Political Ramblings of a Madman: 201305

2013-05-31

Cato: A Religious Fire Bell in the Night

Many of America’s biggest security threats emanate from its nominal allies, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Without them neither the Taliban nor al Qaeda would have been nearly so strong.

These countries also are hostile to religious minorities. Other malefactors include Iraq, where the government is a creation of U.S. invasion, and Afghanistan, where the government survives only with allied military support.

Religious intolerance is on the rise even in Kuwait, perhaps America’s best friend in the Arab world.

Until now Christians have worshipped freely in the Persian Gulf state. However, growing threats to religious minorities reflect public attitudes which could undermine the heretofore close U.S.-Kuwait relationship.

Saudi Arabia long has promoted the worst forms of religious intolerance. Spiritual liberty simply doesn’t exist. The country is essentially a totalitarian state. The government claims the right to decide the most fundamental questions involving every individual’s conscience.

The State Department’s latest report on religious freedom observed: “The laws and policies restrict religious freedom, and in practice, the government generally enforced these restrictions. Freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law and is severely restricted in practice.” At best non-Sunni Muslims can hope to be left alone when they worship privately. The group Open Doors placed Saudi Arabia on its “World Watch List,” noting simply that “religious freedom does not exist in this heartland of Islam where citizens are only allowed to adhere to one religion.”

Earlier this year the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom tagged the kingdom as a “country of particular concern.” The Commission found that “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom continued despite improvements.” A decade after 9/11, “the Saudi government has failed to implement a number of promised reforms related to promoting freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief. The Saudi government persists in banning all forms of public religious expression other than that of the government’s own interpretation of one school of Sunni Islam.”

Cato: Present Policy Is Producing No Results

US leaders have painted themselves into a corner regarding policy toward the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. For more than two decades, Washington’s strategy has been to offer Pyongyang a stark choice: give up its nuclear program or face ever-greater isolation from the international community. US President Barack Obama was especially blunt about presenting that alternative to the DPRK leaders during his early weeks in office.

That approach clearly has not worked. Indeed, the Obama administration has created the risk of the worst possible outcome: a DPRK that is a nuclear power, but which lacks meaningful international economic ties, and has no formal diplomatic or economic relations with the US. This is the blueprint for even more dangerous tensions on the Korean Peninsula and throughout East Asia than we face currently.

A new, radically different approach is needed. Instead of continuing the futile strategy of isolating the DPRK, Washington should adopt a comprehensive strategy to normalize relations with Pyongyang. And China has a crucial role to play as the primary facilitator in that process.

The US will need to offer a number of conciliatory measures, as the most important step is to change the atmosphere of unrelenting hostility between the two countries. The DPRK leaders undoubtedly fear that Washington will use its vast military power to intimidate Pyongyang or even engage in forcible regime change, as it did with Saddam Hussein. To reduce tensions, the Obama administration should offer to sign a non-aggression pact with the DPRK. US leaders should also propose a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War.

Cato: The Rise of Private Maritime Security Companies

The number of companies who have jumped into the deep blue sea to offer armed guards and other private security services for commercial shippers who fear pirate attacks has risen sharply the past few years. Many new companies have been formed in this area since 2008 and many existing PSCs have refocused on maritime security. Land based private security has vacillated between being called private military companies (PMC’s) or private security companies (PSC’s). All have been faced with media scrutiny, controversy and varying degrees of helpful and unhelpful legislation. Although the provision of lethal force by private services rather than government services neither new or even unexpected on land it seems to be more complicated on the ocean and in international waters.

Maritime security has existed to protect slow moving oil drilling equipment, private luxury yachts and even undersea cable laying projects. The industry was word of mouth, providers were known by their past clients and there was little demand by traditional shipping companies. The spike in attacks in 2008 forced ship owners and charterers to find ways to reduce risk and rapidly increasing “exception” insurance premiums for routes like the Gulf of Aden and a rapidly expanding piracy zone in the Indian Ocean.

The former military who provide security to ships in dangerous waters are called Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel or PCASP. Many of these men are veterans of the contractor circuit in Iraq and Afghanistan. Somalia Report’s 2011 first-hand report provides a glimpse into this world of tedium interrupted by a few minutes of intense action. Somalia Report was the first news service to leak a State Dept document showing the pragmatic evolution of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s anti-contractor to pro-contractor stance as well as see first hand how this emerging sector actually works in Yemen and Somalia. It is clear that the industry is not only here to stay but will demand proper recognition of of PCASP’s role in keeping ship, crew and cargo safe.

Cato: The Federal Government Can’t Give Itself More Power Just By Signing a Treaty

With ObamaCare, immigration, affirmative action, gay marriage, and the other hot-button issues rolling through our courts this year, some of you may have overlooked a little case on the Treaty Power, United States v. Bond, which was at the Court last year and may well make it back next year.

I’ve covered Bond before, and Cato has filed two amicus briefs in the case (before the Supreme Court and then in the Third Circuit on remand). As I described it last year, Bond is “your typical sordid tale of adultery, toxic chemicals, and federalism.” It’s a bizarre scenario you can read about in the previous links, but the issue that has drawn Cato’s attention—and that of Paul Clement, who remains Mrs. Bond’s counsel—is whether Congress can regulate the conduct of something solely because the United States is party to a treaty regarding that subject.

That is, even though Congress does not have the power to pass, for example, general criminal statutes, if Congress ratifies a treaty calling for such statutes, the dominant reading of an old precedent called Missouri v. Holland is that its power increases beyond constitutional limits. Not only would this mean that the Executive has the ability to expand congressional power by signing a treaty, but it would mean that foreign governments could change congressional power by abrogating a previously valid treaty—thus removing the constitutional authority from certain laws. Cato’s briefs have taken issue with such an interpretation of the Treaty Power, tracking the argument made by new Cato senior fellow (and Georgetown law professor) Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz in his magisterial Harvard Law Review article, “Executing the Treaty Power.”

Cato: Constitutional Death for Obamacare? The Left Threatens John Roberts and the Supreme Court

The Constitution created a national government of limited, enumerated powers. Over the years the Supreme Court dismantled many of the original barriers to expansive government. Now the President and the left-wing legal establishment are lobbying the Court to ratify the unprecedented power grab known as Obamacare.

America’s health care system is a mess. However, there were better options than a federal takeover through the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Which is why a majority of Americans continue to oppose the law and support its repeal.

Moreover, Obamacare exceeded the federal government’s authority. States have what is known as “police power,” which allows them to regulate widely—such as requiring residents to purchase auto insurance. However, the national government has no such authority. Congress may act only on an explicit grant of power under Article 1, Section 8.

No provision authorizes Washington to dictate that Americans purchase a private product like health insurance. If the federal government can do that, it can do anything—that is, act like a state with “police power.” Hence Washington could force Americans to buy General Motors autos, Lehman Brothers securities, or a new home to boost the economy. Or, to use the famous hypothetical, force Americans to eat broccoli to reduce health care costs. In more than two centuries Congress has never claimed to possess such authority.

Admittedly, the idea of constitutional limits is not fashionable in Washington. The regulation of “interstate commerce” has become the all-purpose justification for almost everything Congress does. Interstate commerce once really meant interstate commerce. Now it means anything that vaguely sort of indirectly affects interstate commerce. Indeed, defenders of Obamacare argued that Uncle Sam can regulate individuals who have not acted, but simply engaged in “mental activity” by choosing not to enter interstate commerce, as one district court judge put it. It is an extraordinary claim.

Members of Congress rarely ask whether they have authority to act. When Obamacare was passed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed shocked by the question, responding “are you kidding?” Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) acknowledged that “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do.” Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.) told constituents: “I don’t worry about the Constitution.”

Cato: A Trap for Small Businesses

Laws are like fine nets, catching the common fish even as the biggest push their way through. Or so you might think on learning of how federal prosecutors keep nabbing small and medium-size business people who violate an obscure law relating to bank paperwork, even as the best-known violator of the law so far (a certain well-connected politico named Eliot Spitzer) walks free.

Last month, the feds swooped down on a successful Maryland dairy business, South Mountain Creamery, seizing $70,000 in its bank accounts and formally charging its owners, Randy and Karen Sowers, with the offense of bank “structuring.” Based in Middletown, outside Frederick, South Mountain has thrived as a direct-to-consumer seller at farmer’s markets and other food events in Baltimore and elsewhere around the region. That means it does a lot of cash business, which helped get it in trouble. The feds charged last month that Randy Sowers had been arranging bank deposits so as not to put in more than $10,000 at once, a threshold that triggers the requirement to file paperwork with the feds. There was no allegation that Mr. Sowers was engaged in tax evasion or other underlying illegality, aside from seeking to avoid large deposits.

Few among the general public realize it, but splitting up large bank deposits to avoid the need to file federal reports on them constitutes a criminal offense known as “structuring” under something called the Bank Secrecy Act. The idea is that the reporting requirement helps federal investigators detect some instances of drug money laundering and terrorist finance, and that if a pattern of repeated $9,000 deposits were not also banned, the law would be too easily evaded. In fact, the feds instruct banks to report suspicious patterns of sub-threshold deposits, and not to warn customers that they are doing so. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that the law would not support a conviction unless defendants knew the practice was illegal, Congress promptly passed a bill striking out the willfulness requirement.

Cato: Apple: Too Big Not to Nail

In Sunday’s New York Daily News, I deplore the efforts of politicians and regulators to drag successful companies into the parasite economy of Washington, the most recent example being Apple. As the article says,

Heard of “too big to fail”? Well, to Washington, Apple is now too big not to nail.

I was prompted to these reflections by a recent article in Politico. The Wall Street Journalused to call itself “the daily diary of the American dream.” Politico is the daily diary of the rent-seeking class. And that class is very upset with Apple for not hiring many lobbyists, as illustrated by Politico’s front-page cartoon:

The story begins:

Apple is taking a bruising in Washington, and insiders say there’s a reason: It’s the one place in the world where the company hasn’t built its brand.

In the first three months of this year, Google and Microsoft spent a little more than $7 million on lobbying and related federal activities combined. Apple spent $500,000 — even less than it spent the year before.

Cato: How to Get Economy Growing Fast

In a recent discussion of what his administration might accomplish, Mitt Romney claimed that “by virtue of the policies that we put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6%, and perhaps a little lower,” over a period of four years.

Is this goal attainable?

It is. Indeed, it is not that tough a task. If the United States avoids new growth-retarding policies, such as the tax hikes scheduled for January 1, the economy’s natural adjustments will lower unemployment substantially. These include downward adjustments in wages, reallocation of job-seekers from slower to faster growing sectors and regions, reduced in-migration plus increased out-migration, and withdrawals from the labor force.

These adjustments do not always work quickly or for everyone (not every former construction worker can become a computer technician). But history suggests the adjustments do occur, as they have since the recession began. Over the next four years, they will continue to lower the unemployment rate, if not to 6%, at least near that territory.

The more important task for either presidential candidate is restoring the economy to its prerecession growth path. Real GDP has historically grown about 3% per year, and major downturns have been followed by strong recoveries. Within two to three years, therefore, output is typically “back where it would have been.”

In this recession, the rapid recovery phase has so far been absent; real GDP is still well below where one would have predicted pre-2008, and with average growth under 3% since the recession ended, the gap grows larger every quarter.

So can Romney, or anyone, get us back to a higher growth rate? Yes. Here is a program that will restore U.S. economic performance:

Cancel all the tax increases scheduled to take effect at the end of 2012 and provide tax stability going forward. Make (all) the Bush tax cuts permanent. Repeal the alternative minimum tax. Eliminate the health care law’s increases in the hospital insurance tax. All this will stimulate in the short term and set the stage for long-term growth.
Reform the tax code by eliminating the misguided deductions, exemptions, credits and loopholes that distort incentives and reward special interests. These features include big-ticket items like the deductibility of mortgage interest and employer-paid health insurance premiums, plus myriad small but senseless other provisions.

Read more at http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/how-get-economy-growing-fast

Cato: Trim Nuclear Fat from the Pentagon Budget

Members of Congress always claim to be looking out for wasteful spending, especially now that they need to get under the spending caps contained in the Budget Control Act. If they are serious, they should target the “nuclear triad,” the three different means — manned bombers, long-range missiles and submarine-launched missiles — that U.S. forces can use to deliver nuclear weapons.

Even by the most merciless arithmetic, this triple threat is unnecessary. Congress should take the advice of experts like former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright and decommission either the bomber or ICBM leg while cutting the forces in the remaining two legs, leaving a deployed warhead total under 500.

The triad’s rationale is that diversity of delivery vehicles ensures that the nation’s nuclear forces cannot all be wiped out easily, so that enemies can never be certain of avoiding a retaliatory response. But that story is a post hoc rationalization for a force bloated by parochialism between the service branches.

The real reason the triad exists is that the Air Force, having failed to either prevent or control the proliferation of ballistic missile submarines by the early 1970s, coined the term “triad” as part of a marketing effort to protect their bombers. Air Force officials had previously argued that missile submarines weren’t necessary to keep the Soviets in check. When the Navy developed nuclear-armed submarines in the late 1950s, its leaders began to question the survivability of bombers and ICBMs.

Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke advocated for “finite deterrence” — maintaining the smallest arsenal that deterrence requires, by which he meant a system based mostly on submarines. Of the multiplicity of delivery systems, he said, “You very seldom see a cowboy, even in the movies, wearing three guns. Two is enough.”

Cato: College Applicants Should Be Judged on Their Merits, Not the Color of Their Skin

The Supreme Court has waded back into the affirmative action thicket, taking up the issue of the proper role, if any, of race in college admissions, in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which it will be hearing this fall, likely in October.

Abigail Fisher, who is white, was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin even though her academic credentials exceeded those of many admitted minority applicants. She challenged UT-Austin’s consideration of race in selecting its incoming freshmen but lost before the district court in light of the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger.

In Grutter, a divided Court held that using race as a factor (but not one tied to a set number of points or quotas) was justified in the name of diversity. But UT-Austin’s admissions program treats race in a different way, and gets different results, than did the admissions program Grutter upheld at the University of Michigan Law School.

The Fifth Circuit panel nevertheless affirmed the district court, but Judge Emilio Garza specially concurred to say that while he was bound by Grutter, that decision seemed to conflict with other precedent and with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Fifth Circuit then voted 9-7 against rehearing the case en banc (before all judges on the court), over a sharp dissent from Chief Judge Edith Jones that emphasized how the ruling would allow states to play fast-and-loose with Grutter’s narrow-tailoring requirement.

Cato: Why California’s Bid to Legalize Undocumented Immigrants Works

State immigration laws usually offer more enforcement, rules, and regulations that exacerbate the effects of our already-restrictive immigration laws.

This time, California is making an exception. A new California law, AB 1544, proposed by Assemblyman Manuel Perez, D-Coachella, and originally coauthored by Assemblywoman Linda Halderman, R-Fresno, who has since removed her support, sets up a state work permit (subject to federal approval) to legalize many unauthorized immigrants in California.

Unauthorized immigrants make up the majority of farmworkers in California, as they do in many other states. Many unauthorized immigrants also labor in the service, light manufacturing, and food-preparation sectors. Native-born Americans would have to take a big pay cut to work in these industries, something most are not willing to do.

Bringing these workers into the legal market will help California’s economy and, consequently, expand the tax base. California’s proposed immigration law will expand the size of the market rather than shrinking it, as immigration laws in Alabama, Arizona, and Georgia have done.

Intractable deficits are forcing Californians to rethink how they deal with unauthorized immigration, just as the desire for taxing alcohol—not a sobering realization that banning alcohol was a failure—was the straw that broke the back of Prohibition in 1934.

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the federal government faced problems similar to the ones California is confronting today. Plummeting tax revenues, massive government spending sprees under President Hoover and President Roosevelt, and already-high tax rates put the government in a bind. How to raise revenue? Like so many answers, this one lay in the bottom of a bottle.

Prohibition of alcohol became law in 1920 largely because of the offsetting revenue from the income tax. In 1913, the last year before the federal income tax became law, about a third of federal revenue came from taxes on alcohol. When the income tax provided an unexpectedly huge boost to government revenues, the government could ban alcohol and deny itself the tax revenue. Deficits during the Great Depression changed that thinking.

Cato: The Constitution, Gridlock, and American Politics

University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson has an op-ed in today’s New York Times on the thesis of his new book, Framed. He makes the observation that too many Americans “have seemingly lost their capacity for thinking seriously about the extent to which the Constitution serves us well. Instead, the Constitution is enveloped in near religious veneration.” That’s a fair point. I have no doubt that if, say, podcast interviews were around in the 1790s, Patrick Henry, George Mason, James Madison, and the other leaders of that time would tell us very frankly what they disliked about the Constitution and what improvements they thought would be beneficial. Such discussions are pretty rare nowadays and that is lamentable. A few weeks ago, Professor Levinson stopped by Cato for an informal luncheon to discuss his book and reform proposals.

Professor Levinson and Cato scholars tend to disagree about his view of political ”gridlock” and whether it is responsible for the electorate’s low opinion of the Congress and of the federal government more generally. Speaking only for myself, I agree with Professor Levinson that the Article V amendment procedure has proven to be a defect and I explain why here (pdf).

Related material here and here.

Read the original post at http://www.cato.org/blog/constitution-gridlock-american-politics

Cato: Hearkening Back to the USSR

Back in the 1970s, the U.S. government passionately pleaded for untrammeled emigration as a fundamental human right. In 1975, the U.S. imposed trade sanctions on the Soviet Union for levying an exit tax on citizens wishing to emigrate (mostly Jews). In a complete reversal of that moral passion, Senator Charles Schumer has now introduced legislation to levy a tax of 30% on assumed capital gains of people like Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, for giving up American citizenship and emigrating to Singapore. The exit tax proposed on Saverin and others like him is thousands of times higher than anything the Soviet Union dreamed of.

Even current U.S. law imposes an exit tax, via imagined capital gains, on anybody who has been a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident for more than seven years. Capital gains are calculated under the presumption that all assets of the emigrant have been sold at the time of emigration. These gains are currently taxed at 15 percent. Schumer wants the rate raised to 30 percent. Further, he wants to ban such persons from ever re-entering the U.S.

Whatever happened to the human rights that the U.S. swore by in the 1970s? The Soviet Union imposed a so-called “diploma tax” on the ground that it should be able to recover the cost of higher education for the emigrants — its rate of exit tax ($ 5,000 to $ 25,000) rose with the level of education. Enraged by this, Senators “Scoop” Jackson and Charles Vanik pushed through legislation denying Most Favored Nation trade treatment to countries that restricted emigration through measures like an exit tax. Twenty-one American Nobel laureates issued a public statement condemning the exit tax as a “massive violation of human rights.”

People have a fundamental right to migrate to improve their prospects. The UN Declaration of Human Rights says in Article 13, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.” Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights incorporates this right into treaty law. It says “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own. The above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those provided by law necessary to protect national security, public order, public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others.” The permitted restrictions do not mention exit taxes.

Cato: With All Due Respect, Rep. Cole, My Arguments Against Race-Based Government Are Quite Principled

While campaigning for former Hawaii governor Linda Lingle, who is now running for U.S. Senate, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), the only Native American in Congress, said that opposition to the Akaka Bill is “arrogant” meddling in local affairs. (The Akaka Bill, which I’ve covered extensively, would create a race-based governing entity that would negotiate with the federal and state governments over all sorts of issues—effectively carving out an unconstitutional system of racial spoils.)

As quoted in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser ($):

“Hawaii has told us again and again, on a bipartisan basis, this is what we want to do,” Cole said. “I’d have to tell you, I think it’s incredibly arrogant, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat that opposes tribal sovereignty — in this case sovereignty for Native Hawaiians—when the people of Hawaii have told us we’d like it. Who are we to impose our opinions?”

Cole’s attack is not only a calumny on those who oppose the Akaka Bill in good faith—including all but six of his House Republicans who voted against it in 2010 after years of deliberation, public vetting, and a 2006 Department of Justice conclusion that the bill was unwise as a policy matter and presented serious constitutional difficulties—but itself displays a dangerous misunderstanding of the issues involved.

It’s easy to think of the Akaka Bill as being “merely” another request for self-governance by native peoples as was extended to Aleuts upon Alaskan statehood, but that’s simply not what’s going on in Hawaii. Hawaiians, “Native” and otherwise, have a different history and political sociology from the tribes that are accommodated in our (dubious and counterproductive) Indian law, which itself is a unique compromise with pre-constitutional reality. Congress can’t simply define Hawaiians as an “Indian tribe” because that term has a fixed meaning, limited to preexisting North American tribes that were “dependent nations” at the time of the Founding. Such tribes, to benefit from the protections of Indian law, must have an independent existence and “community” apart from the rest of American society, and their separate government structure must have a continuous history for at least the past century. By these standards, Hawaiians don’t qualify.

Moreover, it’s false to say that Hawaiians support the Akaka Bill or ethnic/racial preferences more broadly. There has never been a public referendum—Akaka Bill supporters resist such a move—but a November 2009 Zogby poll revealed that 51% of Hawaiians oppose the bill, 60% opposed if you remove the undecideds. In addition, 76% would oppose tax increases to pay for the Akaka nation-tribe (which would be inevitable), only 7% favor separate laws and regulations for a new native government, and only 28% say the bill is fair with respect to racial discrimination. Perhaps most importantly, 58% would want a chance to vote before the Akaka Bill could become law, with only 28% saying that would be unnecessary.

Cato: With Alaska’s Pebble Partnership, The EPA Waves the Precaution Flag

On May 18, the Environmental Protection Agency took sides with opponents of Pebble Partnership, a company exploring a copper deposit, some 200 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska. Pebble is probably the largest accessible aggregation of copper-bearing minerals in North America.

The Obama Administration has been under relentless pressure to stop Pebble—much more of the pressure emanating from hordes of bicoastal environmentalists as opposed to citizens of sparsely populated Alaska. EPA’sAssessment of Potential Mining Impacts on Salmon Ecosystems of Bristol Bay, Alaska is designed as the first step to do just that, before the Pebble developers have even submitted one permit application.

All of this has very little to do with the welfare of Alaskans. It has much more to do with the President pleasing his environmental base. In fact, it seems that the less that one has been to Alaska, the more one knows what’s best for it. The dinosaur media, especially in northeastern cities, is particularly exercised about the stretch of desolate Alaska that is Pebble—land that was traded by the federal government to the State for mineral development, in exchange for the some land that became Lake Clark Park and Preserve.

EPA’s Assessment ignores this history and the positive economic impact $7 billion of new infrastructure would bring to a place without a diverse economy. The Assessment is designed to be used for regulation based upon the “precautionary principle”. This darling of the global left states that “if something has the potential to cause harm, it shouldn’t be done”. The UN’s a big fan and reports are that they have been sniffing around parts of Bristol Bay looking for a way to get in on the Pebble issue. In fact, its Framework Convention on Climate Change—the scaffold upon which the failed Kyoto Protocol on global warming was erected-is based on the precautionary principle, noting that a lack “full scientific certainty” should not provide grounds to preclude regulation.

Cato: If You Love Something, Set It Free: A Case for Defunding Public Broadcasting

Available today is my new policy analysis, “If You Love Something, Set it Free: A Case for Defunding Public Broadcasting.” As a long-time fan of public broadcasting, particularly NPR, it has often irked me that public broadcasting spends so much time embroiled in political battles. The recent kerfuffles over Juan Williams’s controversial dismissal from NPR and the sting videos of NPR executives making derogatory remarks about the Tea Party were only the latest episodes in a long line of political squabbles that goes back to the very beginning, 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act.

From the standpoint of politicians, however, political fights over public broadcasting’s content are not bugs, they’re features. Just as “war is the health of the state,” politicians view a politically controlled, sufficiently chastened public broadcasting system as a healthy one. During the debates over the Public Broadcasting Act, Sen. Norris Cotton (R-N.H.) explained how politicians would approach public broadcasting:

If this bill becomes law, … and if, as time goes on, we have occasion to feel that there is a slanting, a bias, or an injustice, we instantly and immediately can do something about it. First, we can make very uncomfortable, and give a very unhappy experience to, the directors of the corporation. Second, we can shut down some of their activities in the Appropriations Committee and in the appropriating process of Congress … . The Corporation is much more readily accessible … to the Congress, if it is desired to correct any injustice or bias which might appear.

As Senator Cotton’s remarks show, from the very beginning public broadcasting was intended to be politicized. In fact, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was partly created to provide a politically controlled voice in the marketplace of ideas.

Cato: It’s Illegal to Say ‘None of Your Damn Business’

The government’s troops are rallying behind the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. “After the House voted this month to defund a major part of the U.S. Census Bureau, the agency is taking the threat very seriously,” reports the Washington Times, “with its supporters in both business and government rallying to preserve the annual questionnaire.”

Wait. Who could be against the Census Bureau? Its constitutional charter is to enumerate citizens every ten years for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. This is a necessary and unremarkable administrative function.

Oh, wait—again. Government bloat is a law of gravity, and the Census Bureau does far, far more than count noses. Its American Community Survey has made the Census Bureau the research arm for the welfare/redistribution state and a source of corporate welfare in the form of demographic data about Americans.

So Census goes around asking people dozens of questions that have nothing to do with the agency’s constitutional purpose.

Cato: How Soon They Forget

If you are a nonimmigrant American reading this, do you know why your ancestors came to America? The fact is, a large percentage of immigrants were trying to escape various forms of government persecution, including religious and tax persecution. The American Revolution was set off, in part, by a tax on tea that ranged from about 10 percent to 33 percent of its value. That and other grievances were enough to cause people to take up arms against the British.

Rather than taking up arms, most people who believe the tax burden now has become too great pick up and leave, such as all of those Californians and New Yorkers who are moving to Texas and Florida, where there is no state income tax. Many are all atwitter about Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin deciding to move to Singapore to partially escape what he believes is excessive taxation. Leaving the U.S. is a much more extreme action than moving from a high-tax state to a low-tax state, but a record number of Americans gave up their citizenship last year.

At what point would you consider leaving the U.S.? If you were taxed 98 percent of your income, or 75 percent as the new French president wants to do, or merely 50 percent-plus which is what many Californians will be paying if Gov. Jerry Brown gets his proposed tax increase and President Obama succeeds in getting his proposed tax increase?

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr., Pennsylvania Democrat — whose thought processes seem to be similar to those of King George III in 1776 — have denounced Mr.Saverin and introduced legislation to punish him and others who may wish to leave because of high taxes. It appears to me that this is nothing more than a modern version of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which demanded slaves be returned to their “owners,” who were in effect imposing close to a 100 percent tax upon their slaves. If not for that pesky Constitution, you can bet Mr. Schumer would be proposing legislation to force all of those New York tax exiles in Florida and Texasto return to their high-tax New York plantations. The U.S., to its great shame, already imposes tax penalties on those who give up their citizenship — just like the old USSR did. Mr. Schumer, Mr. Casey, and others seem to have forgotten that theU.S. was founded on the idea of individual liberty, which includes the fundamental right of being able to flee what one views as an oppressive government.

Cato: WTO Correctly Calls the U.S. to Task for Lying about Dolphins

In a dispute between the U.S. and Mexico over federal regulations defining “dolphin safe” tuna, the World Trade Organization recently held that the U.S. rules are an unjustifiable discrimination against Mexican tuna fishers. They are also in violation of WTO obligations.

This outcome is a welcome indictment of American policies that prevent eco-conscious consumers from having effective access to information, and using their power in the free market to support environmental causes. Moreover, it casts light on a growing trend that opaquely mixes health, safety, and environmental regulations with trade protectionism.

Current U.S. law prohibits tuna producers from making any statements on their product labels about how their fishing practices affect dolphins unless they meet the minimum requirements for the official “dolphin safe” label. Advocates of the law say it is about truth in advertising and accuse the WTO of putting the world’s dolphins at risk for the sake of trade flows. This argument fails to appreciate the sophisticated competence of American consumers and, more importantly, ignores the fact that these federal rules are misleading.

Tuna caught in a part of the Pacific Ocean near Mexico must meet strict requirements before it can be labeled “dolphin safe.” Mexican tuna fishers work primarily in the Eastern Tropical Pacific where dolphins and tuna often school together. They catch tuna by “setting on dolphins,” that is, by locating a school of dolphins and encircling it with nets to catch the tuna swimming underneath. This practice can result in dolphin mortality as the tuna are captured, although dolphin death has declined significantly since the institution of the International Dolphin Conservation Program, which places independent observers on all Mexican tuna fishing vessels in the region. The U.S labeling law prohibits any tuna caught using this method in this part of the ocean from being labeled dolphin safe even if an observer certifies that no dolphins were killed.

Cato: Canada’s Economic Reforms

The lead article in the new Cato Policy Report is entitled “We Can Cut Government: Canada Did.” The article reviews Canada’s economic reforms since the 1980s, which have included free trade, privatization, spending cuts, sound money, large corporate tax cuts, personal tax reforms, balanced federal budgets, block grants, and decentralizing power by cutting the central government.

Those all sound like things we ought to pursue in America. The political systems of the two countries are different, but Canada’s pro-market reform lessons are universally applicable.

Canada’s reforms, for example, refute the Keynesian notion that cutting government spending harms economic growth. Canadian federal spending was cut from 23.3 percent of GDP in 1993 to 16.5 percent by 2000. Keynesians and their macro models would predict a crushing economic blow from such a spending reduction. They would argue that the “austerity” would slash “aggregate demand” and “take money out of the economy.”

Cato: FBI Free to Ambush our Bill of Rights

When I was a kid, beginning to learn what it is to be an American, I found a hero in George Mason, a leading Virginia delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Mason refused to sign on to the Constitution that was passed by the convention. Why?

“There is no Declaration of Rights,” he explained.

There was no section in the Constitution protecting citizens’ individual rights against an imperious government in this new America — similar to the charges Thomas Jefferson made against King George III’s government in our Declaration of Independence in 1776.

George Mason’s contagious objections became a major reason that the first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, were finally listed and ratified by enough states to be added to the Constitution in 1791.

And we still proudly have them! Or do we? As George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have eroded our guarantees of a self-governing republic, how many Americans are aware they are losing some of the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights? How many Americans even know who George Mason was?

Thomas Jefferson said Mason was “of the first order of greatness” (“George Mason’s ‘Objections’ and the Bill of Rights,” Robert A. Rutland, “This Constitution: A Bicentennial Chronicle,” American Political Science Association and American Historical Association, 1985).

I know enough about my hero to have no doubt what George Mason’s reaction would be to one of the most persistent and unpunished present violators of the Bill of Rights — the FBI!

In the fall of 2008, just before the Bush administration left, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey changed and expanded the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations. The guidelines were made official on Dec. 1, 2008. They remain in force under Obama.

If James Madison and Thomas Jefferson could see this shredding of the Bill of Rights, they might be leading another American Revolution.

Political Ramblings of a Madman