According to a Reuters report, a new study from the United Kingdom estimates that more than 3,000 lives would be extended if the 17.5 percent value-added tax was imposed on supposedly unhealthy foods. Without endorsing the specific estimates, the underlying economic analysis is sound. Certain foods presumably are unhealthy (at least for people who already are overweight) and taxing those foods will change behavior (just like taxing work, saving, and investment changes behavior).

But this does not mean, as a matter of principle, that the government should use the tax code to dictate private choices. Once politicians wander down that path, what will stop them from taxing people at higher rates if they don’t jog at least three times a week? Or how about tax credits for eating green vegetables? Some might respond that taxpayers have a right to insist on healthy behavior since they are paying – via the government-run health care systems – the medical costs of unhealthy people. But this highlights the problem of a socialized health care system. If people are responsible for the consequences of their own choices, then there is less temptation for nanny-state policies. For what it’s worth, this does not mean that the U.K. should maintain a VAT exemption for food. But the exemption should be eliminated as part of a plan to reduce the general tax burden, not as a scheme to control people’s lives:

A “fat tax” on salty, sugary and fatty foods could save thousands of lives each year, according to a study published on Thursday. Researchers at Oxford University say that charging Value Added Tax (VAT) at 17.5 percent on foods deemed to be unhealthy would cut consumer demand and reduce the number of heart attacks and strokes. The purchase tax is already levied on a small number of products such as potato crisps, ice cream, confectionery and chocolate biscuits, but most food is exempt. The move could save an estimated 3,200 lives in Britain each year, according to the study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. …Any “fat tax” might be seen as an attack on personal freedom and would weigh more heavily on poorer families, the study warned. A food tax would raise average weekly household bills by 4.6 percent or 67 pence per person. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has previously rejected the idea as an example of the “nanny state” that might push people away from healthy food.

Most Americans are appalled by pork spending, corporate welfare, and other congressional waste. But at least one man relishes federal giveaways. He extols the government freebee. The July 4 Falls Church (Virginia) News-Press notes:

“Mothers, lock up your daughters, because Matthew Lesko, the so-called ‘crazy Free Money Guy,’ will be camping out in front of the U.S. Capitol from August 14-17. Famous for his question-marked suit, Lesko will be answering questions during his campout as part of a program he calls: One Man, 72 Hours, 100,000 Government Freebies.”

So folks, don’t leave the taxpayer rip-offs to the expert Washington lobby firms such as Cassidy and Associates. If you are vacationing in D.C. this August, you can teach yourself how to drain the U.S. Treasury from the Free Money Guy.

(These days pilfering from federal taxpayers has been raised to a fine art form. Indeed, here’s Lesko immortalized in a D.C. art gallery.)

Yesterday, Democrats made good on their promise to transform the U.S. House of Representatives from what they said had been a wholly-owned subsidiary of student lending companies under Republicans, into a wholly owned subsidiary of middle- and upper-middle-class freeloaders under them.

By a 273 to 149 vote, the House passed the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007. Its good side is that it would cut several subsidies to lenders in federal loan programs, supposedly saving about $19 billion. The bad part is how it would use those savings. If enacted, the bill would modestly increase Pell Grants – which is not good news if you dislike taxpayer-dollar giveaways, though at least Pell is somewhat geared toward the truly needy – but would focus most benefits on loan programs utilized much more by the financially able. (See table 5 of this report to see loan utilization by family income.)

Indeed, the bill would cut in half – to a tiny 3.4 percent in five years – interest rates on subsidized student loans, and offer $5,000 in loan forgiveness to public servants ranging from police all the way to – get this – prosecutors! That is, it would offer $5,000 until those people had been in their jobs for ten years, at which point the entire remainder of their loans would go bye-bye, eaten by taxpayers who themselves get, approximately, nothing out of this bill.

Needless to say, professional advocates for college kids with huge senses of entitlement – like these guys, these folks, and this gal – are ecstatic about this transfer from one group of thieves to another. As for me, I’m just sorry that it’s too late for poor, common-good-obsessed prosecutors like this guy to have his loans forgiven. Oh, and this famous public servant, too.

Unhealthy products from China have been in the news lately. First it was poisoned pet food, then contaminated toothpaste, toy trains with lead paint, and now farmed fish containing unauthorized chemicals. For skeptics of trade, the news offers yet another reason to beware of imports in general but especially those “Made in China.”

Consumers have every right to be concerned about the safety of the products they buy, but the problem of potentially harmful products is not unique to China or even imports. As a New York Times story points out today, U.S. customs officials routinely intercept more potentially harmful food imports from Mexico and India than they do from China. Federal inspectors have turned away hundreds of shipments of produce from the Dominican Republic and even candy from Denmark.

Safety concerns are not confined to imports. Americans have been poisoned by beef from Nebraska, spinach from California, and peanut butter from Georgia. The same safety standards apply to imported food as to domestic food. The right response is not wholesale restrictions on imports, but to find better ways of keeping harmful products out of stores no matter where the products originate.

The large majority of food products imported to the United States, like those grown domestically, are safe and healthy. In fact, imports improve our health by making fresh produce available year around. Imports also keep prices down at the grocery store, which benefits low-income families most of all. Raising tariffs on imported food would certainly do more harm than good.

President Sarkozy’s Finance Minister has unveiled a set of tax cuts. Some of the tax cuts, such as lower death taxes and reducing the income tax so that it never exceeds 50 percent, are well designed. But the pacakge also contains gimmicky proposals such as eliminating tax on overtime (one wonders whether every French worker will seek to work 80 hours one week and zero hours the following week, though the government will probably have a plethora of rules restricting the definition of overtime). The government also wants a tax preference for some mortgages, a silly policy that will probably undermine long-term growth by misallocating capital. While Sarkozy’s package leaves something to be desired, the fact that the French government is seeking to cut taxes rather than the other way around is worth applauding. But before popping champagne corks, the Tax-news.com story includes a worrisome mention that these tax cuts may be accompanied by offsetting tax hikes:

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has presented an EUR13.6 billion package of tax cuts to the national assembly… The measures, which will cost up to EUR11 billion in 2008 alone, include the removal of taxes on overtime, reducing taxes on inheritances, capping income tax at 50% and the introduction of tax deductibility on some mortgages. …The package places much emphasis on reducing taxes on the wealthy, a measure sure to spark debate that the government is putting the interests of the rich before looking after its more vulnerable citizens. Lagarde however, argued that such measures are vital if France is to be a place of wealth creation. “All you have to do is go to Gare du Nord on Friday night to Eurostar and Thalys arrivals to understand that these French bankers, who have gone to work in the City, those tax exiles in Belgium, want one thing, to come back to France,” she told lawmakers. …However, it remains unclear from the government’s plans whether some or all of the cost of the tax cuts will be recouped with tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere.

This morning there is a congressional hearing about the DEA’s campaign against pain doctors.  The drug war is a disaster in so many ways–but this aspect of the war is particularly cruel.  Siobhan Reynolds of the Pain Relief Network will give members of Congress an earful as to what the government is actually doing.

For Cato work on this DEA campaign, read this and this.

Motivated primarily by climate change hysteria (with a bit of hate-the-rich envy probably in the mix as well), a British member of the European Parliament wants to ban cars that go more than 101 miles per hour. A Bloomberg columnist dismisses this silly notion and makes a more serious point about how limits on energy consumption are a threat to people in poor nations:

driving a sports car anywhere but on a racetrack might be relegated to history’s dustbin. Fast, powerful cars within a few years may be outlawed in Europe, an idea that has been raised ostensibly because Ferraris and Porsches produce too much carbon dioxide. … Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures — a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. … The folks against sports cars in Europe and big sport utility vehicles in the U.S. often are same ones who hate McMansion-sized homes, corporate jets, jumbo freezers, yachts, 60-inch flat-screens TVs, overnight-delivery services and other trappings of Western-style wealth and energy use. … Outside of a handful of command economies, few today would agree that a central authority ought to regulate who owns what. … Calls for limits on carbon dioxide ignore a basic point. People are likely to be better judges of the benefits of fast cars, TVs, air conditioners, and jets than government planners. Besides, the brunt of government limits on energy use may well fall on the world’s poorest nations, which need more energy — thus generating more carbon dioxide — to provide lighting, refrigeration, harvesting, water purification and transportation. What right do environmentalists in rich countries have to deny residents of poorer ones the benefits of higher living standards?

Today’s NYT features a front page, above-the-fold story about former surgeon general Richard Carmona’s charge that the Bush administration interfered with his office by (in the words of the NYT) ”repeatedly [trying] to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.” He made the charge yesterday in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Carmona described Bush administration behavior that ranged from petty (urging him not to attend Special Olympics events because of the Kennedy family’s connection to the program) to outright worrisome (directing him, again in the words of the NYT, “to put political considerations over scientific ones”). His claims add to the image of a Bush White House in which political considerations and ideology trump all others.

However, Carmona’s prepared statement suggests that the Bushies aren’t the only folks caught up in ideology.

Carmona considers himself a person of science, and scientists have an important role in policymaking. They try to determine the existence of various empirical relationships (e.g., certain emissions trap heat in the atmosphere; exposure to tobacco smoke increases the risk of cancer) and use those determinations to make predictions about the future (e.g., ongoing emission of greenhouse gases at certain levels will affect the climate; reduced tobacco use will decrease the incidence of cancer). In this way, science informs policymaking by predicting the outcomes of various policy choices.

But though science informs policy choices, it cannot make those choices. Science is a non-normative endeavor, and cannot answer such questions as whether climate change should be avoided, and whether reducing tobacco use should be used as a means to reduce the incidence of cancer. Those are the subject of value judgments — and, for public decisions, of politics.

(more…)

In researching my new bulletin, Milk Madness, the weirdest document I came across was this 2003 note from then New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer.

Spitzer was going after retailers of milk for “price gouging,” or charging prices that were “excessive.”

Talk about regulatory chutzpah. The federal government runs a milk cartel system, called “marketing orders,” which has the direct goal of raising prices. A federal price support program and import barriers are designed to raise milk prices. It has been federal policy for 70 years to screw milk consumers for the benefit of milk producers.

And the government of New York is going after retailers for overcharging? 

Don’t miss Ed Crane in today’s Financial Times: “Is Hillary Clinton a neocon?” (Subscribers only, alas; you may have to run out and buy a copy.) Here’s a taste:

“You know, when I ask people, ‘What do you think the goals of America are today?’ people don’t have any idea. We don’t know what we’re trying to achieve. And I think that in a life or in a country you’ve got to have some goals.” Senator Hillary Clinton, MSNBC, May 11 2007

Senator Hillary Clinton’s worldview, as formulated above, is starkly at odds with that of America’s founders. The idea that the American nation had “goals”, just as individuals do, would have been wholly alien to them. For them the whole undertaking of government was to protect our “self-evident” rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This emphasis on the primacy of the individual is the essence of true American exceptionalism.

National goals are a euphemism for concentrated national political power. The “Old World” was full of nations with goals, almost all pernicious. The concept of national goals is not so much un-American as it is non-American. But Mrs Clinton persists in promoting the concept, saying at a recent campaign speech in New Hampshire that rather than an “ownership society” she would “prefer a ‘we’re all in it together’ society”. She frequently invokes the notion that Americans want “to be part of something bigger than themselves”.

She has an unusual ally in this. The one other powerful political force in the US today that shares her frustration over the lack of national goals is neoconservatism.  …

UPDATE: Read the whole piece here.

Now that the German Senate has given its approval, the corporate tax rate will drop to less than 30 percent beginning next January. Not surprisingly, tax competition was the motivating force. The Tax-news.com story also reveals that Germany will be implementing a lower-rate tax on capital income. The 25 percent rate on interest, dividends, and capital gains will still be too high, but it is an improvement over the current system, which has rates as high as 42 percent:

German lawmakers have given their approval to a key corporate tax reform that will reduce the overall corporate tax burden on companies in Germany by almost 10%, placing the country in the middle of the European corporate tax league table. …

In urging the lawmakers to approve the bill, Peer Steinbrueck, German Finance Minister, argued that the tax cut represents “an investment in Germany as a business location”, making domestic and foreign investments more attractive. …

Germany currently has one of the highest corporate tax burdens in the world, and the business community has long called for rates to be reduced to help breathe life into Germany’s stagnating economy. The new law effectively cuts the corporate tax rate from the current 38.65% to 29.83%. …

The ruling coalition parties have also agreed to introduce a 25% capital gains tax from January 1, 2009. This will replace the current system, whereby capital gains are subject to personal income tax, which can be as high as 42%. This will apply to income from earned interest and dividends, and private investors’ share sales.

A news article in today’s Washington Post — about which Michael Tanner also blogs here – notes the similarities between (1) the 1993 Clinton health plan, (2) the Mitt Romney-Heritage Foundation plan that Massachusetts enacted last year, and (3) the health plans of the leading Democratic presidential candidates:

To move toward universal coverage, [Senators] Edwards, Clinton and Obama have approaches that borrow from the Massachusetts model. That plan, regarded as one of the nation’s most innovative, took key elements of the 1993 Clinton plan and made them practical politically — so practical that the plan was enacted in 2006 by a Democratic legislature with support from a Republican governor, 2008 presidential candidate Mitt Romney…

All three Democrats support a provision similar to another part of the Massachusetts plan that would require businesses either to offer insurance to their employees or pay a tax. Fourteen years ago, a similar proposal helped drive opposition to Bill Clinton’s heath-care plan…

Republican presidential candidates, wary of large plans that call for tax increases, have depicted the Democratic proposals as “socialized medicine.” Romney is among them, even though the law he signed as governor of Massachusetts has been a model for Clinton, Edwards and Obama…

When Edwards released his plan in February, [bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel] blasted it in an e-mail to one of the candidate’s aides, saying it was hard to figure out why someone seeking the Democratic nomination was backing a health-care approach crafted by Romney, a Republican.

Oh, I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out.

The Cato Institute was the first to note the similarities between RomneyCare and the 1993 Clinton health plan.  The New Republic ($) and The Washington Post soon followed. 

I wonder who will be next?

The Anti-Universal Coverage Club was written up in National Journal (subscription required) just nine days after it was launched.  The article notes that former Medicare trustee Tom Saving is among the club’s members.

It also notes that the club is “at odds not only with liberals but also with some conservatives.”  For example, it quotes Galen Institute president Grace-Marie Turner on why she does not plan to join:

It’s perception. If people think we’re against having everyone have health insurance coverage, what kind of statement is that?

Turner is right about those opposed to “universal coverage” facing a perception problem.  In my experience, the health policy community is characterized by:

1. A pervasive opinion that the best way to protect people’s health is for government to pursue health insurance coverage for all, and
2. A common perception that if you do not support universal coverage, you are an uncaring person. 

Another word for #2 is prejudice.  Which is bad enough by itself.  But if #1 is incorrect — and there is ample reason to suspect that it is — then #2 commits another sin by preventing people from questioning #1.

Turner values freedom and thinks that markets outperform government.  If such people believe that #2 is too difficult to overcome, that makes it even more important that the Anti-Universal Coverage Club challenge that prejudice.

According to Tax-news.com, about 200,000 Brits have tattled on their neighbors to the tax authority. It is unclear whether this has generated more revenue for the
UK’s bloated public sector, but the more interesting aspect of this story is that the snitches do not get any reward. At least Russians who ratted out family members to the KGB might get a pair of jeans from the West. And Cubans who turn in their colleagues might get their meat ration upped to twice monthly:

Almost 200,000 Britons have shopped their friends, family and colleagues to the tax man in the year since HM Revenue and Customs set up a confidential hotline for taxpayers to inform on those they suspect of dodging their taxes. … However, it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the HMRC initiative, as the Treasury reportedly refused to divulge to the Times how many successful prosecutions had resulted from such informants, nor how much extra tax had been brought in. …informants in the UK receive no monetary rewards for shopping tax evaders. …HMRC has said that it needs additional powers and deterrents to extract money from non-payers, in order to reduce the cost and effort of pursuing around 200,000 people through the court system every year.

The Washington Post has a story today gushing over how “pragmatic” and “moderate” Democratic presidential candidates are being in pursuit of universal health care. Moderate in comparison to Michael Moore maybe, but let’s look at what those candidates are actually proposing:

1) An individual mandate requiring every American to purchase a specific government-designed insurance plan or face financial penalties. (Edwards and Clinton). Such a mandate, however unenforceable in practice, is an unprecedented (except for Massachusetts) infringement on individual liberty and sets the stage for further regulation of the insurance industry.

2) A “play or pay” mandate on businesses, requiring them to provide employees with health insurance or pay additional taxes (Obama, Edwards, Clinton). Such a mandate would raise the cost of employment resulting in a loss of jobs and lower employee compensation.

3) A government-mandated minimum benefits package for insurance (Obama, Edwards, Clinton). Rather than true insurance—spreading catastrophic risk—the government would require a “Cadillac” policy, leading to a feeding frenzy for special interests representing providers and disease constituencies.

4) Community rating and guaranteed issue, raising the cost of insurance for young and healthy individuals. (Obama, Edwards, Clinton).

5) Price controls on insurance premiums (Obama) and prescription drugs under Medicare (Obama, Edwards, Clinton).

6) Huge tax increases, ranging from $65 billion per year (Obama) to more than $120 billion per year (Edwards).

7) Massive expansion of government health care programs like Medicaid (Obama, Edwards, Clinton). Edwards would also create a new government-run health care program like Medicare to compete with private insurance.

8) Managed-competition-style regional insurance pools or “connectors.” (Obama and Clinton).

The fact that Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation also support many of these proposals doesn’t make them any more moderate. These proposals would radically increase government control over one seventh of the US economy, would increase taxes, destroy jobs, and slow economic growth, and most importantly would lead to worse health care for millions of Americans.

The blogger David in DC describes himself as a “Knee-Jerk Bleeding-Heart Liberal-Progressive With a Hyphenation Problem.”  He nevertheless offers his praise for David Hyman’s book Medicare Meets Mephistopheles:

O.K., how often do you suppose you’re gonna get a recommendation from me for a book published by the Cato Institute (a libertarian think tank) and denouncing one of the most important legacies of LBJ’s “Great Society” program?…

This book has charts, graphs and endnotes. It’s a scholarly work.

But it’s also damnably funny.

Check it out.

It’s a nice review.  But I think his mom put him up to it.

The Associated Press reports that financial institutions in North America are paying 71 percent more over the past three years to comply with government anti-money laundering rules and regulations. Even supporters of the current approach admit that the costs are enormous, totaling about $7 billion yearly (and that estimate is three years old). This steep burden might be worthwhile if it led to a reduction in crime and/or terrorism, but as I have explained elsewhere, there is scant evidence that anti-money laundering laws reduce underlying criminal/terrorist behavior. Indeed, because law enforcement resources are being used to spy on everybody rather than targeted at those who want to harm the country, it is possible that the misallocation of resources required by anti-money laundering policy actually makes America less safe:

Complying with anti-money laundering laws has been much more expensive than banks anticipated, and some still aren’t meeting all requirements, a new survey says. …Among the six regions surveyed, North American banks saw the highest percentage cost increase, with costs rising 71 percent over the last three years. …Many governments require that banks take steps to prevent money laundering. Money laundering involves making certain financial transactions to hide the source, nature or destination of illegal funds. The United States has the Bank Secrecy Act, which was passed in 1970 and amended by the USA Patriot Act of Oct. 26, 2001. It has since been used increasingly to stop the flow of financing to terrorist organizations.

Cato’s Brink Lindsey has a good essay in today’s WSJ on how cultural differences between communities (from child-rearing to views and expectations on education) widen America’s socioeconomic gap. The one point where I diverge from Brink is that I am far more sanguine about the feasibility of reducing the cultural gaps that exacerbate the socioeconomic gap. The key is to understand that our educational institutions actually shape our culture.

Our monopoly school system has gradually marginalized parents, removing from them any significant responsibility for deciding where, what, how, when, and by whom their children are taught. This usurpation of traditional parental responsibilities has not only facilitated but fomented an unprecedented level of disengagement from their children’s education. Responsibilities breed responsibility. Powerlessness breeds apathy and disengagement.

When parents are actively involved in choosing their children’s schools, and when they have some measure of financial responsibility for their children’s education, they take a more active role, they are more satisfied with their children’s education, and their children’s achievement and attainment goes up. The most dramatic findings come from the areas most in need of improvement: our inner cities. University of Chicago economist Derek Neal has shown that urban black students attending Catholic schools are far more likely to graduate from high-school, be accepted to college, and graduate from college than similar students who attend government schools. That and other relevant research is digested and linked to here.

Replacing our dependency-producing school monopoly with a free education market that requires all parents to choose their children’s schools, and requires all parents to contribute something to the cost of their own children’s education (in kind rather than cash, where necessary), would not simply minimize the damage done by America’s culture gap. It would significantly shrink that gap, because it would compel parents to once again take a more active role in their children’s education. “Free” monopoly schooling isn’t merely inefficient, it is socially destructive.

The July issue of Cato Unbound hits virtual newsstands this morning with Cato VP for research Brink Lindsey’s new essay elaborating his argument in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture that the culture wars are over and a vaguely libertarian consensus is the result. While recognizing that principled libertarianism doesn’t have a significant constituency, Lindsey argues that the soft libertarian synthesis constrains the Democrats and Republicans as they seek to cobble together working political majorities. Keep your browsers pointed to Cato Unbound: Jonah Goldberg of National Review has first whack at Brink on Wednesday.

The United Kingdom has extremely favorable rules for “non-domiciled” residents, a policy that enables highly productive people to live in London while avoiding most taxes on capital income and foreign-source income. The left in Europe hates this policy, especially since entrepreneurs and investors are escaping high-tax nations to live in London, but the new Chancellor of the Exchequer seems content to leave well enough alone. The Observer reports:

London, the great global financial centre, has another claim to fame: it has become the fastest growing destination for international tax avoiders. The world’s super-rich and an elite cadre of financiers working in the Square Mile are increasingly using non-domicile tax status to sidestep paying tax on their fortunes. …Those benefiting from non-dom status have rocketed over the last five years. The Treasury…confirmed that 112,000 individuals indicated non-dom status in their self-assessment returns in the tax year to April 2005. This is a 74 per cent increase over 2002’s figures. …Unlike UK citizens, non-doms escape tax on income from property or capital gains. It is not only the international jet set who claim non-dom status; it is also available to some of the most powerful figures in the City. …Non-domicile status is self-assessed. Forms are easy to download from the web and there are just 19 questions. One tax expert says it is easy to convince the Revenue that a claimant is based overseas, whether it is through a relative or a series of overseas investments. In addition, the Revenue makes very few checks on status. Many senior City figures qualify for non-dom tax exemptions, including Dominic Murphy, the UK boss of private equity giant KKR. And it is widely thought that the Chancellor’s City adviser Sir Ronald Cohen and a large collection of Labour Party donors do too.  …Earlier this week, new Chancellor Alistair Darling made it clear that nothing must harm the international pre-eminence of the City and he warned against ‘knee jerk’ reactions to calls to amend the regulation.

I started the Anti–Universal Coverage Club in part to make a point, but also because I was curious to see how many people agreed with its basic premises. 

I’m pleased to report that such people do exist. As of today, I count 86 club members.  Rather than list them all, I’ll run through just those who might be recognizable to the policy community. Affiliations are provided for identification purposes only and do not imply that any of those organizations agree with us. At all. Unless I list an organization by itself.

Nathan Benefield
Director of Policy Research
Commonwealth Foundation

Greg Blankenship
President
Illinois Policy Institute

David Brown
Editor
Laissez Faire Books Blog

Joseph Coletti
Health Care Policy Analyst
John Locke Foundation

Karla Dial
Managing Editor
Health Care News

Paul Gessing
President
Rio Grande Foundation

John Graham
Director, Health Care Studies
Pacific Research Institute

Curly Haugland
Republican National Committeeman
North Dakota

Carla Howell
President
Center For Small Government

Arnold Kling
Economist/Blogger
Cato Institute/Library of Economics & Liberty

Frayda Levy
President
Moving Picture Institute

Mark Litow
Consulting Actuary
Milliman, Inc.

Montana Liberty Project

National Review

Michael Ostrolenk
Director of Government Affairs
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

Tom Patterson
Chairman
Goldwater Institute

Jared Rhoades
Director
Lucidicus Project

James Rottet
Legislative Specialist
The Heartland Institute

Herbert Rubin
Professor
UCLA School of Medicine

Thomas Saving
Professor of Economics
Texas A&M University

Greg Scandlen
Founder
Consumers for Health Care Choices

Greg Schneider
Health Care Fellow
Flint Hills Center for Public Policy

Jeffrey Singer
Contributing Editor
Arizona Medicine

Henry Stern
Blogger
Insure Blog

Mary Katherine Stout
Vice President
Texas Public Policy Foundation

Andrew Sullivan
Journalist
The Atlantic Online

The club has received a fair number of favorable mentions from blogs I had heard of (Coyote Blog, MooreWatch.com, SPN Blog, and Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket) and some I had not (Blog of Bile, Chaos From Order, A Chequer-Board Of Nights & Days, Con Law Geek, DeadBeef.com, Health Care BS, I Was The State, and JasonPye.com).

Not everyone had a favorable reaction. Neil Versel’s Healthcare IT Blog described our one recruitment email as “unbelievably shocking.”  Ezra Klein of The American Prospect wished us well in recruiting members, I think because he’s happy to have someone else compile his enemies list for him. Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic Online congratulated me for starting the club but then deftly missed the point when he wrote, “I’m fairly certain that, politically, ‘we don’t care if you can’t afford health insurance’ is a losing slogan.”

Some members (not listed above) asked that I not use their real names because they feared giving offense — or even receiving offense, in the form of professional reprisals.  Some think my name is spelled “Canon.” Others think my name is spelled “Tanner.”  That’s fine. I’m just happy to have them aboard.  I especially love that we have a Curly.

Not bad considering how little effort I’ve put into this.

Drawing from Amity Shlaes’ excellent new book The Forgotten Man, George Will notes that FDR’s policies were an economic failure but a political success.

It is particularly galling that Roosevelt’s statist policies were so harmful (as Chris Edwards has succinctly explained), yet he is portrayed as the man who saved the nation from unbridled capitalism:

Franklin Roosevelt’s success was in altering the practice of American politics. This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive.

…Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies — labor, retirees, farmers, union members — to be dependent on government.

…Roosevelt implemented the theory that (in [Shlaes’] words) “spending promoted growth, if government was big enough to spend enough.” In only 12 months, just one Roosevelt improvisation, the National Recovery Administration, “generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.” Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. …In 1936, for the first time in peacetime history, federal spending exceeded that of the states and localities combined.

…[A]s Roosevelt demonstrated and Shlaes reminds us, compassion, understood as making the “insecure” securely dependent, also makes the state flourish.

Conservative evangelical Christians are having trouble finding an appealing presidential candidate this year. Among the major Republican candidates, they note that Giuliani is pro-choice, Romney is Mormon, and McCain in 2000 called religious right leaders “agents of intolerance.”

I’d like to see a pollster ask conservative Christians two questions:

1. Would you support a presidential candidate who is divorced, has estranged relations with his children, never sees his grandchildren, rarely attends church, strongly opposes a law to ban gays from teaching school, and as governor signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law?

2. Would you support him if you knew his name was Ronald Reagan?

Bill Monroe, who was moderator for NBC’s Meet the Press for about 10 years, is a longtime advocate of extending the First Amendment to broadcasting. Actually, I’m sure he thought that the First Amendment did cover all forms of the news media — but he knew that Congress and the courts didn’t see it that way, so he wanted an explicit amendment to make that clear.

Because his articles on this topic were published in the pre-Internet Dark Ages (yes, children, there are great ideas not online), I can’t link to any of them. But he briefly reprised the argument in the letters column of the Washington Post today, concluding:

Broadcasters are also open to government pressure through the Federal Communications Commission, whose members are appointed by the president. Newspapers are specifically protected against government interference by the granite wall known as the First Amendment.

When the present form of broadcast regulation was set up early in the previous century, nobody understood what powerful instruments of news and information would evolve from the primitive radio stations of that day. Now that we do understand it, we can repair that historic mistake. We can extend the clear, stirring language of the First Amendment to equal protection for freedom of the electronic media. The problem of allocating broadcast licenses does not have to cost the American people the benefit of free broadcasting.

The Anti-Universal Coverage Club is a list of scholars and citizens who reject the idea that government should ensure that all individuals have health insurance. It exists to challenge the idea that “universal coverage” is the best way to protect and promote health.

The following principles explain the club’s opposition to “universal coverage”:

1. Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
2. “Universal coverage” could be achieved only by forcing everyone to buy health insurance or by having government provide health insurance to all, neither of which is desirable.
3. In a free society, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
4. If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care, they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals, uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be forced by a policy of “universal coverage” to subsidize people via “insurance.”

To join, post something to your blog or email me here.  If you blog about the club, pro or con, please send the link to that address as well.

In today’s Washington Post, former Bush speechwriter and policy adviser Michael Gerson sees the online role-playing game Second Life as a “large-scale experiment in libertarianism.” And since the world of Second Life apparently features its share of weirdness — violent, sexual, and otherwise — Gerson concludes that the libertarian concept of spontaneous order is a fantasy. Because of what he saw in a fantasy game. 

I know, I can’t follow the logic either, but remember that Gerson runs with a crowd that thinks “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” so he may not be all that clear on the distinction between what’s real and what’s make-believe.  

I don’t know much about Second Life, and what I hear about it makes me feel crotchety and unhip beyond my years. But however bizarre the game is, it seems that nobody actually gets hurt. In that respect at least, it’s superior to the large-scale experiment in “compassionate conservatism” that Gerson helped conduct for the last several years. That experiment has left us with an exploding federal budget, a metastasizing welfare state, and a vast humanitarian disaster in Iraq. It’s little wonder some people prefer virtual reality to the real thing.     

Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey tries to be a uniter, not a divider. In his much-discussed “Liberaltarians” article for the New Republic, Brink held out an olive branch to liberals. TNR’s Jonathan Chait was, well, less than enthusiastic.

In his “A Farewell to the Culture Wars,” recently published in National Review, Brink does much the same for conservatives, advising them to seek to conserve the “great American heritage of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets,” instead of, say, exclusively heterosexual marriage and a not-so-Mexican America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, NR’s Ramesh Ponnuru has declined the advice. Brink’s rejoinder, published online this Tuesday, is smart and effective:

Ramesh Ponnuru concedes the main point I was trying to make. Specifically, he admits that “[i]t really is pointless to pine for the social order that existed prior to the late 1960s,” and that “most conservatives would not want to go back if they could.”
 
Ramesh makes this concession almost casually, as if it were no big deal. But I’m sorry, it’s a very big deal indeed. After all, a great deal of intellectual and emotional energy on the right has been expended over the years in precisely the kind of pining Ramesh now regards as pointless. Conservatives have defended, with great conviction and moral passion, positions on race relations, the role of women in society, and sexual morality that most conservatives today would disown as ludicrous or offensive. I don’t think it suffices to dismiss these glaring errors of judgment with an Emily Litella-like “Never mind.”

While commentators left and right may be hesitant to pick up what Lindsey’s laying down, that doesn’t mean he’s about to stop trying to transcend the stale terms of yesterday’s political dialectic.

Tune into Cato Unbound on Monday, where Brink will kick off a fresh round of discussion on “The Politics of Abundance” with a panel of blogosphere luminaries. On the left, we’ll have The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias. On the right, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. And in the … middle? … Reason contributing editor Julian Sanchez.  

In an article today in the Boston Globe, Rep. Barney Frank (D, MA) commented on the closure of a fabric maker located in or near (the article is unclear) his district:

These working-class people are bearing the brunt of a policy of globalization that benefits the few and damages the many,” Frank said. (my emphasis)

Mr. Frank has the problem precisely backwards. Open trade benefits the many — through more competition and lower prices — even though it takes away the protection of a chosen few. It is tariffs that impose (relatively small) costs on many dispersed consumers, but benefits concentrated interests (and harms the economy overall). In this case, the closure of a 900-employee textile plant is a highly visible manifestation of a phenomenon that has been largely postive on net. It is sad for those losing their jobs, to be sure, but millions of American consumers benefit every day from opening the U.S. market to cheaper imports.

As a Wall Street Journal article yesterday pointed out (and my colleague Dan Ikenson blogged about here last week), the power of organized labor in the Democratic Party has probably spoiled any further trade liberalization in the near future, despite the month-old and much-hyped “bipartisan deal” on trade. This backtracking comes after the administration agreed to Democrats’ demands for stronger labor and environmental provisions in trade agreements.

The recently-inked deal with Korea — the biggest trade deal for the United States since NAFTA, and one that promises large market opportunities for American farmers and service providers, not to mention deals for U.S. consumers — is probably off, all because of American automobile makers who fear competition from Korean imports and assert that the Korean market was not going to open enough for their liking. (Of course, if the deal fails, then the market probably won’t open further at all, but that logic is apparently unconvincing.) Talk about benefiting the few and damaging the many.

In one city, the right to keep and bear arms is respected. And so is the right to use arms for self-defense.

In another city, the right to keep and bear arms has been criminalized. In that city, the police want to lock up people who take responsibility for their own safety.

For Cato work about self-defense and gun control, go here and here.

One Richard Eskow criticizes an op-ed that Mike Tanner and I wrote for the L.A. Times. Rather than fisk the whole thing, I’ll zero in on just this one claim:

[W]hile the authors observe that some people on waiting lists are in chronic pain, they fail to note that few if any universal coverage advocates believe that is anything other than a flaw that needs to be corrected.

A flaw that needs to be corrected! Et si ma tante en avait, elle s’appellerait mon oncle.

In a Cato Institute policy analysis titled “Health Care in a Free Society: Rebutting the Myths of National Health Insurance,” John Goodman explains why Eskow’s belief that waiting lists are minor problems to be corrected is mostly just wishful thinking:

The characteristics described above are not accidental byproducts of government-run health care systems. They are the natural and inevitable consequences of placing the market for health care under the control of politicians. Health care delivery in countries with national health insurance does not just happen to be as it is. In many respects, it could not be otherwise….

Why do national health insurance schemes skimp on expensive services to the seriously ill while providing so many inexpensive services to those who are only marginally ill? Because the latter services benefit millions of people (read: millions of voters), while acute and intensive care services concentrate large amounts of money on a handful of patients (read: small numbers of voters).  Democratic political pressures in this case dictate the redistribution of resources from the few to the many.

Goodman offers other examples of problems inherent to political control of health care that are not so easily fixed. Read the whole thing.

Some people hoped that new French president Nicolas Sarkozy would liberalize France’s economy and reduce the burden of government. But all the evidence points in the other direction.

The International Herald Tribune reports on Sarkozy’s statist choices:

[C]riticism of Sarkozy’s interventionist language…is mounting. The question that Eurocrats, central bankers and fellow politicians are asking is the same they asked three years ago: Is the man who wants to shake up France’s labor market and ignite economic growth with a flurry of tax cuts the liberal European he claims? Or is he an old-style Gaullist in modern disguise?

…

“Institutions, procedures, directives and rules are not ends in themselves,” Sarkozy declared in Strasbourg, calling for a Europe “that does not submit itself to the pseudo-dictatorship of the market….

Sarkozy has shown little willingness to abandon certain nationalist instincts of past French leaders. He has defended EU agricultural subsidies against demands for greater trade liberalization. He has shown little inclination to withdraw from France’s aim of creating national champions, particularly in the energy sector. On Thursday, he debated the future of the state-controlled gas company Gaz de France with his prime minister and finance minister. And rather than encouraging globalization, he has appeared to reinforce French fears of unfettered capitalism — for example, by fighting to remove a largely symbolic affirmation of EU competition policy from the revamped treaty agreed last month in Brussels.

“Sarkozy talks right but rules left. Portrayals of him as a French Thatcher who will shake things up are vastly exaggerated,” said one EU official in reference to the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. “He is, after all, French.”

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about Rupert Murdoch’s drive for total world domination. I’d be as disappointed as anyone if he took over the Wall Street Journal and wrung out of it what makes the Journal a great paper.

But a recent New York Times story on “Murdoch, Ruler of a Vast Empire” rather off-handedly made clear what real power is — and it isn’t what Murdoch has. As the Times reported,

Shortly before Christmas in 1987, Senator Edward M. Kennedy taught Mr. Murdoch a tough lesson in the ways of Washington.

Two years earlier, Mr. Murdoch had paid $2 billion to buy seven television stations in major American markets with the intention of starting a national network. To comply with rules limiting foreign ownership, he became an American citizen. And to comply with rules banning the ownership of television stations and newspapers in the same market, he promised to sell some newspapers eventually. But almost immediately he began looking for ways around that rule.

Then Mr. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, stepped in. Mr. Kennedy’s liberal politics had made him a target of Murdoch-owned news media outlets, particularly The Boston Herald, which often referred to Mr. Kennedy as “Fat Boy.” [This is an unfair claim by the Times; one columnist at the Herald calls Kennedy that. This is like saying “The Times often refers to Cheney as ‘Shooter’” because Maureen Dowd does.] He engineered a legislative maneuver that forced an infuriated Mr. Murdoch to sell his beloved New York Post.

Murdoch could spend $2 billion on American media properties and change his citizenship — but one irritated senator could force him to sell his favorite American newspaper. The Times continued,

“Teddy almost did him in,” said Philip R. Verveer, a cable television lobbyist. “I presume that over time, as his media ownership in this country has grown and grown, he’s realized that you can’t throw spit wads at leading figures in society with impunity.”

Well, actually you can in a free society. That’s what makes it a free society — that you can criticize the powerful. And true, nobody tried to put Murdoch in jail. They just forced him to change his citizenship and sell his newspaper.

He ran into similar problems in Britain. His newspapers there, unsurprisingly, usually supported the Conservative Party. But in 1997 two of them endorsed Labour Party leader Tony Blair for prime minister. Blair reacted warmly to the support, but some Labour leaders still wanted to enact media ownership limits, which might have forced Murdoch to sell some of his properties.

“Blair’s attitude was quite clear,” Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times under Mr. Murdoch in London from 1983 to 1994, said in an interview. “If the Murdoch press gave the Blair government a fair hearing, it would be left intact.”

Is this what the long British struggle for freedom of the press has come to? A prime minister can threaten to dismantle newspapers if they don’t give him “a fair hearing”?

Murdoch has been a realist about politics. He knows that while he may buy ink by the barrel, governments have the actual power. They can shut him down at the behest of a prime minister or a powerful senator. So he plays the game, in Britain and the United States and even China.

After the 2006 elections, for instance, News Corporation and its employees started giving more money to Democrats than Republicans.

“We did seek more balance,” said Peggy Binzel, Mr. Murdoch’s former chief in-house lobbyist. “You need to be able to tell your story to both sides to be effective. And that’s what political giving is about.”

Rupert Murdoch’s empire may become yet more vast, but he’ll still be subject to the whims of powerful politicians. This is hardly surprising in China. But one would hope that in the country of John Milton and the country of John Peter Zenger, and especially in the country of the First Amendment, a publisher would be free to say whatever he chooses without fear of government assault on either his person or his property.

The European Union commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquin Almunia, thinks there should be a minimum wage for all EU member nations. This is a destructive notion, considering many European nations suffer from substantional unemployment and under-employment. To the extent that minimum wage policy is harmonized (as opposed to 27 different minimum wage policies in 27 EU nations), poorer countries will be hardest hit.

The EU Observer reports on the latest proposal from the statists in Brussels:

EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner Joaquin Almunia has mooted the idea of minimum wages being introduced in each of the 27 member states across the European Union. “Every country in the EU should have a minimum wage,” Mr Almunia told the German weekly Die Zeit in an interview.

…[O]nly 20 EU member states currently have a set level of minimum wages…. Germany … is one of the few major world economies without a minimum wage.

But for the intriguing–and unsettling–revelation that President Bush’s nickname for his attorney general is “Fredo,” there’s not much new in the Washington Post’s recent four-part series on vice president Dick Cheney.  But the series does serve to remind us of how consistently Cheney has pushed for three decades to expand the powers of the presidency.  That in turn is a good jumping-off point for examining how inconsistent post-Watergate conservatives’ affinity for powerful executives is with conservatism, properly understood. 

Almost to a man, the postwar conservatives who coalesced around William F. Buckley’s National Review associated presidential power with liberal activism and viewed Congress as the “conservative” branch.  In 1960 NR senior editor Willmoore Kendall, who had been one of Buckley’s professors at Yale, published an influential article called “The Two Majorities,” which made that case.  In 1967, Russell Kirk and coauthor James McClellan praised the late Robert A. Taft, “Mr. Conservative,” for insisting that war had to be a last resort, threatening as it did to “make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, [and] break in upon private and public morality.” 

Even so ardent a Cold Warrior as NR’s James Burnham recognized that “by the intent of the Founding Fathers and the letter and tradition of the Constitution, the bulk of the sovereign war power was assigned to Congress.”  Burnham doubted that congressional control of the war power could be maintained, given the demands of modern war.  But he wrote a book defending Congress’s centrality to the American constitutional system and warning that erosion of congressional power and the rise of activist presidents risked bringing about “plebiscitary despotism for the United States in place of constitutional government, and thus the end of political liberty.”

The politician who represented the culmination of postwar conservatives’ hopes for political success, Senator Barry Goldwater, could sound as extremist in opposition to presidential power as he did on other matters involving “the defense of liberty.” In his 1964 campaign manifesto “My Case for the Republican Party,” Goldwater wrote:

We hear praise of a power-wielding, arm-twisting President who “gets his program through Congress” by knowing the use of power. Throughout the course of history, there have been many other such wielders of power. There have even been dictators who regularly held plebiscites, in which their dictatorships were approved by an Ivory-soap-like percentage of the electorate. But their countries were not free, nor can any country remain free under such despotic power. Some of the current worship of powerful executives may come from those who admire strength and accomplishment of any sort. Others hail the display of Presidential strength … simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power. This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means…. If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.

(more…)

The AP Reports that some war protesters are refusing to pay taxes.  Some fear that if this keeps up, the government might come grinding to a halt.  If they have any other objections, they’re not saying.

Go here and here for more about taxes.