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.
July 3, 2013
Latest Studies: 26 new items, including a report from the Galen Institute on Pennsylvania’s high price for Medicaid expansion, and a report from the Hudson Institute on the state of philanthropic freedom
Notes on the Week: Happy Independence Day! the Obama administration is afraid to implement ObamaCare, now it’s your job to know the case for preserving marriage, and more
To Do: Hear whether America is in decline
Budget & Taxation
• Congress Could Cut Five USDA Programs and Save $2.8 Billion a Year – The Heritage Foundation
• How to Cut $30 Billion More from the THUD Bill – The Heritage Foundation
• Six Reforms for the House Farm Bill – The Heritage Foundation
• The 2013 Farm Bill: Limiting Waste by Limiting Farm-Subsidy Budgets – Mercatus Center
Crime, Justice & the Law
• The Ford Foundation: Shaping America’s Laws by Re-Making Her Law Schools – Capital Research Center
Economic Growth
• Beyond Unemployment: Pennsylvania’s Sluggish Labor Market – Mercatus Center
• The Economic Situation, June 2013 – Mercatus Center
Education
• 21st-Century Teacher Education – Education Next
• Disrupting Teacher Education – Education Next
• Limits on Collective Bargaining – Education Next
Elections, Transparency, & Accountability
• Obstructed Views: Illinois’ 102 County Online Transparency Audit – Illinois Policy Institute
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Britain and the U.S.: Two Peoples United by an Attachment to Self-Determination – The Heritage Foundation
• U.S. Should Warn Egyptian President Morsi Against a Crackdown – The Heritage Foundation
Health Care
• Pennsylvania Would Pay a High Price for Medicaid Expansion – Galen Institute
• The Cost of Educating the Public on Obamacare – The Heritage Foundation
• 27 Ways Obamacare Increases Premiums – Independence Institute
Immigration
• Foreign-Born Share Would Hit Historic High in Seven Years Under S.744 – Center for Immigration Studies
Information Technology
• Lessons Learned from the U.S. Unbundling Experience – Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies
Labor
• Breaking the Bank: Unions Fight a Civil War Over Amalgamated Bank – Capital Research Center
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Modeling State Credit Risks in Illinois and Indiana – Mercatus Center
• Rethinking Which Accounts Qualify For Deposit Insurance – Mercatus Center
National Security
• Passenger Screening Using Advanced Imaging Technology – Mercatus Center
Philanthropy
• Philanthropic Freedom – Hudson Institute
Regulation & Deregulation
• The Employment Impact of Regulation – Mercatus Center
• Evaluation of Plan Bay Area – Pacific Research Institute
Retirement/Social Security
• Social Security Personal Accounts: Prosperity for All – Heartland Institute
Notes on the Week
Forward or backward? If progressives were honest, says David Azerrad, they would rewrite the Declaration of Independence to fit the age of Obama. Here’s how he suggests they would begin:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to abandon the Principles which have hitherto guided them, and to embrace the more progressive Ideals which their quest for Equality, Fairness, and social Justice demands of them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of the global Community requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the Separation.
We hold these Values to be self-evident, that all human Beings are born into vastly unequal Conditions, that to attain their full Potential they are to be endowed by the State with an ever-expanding Set of Rights, that among these are day Care and health Care; Contraception and Abortion; higher Education, a Placement Service, and a remunerative Job; affordable Housing, pension Plans, and whatever else may contribute to Happiness—That to obtain these Rights, administrative States are established over Men and Women, deriving their just Powers from the impartial Expertise of those administering them—That whenever any new strong Desires take hold of the People, it is the Duty of their Leaders to declare them to be Rights, and to expand the scope and reach of the State, laying its Foundation on such Values and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their economic Security and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Programs once established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that the People are more disposed to suffer, while these Programs are new, than to wrong themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are not yet accustomed. But when a long Train of Benefits and Payments, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to elevate them to effective Freedom, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to consolidate these Gains, and to demand new Programs, Entitlements, and Rights for their future Security. [National Review, July 3]
On the other hand, here are some words from silent Calvin Coolidge:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restfull. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. [Speech in Philadelphia, July 5, 1926]
Happy Independence Day!
Now it’s your job to know the case for preserving marriage. As Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint notes, the Supreme Court last week failed to consider the actual arguments made by supporters of the traditional definition of marriage and instead concluded that the only purpose of the Defense of Marriage Act was to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” homosexuals. DeMint outlines the argument that the Supreme Court chose not to hear:
Our interest in marriage policy from the beginning has been to ensure that a man and woman commit to each other as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children they create. This gives children the best chance at a flourishing future. When children have that, liberals are less likely to succeed in their efforts to grow the welfare state. It is impossible for the government to redefine marriage to make fathers optional and for society to insist at the same time that fathers are essential.
In its ruling last week, the Supreme Court refused to wrestle with any of the serious scholarly arguments that support marriage policy as the union of a man and a woman, and instead declared that Congress acted solely out of ill will.
It is outrageous to suggest that 342 Members of the House, 85 Senators, and President Bill Clinton were all acting on the basis of anti-gay bias in 1996, when the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was enacted. As Chief Justice Roberts says in his dissent, “I would not tar the political branches with bigotry.”
Indeed, as Heritage has argued repeatedly, there are valid reasons to oppose the redefinition of marriage—which those House Members, Senators, and President Clinton took into account. Marriage matters for children, civil society, and limited government, because children deserve a mother and a father, and when this doesn’t happen, social costs run high. [The Foundry, July 2]
For now at least, the Supreme Court has left it up to each state to define marriage as it wants, and 38 of them have defined it as a union of one man and one woman. To get a free copy of the new e-book Why Uphold Marriage?, go to www.heritage.org/marriage/.
And here is a short reading list drawn from the links above:
• “How Broken Families Rob Children of Their Chances for Future Prosperity,” by Patrick F. Fagan, The Heritage Foundation, June 1, 1999;
• “Encouraging Marriage and Discouraging Divorce,” by Patrick F. Fagan, The Heritage Foundation, March 26, 2001;
• “Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,” by Robert Rector, The Heritage Foundation, September 5, 2012;
• What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense by Sherif Girgas, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George, Encounter Books, 2012; and
• “Marriage: What It Is, Why It Matters, and the Consequences of Redefining It,” by Ryan T. Anderson, The Heritage Foundation, March 11, 2013.
Tradition counts—except when it doesn’t. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s refusal to consider the Defense of Marriage Act using a relaxed “rational basis” test in Windsor has “ratified a sea change in constitutional jurisprudence,” says Richard Epstein. But it is a confusing sea change:
Justice Kennedy could have said openly that tradition should not count, or at least not count for very much, on the constitutional scales of justice. But on this occasion, his argument against DOMA was not the straight up “equal protection” argument that the Court finessed by invoking standing in Perry.
Rather, Kennedy’s lead argument (in this age of boundless federal power) was that the definition of marriage is properly left to the states. And why: “By history and tradition the definition and regulation of marriage has been treated as being within the authority and realm of the separate States.” Oh. What, then, of Proposition 8?
So a question then arises: If the allocation of power between the two levels of government should be controlled by tradition, why does the definition of marriage traditionally used by all states now fail at the federal level? The point is particularly odd in this context given that DOMA says nothing about how states regulate their own definitions of marriage, but only determines how the federal government defines marriage for the purpose of distributing federal benefits—which has to be regarded as a core federal function. Of course, the federal government can follow state definitions, but it need not, and as Justice Kennedy himself notes, does not do so in defining marriage in immigration cases.
At this point, moreover, Justice Kennedy only compounds the confusion. If the federalism issue controls, those states that adhere to traditional definitions of marriage now control how the federal government distributes its benefits, so that it appears, at least for a nanosecond, that the United States could not constitutionally define marriage to include same-sex couples under DOMA for potential recipients who live in states that follow the traditional definition of marriage.
But don’t believe that this argument would ever win. [Defining Ideas, July 2]
Kenneth Minogue, R.I.P. Kenneth Minogue, one of the great political thinkers of the past 50 years, died unexpectedly on Friday following a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in the Galapagos Islands. He was 82.
Minogue’s books, beginning with The Liberal Mind (1963), challenged the pretenses of the liberal world view. In The Liberal Mind, he described liberalism this way:
The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon. After many centuries of hopelessness and superstition, St. George, in the guise of Rationality, appeared in the world somewhere about the sixteenth century. The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. These battles won, he rested for a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention. During the nineteenth century, his lance was never still, prodding this way and that against the inert scaliness of privilege, vested interest, or patrician insolence. But, unlike St. George, he did not know when to retire. The more he succeeded, the more he became bewitched with the thought of a world free of dragons, and the less capable he became of ever returning to private life. He needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes—the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.
In his last book, The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (2010), he observed that “while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them.”He continued:
Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.
Conservatives are remembering Minogue this week for his many contributions to the cause of a free society. Ed Feulner, Founder and longtime President of The Heritage Foundation, was tutored by Minogue at the London School of Economics in 1965. Feulner, who was with Minogue in the Galapagos Islands shortly before he died, writes:
Born in New Zealand, reared in Australia, educated in Britain, a teacher there and in the United States, and an international lecturer, Ken Minogue brought political thought home to generation after generation of students. Those who assumed liberalism’s benevolence were challenged, and those skeptical of liberalism were given the intellectual armor for combat.
Yet Ken was much more than a lecturer and teacher. He lent his name and considerable talents to organizations around the world promoting freedom. From 2010 to 2012, he served as the president of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international group of advocates for the free society, of which I am a member. As a frequent attendee at the society’s gatherings, Ken could always be counted on to remind us of the past’s connection to contemporary issues. [Wall Street Journal, June 30]
Roger Kimball at PJ Media, John O’Sullivan at National Review, and Steven Hayward at Powerline (h/t for the quotes above) also have remembrances of Minogue.
Obama Treasury: Laws are for you to follow, except when we decide enforcing them is inconvenient. The Department of the Treasury announced on Tuesday that it would not enforce the ObamaCare employer mandate until 2015. That means businesses won’t have to worry about providing qualifying health insurance to their employees or paying a penalty. But the individual mandate is still in place. Some individuals who were counting on getting qualifying health insurance from their employer may now have to get it from an ObamaCare exchange—or pay a penalty (tax, per the Supreme Court).
The ostensible reason for the delay is that the reporting requirements need to be simplified in order for businesses to comply. If businesses don’t have to report what insurance benefits they provide their workers, the employer mandate cannot be enforced. Further, Michael Cannon argues that ObamaCare’s other provisions won’t work either:
[W]ithout that information on employers’ health benefits offerings, the federal government simply cannot determine who will be eligible for credits and subsidies. Without the credits and subsidies, the “rate shock” that workers experience will be much greater and/or many more workers will qualify for the unaffordability exemption from the individual mandate. Either way, fewer workers will purchase health insurance and premiums will rise further, which could ultimately end in an adverse selection death spiral. The administration can’t exactly solve this problem by offering credits and subsidies to everyone who applies, either. Not only would this increase the cost of the law, but it would also lead to a backlash in 2015 when some people have their subsidies revoked. [Cato Institute, July 3]
The real reason for the delay is probably the same reason for all the other Obama administration decisions to deviate from the law without authority (at least the seventh such instance, says Cannon): politics. In 2015, another election and another “recovery summer” will have passed, making it politically a safer time to risk job-killing taxes. But what hurts job growth in 2014 will surely hurt job growth in 2015, too. Why not just repeal the whole thing permanently?
• Get to Las Vegas, where you can hear some of the best minds in the liberty movement address the question: Are We Rome? The four-day Freedom Fest 2013 will kick off July 10 at Planet Hollywood.
• Figure out what the Supreme Court got right and what it got wrong in its 2012 - 2013 term. The Heritage Foundation’s annual Scholars & Scribes review will begins at 11 a.m. on July 11.
• Find out if big business is a big problem for free enterprise. The American Enterprise Institute will host a panel on whether big business is an ally or an enemy in the fight for free enterprise. The discussion will begin at noon on July 11.
• Learn about the government’s passion for classifying things “top secret” and the threat it poses to government transparency and everyone’s freedom. Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Cully Stimson of The Heritage Foundation will speak at The Heritage Foundation at noon on July 9.
• And don’t forget: If you are in the D.C. area tomorrow, stop by the 42nd National Fourth of July Soiree at Bull Run Regional Park in Centreville, Va., from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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