Category: Magazine

BY THOMAS SOWELL

The unconstitutionally invasive new airport security measures in the US are not only illegal, but doomed to be ineffective. Why, then, do the powers that be insist on going forward?

No country has better airport security than Israel — and no country needs it more, since Israel is the most hated target of Islamic extremist terrorists. Yet, somehow, Israeli airport security people don’t have to strip passengers naked electronically or have strangers feeling their private parts.

Does anyone seriously believe that we have better airport security than Israel? Is our security record better than theirs?

“Security” may be the excuse being offered for the outrageous things being done to American air travelers, but the heavy-handed arrogance and contempt for ordinary people that is the hallmark of this administration in other areas is all too painfully apparent in these new and invasive airport procedures.

Can you remember a time when a Cabinet member in a free America boasted of having his “foot on the neck” of some business or when the President of the United States threatened on television to put his foot on another part of some citizens’ anatomy?

Yet this and more has happened in the current administration, which is not yet two years old. One Cabinet member warned that there would be “zero tolerance” for “misinformation” when an insurance company said the obvious, that the mandates of ObamaCare would raise costs and therefore raise premiums. Zero tolerance for exercising the First Amendment right of free speech?

More than two centuries ago, Edmund Burke warned about the dangers of new people with new power. This administration, only halfway through its term, has demonstrated that in many ways.

What other administration has had an Attorney General call the American People “cowards”? And refuse to call terrorists Islamic? What other administration has had a Secretary of Homeland Security warn law enforcement officials across the country of security threats from people who are anti-abortion, for federalism or are returning military veterans?

If anything good comes out of the airport “security” outrages, it may be in opening the eyes of more people to the utter contempt that this administration has for the American people.

Those who made excuses for all of candidate Barack Obama’s long years of alliances with people who expressed their contempt for this country, and when as president he appointed people with a record of antipathy to American interests and values, may finally get it when they feel some stranger’s hand in their crotch.

As for the excuse of “security,” this is one of the least security-minded administrations we have had. When hundreds of illegal immigrants from terrorist-sponsoring countries were captured crossing the border from Mexico — and then released on their own recognizance within the United States, that tells you all you need to know about this administration’s concern for security.

When captured terrorists who are not covered by either the Geneva Convention or the Constitution of the United States are nevertheless put on trial in American civilian courts by the Obama Justice Department, that too tells you all you need to know about how concerned they are about national security.

The rules of criminal justice in American courts were not designed for trying terrorists. For one thing, revealing the evidence against them can reveal how our intelligence services got wind of them in the first place, and thereby endanger the lives of people who helped us nab them.

Not a lot of people in other countries, or perhaps even in this country, are going to help us stop terrorists if their role is revealed and their families are exposed to revenge by the terrorists’ bloodthirsty comrades.

What do the Israeli airport security people do that American airport security do not do? They profile. They question some individuals for more than half an hour, open up all their luggage and spread the contents on the counter — and they let others go through with scarcely a word. And it works.

Meanwhile, this administration is so hung up on political correctness that they have turned “profiling” into a bugaboo. They would rather have electronic scanners look under the clothes of nuns than to detain a Jihadist imam for some questioning.

Will America be undermined from within by an administration obsessed with political correctness and intoxicated with the adolescent thrill of exercising its new-found powers? Stay tuned.

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009.

BY THOMAS SOWELL

Appointing a ‘deficit reduction commission’ in times of economic crisis is a favorite political show.  But do we really need another layer of bureaucracy to explain basic math?

Another deficit reduction commission has now made its recommendations. My own recommendation for dealing with deficits would include stopping the appointment of deficit reduction commissions.

It is not the amount of money that these commissions cost that is the issue. It is the escape hatch that they provide for big-spending politicians.

Do you go ahead and spend the rent money and the food money — and then ask somebody else to tell you how to escape the consequences?

If President Obama or the Congress were serious about keeping the deficit down, they could have had this commission’s recommendations before they spent hundreds of billions of dollars, handing out goodies hither and yon to their pet constituencies.

I don’t know why people agree to serve on these bipartisan commissions, which save the political hides of the big spenders after they have run up huge deficits. Back in the 1950s, there was a saying: “If you didn’t invite me to the take-off, don’t invite me to the crash landing.”

Deficit commissions make it politically possible to spend money first and get somebody else to recommend raising taxes later. They are a virtual guarantee of never-ending increases in both spending and taxes.

Why provide political cover? Leave the big spenders out there naked in front of the voters! Either the elected officials will change their ways or the voters can change the officials they elect.

There is no special information or wisdom available to unelected deficit commissions that is not available to elected officials. Nor are they more far-seeing than politicians.

Cutting defense spending to save money? That is one of the oldest moves in the liberal play book. Some soldiers may pay with their lives for this, but that could be years from now — and after the next election, which is as far as most politicians think.

The biggest immediate tax issue is whether the Bush tax cuts will be extended for everyone. Here, as elsewhere in politics, sheer hogwash reigns supreme.

Nancy Pelosi claims that the “tax cuts for the rich” cannot be continued because it would be “too costly.” Although former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey says, “Demagoguery beats data” in politics, here are some data anyway.

The first big cut in income taxes came in the 1920s, at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. He argued that a reduction of the tax rates would increase the tax revenues. What actually happened?

In 1920, when the top tax rate was 73 percent, for people making over $100,000 a year, the federal government collected just over $700 million in income taxes — and 30 percent of that was paid by people making over $100,000. After a series of tax cuts brought the top rate down to 24 percent, the federal government collected more than a billion dollars in income tax revenue — and people making over $100,000 a year now paid 65 percent of the taxes.

How could that be? The answer is simple: People behave differently when tax rates are high as compared to when they are low. With low tax rates, they take their money out of tax shelters and put it to work in the economy, benefitting themselves, the economy and government, which collects more money in taxes because incomes rise.

High tax rates which very few people are actually paying, because of tax shelters, do not bring in as much revenue as lower tax rates that people are paying. It was much the same story after tax cuts during the Kennedy administration, the Reagan administration and the Bush Administration.

The New York Times reported in 2006: “An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.”

Expectations are in the eyes of the beholder — and in the rhetoric of the demagogues. If class warfare is more important to some politicians than collecting more revenue when there is a deficit, then let the voters know that.

And spare us so-called “deficit reduction commissions.”

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009.

BY JACOB SULLUM

The howling over how individuals and corporations spend their dollars in an attempt to influence politics reached a fever pitch this year. But was the fervor warranted?

Two months ago, The New York Times reported that “Democratic officials” believed “corporate interests, newly emboldened by regulatory changes,” were trying to “buy the election.” But it turned out the election was not for sale — at least, not to the highest bidder.

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, Democrats and Republicans each shelled out $1.6 billion during this election cycle, including spending by candidates, parties, party committees and independent groups. In terms of spending, the two parties were evenly matched. But that is not how it looked on election night.

A closer look provides further evidence that Republicans did not win by outspending their opponents. They got substantially more votes in House races, where they spent less than Democrats yet picked up more than 60 seats (and control of the chamber), than they did in Senate races, where they spent more than Democrats and added half a dozen seats.

The squandered money included $46 million that Linda McMahon, the Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut, spent out of her personal funds, which amounted to nearly $100 for each vote she received. She lost by 12 points. Less dramatically, John Raese, the Republican running for a Senate seat in West Virginia, spent $4.6 million of his own money ($20 per vote) and lost by 10 points.

But this year’s poster child for the lesson that money can’t buy you love is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who blew $140 million of her own money ($45 per vote) in her race for California governor against Democrat Jerry Brown, who won by 12 points. Also in California, a marijuana legalization initiative got more votes than Whitman but still lost by eight points, even though its supporters outspent its opponents by 10 to one.

At the other end of the spending spectrum, Slate’s Dave Weigel identified five House races in which extremely thrifty Republicans beat well-funded incumbents after raising far less than the $1 million that is commonly accepted as the threshold for a serious congressional campaign. Four of those Republicans also benefited from significant independent spending, ranging from about $200,000 to almost $1 million.

Analyses by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal found that independent spending helped Republicans mainly by eroding (but not erasing) the financial advantage enjoyed by incumbents — whose re-election rate, even in this year of supposedly sweeping change, was still about 85 percent.

The role played by “shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names,” as President Obama describes organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, should not be exaggerated, however. Money from independent groups, including those favoring Democrats as well as Republicans, came to about $293 million, less than one-tenth of the total.

The amount of independent spending was more than in any previous midterm year and nearly as much as in the last presidential election. But in a different political environment — one in which Democrats were less vulnerable and Republicans had less of a shot at seizing control of Congress — the impact of this spending might not even have been noticed. In a different political environment, of course, the money probably would not have been raised to begin with.

That consideration also makes it hard to evaluate the impact of Citizens United v. FEC, the January decision in which the Supreme Court dismayed Obama and other Democrats by overturning restrictions on the political speech of unions and corporations.

Some of this year’s ads — for example, messages sponsored by unions or nonprofit interest groups that amounted to “express advocacy” or its “functional equivalent” — would have been illegal prior to Citizens United. But much of the money that paid for those messages might otherwise have gone to groups that were already allowed to run campaign ads.

Money clearly matters in politics, because speech cannot travel very far without it. But as disastrously unsuccessful big spenders such as McMahon and Whitman vividly demonstrate, the ability to reach a wide audience does not guarantee that you will persuade anyone.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine, and his work appears in the new Reason anthology Choice (BenBella Books). Sullum is a graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in economics and psychology. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.

BY THOMAS SOWELL

Many activists complain about the phenomenon of party gridlock.  But a look at history shows that nothing provides more benefits to the people than the division and limitation of power.

Whenever the party that controls the White House does not also control Capitol Hill, political pundits worry that there will be “gridlock” in Washington, so that the government cannot solve the nation’s problems.

Almost never is that fear based on what actually happens when there is divided government, compared to what happens when one party has a monopoly of both legislative and executive branches.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, instead of its usual deficits, there was divided government. That was when the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, and Bill Clinton was in the White House. The media called it “the Clinton surplus.”

By the same token, some of the worst laws ever passed were passed when one party had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, as well as being led by their own President of the United States. ObamaCare is a product of the kind of arrogance that so much power breeds.

It was the same story back in the famous “first hundred days” of the New Deal in 1933. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 clamped down on the American economy the kind of pervasive government control seldom seen outside of totalitarian countries.

It was the ObamaCare of its time, but covering industries right down to local dry cleaners. One man was sent to jail for charging less than the government-specified price for pressing a suit of clothes. This typified the mindset of the New Deal.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court eventually declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. But, before that happened, the N.I.R.A. probably did more to prevent the economy from recovering from the Great Depression than any other law or policy. Even liberal icon John Maynard Keynes said at the time that the N.I.R.A. “probably impedes recovery.”

You cannot tell what effect a law or policy will have by what politicians call it, whether they label it a “recovery” program or a “stimulus” program.

Those who fear gridlock in Washington today implicitly assume that government actions are needed to “solve” the economy’s “problems.” That assumption has been so pervasive over the past 80 years that many people fail to realize that the republic existed for nearly twice that long before the federal government intervened to get the economy out of a recession or depression.

During all that time, no depression ever lasted even half as long as the Great Depression of the 1930s, when first President Hoover and then President Roosevelt intervened.

For most of the history of this country, there was no Federal Reserve System, which was established in 1914 to prevent bank failures and the bad effects of large expansions or contractions of the supply of money and credit. But bank failures in the 1930s exceeded anything ever seen before the Fed was established. So did the contraction of money and credit during the Great Depression.

The seductive notion that some Big Daddy in Washington can solve our problems for us — whether healing the sick, preventing poverty or “growing the economy” — is encouraged by politicians for obvious reasons, and the media echo the idea.

Both in Washington and in the media, there is virtually zero interest in comparing what actually happens when the federal government intervenes in the economy and when it does not.

More than a century and a half of ignoring downturns in the economy never produced a depression as deep or as long as the 1930s depression, with its many federal interventions, first under Herbert Hoover and then under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The unemployment rate was 6.3 percent when the first big intervention took place, during the Hoover administration. It later peaked at 25 percent, but its fluctuations were always in double digits throughout the 1930s, as FDR tried one thing after another. As late as the spring of 1939, nearly a decade after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment hit 20 percent again.

It is not a matter of faith that a market economy can recover on its own. It is a matter of faith that politicians speed recovery. But there is no way that Barack Obama is going to stop intervening in the economy unless he gets stopped. Only gridlock can do that.

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009

BY LARRY ELDER

While many voters express disgust with runaway government spending, this feeling rarely extends to the most costly entitlement programs that threaten to bankrupt the United States. Why?

On Nov. 2, 2010, the Republican Party recaptured the majority in the House. In the Senate, Republicans now possess numbers sufficient to sustain a filibuster and stop objectionable legislation from getting to the floor.

Obamalism has now been arrested. Voters rose to say no to the two-year gusher of spending and the staggering increases in the annual deficit and the national debt. Under Obama and the Democratic congressional majority, the national debt, as a percentage of GDP, jumped from 69 percent to a projected 94 percent. Voters said, “Enough!”

Now what?

“Governing isn’t as easy as you think,” said retiring Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. “Many of you have taken pledges that are contradictory. … You must be honest about the numbers, since our annual deficit now exceeds all discretionary spending combined. If you set as your goal to roll back the size of government, you have an obligation to answer the tough questions and show real courage, not just appeal to ideology. Treat the voters like adults.”

Politicians take contradictory pledges because voters send contradictory signals. Voters oppose tax hikes, even on the so-called rich. They agree that government is too large and understand that the three major drivers of domestic spending — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — grow on automatic pilot and saddle future generations with trillions of dollars in unfunded liability.

But voters, especially older ones, still want to spare this or that program or entitlement from the scalpel. Voters dislike ObamaCare. But a majority finds it perfectly acceptable to mandate that insurance companies take on those with pre-existing illnesses. This, of course, stands the concept of “insurance” on its head by forcing companies to assume known risks rather than just unknown ones.

We need a November 3 Contract with America.

This Contract acknowledges that the Founding Fathers designed the Constitution as a contract that limits the size and scope of the federal government, not as a “living, breathing document” that supports whatever desires voters want and politicians grant.

It challenges voters to face up to the train wreck of entitlement programs, annual deficit, national debt and interest payments on the debt. The Contract reduces government’s size and scope so that we never again jeopardize our prosperity — which threatens our national security by robbing Americans of the resources necessary to defend ourselves against our enemies.

The November 3 Contract with America addresses these issues without raising taxes or cutting benefits for those currently receiving them or who will soon be eligible for them.

I. Sell or lease land. The federal government owns about 700 million acres, more than one-fourth of all land in the U.S. For fiscal year 2007, the government valued its land holdings only at about $1 trillion — but that includes a zero-dollar valuation for much of the acreage because it was never “purchased.” The national debt is approximately $14 trillion. The proceeds from sales/mortgages/leases will fund our current and near-term liabilities and, with other changes, will completely eliminate our debt.

II. Social Security. Workers below the age of 55 shall have the option of placing their retirement contributions in private savings accounts.

III. Medicare. Health care needs of those below the age of 55 shall be addressed with individual, tax-free health savings accounts. From these accounts, people can purchase policies with high deductibles, as we do with auto insurance. Non-emergency matters will be paid for out-of-pocket from the accounts.

IV. Medicaid. Those currently on Medicaid must be grandfathered in, but by a date certain, all federal welfare payments will stop. The needs of the needy will be handled by the states and/or by the unparalleled generosity of the American people.

V. Eliminate, privatize, outsource or sell/lease many federal activities. These include, but are not limited to, Amtrak; the Tennessee Valley Authority; government-operated dams and nuclear power plants; the federal student aid grants and loans; public housing; the Food and Drug Administration; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; the departments of Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development; the Environmental Protection Agency; Freddie Mac; Fannie Mae; the National Institutes of Health; and the Federal Housing Administration.

VI. Repeal laws that violate the principle of federalism, such as wage and hour laws; federal minimum wage; the Clean Air Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act; equal pay laws; the Davis-Bacon Act (mandating prevailing union wages for those working under federal contracts); and all federal anti-discrimination laws that apply to the private sector.

VII. Taxes. Eliminate income, corporate, capital gains, dividend and estate taxes. Given the reduced size of government, the limited duties of the federal government as described in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution will be funded, as the Founding Fathers envisioned, with duties and tariffs.

Conclusion:

The Contract extricates the taxpayers from this unsustainable burden of spending and mortgaging our future. To do so without drastically reducing the size of government is like burning the living room furniture to keep warm. There is no “solution,” only trade-offs.

Let’s begin the conversation, and let it lead to action.

Larry Elder is a syndicated radio talk show host and best-selling author. His latest book, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” is available now. To find out more about Larry Elder, visit his Web page at www.WeveGotACountryToSave.com.

BY JACOB SULLUM

California is now considering a blatantly unconstitutional law that blocks the sale of ‘offensively violent’ video games to minors. But who gets to be the arbiter of taste in this matter? Consider the implications.

Does a zombie count as “an image of a human being”? What about an android or a shape-shifting alien? If his arm regenerates when you hack it off, does that still amount to “maiming”? Are you “killing” him if he comes back to life after you incinerate him with a flamethrower?

These are a few of the questions raised by California’s law against selling “offensively violent” video games to minors. But the most important question is this: Should the Supreme Court, which considered arguments for and against the law on Tuesday, create an exception to the First Amendment at the behest of moral crusaders who, like critics of dime novels, motion pictures, and comic books in earlier generations, see a newly popular medium as an intolerable threat to the youth of America?

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in violent movies that have inspired several violent video games, nevertheless argues that the Court should uphold the law (which he proudly signed) by extending the logic of a 1968 decision that allowed states to impose age restrictions on sales of pornography. But that ruling was based on the obscenity doctrine, which holds that certain kinds of sexual material are beyond the scope of the First Amendment even for adults.

The Court has never taken that position with respect to violence. Furthermore, as two industry groups note in their challenge to California’s law, “Depictions of violence, unlike obscenity, have played a longstanding and celebrated role in expression properly consumed by minors, from Greek myths to the Bible to ?Star Wars? and Harry Potter.”

Although California’s law applies only to video games, the principle espoused by its defenders would authorize censorship of other media as well ‒ a point that Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who ordinarily do not agree on much, both made in questions on Tuesday. There is no constitutional basis for distinguishing between video games, a form of artistic expression that tells interactive stories, and books, movies, or TV shows.

The evidence that California cites to support a video game exception has failed to persuade any of the federal appeals courts that have considered this issue. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit noted when it overturned California’s law last year: “Nearly all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology as they relate to the state’s claimed interest. None of the research establishes or suggests a causal link between minors playing violent video games and actual psychological or neurological harm.”

In any event, the research does not support the distinctions California wants to draw, since it implicates TV shows as well as video games and cartoonish as well as realistic violence. The trade groups challenging the law note that the state’s main expert witness “admits that even viewing a picture of a gun has the same aggressive effect as playing a violent video game,” while “one of his fellow researchers claims to find nearly identical links between aggressive behavior and reading violent passages in the Bible.”

Although California says it is only “reinforcing parents’ authority,” there is little evidence that parents need the state’s help. They already can use the industry’s rating system, backed up by parental controls built into game consoles, to regulate the games their children play.

Unlike the industry’s age-based ratings, California’s law treats 17-year-olds the same as preschoolers. Its vague standards would encourage the industry to err on the side of labeling games as off-limits to teenagers, while its penalties would discourage stores from stocking such games, thereby affecting adults as well as minors.

Despite the far-reaching implications of the constitutional license California seeks, it complains that it cannot reasonably be expected to supply “empirical proof of how expressive material impacts such nebulous concepts as one’s ethics or morals.” It could avoid this problem if it stopped using such nebulous concepts to justify censorship.