Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
September 14, 2012
Latest Studies: 49 new items, including a new book by Carrie Lukas and Sabrina Schaeffer dismantling the charge of a war on women, and a report by the Hudson Institute on the collapse of startups in job creation
Notes on the Week: New issue of The Insider is out, appeasement still doesn’t work, eventually public schools will run out of other people’s money, and more
To Do: Celebrate Constitution Day
Budget & Taxation
• Field of Schemes Mark II: The Taxpayer and Economic Welfare Costs of Price Loss Coverage and Supplementary Insurance Coverage Programs – American Enterprise Institute
• Cutting up the Credit Cards: Seven Ideas to Reform the Culture of Debt in State and Local Government – Goldwater Institute
• Clinton Tax Hikes Slowed Growth – The Heritage Foundation
• Congress Should Finish Its Summer Job: Stop Taxmageddon – The Heritage Foundation
• FY 2013 Continuing Resolution: Spends Every Dollar and More – The Heritage Foundation
• Government Employees Work Less than Private-Sector Employees – The Heritage Foundation
• Romney, Obama, & Simpson-Bowles: How Do the Tax Reform Plans Stack Up? – Tax Foundation
• The Estate Tax: Even Worse Than Republicans Say – Tax Foundation
• Enhancing Texas’ Economic Growth Through Tax Reform – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Economic and Political Thought
• Liberty Is No War on Women – Independent Women’s Forum
Economic Growth
• Defining the Baseline Down – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Defending the Dream: Why Income Inequality Doesn’t Threaten Opportunity – The Heritage Foundation
• Heritage Employment Report: Dog Days of August Howl in the Labor Market – The Heritage Foundation
• Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty – The Heritage Foundation
• Not Looking for Work: Why Labor Force Participation Has Fallen During the Recession – The Heritage Foundation
• The Collapse of Startups in Job Creation – Hudson Institute
• A Report on Corporate Governance and Shareholder Activism – Manhattan Institute
• Economic Recovery: Lessons from the Post-World War II Period – Mercatus Center
• The Economic Situation, September 2012 – Mercatus Center
Education
• Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology – American Enterprise Institute
• The High Cost of College: An Economic Explanation – American Enterprise Institute
• Turning the Tides: President Obama and Education Reform – American Enterprise Institute
• No Child Left Behind Waivers: Bogus Relief, Genuine Overreach – The Heritage Foundation
• Breaking the Public Monopoly on K-12 – Hoover Institution
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• A Quest for Democratic Citizenship: Agendas, Practices, and Ideals of Six Russian Grass-roots Organizations and Movements – American Enterprise Institute
• Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy – Encounter Books
• International Security Advisory Board’s Misplaced Focus a Cause for Concern – The Heritage Foundation
• Politics Over Security: Homeland Security Congressional Oversight in Dire Need of Reform – The Heritage Foundation
• The U.N. Human Rights Council Does Not Deserve U.S. Support – The Heritage Foundation
• The U.S. Should Withdraw from the U.N.’s “Programme of Action” on Small Arms – The Heritage Foundation
• The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty: Fair, Balanced, and Worth Defending – The Heritage Foundation
• U.S. Should Challenge Huge U.N. Funding Disparities – The Heritage Foundation
Government Reform
• Citizens' Guide to Initiative 1185: To Affirm the Two-thirds Vote Requirement for Tax Increases – Washington Policy Center
Health Care
• Curing the Pre-Existing Conditions of ObamaCare – American Enterprise Institute
• Medicaid Expansion Will Become More Costly to States – The Heritage Foundation
• State Lawmaker’s Guide to Evaluating Medicaid Expansion Projects – The Heritage Foundation
• Why Traditional Medicare Must (and Will) Be Reformed – The Heritage Foundation
• Medicare’s New Price Control Board – National Center for Policy Analysis
International Trade/Finance
• Trade Freedom: How Imports Support US Jobs – The Heritage Foundation
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing: Wrong Medicine for an Ailing Economy – The Heritage Foundation
National Security
• Annual Compliance Report: Lack of Clarity Damaging to U.S. Security – The Heritage Foundation
• Congress Should Not Enable Executive Orders on Cybersecurity – The Heritage Foundation
• Eleven Years Later: U.S. Should Not Lose Momentum in the War on Terrorism – The Heritage Foundation
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Would a Carbon Dioxide Tax Be ‘Efficient’? – American Enterprise Institute
• A (Genetically-Modified) Apple a Day … – Hoover Institution
• The China Model and U.S. Energy Policy – Hudson Institute
• Edwards Aquifer Authority v. McDaniel: A New Day for Texas Groundwater Rights – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Retirement/Social Security
• How Are Baby Boomers Spending Their Money? – National Center for Policy Analysis
Welfare
• Welfare Work Requirements: Vague Replacement of Work for Welfare – The Heritage Foundation
“The most transparent administration ever” has been accused of hiding official correspondence. Keep your eye on a new lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Competitive Enterprise Institute; if it succeeds, federal bureaucrats would no longer be able to shield official correspondence from public disclosure by sending it through personal e-mail accounts.
In May, the free market think tank filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking correspondence between Environmental Protection Agency Regional Administrator James Martin and the Environmental Defense Fund, for whom Martin worked before joining the EPA. CEI requested correspondence sent by Martin from both official and non-official e-mail accounts, because, CEI contends, Martin has a “clear history of using such accounts to perform official business.”
But the EPA has been stonewalling the request, so on Tuesday CEI went to court. According to CEI fellow Christopher Horner, the practice of conducting official government business via non-official e-mail accounts, “is organized and systematic throughout the ‘most transparent ever’ administration.”
For tips on using the Freedom of Information Act, see “Getting Government Records: How to File a Successful Freedom of Information Act Request” by Lisette Garcia in the summer issue of The Insider.
Invitation to Fraud: The Insider, Summer 2012: The new issue is out, and here is the editor’s note (with links to individual articles embedded):
Who Works for Whom?
In March 2010, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi delivered the most notable and quotable line of the past few years. Explaining the rush to pass President Obama’s signature health care bill, she said: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
In addition to raising doubts about Ms. Pelosi’s own grasp of the bill (Couldn’t she just tell us?), the line revealed a backward theory of American democracy. James Madison and company thought they had created a government that worked for “we the people.” The attitude of Ms. Pelosi and company is that the people will be informed in due course what the government has decided.
We are occasionally reminded, however, that even if the people aren’t doing a very good job of being governed, the government can’t just throw them out and choose a different group of people to go be the people. Those occasions are called elections, and they work the other way around.
Unfortunately, as John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky observe in our cover feature, democratic accountability is undermined by an election system that provides plenty of opportunity for voter fraud. In many cities around the country, the number of registered voters exceeds the number of residents over the age of 18. Thirteen percent of the nation’s voter registrations are either inaccurate or invalid, according to the Pew Center on the States. Fixes could be made; the question is whether the politicians want them.
Giving the people information may be a low priority for some in government, but we can at least thank Congress for the Freedom of Information Act, which requires the federal government to disclose many of its records upon request. Lisette Garcia, a senior investigator with Judicial Watch, provides us some tips on the finer points of crafting a Freedom of Information Act request.
In other articles of this issue, we talk with John Goodman about the need for real free markets in health care, Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven explain how ending corporate welfare will generate more entrepreneurship and innovation, and Jennifer Marshall explains how welfare dependency is on the way back.
Eventually public schools will run out of other people’s money. Public-sector monopolies like public schools don’t exist to improve services; they exist to limit competition and expand their power to extract benefits from taxpayers. That is the system that teachers unions, like the one representing Chicago’s striking teachers, are defending. Here’s a graphic illustration of how it works, from reason.tv and the Motion Picture Institute:
The economy is worse than the unemployment rate shows. Since the recession began, the proportion of adults working or looking for work has fallen to its lowest level in decades. In fact, if all those discouraged workers were still counted as unemployed, there would have been no drop at all in the unemployment rate in the past three years. The reason the jobs situation remains bad, explains James Sherk, has less to do with layoffs than with a lack of new hiring:
Employers hired 13 million new employees in the second quarter of 2012—15 percent fewer than the 15.3 million new workers hired in the last quarter of 2007. Unemployment remains high primarily because businesses are creating fewer new jobs—not because of increased layoffs. […]
Job creation and new hiring remain low for several reasons. The most prominent are the lingering effects of the collapse of the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis, as well as the domestic consequences of the economic slowdowns in Europe and China. The U.S. government has also contributed to the problem. Excessive taxes and increased regulation discourage risk-taking and investment. Prominent leaders in Congress have announced their intentions to raise taxes by $500 billion in January 2013. The Administration has increased the regulatory burden facing businesses, especially in health care.
Small-business owners report that tax burden and government red tape are significant problems. In fact, small-business owners are statistically as likely to cite either taxes (21 percent) or regulations and red tape (21 percent) as poor sales (20 percent) as their single greatest problem. [The Heritage Foundation, August 30]
Thomas Szasz, R.I.P. Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and other writings that challenged the psychiatric profession’s claims of a scientific understanding of human behavior, died Tuesday. “Szasz’s war against psychiatry,” writes Trevor Burrus, “can be viewed in the same light as Hayek’s war against planned economies: an opposition to state-backed conglomerations of power masquerading under the pretense of knowledge.”
Szasz’s unique contribution to psychiatry was to continually refocus the question on whether there is a scientific, objective basis for asserting that certain “kinds of behavior are regarded as indicative of mental illness.” His unique contribution to libertarian thought was to focus on personal responsibility as the proper response to claims of “mental illness,” to be concerned about the involuntary incarceration of the “mentally ill” as an immoral deprivation of liberty, and to criticize the state as the most significant “whom” that defines mental illness.
Because of this focus on the state’s effect on social and scientific areas, rather than in just the economic and philosophical realms, Szasz’s work encourages libertarians to look to broader social criticisms of government. Szasz wisely questioned the implications of letting the government define “mental illness” and trusting the political forces that affect those determinations. As he wrote in The Myth of Mental Illness, “Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by legislation about the medicalization and demedicalization of behavior. Old diseases such as homosexuality and hysteria disappear, while new diseases such as gambling and smoking appear, as if to replace them.” [Cato-at-Liberty, September 11]
This “recovery” is different, explains e21:
Rather than accelerating to return to the trend growth rate, the economy has actually grown at a slower average pace after the recession ended than it did before the recession began. This is anomalous because one would have anticipated an especially brisk recovery to match the size of the contraction. For the first time in U.S. economic history, the depth of the contraction and the strength of the recovery have been asymmetric, causing the economy to fall well below the level consistent with its long-run trend.
[e21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century, September 12]
The Fed is engaging in class warfare. It’s plan for more quantitative easing [i.e., printing money] really means more redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the very rich. As Anthony Randazzo explains, the Fed buying up securities will boost the value of stocks, most of which are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent. But that’s not all, says Randazzo:
The whole idea of QE is to drive investors out of lower risk investments like mortgage backed securities and government debt and get them to put that money in “more productive” use—lend it, build skyscrapers, invest in technology, etc. Since there is little confidence about the future of the economy, many investors have crowded into the stock market with their money, and still others have invested in commodities.
The problem is that investing in commodities can push up prices on things like gas, meat (because of feed corn prices), bread (because of wheat prices), and even orange juice. There certainly have been other contributors to commodities prices going up, but if the Fed has boosted stocks, they’ve boosted commodities too. So not only are the cronies gaining from quantitative easing, there is a negative wealth effect too.
The cronyism doesn’t end there. In a Dallas Fed paper released in August, OPEC chief economist William White points out that easy monetary policy favors “senior management of banks in particular.” And even Bernanke himself suggested (as if it was a good thing) that quantitative easing purchases “have been found to be associated with significant declines in the yields on both corporate bonds and MBS.” Translation: the Federal Reserve has made it artificially cheaper for corporations to borrow money and has pushed up the prices of houses (benefiting homeowners but hurting homebuyers). [Reason, September 13]
Also, it encourages the same kinds of bad investments that led to the crisis in the first place.
Appeasement still doesn’t work. On Tuesday, the U.S. embassy in Cairo addressed the controversy over a film produced privately in the United States that portrayed the prophet Muhammad as a child molester and gay by issuing this statement:
The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. […] We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others. [Embassy of the United States, Cairo, Egypt, September 11]
That was before a mob attacked the embassy, and before another mob did the same in Benghazi, killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. About this idea that the U.S. government can reject the constitutionally protected actions of private citizens, Jesse Walker observes:
When you issue such statements, you encourage the view that the government is somehow responsible for the speech you’re condemning. Even if you succeed in calming the crowds – and to judge from what happened yesterday, you shouldn’t expect to achieve even that much – any fringe film that you haven’t anathematized can become the next cause célèbre. [Reason.com, September 12]
Advice from Winston Churchill:
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. [Winston Churchill, address to the students of Harrow, November 29, 1941]
A lesson in union power: About 350,000 students at public schools in Chicago are not learning in the classroom this week because the unionized teachers decided to go on strike. The teachers want a 30 percent pay raise, but as John Fund notes, teachers in Chicago are already well compensated:
Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work. [National Review, September 10]
Teachers also get approximately three months off every summer, time they can use to earn extra money or not work at all. The teachers also want to renegotiate the city’s new teacher evaluation system that emphasizes student performance. Of course they do: In Chicago only 56 percent of students who start the ninth grade end up graduating.
Who is still in the classroom in Chicago this week? Students attending private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools. [Chicago Tribune, September 9] Hey, why don’t we have more of those schools?
Memorializing disfunctional government: The rebuilding of the World Trade Center has become an opportunity to fleece the taxpayer, reports ReasonTV’s Kennedy:
• Celebrate Constitution Day, which is September 17. Here’s a few ideas: (1) Check out the online Heritage Guide to the Constitution, a comprehensive and searchable guide to every clause in the Constitution; (2) Visit Hillsdale College’s online Constitution Reader, which lets you view 113 primary source documents related to the Constitution. (3) Take Hillsdale’s online course Constitution 101, which is archived and can be started at any time. (4) Pick up a copy of the Federalist Papers, now available in free e-book format (along with 375 other classics) from OpenCulture.com. (5) Check out TeachingAmericanHistory.org’s exhibits on the American Founding. (6) Learn about current constitutional controversies at the Cato Institute’s annual Supreme Court Review, an all-day conference on September 18.
• Head over to the Values Voter Summit, which runs Friday through Sunday at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, D.C. Among the discussions offered: Understanding Radical Islam 101; Repealing ObamaCare; Economic Inequality: Reconciling Capitalism and Compassion; Millennials and the Future of Political Engagement; and Debunking the Myth of Separation … Why Pastors Must Engage in Politics. The Values Bus will be there, too.
• Fill up your e-library with some classics every conservative should read. Did we mention the Federalist papers are now available for free in e-book format at OpenCulture.org. So are selected works of John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and George Orwell.
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