerland, the United States (under Reagan), Chile, and Singapore – tend to enjoy growth and rising living standards.

  However, I can’t help adding to their discomfort. Let’s look at more evidence.

  Here’s some of what Richard Rahn wrote for the Washington Times about Hong Kong’s economic miracle.

  Hong Kong is about as close to the ideal free-market capitalist model that you can find on the planet — which came about largely by accident. …The British basically left Hong Kong to fend for itself… here was no foreign aid and no welfare state — but there was a competent government that kept the peace, ran an honest court system with the rule of law, provided some basic infrastructure, and little more. Also, Hong Kong had economic freedom — for the last several decades, Hong Kong has been ranked as the freest economy in the world (according to Economic Freedom of the World Index). Economic freedom allowed the people to create an endless number of productive enterprises, and because they had free trade, they could import necessary goods and services to fuel these enterprises. …average real income has gained parity with the United States, and it will probably be double that of France in a couple of years.

  By the way, if you don’t believe the last sentence in that excerpt, check out this remarkable chart.

  “ It can’t be easy to hold views that are so inconsistent with global evidence.”

  But the big takeaway is that free markets and small government have made the people of Hong Kong very rich. Gee, it’s almost as if there’s a recipe to follow if you want prosperity.

  Let’s look at another example. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, former Senator Phil Gramm and Michael Solon compare economic policy and outcomes in Ukraine and Poland.

  They explain that statist policies in Ukraine have stymied growth in a nation that otherwise could be very prosperous.

  There is no better modern example of the power of an economic triumph than the experience of Ukraine and Poland in the post-Cold War era. …Ukraine has largely squandered its economic potential with pervasive corruption, statist cronyism and government control. …The per capita income of Ukraine, in U.S. dollar equivalence, has grown to only $3,900 in 2013 from a base of $1,570 in 1990. …Ukraine should be a wealthy country. It has world-class agricultural land, it is rich in hydrocarbons and mineral resources, and it possesses a well-educated labor force. Yet Ukraine remains poor, because while successful Central European nations have replaced their central-planning institutions with market-based reforms, Ukraine has never been able to break the crippling chains of collectivism.

  Poland was in the same position as Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet empire, but it followed better policy and is now several times richer.

  By employing free-market principles and unleashing the genius of its people, Poland has triggered an economic triumph as per capita GDP, in U.S. dollar equivalence, soared to more than $13,432 by 2013 from $1,683 in 1990. Today Poland is the fastest-growing economy in Europe. …The man largely responsible for Poland’s transformation is Leszek Balcerowicz, the former finance minister who was later governor of Poland’s Central Bank. …The Balcerowicz Plan was built around permitting state firms to go bankrupt, banning deficit financing, and maintaining a sound currency. It ended artificially low interest rate loans for state firms, opened up international trade and instituted currency convertibility. …A miracle transition was under way and the rest is history.

  Since I’ve also compared Ukraine and Poland, you can understand why I especially liked this column.

  One final point. Today’s post looks at just a couple of nations, but I’m not cherry picking. There are all sorts of comparisons that can be made, and the inevitable conclusion is that markets are better than statism.

  Here are some previous iterations of this exercise.

  I’ve compared South Korea and North Korea.

  The data for Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela is very powerful.

  I’ve shown how Singapore has eclipsed Jamaica.

  Here’s a comparison of Sweden and Greece.

  And we can see that Hong Kong has caught up with the United States.

  So hopefully you can understand why I have a tiny (very tiny) degree of sympathy for my left-wing friends. It can’t be easy to hold views that are so inconsistent with global evidence.

  P.S. When presented with this kind of evidence, leftists oftentimes will counter by saying that many nations in Europe are rich by global standards, while also having large governments. True, but it’s very important to understand that they became rich nations when they had small governments. Moreover, some of them have wisely compensated for large public sectors by maintaining ultra-free market policy in other areas.

  Daniel Mitchell is an economist and senior fellow at The Cato Institute.

  

  

  

  2/9/2014

• Public School Groups Sue to Limit Public's Educational Options

  Andrew J. Coulson

  Andrew J. Coulson

  Last week, Florida’s state school establishment sued to kill an education tax credit program that benefits 60,000 low income, mostly black and Hispanic children. The credits cut taxes on businesses that donate to non-profit scholarship organizations, and those organizations help needy families who want to send their children to private schools. Studies show performance gains for both the students who switch to private schools and the students who remain in public schools, and taxpayers save tens of millions of dollars every year. The tax credits thus create a win-win-win scenario.

  But Florida’s teachers union, school administrators association, and school boards association want to kill the program anyway. In their legal complaint, they claim that the credits violate state constitutional provisions forbidding public spending on religious schools and requiring a “uniform” public school system. Before getting to the merits of these claims, it is worth pointing out that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue in the first place.

  Before courts will hear a lawsuit, plaintiffs must establish “standing” by showing that they have been injured in some concrete way. But on the same day that the Florida suit was filed, the New Hampshire supreme court ruled that plaintiffs in that state did not have standing to file suit against their education tax credit program. And in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same conclusion with respect to a suit against Arizona’s education tax credits (ACSTO v. Winn). In both the NH and U.S. Supreme Court cases, the justices ruled that plaintiffs demonstrated no personal injury either financially or to their constitutional rights, so they were sent packing.

  “In short, the plaintiffs are not harmed by this program and the children and taxpayers of Florida are helped by it.”

  In Florida, the public school plaintiffs have once again failed to demonstrate that they have been injured by the tax credit program. They imply that they have been forced to support religious schooling, but as the U.S. Supreme Court explained in ACSTO v. Winn, “that’s incorrect.”

  tax credits and governmental expenditures do not both implicate individual taxpayers in sectarian activities. A dissenter whose tax dollars are “extracted and spent” knows that he has in some small measure been made to contribute to an establishment [of religion] in violation of conscience…. [By contrast,] awarding some citizens a tax credit allows other citizens to retain control over their own funds in accordance with their own consciences.

  Anyone who objects to the program has the option of not participating, in which case their taxes are collected as they had always been and none of their money goes to religious schools. So, no harm done.

  The plaintiffs also allege that they have been injured because some of their children attend public schools, and because when a student uses a private scholarship to switch from public to private school it reduces district funding. This, they claim, hurts their children’s education. Not only do they fail to provide any evidence of this, but the data actually prove the opposite. First, as noted above, research shows that the scholarship program improvesthe performance of students who remain in public schools. And second, Florida school districts lose only a fraction of their per pupil funding when a child leaves (the state “FEFP” portion, which is roughly 2/3rds of the total). So not only does the departure of scholarship students improve the performance of their public school peers, it also leaves more money per pupil to be spent on those peers. Public school districts are thus left better off both academically and with respect to per-pupil funding. Again, no harm done.

  But, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the courts decide to hear this case despite the lack of harm to the plaintiffs and hence their lack of standing to sue. Both of the plaintiffs’ claims would still be without legal merit. The first claim, that public monies are being spent on religious education, is simply false. In addition to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling above, the Arizona Supreme Court, and Illinois district courts have also concluded that donations made under education tax credit programs are not public money. Black’s law dictionary agrees, as the Arizona court observed.

  Plaintiffs’ second argument is that the tax credit program violates Article IX, Section 1 of the Florida constitution, which states that “Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools.” The Florida supreme court ruled in Bush v. Holmes that the state’s publicly-funded school voucher system violated this clause, because “it diverts public dollars” from “the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida’s children.”

  It is worth noting that Florida’s constitution does not stipulate that the uniform system of free public schools must be the sole means of providing for children’s education. On the contrary, it explicitly authorizes — in the very same sentence — such “other public education programs that the needs of the people may require.” The majority on theBush court decided to interpret away this clause, claiming that it referred exclusively to junior colleges and adult education outside K-12 schooling. Though they cited a precedent for this claim (Board of Public Instruction v. State Treasurer, 231 So. 2d 1, 1970), the given case does not support their contention. That precedent merely states that junior colleges and adult education happen to fall within the meaning of “other public education programs,” not that they are the only programs that do so.

  But though fabricated out of thin air, the court nevertheless used its new exclusivity doctrine to stop the legislature from running its publicly-funded K-12 voucher program for a general student population. Fortunately, as already noted, donations to private school scholarship organizations are not public funding, and so the court’s newly invented constraint has no bearing on Florida’s education tax credits.

  The exclusivity doctrine may compel the state government to create one and only one publicly funded K-12 school system of its own, but it most certainly does not compel all Floridian children to use it. It does not prohibit parents from choosing private schools. It does not prohibit businesses from donating to educational charities. And it does not prohibit the legislature from setting tax policy in such a way as to reduce the penalties for those private decisions. The plaintiffs themselves repeatedly admit that neither the donors, nor the private schools, nor the scholarship granting non-profits, nor the low-income families themselves are under the thumb of state officials. Not a single donation is made, nor a single scholarship awarded, nor a single child educated at a private school except as the result of the independent decisions of Florida parents, businesses, and charities. The system is private, autonomous, and voluntary — and Florida’s constitution is designed to limit the power of government not the rights and freedoms of the people.

  Not only is the scholarship tax credit policy consistent with Article IX, Section 1 of the state constitution, it has been proven to advance that constitutional mandate. It improves the academic performance of the low-income, mostly minority students who use scholarships to attend private schools, and also that of their peers who stay in the public schools. By doing so, it diminishes the inequality in achievement that would otherwise exist in Florida’s public schools. Furthermore, the program has been shown to save the state money, advancing the constitutional exhortation for “efficiency.”

  In short, the plaintiffs are not harmed by this program and the children and taxpayers of Florida are helped by it. So why are the major players in the state-run school system suing to kill it? To put it bluntly, this lawsuit has been brought by monopolists to protect their monopoly. Regardless of the legal outcome, the very fact that this suit was filed serves to lift the veil on the true nature of America’s school monopolists. They’re not fooling anyone anymore — perhaps not even themselves.

  Andrew J. Coulson directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and co-authored the Institute’s amicus brief in the ACSTO v. Winn U.S. Supreme Court case.

  

  

  

  2/9/2014

• Hong Kong's Miraculous Progress

  Richard W. Rahn

  Richard W. Rahn

  How did this small city-state of 7.3 million people go from having a per-capita income of only a few hundred dollars per year to a per capita income that is equal to that of the United States in only 50 years? The simple answer is they had the British common law legal system, strong private property rights, competent, honest judges, a non-corrupt civil service, very low tax rates, free trade and a minimal amount of economic regulation. There was no big brother government looking after the people, so they had to work hard, but they could keep the fruits of their efforts.

  Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842, and the adjacent “New Territories” were leased for 99 years in 1898. In 1997, Hong Kong was returned by the British to China, with an agreement that it would become a special administrative region — “one country, two systems.” Hong Kong retained the British legal system, most individual liberties, and a whigh degree of local autonomy, except for foreign policy and defense. The amount of democracy has been limited — with the British serving as the ideal benevolent dictator and the Chinese as a somewhat less benevolent dictator for the past 17 years.

  Hong Kong is about as close to the ideal free-market capitalist model that you can find on the planet — which came about largely by accident. The Japanese had captured Hong Kong in World War II, but when the British regained control after the war, they were in no position to provide much in the way of economic assistance. The British basically left Hong Kong to fend for itself under a British governor with only a tiny military contingent. Hong Kong has virtually no natural resources other than an exceptionally fine harbor.

  “Hong Kong proves that you do not need to have democracy for prosperity and economic (and most individual) freedoms.”

  As China turned communist, many poor refugees fled to Hong Kong , seeking freedom. There was no foreign aid and no welfare state — but there was a competent government that kept the peace, ran an honest court system with the rule of law, provided some basic infrastructure, and little more. Also, Hong Kong had economic freedom — for the last several decades, Hong Kong has been ranked as the freest economy in the world (according to Economic Freedom of the World Index). Economic freedom allowed the people to create an endless number of productive enterprises, and because they had free trade, they could import necessary goods and services to fuel these enterprises. Initially, Hong Kong had the comparative advantage of low-cost labor for manufacturing and textiles, but as it became richer, it started producing more and more sophisticated goods and services. Now it is a major financial center with a very robust high-tech service economy.

  My first trip to Hong Kong was more than 30 years ago. Even though by then Hong Kong had made considerable progress, there were still many with low incomes. Real per capita income was about half that of the United States and still well below that of France. Today, average real income has gained parity with the United States, and it will probably be double that of France in a couple of years. Along with Japan and Singapore, Hong Kong enjoys the highest life expectancy in the world, and comes out at or near the top on most indexes of human development.

  The accompanying chart shows the growth in per capita income in Hong Kong, France and the United States. Each country pursued very different economic models. France greatly enlarged government (56 percent of gross domestic product) along with very high taxes and extensive regulation, while the U.S. somewhat increased the size of government and the regulatory state. (To illustrate the virtues of small government, please watch a very short and fun video “Hotnomics: Government Knockout” produced by Emerald Robinson and available on the websites of The Washington Times and of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation.)

  Hong Kong proves that you do not need to have democracy for prosperity and economic (and most individual) freedoms. In fact, democracy is often an impediment to economic prosperity because people tend to vote themselves benefits (which must be paid by someone else) rather than working for benefits as most people do in Hong Kong. A problem with the Hong Kong governance model is that the benevolent dictator tends to become less benevolent over time, and as the people become richer, they want their individual freedoms enlarged, not curtailed. The demands for more freedom and democracy in Hong Kong are growing, and the Chinese are resisting. However, those in the Chinese government, having achieved rapid economic growth by copying much of the Hong Kong model, also realize that their own people, as they get richer, will be demanding more freedom and more democracy. We all watch with fascination as the dance continues.

  Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

  

  

  

  2/9/2014

• I'm Trying to Solve a Decades Old Mystery: How Many People Were Killed by China's Great Famine?

  Mao Yushi

  Mao Yushi

  There’s a mystery in China that’s decades old: how many people died during the Great Famine?

  It’s almost impossible to say. Some historians call it the worst man-made disaster in human history, killing one out of every eight people in some places. But much about the time period is actively suppressed in China. In fact, it’s euphemistically referred to as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters” there, and discussion remains taboo.

  As an economist and a concerned citizen, I’ve been seeking out the truth. Not only are there important historical and economic lessons to be learned from this episode, the Chinese government’s continued censorship of the past helps perpetuate the closed, authoritarian political system there.

  It’s also important to understand because the Great Famine was caused by avoidable human mistakes, not inescapable natural disasters.

  The trouble began in 1949, when the Communist party took power. Soon after, Mao’s Great Leap Forward tried to modernize China’s agricultural system. But many farmers were unable to grow enough food for themselves after handing over a considerable portion to the government.

  This led to mass starvation across the country’s countryside. At the time, I was in my early 30s and working at the Railway Research Institute. I remember that our basketball court had been transformed into a field to grow wheat.

  Eventually, I was labeled a “rightist” and persecuted, along with thousands of others. We were removed from our posts and sent to the countryside for “re-education.” I was reduced to the lowest human form, constantly stalked by the nightmare that I could never shake: hunger.

  There were 700 people in the small village where I stayed during this period. Roughly 80-90 died from hunger or related diseases before the famine ended in 1961.

  “Even to this day, most Chinese people aren’t aware of the real impacts of the Great Famine.”

  Even to this day, most Chinese people aren’t aware of the real impacts of the Great Famine. Researchers debate the number of people killed, estimating it’s anywhere from 18 million to more than 42 million. The official Chinese government estimate hovers around 20 million.

  I’ve been investigating the question. According to the Chinese government’s own statistical yearbook, the population of China was growing continuously until the end of 1958. If we follow this line of growth, the population should have been 711.18 million by 1962, instead of 658.59 million, a difference of about 52 million individuals.

  We cannot, however, simply say the Great Leap Forward killed 52 million people. Though millions starved to death, that number also accounts for females who did not give birth, and babies that were never born. If we subtract the would-be newborns, given the average mortality and fertility rates of the period, the number of unnatural deaths during the Great Famine was 36 million.

  If this is right, the Great Famine killed about as many people as the Second World War. It is the equivalent of a Nanjing Massacre in every one of China’s 30 provincial capitals five times over.

  “The Chinese people were cheated,” Jo Lusby, head of China operations for Penguin, told the Guardian. “They need real history.” That is my quest — to answer the questions we don’t always know to ask.

  Mao Yushi is a Chinese economist. He is the winner of the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

  

  

  

  1/9/2014

• Restarting the Common Core Debate

  Michael Petrilli, Neal McCluskey

  Michael Petrilli and Neal McCluskey

  Over the past couple of years, a raucous debate has emerged over the Common Core, content standards in English and mathematics adopted by states nationwide. The debate has been marked by acrimony rather than analysis, but there is hope that both sides want a reset. We — one Core advocate, one opponent — want to assist by laying out the facts on which we think everyone should agree.

  What are some signs of detente? Core architect David Coleman recently decried characterizations of Core opponents “as crazies or people who don’t tell the truth,” while strategists at firebrand Glenn Beck’s “We Will Not Conform” event called for ditching invective like “ObamaCore” or “communist plot.”

  Now, the facts.

  First, there is no evidence that most Core opponents or advocates are ill-intentioned. There’s no compelling reason to believe, for instance, that Bill Gates is funding Core advocacy for any reason other than that he thinks it is beneficial, or that opponents are motivated by anything other than concern that the standards are inadequate, or amount to dangerous national standardization.

  Next, the Core was not created by Washington, but groups that saw crummy state standards and tests and agreed on the need to improve their quality. In particular, these organizations wanted to ensure that “proficient” meant the same thing in Mississippi as Massachusetts, and sought to reduce the huge proportion of people arriving at college or workplaces without the skills to succeed. Responding to this, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers started discussing whether common, higher standards could be forged in the basic subjects of reading and math. With support from the Gates Foundation, they launched the effort that eventually became the Core. All this occurred, importantly, before Barack Obama was elected president.

  “Facts must replace invective in discussing the best educational methods.”

  However, federal involvement played an important role in the Core. Federal policy, beginning in 1994, pushed states to develop standards and tests in the first place, and No Child Left Behind, enacted in 2002, doubled down on these mandates, requiring states to disaggregate test results for numerous groups and sanction low-performing schools.

  More directly, in 2010, the Obama administration held the first “Race to the Top” competition. To maximize their chances of winning part of $4 billion, states had to sign on to college- and career-ready standards adopted by “a majority of states,” a definition met only by the Core. The administration also supplied $350 million to develop Core-aligned tests.

  Two years later, the administration announced that states could get waivers from key parts of No Child Left Behind. To qualify, they had to either adopt the Core, or have their standards certified as “college- and career-ready” by a state college system.

  Core adoption was technically voluntary: States could refuse to seek Race to the Top money or waivers, and a few did. The allure of hundreds of millions of dollars and No Child Left Behind relief, though, were certainly powerful. Some Core advocates wanted federal incentives. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers called for them in their 2008 report “Benchmarking for Success,” and some supporters reportedly worked with the administration in formulating Race to the Top.

  Another major concern is whether the Core prescribes, or is agnostic about, curriculum.

  Any set standard puts a box around curriculum, and the crafters of the Core explicitly called for a number of “instructional shifts” in the classroom. In addition, what is on Core-aligned tests may, de facto, fill in some curriculum. This, though, is different from saying only one curriculum will do. Much of the frustration experienced by educators and parents appears to stem from poorly designed textbooks, not the standards themselves. With very limited exceptions, the Core does not prescribe specific readings.

  What about data collection, teacher evaluation and other issues often thought synonymous with the Core? These are connected through Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind waivers, but the Core itself is just standards.

  These are the facts. Hopefully, all can agree on them and focus on the issues with which we really need to grapple: Is there good reason to think common, rigorous state standards will improve outcomes? Does the Common Core fit that bill? What roles should Washington, states, districts and parents have in deciding what standards guide classroom instruction? We have different answers to these questions, but agree on at least one thing: We must stop fighting over basic facts, and respectfully tackle these crucial questions.

  Michael J. Petrilli is the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Neal P. McCluskey is the associate director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

  

  

  

  1/9/2014

• Onslaught of Litigation to Come from Obamacare

  Ilya Shapiro

  Ilya Shapiro

  When Chief Justice John Roberts upheld the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate under the taxing power, and thereby salvaged most of the law, his stated goal was to remove the U.S. Supreme Court from the political arena. But, as with all pieces of major social-welfare legislation, “Obamacare” is destined to keep plenty of lawyers occupied as it comes before the court again and again.

  Forget Hobby Lobby and other challenges to the contraceptive mandate. Those cases are important for religious liberty but don’t threaten Obamacare’s operation. Instead, what the Supreme Court now faces is a steady stream of lawsuits against the complex web of subsidies and penalties at the heart of the health care scheme.

  You may recall that last month, two federal appeals courts issued offsetting rulings regarding the IRS’ implementation of the Affordable Care Act. First, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held in Halbig v. Burwell that the agency broke the law in issuing tax credits — better known as subsidies — for people to buy policies from federal exchanges, because the Affordable Care Act provides for subsidies only to those who enroll in exchanges established “by the state.” A couple of hours later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in King v. Burwell, ruled in favor of the government’s ability to provide these credits.

  These subsidies are even more important to Obamacare than the individual mandate. Without them, consumers would face the full cost of health care and so enrollment would plummet. They also trigger the taxes on individuals and businesses that don’t buy the requisite level of care. So, the issue is whether the executive branch spent billions of taxpayer dollars and subjected millions of people to taxes without any authority to do so. To paraphrase Joe Biden, that’s a big deal.

  “Recent circuit court split foreshadows protracted court battles over the Affordable Care Act.”

  TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
  The lead counsel for plaintiffs in both cases, Michael Carvin — who represented the National Federation of Independent Business in the original Obamacare challenge, NFIB v. Sebelius — quickly petitioned the Supreme Court to review King v. Burwell. He followed that with a letter asking the full court, not just the court’s clerk, to consider any requests for extension in the government’s time for a response (due on Sept. 3, but, at press time, the government indeed had asked for a 30-day extension, which Carvin has opposed). Such requests are typically granted by the clerk as a matter of right, but Carvin wanted to make clear that time was of the essence, given that the fate of national legislation was stake.

  The solicitor general, meanwhile, asked the D.C. Circuit to rehear Halbig en banc — that is, for all 11 active judges to reverse the three-judge panel’s decision. Having filled the court with his own nominees after the Senate ended filibusters of judicial nominees — there are now seven judges appointed by Democrats — President Barack Obama thinks he has a good shot at erasing the circuit split and thus making King less attractive to the Supreme Court. Carvin’s typically pugnacious response came on Aug. 18, arguing that Halbig is a poor vehicle for en banc review.

  Indeed, having a majority of a circuit court think that a panel was wrong normally isn’t enough to grant full rehearing. Federal appellate rules say that such review “is not favored.” The D.C. Circuit has a particularly high bar, on average taking only one case per year en banc. Judge Harry Edwards, who dissented in Halbig, has taken great pains to reduce the number of en banc hearings (which distract the entire court and moot the efforts of the panel, not to mention counsel), in part to restore collegiality on a court that was hopelessly embattled in the 1980s. Even before he served as the D.C. Circuit’s chief judge, Edwards wrote in Bartlett v. Bowen (1987) that “the institutional cost of rehearing cases en banc is extraordinary” and that it “substantially delays the case being reheard, often with no clear principle emanating from the en banc court.”

  Moreover, even if the D.C. Circuit were to change its practice, rehear Halbig, and reverse the panel, the shadow over the IRS subsidies would not go away. At least two other lawsuits elsewhere in the country raise the same question. One, brought by three dozen school districts in Indiana last month, survived a motion to dismiss. The other, filed by the Oklahoma attorney general, is on a similar track. Whoever wins those cases in district court will appeal to appeals courts — the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the Tenth Circuit, respectively — that are less friendly to the government than the courts that have already ruled.

  Make no mistake: Regardless of what happens in Halbig, there will almost certainly be a circuit split for the Supreme Court to contend with. The only question is whether the D.C. Circuit will enable its superior to avoid that day of reckoning for another year or two, allowing the justices to kick the Obamacare can down the road.

  Of course, all this is the direct consequence of three developments that we’ve seen too often in recent years: first, an overly complicated law rammed through Congress without serious consideration and against the will of the people; second, a politicized IRS that implements administration policy over the recommendations of career civil servants; and third, a White House that believes it gets more power when “Congress won’t act,” never mind that Congress is fully ready to reopen the health care legislation.

  It’s too late in the day for the D.C. Circuit to fix this mess. The ball is again in the Supreme Court.

  Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. He filed briefs supporting the challengers in both Halbig and King.

  

  

  

  1/9/2014

• Egypt's Al-Sisi Establishes Tyranny Mubarak Only Dreamed of: Washington Should Stop Playing the Fool by Praising Cairo's Commitment to Democracy

  Doug Bandow

  Doug Bandow

  Egypt’s capital is crowded, busy, confused, and messy. Security isn’t obvious, until you get close to a sensitive site, such as the Interior Ministry. Blocks away the street is closed. There are metal fences, concrete barriers, and barbed wire. Uniformed and plain clothes security personnel. Armored personnel carriers. And multiple checks to get to the ministry’s door.

  In Minya a judge handed down 683 death sentences against protestors in one case. The street leading to the courthouse was blocked by an APC topped by armed soldiers and backed by abundant security personnel. Tanks stood as sentinels at the Burja al-Arab prison, where ousted president Mohamed al-Morsi is being held.

  The military has taken firm control, elevating its leader, Gen. Abdel Fata al-Sisi, to the presidency. He follows in the footsteps of dictators Gamal Abdel Al-Nasser, Anwar al-Sadat, and Hosni al-Mubarak. The uniformed services are a profitable caste for their members. Complained Kaled Badawy, one of Morsi’s attorneys, “we need a professional armed forces, not mercenaries which results in corruption.” The army permitted Mubarak’s ouster by street protests because he planned to turn military rule into a family dynasty, with his son as heir apparent.

  Morsi had no chance to succeed. He exhibited authoritarian and sectarian tendencies and made abundant political mistakes, playing into his critics’ hands. Moreover, he never controlled the bureaucracy or police. Indeed, the latter even refused to protect the Brotherhood’s headquarters from mob violence. Crony capitalists grown rich under Mubarak apparently manipulated markets to create artificial shortages and exacerbate economic hardship. Most important, the army never accepted Morsi and fomented the very demonstrations used to justify its seizure of power.

  Had Morsi and the Brotherhood been defeated in a future election, they would have been discredited peacefully. However, the coup turned the movement’s members into angry victims. In Cairo they took over Rab’a al-Adawiya and al-Nahda Squares, just as the anti-Mubarak and anti-Morsi crowds had done in Tahir Square. As many as 85,000 protestors, including more than a few women and children, turned out.

  The military government responded with a campaign of premeditated murder.

  In its new report, “All According to Plan: The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protestors in Egypt,” Human Rights Watch detailed the junta’s crimes. From the beginning the military used deadly force with no concern for casualties. In the aftermath of the coup, reported HRW, “security forces repeatedly used excessive force to respond to demonstrations, indiscriminately and deliberately killing at least 281 protestors in different incidents.” In fact, the army began using live ammunition against protestors just two days after the coup. On July 8, for instance, 61 demonstrators were killed by soldiers outside of the Republican Guard headquarters. On July 27 security forces cut down 95 “largely peaceful protestors” on Cairo streets. Medical personnel said the shootings were close range at people’s heads, necks, and chests.

  The most horrific episode came on August 17, when the regime used overwhelming force against protestors in Rab’a and al-Nahda Squares. HRW found that the Sisi regime expected high casualties: “Numerous government statements and accounts from government meetings indicate that high-ranking officials knew that the attacks would result in widespread killings of protestors.”

  The regime deployed soldiers, APCs, bulldozers, police, and snipers to destroy a vast tent village in Rab’a. The authorities intended to kill. Explained HRW: “security forces used lethal force indiscriminately, with snipers and gunmen inside and alongside APCs firing their weaponry on large crowds of protestors. Dozens of witnesses also said they saw snipers fire from helicopters over Rab’a Square.” In roughly 12 hours HRW figured that at least 817 and likely more than 1000 people were slaughtered. Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director, said: “In Rab’a Square, Egyptian security forces carried out one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”

  In contrast, clearing Tiananmen Square in Beijing took twice as long and killed between 400 and 800 protestors. Moreover, reported HRW: “Security forces detained over 800 protestors over the course of the day, some of whom they beat, tortured and in some cases summarily executed,” according to witnesses. (Other groups, such as the International Coalition for Freedoms and Rights, put the death toll much higher.)

  There was no respite for the wounded or those treating the wounded. Added HRW: “Security forces from the morning fired at makeshift medical facilities and positioned snipers to fire on those who sought to enter or exit Rab’a hospital.” After taking control of the square later in the day, regime personnel expelled the doctors and set fire to both Rab’a hospital and the field hospital.

  The Sisi junta claimed that the protestors had responded with violence. HRW reported that hundreds of protestors tossed rocks and Molotov cocktails. But the group found only “a few instances” of gunfire. The government claimed eight dead, a small toll if the demonstrators had been as well armed as officials suggested, which itself seemed unlikely since the Interior Minister only claimed to have seized 15 guns. Concluded HRW: “the protestors’ violence in no way justified the deliberate and indiscriminate killings of protestors largely by police, in coordination with army forces.”

  Western journalists were among the victims. Last month the Washington Post’s Daniela Deane wrote about the murder of her husband, a cameraman with Britain’s Sky News, by a government sniper. Security personnel could not have mistaken him, with his camera, for a Brotherhood protestor.

  Clearing al-Nahda Square near Cairo University also had bloody results. HRW reported that security forces began “firing at protestors, including those attempting to leave from the designated ‘safe’ exit. Witnesses described how police fired at protesters both deliberately and indiscriminately, using teargas, birdshot and live ammunition.”

  The government justified its actions as necessary to return Cairo’s life to normal. But, concluded HRW, “these allegations fail to justify a forcible dispersal that resulted in the deaths of at least 817 people and amounted to collective punishment of the overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors. The mass killings of protestors were clearly disproportionate to any threat to the lives of local residents, security personnel or anyone else.” The regime failed to take any precautions, such as safe exits, which would have minimized casualties. The military obviously intended to kill promiscuously.

  “There isn’t much the U.S. can do to change events in Cairo.”

  After clearing the encampments the army continued to shoot down protestors. Ten days later regime forces killed 120 demonstrators. The government claimed that they attacked a police station, but “the number of protestors killed, statements by victims and witnesses, including independent observers, and video footage show that the police intentionally fired on largely peaceful protestors,” said HRW. The group documented “several instances of police killing clearly unarmed protestors.” Since then little has changed. Said HRW: “Security forces have continued to use excessive lethal force against demonstrators.”

  Moreover, the regime moved against liberals and other critics, including youthful leaders of the revolution against Mubarak. For instance, Ahmed Maher, founder of the April 6 Youth Movement, is serving a three-year prison term for criticizing the new law against public protests.

  Gamel al-Eid of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information said the regime’s message was: “It is time to shut up, to stay quiet. There is only one choice—to support the military or to be in jail.” Bahey al-Din Hassan, head of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, argued that military control “is more horrible than the old regime.”

  In fact, the military speedily recreated Egypt’s Deep State, only with Sisi instead of Mubarak in charge. The government appointed military officials as provincial governors, revived the secret and intelligence police, instituted harsh restrictions on dissent, dragged protestors before military tribunals, and deployed private toughs against regime critics.

  By its own count the government has arrested 22,000 people, many of whom have been tortured. Mass trials have been conducted based on negligible evidence. Attorneys have been arrested when they went to meet their clients. Family members have been detained as leverage against defendants. Hundreds of protestors have been sentenced to death at a time. Many others, including teenage girls, have received lengthy prison terms for organizing peaceful protests. Independent journalists have been cowed or silenced. Students have been killed, arrested, and expelled. The regime has implemented a comprehensive program to monitor social media.

  When meeting a visiting ICFR delegation of which I was part, Ayaalaa Hosni, spokeswoman for a women’s anti-coup group, complained that you can’t demonstrate without a warrant but if you “go to ask for a warrant you get arrested.” Human rights activists told us they were subject to arrest at any moment.

  Outside assessments are uniformly negative. David Kramer, president of the group Freedom House, declared in June: “the human rights situation has worsened compared to what it was at any point under Hosni Mubarak.” The organization reported that Egypt had gone from “Partly Free” to “Not Free” after the coup, with significant deterioration almost across the board: political rights, political pluralism and participation, freedom of expression, associational rights, rule of law. Only in approving a new constitution and holding elections had there been democratic progress over the last year. There was stasis or reversal in other areas: political participation, religious freedom, peaceful assembly, judicial independence, civilian control, media freedom.

  In a separate study Freedom House rated Egypt’s media “not free.” The group explained: “After Morsi’s overthrow in July, the press engaged in increased self-censorship due to the intimidation, arbitrary detention, and killings of journalists, particularly those who were viewed as critical of the military-supported interim government or sympathetic to Morsi and his Islamist supporters.” Last December the Committee to Protect Journalists rated Egypt ninth in the world for jailing journalists.

  An organizer for press freedom who met us in Cairo said ten journalists had been killed. Scores had been shot and injured, more than 100 had been assaulted, and scores more had been arrested. Newscaster Shahira Amin, dismissed from her position for “implying” the coup was a coup, publicly complained that “now is the worst ever” for journalists. Another reporter told us simply: “Journalism has become a crime.”

  Yet repression is unlikely to deliver stability. Mubarak’s jails helped turn Brotherhood activist Ayman al-Zawahiri into al-Qaeda’s leader. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, both formerly with the State Department, wrote: “Repression of Islamists in Egypt was an essential stage in the emergence of contemporary jihadism. As splinter groups that were significantly more radical than the Muslim Brotherhood formed, Islamists became more violent.”

  This experience is likely to recur. Terrorist attacks are on the rise and jihadist fighters returning from Iraq and Syria may target the Sisi regime. Nor are Islamists the only potential terrorists. Mara Revkin, a graduate student at Yale, noted that some attacks have been claimed by youth groups, which see violence as the only way to challenge a regime which increasingly bars peaceful dissent.

  Human rights activists fear the same phenomenon. Maher wrote, in addressing Sec. Kerry: “If your Apache helicopters are important in the fight against terrorism, I assure you that individual freedoms, democracy, respect for human rights, dialogue and inclusion are also important in the fight against terrorism.”

  There isn’t much the U.S. can do to change events in Cairo. But the Obama administration has blundered consistently—endorsing Mubarak despite popular protests, backing Morsi after his election, opposing and then accepting the coup, and blessing the military regime for planning to restore democracy. Among Secretary John Kerry’s low points were refusing to call a coup a coup, restoring foreign aid, and babbling about President Sisi’s supposed commitment to democracy.

  Washington on occasion proclaimed itself “deeply troubled” or otherwise disappointed by Cairo’s unending abuses, but did nothing to back up its criticism. And even these anodyne comments were denounced as unwarranted interference by the Sisi government. Cairo retaliated by urging restraint in response to the popular protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The Sisi regime also complained that HRW was “above the law” and refused to allow its staffers to enter Egypt to publicly release the new report.

  Egypt’s revolution faded away as the military reconstituted Mubarak’s repressive structure. Repression rules: One lawyer told our ICRF group that the Sisi government is a “weak and cowardly regime.” The U.S. should work with Cairo on issues of shared interest but otherwise maintain substantial distance. In particular, the administration should stop using foreign aid to bribe Egypt’s generals. They don’t have to be paid to keep the peace and shouldn’t be paid for anything else.

  In any case, Washington’s influence will remain limited: the Sisi regime will do whatever it believes necessary to retain power. Today Egypt appears likely to end up without liberty or stability. Instead of pretending to be in control, Washington should step back from a crisis which it cannot resolve.

  Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire. (Xulon Press).

  

  

  

  1/9/2014

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