Reason.com

Separating Church and State Money

2012-05-24T18:00:00-04:00

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum declared in a February 26 interview with ABC’s This Week. “What kind of country do we live in that says only people of nonfaith can come into the public square and make their case?”

What is the former Pennsylvania senator talking about? Doesn’t appearing on a national news program while seeking the presidential nomination of a major political party qualify as making your case in the public square?

Santorum’s comments were prompted by the latest brouhaha over the role of religion in politics. In January the Obama administration unveiled new health care regulations that require organizations run by the Roman Catholic Church to offer health insurance that covers women’s reproductive services, including contraception. The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops denounced the mandate as a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on laws “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.

The Obama administration tried to limit the political damage by claiming that covering contraception would, on balance, save insurers money by reducing claims related to pregnancy and birth. Hence insurers could offer the coverage at no additional cost to them or their customers, meaning the Catholic Church would not actually have to pay for contraception. That argument is bunk: money saved but not rebated as a lower fee is not really distinguishable from paying for the covered service.

As the contraception controversy illustrates, conflicts between church and state in this country typically arise from the way that benefits supplied or mandated by the government are distributed. University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, who has spent a career looking at the interaction between government and religion, highlights Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s formulation in the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education.

Writing for the 5-to-4 majority in Everson, Black declared, “No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” So far, so good. But Black also argued that government “cannot hamper its citizens in the free exercise of their own religion. Consequently, it cannot exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Nonbelievers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation.” The Court therefore ruled that New Jersey’s policy of reimbursing parents for bus transportation to and from parochial schools did not violate the First Amendment’s ban on “an establishment of religion” because the state was merely supplying a general service to all schools.

When the Constitution was adopted in the 18th century, Justice Black’s two principles—1) citizens cannot be taxed to support religious activities, and 2) the state may not deny tax-financed public welfare benefits to any citizen based on his religious beliefs—rarely conflicted. “In an era with few public welfare benefits,” Laycock explained in a 2006 essay from his collection Religious Liberty, “no-aid [to religious activities] protected citizens from being forced to contribute to churches involuntarily: it protected the churches from financial dependence on government, and thus from government control.”

But with the relentless expansion of the welfare state, this separation of church and government transfers became a thing of the past. In their 1997 book The Challenge of Pluralism, political scientists Stephen Monsma of Calvin College and J. Christopher Soper of Pepperdine University argued that government funding of secular nonprofit public service programs places similar religious programs “at a government-created disadvantage.” This claim makes sense only if one assumes that government agencies are engaged in teaching religious or nonreligious beliefs as they dispense food stamps, rent vouchers, and vaccines. A cynical public choice analysis suggests that both churches and government welfare agencies may see themselves in competition when it comes to increasing the number of people who are dependent upon them.

To address concerns that religious organizations are “disadvantaged” by competition with secular welfare agencies, recent administrations have devised ways to shower tax dollars on various faith-based initiatives. The total amount of tax money involved is hard to determine. But Catholic Charities affiliates, for example, received more than 60 percent of their budgets (nearly $3 billion) from government sources in 2010, while only 3 percent came from diocesan church contributions. Subsidizing a religious group’s welfare activities, of course, frees up other funds to be used for nonsecular purposes.

There is a way to call a ceasefire in Rick Santorum’s culture war. As Monsma and Soper observe, “Government’s advantaging of the secular over the religious could be avoided if government would simply stay out of a given policy area.” But they think there is no way to untangle the contentious church/state social service mess into which we’ve gotten ourselves. Here they are wrong.

Consider public education. States and localities could collect tax dollars as usual and then offer school vouchers that parents could use to send their children to whatever religious or secular school they choose. States likewise could use vouchers to subsidize higher education, rather than running their own universities.

What about health insurance? The tax code could be reformed so that employers give their workers cash instead of medical benefits, allowing individuals to select the private health plan that works best for them, deciding for themselves whether they want coverage for contraception, abortion, sterilization, stem cell treatments, and so on. The poor could receive tax-financed vouchers to buy whatever private insurance they prefer. In fact, most public welfare services, including job training, nutrition support, and drug treatment, could be converted into voucher programs.

Religious groups have always been welcome to make their cases in the public square, but if churches want to be left alone, they should stop begging for alms from the government. Rick Santorum should heed Ronald Reagan’s admonition. “We establish no religion in this country,” Reagan declared in 1984. “We command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate.”

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey is the author of Liberation Biology (Prometheus).

Scott Walker Will Survive Wisconsin Recall: Reason-Rupe Poll Results

2012-05-24T16:59:00-04:00

The Lighter Side of Electronic Monitoring

2012-05-24T16:30:00-04:00

Thirty five years ago, only one person in the United States was subject to electronic monitoring. His name was Spider-Man, he was battling evil on the pages of America’s newspapers; and for several weeks during the summer of 1977 the syndicated Spidey’s every move was tracked via an “electronic radar device” cuffed to his wrist by a villain known as the Kingpin.

“Even your awesome power cannot remove it!” the Kingpin exclaimed. “Nothing can—except my hidden laser key!”

While the Kingpin used electronic monitoring in the pursuit of evil, New Mexico state district court Judge Jack Love saw the Spider-Man strips and envisioned a more benevolent application of the Kingpin’s technology. In Love’s estimation, electronic monitoring could help alleviate overcrowded jails while simultaneously allowing individuals convicted of minor offenses a chance to serve their sentences in a manner that was “less degrading than being confined in prison.”

Love shared his vision with several electronics companies, including the aerospace and computer industry giant Honeywell, but none showed any
interest.

A Honeywell salesman, Michael Goss, embraced Judge Love’s vision, however. In 1982, he quit his job and started his own company, National Incarceration Monitoring and Control Services (NIMCOS), to develop a device.

The end result was a 4 oz. battery-powered, waterproof anklet about the size of a pack of cigarettes. It emitted a radio signal every minute or so, and these
signals were picked up on a receiver connected to a phone jack in the user’s home and then relayed to a central mainframe computer. The device had a range of approximately 150 feet. When a person wearing the anklet strayed further than that from the phone jack, the radio signal could no longer reach the receiver and the system would generate an alert message.

In April 1983, an individual on probation who was caught holding heroin agreed to serve as the device’s first user. He was allowed to leave his home each weekday to attend his job but showed little interest in discussing his experience with reporters—he even turned down requests to appear on the Today Show and That’s Incredible.

NIMCOS exhausted its funding before it was able to bring its system into wide usage, but another company, Boulder Industries, eventually purchased it. Boulder Industries quickly evolved into the offender tracking industry’s leading company. Known today as BI, Inc., it currently supplies products and services to approximately 900 federal, state, and local agencies.

In 1999, when a publication called The Journal of Offender Monitoring conducted its first annual survey to determine the size of the industry, it estimated that there were 75,230 individuals under electronic supervision in the U.S. Ten years later, that number had more than doubled to 200,241—most of the growth came from the introduction of GPS-enabled devices that, unlike their radio-frequency predecessors, keep continuous track of an offender’s location.

Along with BI, Inc., approximately 20 other companies manufacture products for the offender tracking industry too. In Indiana, it costs $54.28 per day to incarcerate an adult inmate. In California, Riverside County made news last year when it announced it was going to start charging some inmates $142.42 per day for their jail stays—the amount it says it costs to keep them there.

In contrast, electronically monitoring offenders costs around $5 to $25 a day. According to a recently published Deloitte case study, moving half of the nation’s low-level offenders to electronic monitoring would save $16.1 billion on an annual basis.

Meanwhile, some states and municipalities are turning to electronic monitoring as a source of revenue. In Mountlake Terrace, Washington, for example, the city pays a company $5.75 per offender per day to provide electronic monitoring services, but it charges offenders who choose home detention over a stay in the local jail $20 per day. With approximately 10 to 14 offenders choosing this option on any given day, the city generates approximately $50,000 to $60,000 a year outsourcing incarceration to the community.

But as an increasing number of cash-strapped states and cities look to electronic monitoring as a means of putting their budgets on lockdown, is there more they could be asking of it?

Nearly 20 years before the Kingpin inspired Judge Jack Love, a pair of identical twins named Robert and Ralph Kirkland Gable had begun to experiment with an electronic monitoring system in the course of their studies as graduate students at Harvard. Their system positioned electronic monitoring as a tool in the process of positive reinforcement rather than a means of deterrence, a way for individuals to document instances of good behavior. (The Gables’ original surname was Schwitzgebel. They legally changed it in 1982.)

“My brother’s advisor was Tim Leary—there was a lot of crazy, creative stuff going on with that,” says Robert Gable, who obtained a PhD in Education from Harvard in 1964 and is now a Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) at Claremont Graduate College. “I was a student of B.F. Skinner. He was mostly working with pigeons and was very boring as a lecturer, and I wasn’t interested in doing anything in the lab. But my brother came up with this idea—why don’t we try the stuff that Skinner’s doing with pigeons on juvenile delinquents?”

Skinner pioneered the concept of operant conditioning—the idea that behavior could be changed by systematically reinforcing specific actions with positive or negative stimuli. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it pecks a button and it will get quite good at pecking buttons. Give it a shock every time it does, and it will avoid this behavior.

“Our plan was to apply positive reinforcement to juvenile delinquents, but in order to reinforce them when something they were doing was right, we had to get some electronic equipment on them,” Gable explains. Participants carried transmitters that sent radio signals to receivers the Gables had set up around Cambridge, Massachusetts. These receivers relayed the signals to a missile-tracking device the Gables had purchased from a war surplus supplier and displayed the participants’ current positions on a large screen. “This way we knew when they were at work or school or drug treatment, or doing something else they were supposed to be doing,” Gable says.

If the participants went to the places they were supposed to go, they became eligible for prizes in a weekly lottery. For example, one prize involved chauffeuring a participant in a limousine to his job at a gas station “We knew a guy who ran a limo service, and he wasn’t very busy in the mornings. So we arranged for him to pick up one of our kids and take him to work for a week. The kid would get all dressed up, the neighbors would come out, the kid would parade into the limo,” Gable recalls.

The Gables’ system included the ability to measure heart-rates and send messages back and forth in the form of electronic beeps, and they were also envisioning systems that could monitor blood-alcohol levels, brain wave activity, and other physiological data. In 1962, Look magazine published an article on their research efforts. In 1964, Ralph published a book detailing their experiments, Streetcorner Research, and eventually a producer from Universal Pictures bought the rights to the book with the intention of making a movie out of it.

Overall, however, initial public reaction to the Gables’ devices tended to be negative. Electronic monitoring seemed intrusive, operant conditioning too prone toward the sort of applications Anthony Burgess explored in A Clockwork Orange. In 1971, Ralph Gable reportedly announced in a Harvard lecture that he was “no longer even willing to reveal his ideas” about electronic monitoring to others because of the “extreme criticism” to which he’d been subjected.

Nonetheless, the Gable brothers continued to explore the possibilities of electronic monitoring. In the late 1960s, Robert moved to southern California and, in collaboration with a colleague named Richard Bird, developed a monitoring system that featured “a belt-mounted transceiver that was capable of sending and receiving tactile signals.” (That is, it vibrated like today’s cellphones.)

In the 1980s, Ralph experimented with a system that Robert would later liken to “Bluetooth AA.” Relying in part on a computer bulletin board, participants would monitor each other, provide encouragement at key moments, and engage in “planned and unplanned beneficial social interactions” designed to reinforce positive behaviors.

By this time, the approach pioneered by NIMCOS had already gained substantial traction in the corrections world and the general perception of electronic monitoring had been established: It was a virtual jail, an authoritarian tool designed to enforce compliance with whatever rules those under supervision had been directed to follow.

In publications like Federal Probation and the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, however, the Gables stayed true to their vision of a kinder, gentler vision of electronic monitoring—and one, they believed, that would result in greater net benefits to society. “An essential tenet of learning theory is that punishment does not change behavior; it temporarily suppresses it,” they wrote in a 2005 issue of Federal Probation. “A person may conform to rules to avoid punishment, but once the threat of punishment is removed, the original behavior is likely to reoccur.”

A truly effective electronic monitoring system, they suggested, would reward small improvements. To keep participants sufficiently motivated over time, it would offer incentives of varying value for instances of improvement, and award these incentives on a varying schedule. The system would also feature two-way communication and incorporate active interventions designed to prevent potential violations.

Thus, if a participant attends a job-training class, he might be rewarded with a letter of commendation. If he shows up for his drug treatment meeting, he might get free movie tickets. If he gets on a bus and appears to be heading toward the bar where his former partners in crime tend to congregate, other participants in the system might text him in an effort to dissuade him. “With the ubiquity of the connections now, all of the Wi-Fi spots, you could really start to do some positive monitoring,” Gable says.

Rewarding individuals in the course of what is generally considered their punishment is one major reason the Gables’ vision of electronic monitoring has failed to catch on. “I’ve been accused of giving cookies to gang members,” he says.

And yet if the Gables’ vision of electronic monitoring is ever going to have a moment, that moment is now. What is the Internet, after all, except a giant electronic monitoring system issuing positive reinforcement in the form of Facebook “likes,” Twitter retweets, and foursquare badges?

Every day, thousands of people publish information about themselves online—what they weigh, how many miles they ran, how many words of their novel they wrote—in the hope that such transparency, along with the support from friends and strangers it engenders, will reinforce positive behaviors and discourage non-productive ones.

If Facebook had introduced a “Dislike” button instead of the “Like” button, its users would post far less often than they do. If the foursquare app on your smartphone tried to discourage you from checking into certain locations by issuing a tiny shock when you did, how many people would use it?

As fast as the correction system’s version of electronic monitoring has grown over the last two decades, Facebook, Twitter, and other less overt forms of electronic monitoring have grown even faster—and they’ve done it in part by avidly incorporating mechanisms for positive reinforcement into to their systems. That the corrections industry has largely ignored this approach may not rise to the level of a crime, but it sure seems like a missed opportunity.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes from San Francisco.

Outdated Law Behind Scott Walker Recall

2012-05-24T14:00:00-04:00

Madison, Wis.—Eighty-six years ago, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s son was newly elected to the U.S. Senate, the Great Depression was a thing of the future, and Wisconsin—a mere 78 years old—amended the state constitution to allow the recall of elected officials.

Times have changed, but Wisconsin’s recall law?

Not so much.

“But I’m sure we’re going to be reviewing it just because of the cost of the election, and I think people, they have election fatigue,” said state Rep. Gary Tauchen (R-Bonduel), chairman of the Assembly’s Election and Campaign Reform Committee, adding, “I think it’s something we need to look at it. There’s definitely a problem.”

Nine Wisconsin state senators faced recalls last year. Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, and four state senators face recall elections June 5.

So whether state laws governing recalls are up to snuff is a matter of some importance.

In Conflict

In at least one instance, state statute conflicts with constitutional law, as Wisconsin Reporter noted recently.

The statute requiring a 21-day time frame for absentee voting conflicts with the constitutional provision requiring a recall election to be held four weeks after a primary, given that election officials need time after the primary to await absentee ballots, canvass, and certify the results.

The Government Accountability Board, the state’s election watchdog, heard testimony from staff Tuesday regarding how the state’s review of recall petitions compares to the Verify The Recall effort, a software-based petition review process from True the Vote, a self-described nonpartisan nonprofit affiliated with the Tea Party.

The GAB staff analysis indicated that the VTR process relied too much on automation, which led to acceptable names being stricken, such as when “Mary Lee Smith” signed her name as “Mary L. Smith.”

But GAB also noted VTR’s review standards are much more rigorous than the state’s, leaving some people scratching their heads.

True the Vote’s process “uses a significantly more demanding standard which would result in far more signatures being eliminated than should be struck under the substantial-compliance standard that has been developed under Wisconsin law,” GAB staff said. “While the GAB’s petition analysis has clear rules based upon the Statutes, the rigid standards of this particular software are ill-suited to the review process.”

The question, VTR and others are asking, is, shouldn’t recall petition standards be rigorous?

True the Vote responded in an email saying, “VTR’s overarching goal throughout its many (and ongoing) efforts is to ensure the integrity of Wisconsin’s election processes... VTR looks forward to continuing its work with the GAB to improve the integrity and transparency of Wisconsin’s recall processes, and to ensure that Wisconsin citizens have a voice in the verification and challenge process.”

State Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington) proposed a constitutional amendment this past legislative session limiting recalls to those officials charged with serious crimes or ethical violations.

Nineteen states allow recalls of state officials, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which provides research and support for lawmakers and legislative staff.

Only eight states list specific grounds for recall.

“Their original intent (of the recall provision) was when you have a crook or someone has committed some moral turpitude that you had a way to get them out,” said Donald Downs, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science, law, and journalism professor.

Policy, however, is the driving force behind the current spate of recalls—specifically the collective bargaining limitations put on most public union employees under Act 10, which Walker pushed and the GOP-led Legislature passed.

Downs is waiting for the results of the June 5 recalls to decide whether Wisconsin has entered a new world order where recalls rule.

“If (recall supporters) lose the recall, right, then I think a lot of this isn’t going to be an issue,” he said. “If (Walker) is recalled, then I think people on both sides are going to say, ‘We have a new weapon.’”

This article originally appeared at WisconsinReporter.com.

Liberal Christianists Pit Luke Against Leviticus

2012-05-24T13:00:00-04:00

So just how would Jesus have voted on H.R. 5652, the Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act of 2012, by House Budget Committee Chairman and Wisconsin Republican and Catholic, Paul Ryan?

When Moral Majoritarians in 1979 began pushing back against sexual revolutionaries, liberal Democrats railed against mixing Biblical dogma with Republican politics. But some on the left now seem eager for a political Holy War of words, pitting Luke against Leviticus for New Testament "social justice," to counter Book-of-Moses admonitions about men lying down with men and more capital punishment than Texas.

Priests at Georgetown Univ. recently protested a speech by Ryan, charging him with un-Catholic callousness toward the poor, about whom St. Luke quoted Jesus in Chapter 6, Verse 20: "Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God." Those words are from a King James Version bestowed upon me in 1956 at the Central Church of Christ, at age 9, when I also got a glow-in-the-dark cross for reciting all the books of the Bible and was admonished I’d burn in hell if I didn’t accept Jesus.

Apparently irrelevant to the Georgetown Jesuits, Luke did not explain appropriate levels of spending on food stamps and Medicaid, nor say anything about tax rates for the "one percent."

The Bible has been employed throughout American history by politicized Believers. Southern Baptists used verses to justify slavery, and northern Unitarians invoked the Book to advocate abolition. In the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe popularized a wrathful God’s “terrible swift sword.” A hundred years later, mainline Protestants marched against the Vietnam War, invoking a peace-loving Jesus.

Widely shared ethics have an obvious place in policy-making. But that’s different from religious dogma for partisan maneuvering. Since the 1950's, when we added our Godly trust to filthy lucre, Americans have witnessed politicos wearing the Savior on their sleeves.

It's not surprising the left is attempting its mix of piety-and-politics. Observing clout wielded by religious conservatives in 1994's GOP House take-over and political Svengali Karl Rove’s 2004 mobilization of evangelicals for George W. Bush, clamors for overtures to God-fearing voters have been heard among Democrats, some serious believers, others, poll-driven consultants pushing Religion Lite.

Sen. John Kerry navel-gazed about what more he could have done to explain his faith to fellow Catholics. A writer on religion and politics for Time with a Harvard Divinity School degree, Amy Sullivan wrote a 2008 book about Democratic piety problems, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap.

Getting in on the act was Jim Wallis, the Christian writer and political activist who founded Sojourners magazine and a same-named liberal religious community in Washington, D.C. (which is kind of like setting up a chapel in a whore house)

Wallis’s books include God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. In June 2007, he persuaded Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards to discuss faith in a cable-cast.

In a stunning pander, Edwards avowed, "I have a deep and abiding love for my Lord, Jesus Christ." He continued: "If I've had a day....where I haven't sinned multiple times, I would be amazed. I believe I have. I sin every single day. We are all sinners. We all fall short, which is why we have to ask for forgiveness from the Lord.” He apparently had a lot on his mind.

Clinton said she prayed during dark days after Bill's intern sinning. Obama was subdued, recalling Lincoln: "We shouldn't be asking whose side God is on, but whether we're on his side.”

Since his election, perhaps over-compensating for nonsense about fealty to Muhammad, the President has his TelePrompTer permanently programmed to seek God’s blessing for America in every speech. But he’s gone beyond petty piety. At a Feb. 2, 2012 prayer breakfast, he talked about “...finding Christ when I wasn't even looking for him so many years ago,” causing squeamishness among secular liberals. To his credit, he had bowed to non-believers in his inaugural address.

But the former Constitutional Law professor seems to forget the Founders consciously, and conscientiously, avoided a single mention of a deity in the Constitution, not even a tip-of-the-hat to the amorphous "Creator" who endowed unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence.

With the religious right's influence waning, perhaps liberals will be restored to secular sanity and stop trying to emulate what they scorned for several decades.

As for Jesus and what he'd do about that budget bill? Well, if there were a Number One Son, I hope he would advise politicians to treat others like they want to be treated, since empathy is the basis of all ethics; that he’d tell them to stop seeking forgiveness and just behave themselves; and, for God's sake, stop asking Him to bless every damned thing they do!

Director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, Terry Michael is a former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. He writes at his libertarian Democrat web site,www.terrymichael.net.

Why Business's Desire for Profit Is a Good Thing

2012-05-24T12:00:00-04:00

Instinctively, we look for people's motives. We need to know whom we can trust and whom we can't. We're especially skeptical of business because we know business wants our money.

It took me too long to understand that business's desire for profit is a good thing. To get our money, businesses—if they can't look to the government for favors—need to give us what we want. Then they must make continuous improvements and do it better than the competition does.

That competition is enough to protect consumers. But that's not intuitive. It's intuitive to assume that competition isn't really consumer protection and that experts at the FDA, FTC, DEA, FCC, CPSC, OSHA and so on must protect us. These experts consult "responsible" businessmen for advice on creating rules to make sure businesses meets minimum "standards."

Unfortunately, this standardization stops innovation.

We are imprinted to be wary of newcomers, strangers. Newcomers by definition are less experienced. Maybe they'll do something unsafe or dishonest! We don't want government to stop them from doing business—we just want consumers protected! Governments claim to do that by licensing businesses.

People like the idea of licensing. We license drivers. We license dogs. It seems prudent. People naively think this government seal of approval makes us safer.

This naivete is used to justify all sorts of rules that kill competition.

Las Vegas regulators require anyone who wants to start a limousine business to prove his new business is needed and, worse, will not "adversely affect other carriers." But every new business intends to beat its competitors. That's the point. Competition is good for us. Las Vegas' anticompetitive licensing rules mean limo customers pay more.

In Nashville, Tenn., regulators ruled it illegal for a limo to charge less than $45 a ride. One entrepreneur had won customers by charging half that, but the new regulations mean the established car service businesses no longer have to worry about him.

Perhaps Nashville's and Vegas' regulators really believe "this is an area where the free market doesn't work," as the manager of the Nevada Transportation Services Authority put it. But it's fishy that charging big fees for licenses just happens to be a very effective shakedown operation. Vegas cab and limousine businesses give "substantial" donations to Vegas-area political candidates, according to the Las Vegas Sun.

Our big government has justified its existence (at least since the Progressive Era) by claiming it is a "countervailing influence" to corporate power—when it is, in fact, incestuously entwined with corporations.

The list of business activities that government insists on licensing, supposedly for our sake, includes hair braiders in Mississippi, wooden-casket makers and florists in Louisiana and even yoga instructors in Virginia.

Established businesses always try to use government to handcuff competition. When margarine was first developed, the dairy industry got Wisconsin legislators to pass a law making margarine illegal. Several states ruled that margarine was "deceptive," since it might be mistaken for butter. Some required a bright pink dye be added to make margarine look different. An "oleomargarine bootlegger" was thrown in the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth.

When supermarkets were invented, small grocers tried to ban them. "A&P will dominate the grocery business and destroy Main Street," the grocers claimed. Minnesota legislators responded by passing a law that forbade supermarkets to put food "on sale."

Established capitalists are often capitalism's biggest enemies.

I used to believe that licensing doctors and lawyers protected consumers, but now I realize that licensing is always an expensive restraint of trade. It certainly hasn't barred quacks and shysters.

Licensing is unnecessary. It creates a false sense of security, raises costs, stifles innovation and takes away consumer choice.

I don't deny that there is fraud in business. I won Emmys for exposing it. Fraud is one of three crimes that must be policed and punished for the market to function (theft and physical assault are the others). Once that's done, however, as long as there is open competition, honesty pretty much takes care of itself.

Free competition—the striving for a good reputation—protects consumers better than government ever will.

John Stossel (read his Reason archive) is the host of Stossel, which airs Thursdays on the FOX Business Network at 9 pm ET and is rebroadcast on Saturdays and Sundays at 9pm & midnight ET. Go here for more info.

Chinese Communists No Longer Put Much Stock in Communism

2012-05-24T10:30:00-04:00

CHANGSHA, China—On an island in the Xiang River stands a massive bust of the late Chinese ruler Mao Zedong as a young man, his long hair blowing gracefully in an imaginary wind. Good thing for him he's a safe distance from the Expo Central China. If he could see it, he would be tearing his hair out.

As leader of the communist revolution of 1949, Mao was dedicated to class struggle and the elimination of property. He created a totalitarian society in which everyone wore the same clothes, chanted the same slogans and—as far as anyone knew—thought the same revolutionary thoughts.

Mao's "new man" was barely recognizable as human. Purported to be selfless, tireless, austere and indifferent to pleasure, he lived for the revolution alone. Skeptics mocked these subjects as "blue ants," for their drab, uniform dress and unquestioning obedience.

But that way of life is extinct and apparently unmourned, as the expo confirms. It's a sprawling complex brightly decorated in corporate logos. Arriving visitors are greeted by rock singer Pink's pugnacious warning: "I'm not here for your entertainment/You don't really want to mess with me tonight."

The risque music emanates from an outdoor exhibit featuring young women in off-the-shoulder gowns alongside the Gucci edition Fiat 500. Gucci? Fiat? This is communism, 21st-century style, and it seems as relevant to Mao as it does to the pharaohs.

Inside, an audience in a glittering ballroom hears one speaker after another hold forth on how China in general and these six provinces in particular can attract foreign investment. Vice Premier Wang Qishan, a member of the Communist Party's Politburo, unabashedly sings the praises of "market reforms."

The adjoining exhibition hall is a carnival of booths, products and hired staffers brandishing glossy brochures. Under Mao's leadership, slogans ran along the lines of "Communism is heaven and people's commune is the bridge." Here, I spy a Wal-Mart display with the pitch: "Save money. Live better." Farther along is a Starbucks, which at one time would have been reviled as a criminally decadent luxury.

The spectacle is not limited to the trade fair. Wal-Mart has 370 stores in China, and Starbucks has more than 570. Mao's masses thronged the streets on bicycles. Today's Chinese sit in late-model cars in endless traffic jams.

All this began some three decades ago, when the People's Republic gave up trying to forcibly redesign human nature in favor of making the best of it. So thorough is the outward transformation that it's often hard to remember—or quite believe—that this is an officially communist country.

American business executives claim that small increases in marginal tax rates or regulatory requirements will sap their drive to achieve. But if China's officially socialist system has a demoralizing effect on the spirit of enterprise, you can't tell.

Critics at home think the problem is just the opposite. In his book, "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers," journalist Richard McGregor quotes one academic's complaint that "the sole dominant ideology shared by the government and the people is money worship."

He says that like it's a bad thing. But the money-worshipping China is a gargantuan improvement on the Mao-worshipping version.

Not that communism is entirely dead. The party remains in firm control of the government, and many enterprises are partly state-owned. Party committees operate in corporate workplaces, where they play the odd role of celebrating those who diligently serve the interests of shareholders.

Touring an auto plant near Shanghai that is part of a joint venture of General Motors and SAIC Motor, I saw more than one employee recognition poster adorned with a smiling face alongside a hammer-and-sickle—signifying that the worker is a card-carrying Communist.

What that means is hard to figure. One Chinese woman, hearing of my strong aversion to Marxist-Leninist ideology, introduced me to her husband, whom she attested is "very anti-communist" and who proceeded to express his discontent with the government.

He seems to have no trouble reconciling these views with his membership in the party. Even Communists no longer put much stock in communism.

Today, it's the consumer who rules, and it's buying and selling that dominates economic life. Mao's visage still dominates Beijing's Tiananmen Square, but his people seem to have more in common with Calvin Coolidge. At the Expo Central China, it's clear that the business of China is business.

This Memorial Day, Freedom Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes

2012-05-24T07:00:00-04:00

What if Memorial Day reminds us of times when we had more freedom? What if freedom is dying right under our eyes? What if the memory of the past is more fulfilling than the reality of the present?

What if the federal government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, no matter what the Constitution authorized? What if the majority in Congress rejects the idea of limited government and views the Constitution as granting it blanket power to do whatever it can get away with? What if the constitutional prohibition on the government's taking of life, liberty or property without due process of law is only for show and is not for real?

What if the House of Representatives seriously considered letting the military lock up whatever Americans the president ordered the troops to arrest, without charges filed or lawyers present or a judge presiding? What if the House seriously debated this idea of indefinite military detention of Americans in America and actually voted in favor of it? What if this unconstitutional monstrosity becomes the law and your right to due process depends on whether you remain with the majority, stay silent or behave properly? What if the Constitution's guarantees are not guarantees at all, but are subject to the whims of whoever is in power?

What if the Declaration of Independence, which articulated the moral authority for the revolution against Great Britain, recognized that our rights come from our Creator and are inalienable? What if very few in government recognize the divine origin of human freedom and its natural integrity to our humanity?

What if the government only permitted freedom so long as it was exercised as the government pleases? What if the government rejected the basic values of every person's right to life and liberty and property in favor of some collective good, where the government could arrest you without evidence, ration your freedom to suit the general welfare and take your property from you and sell it at a profit?

What if the government could hire thugs to keep you safe? What if it gave the thugs uniforms and badges and sent them to airports? What if it gave them rubber gloves to wear and told them they could touch you and your children and your parents however and wherever they wished? What if these thugs touched the private parts of little babies and old ladies and intentionally restrained those who have criticized them while the rest of us just watched and let this happen?

What if the airlines did a better job of keeping their customers happy and their property safe than the thugs did? What if the government spent millions of your tax dollars to advertise what a great job it's doing? What if the government charged the airlines millions of their dollars for the illusory services these thugs are rendering? What if the government's thugs never caught a single bad guy intent on harming a flight in America? What if the government's thugs actually let weapons and bad guys onto planes because the thugs are dopes who have no competition, who can't be sued and who won't be fired?

What if the government found more dopes and dupes and convinced them that they should conspire to commit acts of terrorism? What if the idea for terrorist acts and the means for committing them came from the government? What if no real threats were involved in these games and no real weapons were used, just fake threats and fake weapons, fomented and provided by the government? What if the government created these phony crimes just so that it could solve them? What if no one was ever in danger from these government-created crimes, except those the government tricked? What if the government did this again and again and then boasted that it was keeping us safe from its own creations? What if Congress and the media and even the courts fell for this?

What if, on Memorial Day, we remember times that were more free than today? What if, on Memorial Day, when we think of those who died for our freedom, we end up recognizing that the freedom they died for is dying? What if it becomes fashionable for the government to ignore the Constitution? What if the Constitution dies because the government stops following it? What if, next Memorial Day, freedom is just a memory?

What do we do about it?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written six books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is "It Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom."

Montana’s Misguided Attempt to Nullify Citizens United

2012-05-23T16:30:00-04:00

Western Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Attorney General of Montana should have been an easy case for the Montana Supreme Court. At issue was the state’s 99-year-old ban on corporate spending in political campaigns. Because the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down a nearly identical federal restriction on political spending by corporations and unions for violating the First Amendment in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Montana court was duty-bound to follow this precedent and nullify the state law.

But instead something else happened. “Unlike Citizens United,” the Montana court asserted in its ruling last December, “this case concerns Montana law, Montana elections and it arises from Montana history.”

It’s a clever argument, but it doesn’t hold up. Since its 1925 decision in Gitlow v. New York, the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment applies to both federal and state governments. That’s because the 14th Amendment, which declares that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” incorporates the First Amendment (and other protections from the Bill of Rights) against the states. Montana officials may not like it, but they’re bound to obey the First Amendment just like every other state is bound to obey it. And as the Supreme Court held in Citizens United, the First Amendment protects the right of corporations and unions to spend money on political campaigns.

Indeed, in a sharply-worded dissent, Montana Supreme Court Justice James C. Nelson openly rebuked his colleagues for letting their personal preferences trump their basic judicial responsibilities. “I believe the Montana Attorney General has identified some very compelling reasons for limiting corporate expenditures in Montana's political process,” Nelson wrote. “The problem, however, is that regardless of how persuasive I may think the Attorney General's justifications are, the Supreme Court has already rebuffed each and every one of them. Accordingly, as much as I would like to rule in favor of the State, I cannot in good faith do so.”

Western Tradition Partnership (now known as American Tradition Partnership), the conservative interest group that lost the case, promptly appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which issued a stay in February preventing the decision from taking effect. The Court is now receiving legal briefs from each side and deciding whether to summarily reverse the Montana court or hear an appeal.

At least two justices think the Court should take the case. In a statement attached to February’s stay order, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Stephen Breyer, argued that hearing the case “will give the Court the opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.”

By “huge sums” Ginsburg was most likely referring to recent political spending by so-called super PACs, which are allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money so long as they do not coordinate their activities with a political campaign. Yet as Floyd Abrams, the celebrated First Amendment attorney whose resume includes the landmark Pentagon Papers case, makes clear in a friend of the court brief he recently submitted to the Court in favor of American Tradition Partnership, Ginsburg's fears have little relevance to the constitutional issue at hand. Not only is the Montana decision “in direct contravention” of Citizens United, Abrams writes, but “nothing that has occurred since that ruling warrants its reconsideration.”

As Abrams points out in the brief, today’s super PACs are overwhelming funded by wealthy individuals, not by corporations or unions, and wealthy individuals have been free to make such unlimited expenditures since the Court’s 1972 campaign finance decision in Buckley v. Valeo. If you’re worried about the rise of super PACs, in other words, Citizens United is not your culprit.

Moreover, as my colleague Jacob Sullum recently explained, there’s good reason to believe that super PACs have had a positive impact on the American political scene. They “have made races less predictable and more interesting,” Sullum notes, pointing to the surprisingly contentious GOP presidential contest, “giving a boost to candidates who otherwise would have been crippled by a lack of money.”

So not only did Montana’s high court blatantly ignore binding Supreme Court precedent, the post-Citizens United political landscape features more speech and more choice at the ballot box. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?

The Supreme Court should heed the words of dissenting Montana Justice James C. Nelson and send the state law to its grave.

Damon W. Root is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Haiti's Pepe Trade: How Secondhand American Clothes Became a First-Rate Business

2012-05-23T15:00:00-04:00

Plastic Bag Ban Will Put Los Angeles In Landfill

2012-05-23T13:30:00-04:00

There’s a crisis in Los Angeles. Is it the city’s projected $250 million budget deficit? The city’s $10 billion shortfall in pension obligations? Its crumbling infrastructure? A public school dropout rate approaching 50 percent? No, the City of Angels is facing catastrophe in the form of grocery bags.

So great is the menace that the City Council is poised to impose on the good people of Los Angeles the country’s strictest grocery bag ban, prohibiting the distribution of both plastic and paper bags.

Proponents give three reasons for the bag ban. They claim it will reduce the amount of waste entering landfills, reduce litter on streets, and “help protect the environment.”

But banning free grocery bags will not achieve those lofty goals.

First, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t reduce waste. California’s Statewide Waste Characterization Study [pdf] shows that “Plastic Grocery and Other Merchandise Bags” consistently make up just 0.3 percent of the waste stream in the state. That’s three-tenths of 1 percent. In comparison, organic waste such as food and yard clippings makes up 32 percent while construction debris comprises about 30 percent. The effect of eliminating free grocery bags on the amount of waste generated in the city would be insignificant.

Second, despite misleading claims from environmental groups and the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t do much to reduce litter in the public commons. Litter studies from across the country demonstrate that, on average, plastic retail bags make up about 1 percent to 2 percent of all litter.

Even that small amount of litter doesn’t decline when bans are enacted. In San Francisco, plastic bags comprised 0.6 percent of litter before the city banned plastic bags and 0.64 percent a year after the ban took effect [pdf, pg. 35]. Since plastic grocery bags make up less than 2 percent of roadside trash, banning them will affect neither the total amount of litter nor the cost of cleaning it up.

Third, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t reduce our consumption of foreign (or domestic) oil. L.A.’s Bureau of Sanitation claims [pdf] that “approximately 12 million barrels of oil go into the US supply of plastic bags.” But plastic bags made in the U.S. are not derived from oil; they’re made from a byproduct of domestic natural gas refinement. Manufacturing plastic grocery bags does not increase our need to import oil, and banning them in Los Angeles or anywhere else will not reduce US oil consumption.

Despite claims that plastics threaten our oceans and sea life, there is no evidence that free plastic grocery bags make up any significant portion of the plastic waste found on beaches or in the ocean. In fact, reports from environmental groups doing beach and ocean clean-ups show that plastic bags make up only about 2 percent of the debris.

Furthermore, reusable bags being touted as a “green” alternative carry their own environmental costs. Unlike locally manufactured plastic bags, reusable woven bags are primarily produced in China and imported to the U.S. on cargo ships which burn millions of gallons of dirty low-grade fuel oil. Because they’re made of mixed materials, these reusable bags can’t be recycled and will eventually end up in landfills, unlike plastic grocery bags which are fully recyclable.

Bags made of canvas have an even greater impact on the environment due to the natural resources required to grow cotton and manufacture bags. Frequently, reusable bags often carry more than just groceries. In a recent study by the University of Arizona, almost every bag sampled contained large amounts of bacteria including coliform, E. coli, and other opportunistic pathogens. The public is being instructed to wash these bags after each use, which, over time, will require huge amounts of energy and waste precious water.

So if banning free plastic grocery bags won’t save the planet, what will it do? For one thing, it will lead to the loss of American jobs. More than 30,000 people in the U.S. are directly employed by the plastic bag manufacturing and recycling industry, and thousands more are indirectly employed.

If passed, the L.A. bag ban could potentially lead to the loss of manufacturing jobs that support more than 1,000 families in the Los Angeles area alone, according to Pete Grande, CEO at Command Packaging, a recycler and producer of environmentally friendly plastic bags.

Where patrons have the option to shop in communities without bag bans, that’s exactly what they choose to do. According to Sid Marantz, Program Director for Marantz & Associates, a local provider of grocery store supplies, after Los Angeles County imposed a plastic bag ban in unincorporated areas, shoppers simply went elsewhere and merchants unlucky enough to be located where the ban was imposed have seen a significant decline in business.

The ban on both paper and plastic would also directly lead to a loss of economic activity. With no choice other than to carry stacks of reusable bags or purchase unneeded extra bags, shoppers will have less money for shopping. The 90 percent of the population who now reuse free plastic grocery bags for trash and pet waste will have to buy replacements, depressing their discretionary income.

But the real crisis—the one that rarely gets discussed—is that these types of bans require another public acceptance of total government intrusion into our lives. Is it a legitimate role of government to prohibit one individual from giving a free bag to another individual on the pretext of a supposed societal benefit that does not withstand even friendly scrutiny? Doesn’t every human interaction, no matter how small, have some arguable effect on society? And if so, what’s to prevent those who seek to dictate how everyone lives from invoking that argument at every turn? The crisis in Los Angeles and around the country is that too few people are asking those questions.

Jay Beeber is a filmmaker and activist living in Los Angeles.

Church of the Holy Contraception

2012-05-23T12:00:00-04:00

Are you sick and tired of these moralizing moralizers imposing their morality on the rest of us? I know I am.

Though it's commonly said that social conservatives would force us to live under theocratic rule if they could, these days the group most successful in imposing its worldview on others happens to be called the Democratic Party.

Just ask more than 40 Catholic organizations -- the Catholic University of America, the University of Notre Dame, the archdioceses of New York and Washington, etc. -- that filed suit against Obamacare's contraception mandate. Churches and other private institutions are impelled by government to break conscience in the name of state.

Religious freedom is, of course, limited to the interests of public health, but because contraception is relatively cheap, available in five minutes wherever you happen to be standing at this moment and covered by nearly every insurance plan, the only reason the administration mandates contraception is to coerce everyone to abide by left-wing orthodoxy.

At some point, contraception was transformed from a -- and I hope my Catholic friends will excuse the wording -- godsend to those wanting to avoid unwanted pregnancy to a "public health" concern to a moral societal imperative that must be mandated, lest we abandon our daughters, science, decency, "choice" and freedom.

Vice President Joe Biden once claimed that this debate is about "the right of women to decide for themselves, whether or not they want to use contraception" -- but not, you should note, allowing women to decide what kind of health insurance they can buy.

How does coercion become "choice"? I ran across a headline on the website of the left-wing think tank ThinkProgress that illustrates the awkward logic of this assertion: "Missouri Legislature Approves Bill Allowing Employers To Deny Access To Birth Control."

What could this possibly mean? Are these dastardly priests, archbishops and nuns forming a human blockade in front of the doors of St. Louis area pharmacies, denying men and women their "right" to purchase condoms? Does one deny access by failing to supply that something to another person? But let's transpose this logic to other areas of government that already exist.

We don't need a "State Legislature To Approve a Bill Allowing Employers To Deny Access to iPads" or a "State Legislature To Approve a Bill Allowing Employers To Deny Access to Cupcakes." For the most part, legislators are reacting to intrusions from the federal government. They aren't denying anything to anyone. (By the way, the correct headline should have read: "Missouri Legislature Approves Bill That Doesn't Allow Employees To Force Employers To Give Them Birth Control -- Not To Mention Sterilization Drugs and Abortifacients.")

Perhaps the Catholic Church, which often seems to back economic "fairness" rather than market freedom, will be more sensitive to the intrusions of the state in economic choice. This episode exhibits how economic freedom is intricately tied to all other liberties. When the state creates virtual monopolies through regulatory regimes, it also gets to decide what is moral and necessary and compels everyone to act accordingly.

And though I'm not interested in having the Catholic Church dictate the moral contours of my life, I am equally uninterested in having the Obama administration do it. And the dogmatism of the left -- though not driven by God and though, culturally speaking, I may occasionally agree with it -- is no less intrusive, whatever you might make of contraception.

Drones Pose a Threat to Americans' Privacy

2012-05-23T09:30:00-04:00

"Don't drone, me, bro!"—that's one way to sum up Charles Krauthammer's heated reaction to last week's news that the Federal Aviation Administration had loosened restrictions on local police departments' use of surveillance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

"Stop it here, stop it now," Krauthammer exclaimed on Fox News's "Special Report" Monday, "I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home. ... I'm not encouraging, but I am predicting that the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country."

The neoconservative Krauthammer is rarely mistaken for a civil libertarian, yet here he finds himself to the left of the ACLU. And he has a point. "Drones present a unique threat to privacy," the Electronic Privacy Information Center explains; they're designed to "undertake constant, persistent surveillance," and with special equipment, they're capable of "peering inside high-level windows," perhaps even "through solid barriers, such as fences, trees and even walls."

In several cases, the Supreme Court has held that warrantless surveillance by manned aircraft doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment. But small, cheap, maneuverable, and often undetectable drones may create cases in which a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

Pressure is mounting to normalize the use of drones in the United States. A 2010 Department of Defense report emphasizes the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security's need for "routine access to U.S. airspace" in order "to execute a wide range of missions including ... surveillance and tracking operations."

The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, has seven non-weaponized Predator drones in operation, one of which it used to assist a North Dakota sheriff with an arrest last summer, and "the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations," the Los Angeles Times reported in December.

From Miami, Florida, to Arlington, Texas, local police departments have received federal grants to purchase UAVs. Police in Ogden, Utah, used federal tax dollars for a surveillance blimp outfitted with night-vision cameras. "We believe it will be a deterrent to crime when it is out and about," says the mayor.

In an incident that typifies everything wrong with the growing militarization of U.S. law enforcement, members of a Houston-area sheriff's department brought some of their coolest gear out to a defense contractor's training facility last September for a drone demonstration-slash-photo op. The $300,000 "Shadowhawk" UAV they were looking to buy with DHS grant money lost control and crashed into the SWAT Team's "Bearcat" armored personnel carrier (also purchased with DHS boodle).

Not to worry—they bought a Shadowhawk drone anyway. Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel enthused: "I absolutely believe it will become a critical component on all SWAT callouts and narcotics raids and emergency management operations."

Over the past decade, the creeping militarization of the homefront has proceeded almost unnoticed, with DHS grants subsidizing the proliferation of security cameras and military ordnance for local police departments.

On April 19, Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairs of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, sent a letter to the head of the FAA urging the adoption of privacy protections, given the "potential for drone technology to enable invasive and pervasive surveillance." But Congress needn't wait on Obama's FAA to start protecting Americans' privacy rights.

It's well past time we stopped sleepwalking toward dystopia and had a serious public debate about where the lines should be drawn.

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute, the author of "The Cult of the Presidency," and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, where this article originally appeared.

Is That a Spy in Your Pocket?

2012-05-23T07:00:00-04:00

In January the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that tracking a suspect's movements by attaching a GPS transmitter to his car counts as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. But because the majority opinion emphasized the physical intrusion needed to surreptitiously install the transmitter, it did not resolve the constitutional implications of surveillance using cellphones, the tracking devices that Americans voluntarily carry in their pockets and purses.

In the absence of clear guidance, a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) suggests, law enforcement agencies are making up the rules as they go along, often obtaining location data from cellphone carriers without a warrant even for routine investigations. Last week a House subcommittee considered a bill that would address this threat to privacy by requiring a warrant for geolocational surveillance, regardless of the method used.

While the Supreme Court's decision involved surveillance that required a trespass on the target's property, five justices seemed to agree the real issue was the sensitive information collected by continually tracking his car for 28 days. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit observed in the same case, "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups—and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."

Cellphone tracking can be even more revealing, since people take their phones everywhere, including private indoor locations. Furthermore, carriers retain location records for months or years, creating a trove of personal data that law enforcement agencies can peruse at will if there is no requirement for judicial authorization.

"There have always been facets of American life that have been uniquely safeguarded from the intrusive interference and observation of government," the ACLU's Catherine Crump told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security last week. "Geolocation surveillance threatens to make even those aspects of life an open book to government."

Crump was testifying in support of the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) that would require the government to obtain a probable-cause warrant before intercepting or demanding geolocation data, except in emergencies and cases involving foreign intelligence. That rule is considerably more protective than the Justice Department's current policy, which is to seek a warrant only for real-time tracking of cellphones using GPS or triangulation (a technique that helps locate a phone within the sector served by the nearest base station).

But as Crump observed, "this is a meaningless distinction," since investigators can convert live tracking into historical records simply by waiting a minute or two before looking at the data. In any case, the Justice Department's rule bizarrely implies that examining six months of location records is somehow less intrusive than tracking a cellphone in real time for a day.

Furthermore, as University of Pennsylvania computer scientist Matt Blaze noted in his testimony on the GPS Act, the sectors served by each cellphone base station are becoming smaller and smaller as carriers strive to keep up with increasing demands on their networks. That means it may be possible to identify a target's specific location without GPS or triangulation, simply by knowing the closest base station, which is information cellphones automatically collect.

While the federal approach to cellphone tracking makes little sense, the ACLU reported last month that local policies "are in a state of chaos, with different towns following different rules—or in some cases, having no rules at all." Examining documents from more than 200 law enforcement agencies, the ACLU found that only a few had a general policy of seeking a warrant for cellphone tracking. Some do warrantless tracking only in life-threatening emergencies, but many do it routinely.

Our privacy deserves more respect. The GPS Act would provide it.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist. Follow him on Twitter.

Political Motivations in Scott Walker-Related Probe

2012-05-22T19:11:00-04:00

MADISON — The prosecutor is on the defense.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm released a tersely worded statement Monday in defense of David Budde, his chief investigator into a John Doe probe involving Gov. Scott Walker’s former aides.

The district attorney responded to a Media Trackers report earlier in the day that Budde had a “Recall Walker” sign in the front yard of his home.

Media Trackers, a Milwaukee-area conservative watchdog organization, also reported Budde’s home has a pro-labor “blue fist” poster on the front door.

Chisholm said he spoke with his chief investigator and Budde confirmed that his wife, an employee with Milwaukee County, placed the recall sign in the front yard of the home about a week ago.

He did not mention anything about the blue fist.

“I do not regulate or control the constitutional freedoms of my employees’ families in their private lives,” Chisholm wrote in Budde’s defense. “They have the right, under state law, and in this case, county civil service rules, to express their political views as does any other citizen."

Still, Walker supporters have questioned the objectivity of Chisholm, a Democrat, and his office in a county that is a stronghold for union Democrats.

Chisholm said Budde did not sign the recall petition. The district attorney said his investigator has conducted himself “professionally and independently, as he has done in numerous criminal investigations throughout his 26-year career as a law enforcement officer."

“Any decisions related to the John Doe investigation are based on the evidence and not on the political views of any members of this office or their families,” Chisholm wrote.

But Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has made the John Doe investigation a focal point in his campaign against Walker.

While the Republican governor has not been implicated, Barrett on Monday demanded that Walker release all information related to the probe, including more than 1,000 emails sent through a secret Internet system near Walker’s office in 2010, when he served as Milwaukee County executive.

Barrett's campaign rolled out a fresh round of ads attacking the governor on the John Doe probe.

Walker has said he is cooperating with the investigation.

“The bottom line is my integrity. I’ve always had high standards,” he told Fox 6 in Milwaukee. “In the state Assembly, in my time as county executive, and as governor, I continue to have those high standards. Anytime something’s been brought to my attention that my staff in any way violates that, I’ve taken swift action and the facts are very clear with that."

That point arguably was defined in an email made public in the John Doe investigation.

“We cannot afford another story like this one. No one can give them any reason to do another story. That means no laptops, no websites, no time away during the work day, etc.,” he wrote to a staff member following news that another aide appeared to be campaigning on government time in summer 2010.

Wisconsin Reporter has filed an open records request with the District Attorney’s office seeking information related to Chisholm’s handling of the John Doe documents.

This article originally appeared at WisconsinReport.com.

The Ethics of Egg Freezing

2012-05-22T16:45:00-04:00

“My parents want me to have this as a gift,” say many of the patients of fertility specialist Dr. Daniel Shapiro, the medical director of Reproductive Biology Associates in Atlanta. The gift is financial support for retrieving and freezing their daughters’ eggs.

More and more American women are waiting until they are older to have children. Why? Because they are building their careers and waiting for Mr. Right. But what if Mr. Right fails to come along before age 35? As the biological clock ticks along the chances of having biologically related children steeply diminish. Some women are now taking advantage of "fertility insurance" by having fertility clinics retrieve and freeze their eggs. The new trend for would-be grandparents to pay for this new fertility preserving procedure was reported in mostly approving terms last week on the front page of The New York Times.

While many women put off childbearing as their careers develop, others are stuck waiting for their relationships to reach the next level, thanks to the fecklessness of modern men. Many women in their late 20s and early 30s are in long-term relationships with men whom they think will eventually father their children. The relationship doesn’t work out and the women find themselves without a partner in their mid-30s or later.

Demographic trends over the past 50 years also must also be taken into account. Before the advent of the contraceptive pill in 1960, the median age for marriage for women and men was 20.3 and 22.8 years respectively. In 2010, the median age for marriage had risen to 26.1 and 28.2 years. In addition, the average age of mothers at first birth has increased [PDF] from 21.4 in 1970 to 25.2 in 2009. The most recent vital statistics report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted [PDF] that in 2009 the “rate of 39.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 was the lowest ever reported in the nearly seven decades for which a consistent series of rates is available.” On the other hand, the birthrate for women aged 35-39 was 46.5 births per 1,000 women. In fact, more children were born to women over age 35 than to women under age 20.

Every advance in assisted reproduction comes with ethical questions, and this one is no different. First, should it be done at all? In her 2009 article, "Egg Freezing: A Breakthrough for Reproductive Autonomy," North Carolina State University philosopher Karey Harwood notes that infertility occurs when a normal biological process is impeded by disease or defect. Thus assisted reproduction techniques are used to treat the illness of infertility.

However, women who decide to have their eggs frozen are not infertile. They are making an “elective” or “social” choice to take advantage of egg freezing. Does this make any ethical difference? No, argues Harwood. She points out that contraception and non-therapeutic abortion are both “elective” and do not treat an illness. “The analogy to a contraceptive pill is apt because both egg freezing and the pill can effectuate delayed reproduction,” writes Harwood. “Because egg freezing may be reasonably interpreted as another form of family planning, it can be considered a legitimate exercise in reproductive autonomy.”

In addition, freezing eggs gets around the moral assertion that frozen embryos are persons since uninseminated eggs do not have two sets of genes derived from parents. Of course, using frozen eggs later to create embryos via in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques for implantation into a woman’s womb is likely to run into that objection eventually. Standard IVF techniques often involve producing extra embryos that are frozen as backups to be used if those initially introduced into a woman’s womb fail to implant or if patients later desire additional children. Consequently, there are often frozen embryos leftover once IVF treatments have been completed. Using frozen gametes, both eggs and sperm, means that people using this assisted reproduction technique might not have to make decisions about what should be done with any leftover embryos.

In addition, to the above ethical arguments, some ethicists deploy three other objections to this new way to extend women’s fertility; (1) false hope, (2) harm to children, and (3) inappropriate commercialization.

The biological clock ticks relentlessly away so that typically a woman’s fertility (defined as probability of getting pregnant during a year) falls from 86 percent at age 20 to 52 percent at age 35. Thereafter it drops ever more steeply to 36 percent by age 40 and 5 percent by age 45.

The claim that egg freezing as a kind of “fertility insurance” engenders false hope in women who aim to preserve and extend their fertility rests chiefly on two concerns. The first is women may overestimate the real chances of having a baby using this technique. If the relevant standard is the success rate to other IVF techniques, then recent data from several clinics indicates that the rate of live births using frozen eggs is comparable, about 1 in 3 cycles results in a live birth.

The other issue is that women who hear of the technique will wait too long before taking advantage of it. Clinical evidence strongly suggests that the chances of having a baby is greater for women who choose to freeze their eggs before age 35. This is because eggs frozen after that age do not grow and implant as readily. Older eggs are far more likely to have flaws that prevent them from developing into babies than younger eggs do.

Another ethical concern is that children born from frozen eggs are disproportionately at risk for various physical and mental harms. Already some 2,000 children may have been born using frozen eggs. Preliminary indications are that rate of birth defects among such children is comparable to that of children born by means of conventional IVF techniques. For example, a 2009 study looked at 936 live births from frozen eggs and reported, “Compared with congenital anomalies occurring in naturally conceived infants, no difference was noted.” Of course, since the technique is so new, researchers need to keep an eye on children born using this technique to see if any deleterious consequences arise in the longer term.

The final set of ethical objections centers on claims that this technique furthers the medicalization and commercialization of women’s bodies. Of course, it is women who are choosing voluntarily to take advantage of this technology. They must believe that it can benefit them and further the development of their life plans. Providers of this service do get paid (the whole process can cost as much as $20,000 out of pocket), but so too do lawyers, teachers, car mechanics, plumbers, and everybody else. There is no compelling ethical reason to believe that fertility specialists should not be fairly compensated at market rates for their services.

Some ethicists argue that egg freezing amounts to an illegitimate technological fix to some of the persistent problems of sexual inequality. In this case, the ethical thing to do is to change workplaces so that there is less conflict between bearing children and women’s careers. In addition, public policy should be steered in directions that would encourage women to avoid the problem of age-related infertility simply by having children at younger ages. However, the case of France suggests that contemporary attempts to shift public policy in directions friendly to childbearing and rearing may have limits. In pronatalist France, the average age for first childbirth is 29.9 years, and despite all sorts of social programs aimed at easing the burdens of child rearing, French women have a lower labor force participation rate than do American women.

On the other hand, egg freezing actually promotes equality between the sexes. Oxford University philosophers Imogen Goold and Julian Savulsecu correctly point out, [PDF], “Men already enjoy the choice of when they have children. Women should have the opportunity to enjoy the same choices as men, if we can provide them, unless there are good reasons not to.”

Instead of dismissing egg freezing as a mere biomedical work-around, it should be celebrated as another way in which technological progress is reducing and ameliorating inequalities between women and men, reproductive and otherwise.

Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Reason.tv: Joel Stein on His "Stupid Quest for Masculinity"

2012-05-22T15:00:00-04:00

The Amazingly Bogus Scott Walker 'Divide and Conquer' Video

2012-05-22T13:30:00-04:00

Much has been said of the highly edited 38-second YouTube video in which Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is caught saying he would “divide and conquer” the state. Listening to critics of the governor, you’d think it was almost like finding the smoking gun still at the scene of the crime.

Democrats say it is irrefutable evidence that Walker is a power-hungry pol. They argue it proves the governor says one thing in public and another in private to some of his biggest campaign donors. They point to the video as proof that Walker is set to enact “right-to-work” legislation, and that Act 10, the law reducing government employee's collective bargaining power, was just the beginning.

What’s amazing about the entire video is that documentary filmmaker Brad Liechtenstein refuses to post the entire video. All he’s given the media is a transcript of the conversation. Yet releasing the full video would provide true context of the conversation between Walker and ABC Supply President Diane Hendricks.

Otherwise, given the current video’s make-up, its reliance on out-of-context editing, and the rapid-response from recall backers to fully exploit it, it’s easy to pinpoint its purpose: Re-energize liberal turnout ahead of the recall.

Liechtenstein has been around the politico-cinematic block going as far back as documentary work for PBS in 1996 on the Clinton-Dole presidential race. He probably has been around long enough to know when he has video which will help promote his project. He'd also know if he has video on his hands that can help promote a cause.

The "ConquerGate" video is pure political catnip for the liberal base—meant to re-energize voters who may have been deflated by the recent Democratic primary and a new wave of polling numbers indicating Walker is likely to win.

The reasoning for the video is simple: to broaden the Democratic conversation from the real purpose of the recall—collective bargaining for public employees—to the more universal theme of Walker's alleged untrustworthiness and hunger for power. Collective bargaining doesn’t move votes. Those aren’t my words, they’re the words of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s Communication Director Graeme Zielisnki in the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones.

So would it be safe to say that while collective bargaining might not be moving votes, it might move people to the polls? Given the response and faux outrage over Walker’s remarks, that appears to be the only reason that a video like this is even released three weeks prior to election day.

Add in news reports that the filmmaker will not allow the full, unedited video to be made available so the public may draw its own conclusions, and it’s hard to argue the video wasn’t built to boost Democratic turnout above all else.

Kevin Binversie is a Wisconsin native who has been blogging on the state’s political culture for more than eight years. This article originally appeared at WisconsinReporter.com.

Gary Johnson Marches Up Another Mountain

2012-05-22T12:00:00-04:00

“When researchers announced the discovery of a mountain taller than Everest on the asteroid Vesta, Gary Johnson had already climbed it.” So said “Gary Johnson Facts” on Twitter a while back, after noting that “A duck’s quack does not echo. Gary Johnson is solely responsible for this phenomenon.”

Like Chuck Norris, who inspired this genre of humor, Gary Johnson is not viewed with gravity by a great many people these days. This is too bad, because—unlike Norris—he should be.

The Everest gag refers to a “true fact,” as such things are called: Johnson once climbed to the summit of Mt. Everest—and he did so with frostbitten toes and a leg that had not fully healed from an earlier break. He hopes to reach the highest peak on every continent. If past is prologue, he probably will: He already has scaled Mount Elbrus, Mount McKinley, and Mount Kilimanjaro. He also has competed in the Ironman triathlon five times, has run 100 miles in 30 consecutive hours—in the Rockies—and he has nearly killed himself paragliding.

All of those adventures are just a pastime, however, for a presidential candidate who already has had two careers. When young he went into business as a handyman with zero employees. When he sold his construction company years later, it had more than 1,000.

Then he ran for governor as a Republican in heavily Democratic New Mexico. He had no prior political experience. He won by a 10-point margin. (By poetic coincidence, he beat a competitor for the GOP nomination named Dick Cheney.) Johnson spent his first term slashing taxes and reining in the growth of the state budget. Then he won a second term, and spent that crusading for school vouchers and marijuana legalization. He set a record for vetoing bills—750 of them, more than all other 49 governors combined during the same period—and left a budget surplus in his wake.

Last year Johnson ran for the Republican nomination for president. For reasons known only to the organizers, he was shut out of three early debates, which effectively killed whatever chance he had of gaining traction in the primaries. But those chances were slim to begin with, given his views on issues such as abortion (he believes “fundamentally in the right...to choose”), gay marriage (“equal acess to marriage for all Americans is a right,” he says, blasting President Obama for giving the matter only “lip service”) and national defense (he would cut the Pentagon 43 percent, just like every other department—except Education, which he would abolish).

Equally problematic in the GOP these days, he also believes in evolution. To make matters worse, “I believe in global warming and that it’s man-made.” And even though he does not use tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine, he did use marijuana for three years to ease the pain from his paragliding accident.

On the other hand, he is not likely to win over many Democrats with his views on gun control (“I don’t believe there should be any restrictions when it comes to firearms. None”), taxes (he cut them 14 times as governor), or Obamacare (he has said it is unconstitutional).

Given those positions, he’s a natural fit for the Libertarian Party—whose presidential nomination he won earlier this month. As ABC News put it, Johnson “intends to hit Obama from the left and Romney from the right. ‘I got a leg up on Obama when it comes to civil liberties,’ Johnson said. “I crush Obama when it comes to dollars and cents. I think I have a leg up on Romney when it comes to dollars and cents and I think I crush him on civil liberties.’ ” He would repeal the Patriot Act and says habeas corpus should be “respected entirely.”

Johnson has another political Achilles’ heel: He is unflinchingly honest. “Always be honest and tell the truth” is one of his Seven Principles of Good Government. A profile in GQ last year put it more bluntly: “There is nothing he will not answer, nothing he will not share. . . . Johnson is fundamentally incapable of bull****ing.” Example: When Mitt Romney made a swing through Michigan, he gushed oleaginously about how “I love this state. It seems right here. The trees are the right height. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. . . .” By contrast, when a reporter asked Johnson if he would say the same nice things about Michigan that he had said about New Hampshire, he answered: “No, Michigan’s the worst.”

With those positions and that level of candor, he’ll be lucky to get 0.5 percent of the vote. On the other hand, he will probably enjoy the campaign. As he told another newspaper last February, “The endeavor itself is a great adventure. I’m a Zen kind of guy … You better darn well like the journey, or the destination won’t mean anything.”

A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where this article originally appeared.

Is the GOP an Echo or a Choice?

2012-05-22T10:30:00-04:00

Establishment Democrats don’t come much more established than Dianne Feinstein. The senior senator from California has been in public life since the early 1960s. As a former president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and former mayor, DiFi is as iconic of the City by the Bay as a cable car full of Rice-a-Roni.

In the Senate, Feinstein embodies the lethal center, ever ready to vote for bipartisan boondoggles and back fellow big-government hornswogglers. You can find the patented Feinstein Yea on virtually every major expansion of government power in the last 10 years, including the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, Sarbanes-Oxley, the USA PATRIOT Act (and its subsequent reauthorizations), the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (which created the notorious Troubled Asset Relief Program), the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare), and Dodd-Frank.

Feinstein’s high-and-inside status would seem to be a liability in an age of growing anti-establishment sentiment. While the remnants of Occupy Wall Street complain about the perfidy of the 1 percent, the senator is said to be worth somewhere between $50 million and $100 million; her 2005 fiscal disclosure statement was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “nearly the size of a phone book.” Legistorm.com puts Feinstein’s staff at more than 80 people with a payroll of more than $4 million a year—much larger and more expensive than most Senate staffs. In appearances, Feinstein tends to be surrounded by underlings like “a Gilbert and Sullivan monarch,” as a Los Angeles Times colleague once described it to me.

Feinstein is increasingly out of step with the electorate. “I voted in support of this bill because I believe it remains our best chance at reforming our broken health care system,” Feinstein said of her ObamaCare vote in 2009. That’s a lot to walk back now that a solid majority of Americans want to repeal ObamaCare and more than 70 percent (according to a March ABC/Washington Post poll) believe the law’s individual mandate is unconstitutional.

You’d think Republicans would be champing at this particular bit, fielding highly compelling candidates in an effort to recapture one of the Senate’s crown jewels. They are not, and their inaction illustrates why the opposition party is apt to squander its chance to capitalize on the unqualified disaster of President Barack Obama’s first term in office.

There are plenty of Republicans vying to run against Feinstein in November. Some of them are credible, amusing, or both. Among the candidates with some support from the party establishment, Los Angeles businessman Al Ramirez and San Diego hospital services entrepreneur Dan Hughes are both running on platforms of vigorous if selective deregulation and tax cutting.

The outsider candidates are even better. Surfing rabbi Nachum Shifren is rabidly anti-immigrant and exercised about the threat of Shariah law, but he espouses Tea Party–informed fiscal conservatism and has Herman Cain–like populist appeal. (And did I mention that he’s a surfing rabbi?) Rick Williams, a blustery L.A. lawyer, self-described “Ron Paul guy,” and devotee of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, challenges Feinstein on her militarism and her rotten civil liberties record. And say what you will about eccentric pundit Orly Taitz; if she wins, the world’s greatest deliberative body will finally take on the all-important question of Kenyan birth certificates.

But while I’d be happy to see Rick Williams take the brass ring, the GOP Senate candidate after the June primary is certainly going to be Elizabeth Emken, a Danville-based advocate for autism issues who has put together a slick campaign and won over party leadership. Emken is an affable politico, but the content of her campaign shows what’s wrong with GOP ideology, or lack of it, both in California and nationwide.

During the California GOP convention, I had a chance to ask Emken about DiFi’s voting record, and how Emken’s would have differed. She couldn’t name a single big-government misstep of the Bush era—not TARP, not the PATRIOT Act, not any of the various war authorizations—where she would have voted differently from Feinstein. When I asked her to name her favorite economist, she cited Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. When I asked why libertarians should vote for her, she said she was committed to more efficient government but declined to give specifics.

Emken did have one nice divergence from the Republican mainstream. She said every item in the federal budget, even defense spending, should be “on the table” for cuts. That puts her ahead of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), whose ballyhooed austerity plan would actually restore $55 billion in defense spending slated to be cut under the “trigger” mandated by last year’s debt ceiling deal.

And that’s the real problem. The California Republican Party, you may have heard, is close to extinction, barely holding on to a fraction of the electorate and a mere third of the state legislature. If a Golden State RINO who is hardly distinguishable from the sitting Democrat shows more fiscal responsibility than the party’s leading budget hawk, something is seriously wrong.

As this column was being written, Mitt Romney, who pioneered ObamaCare’s individual mandate when he was governor of Massachusetts, was close to locking down the Republican presidential nomination. Despite the wealth of targets created by Obama’s desolating presidency, the Republicans had managed to seize on nothing but dud issues: immigration (at a time when immigration is in sharp decline), pornography, and the strange claim that the president who ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden, claims the authority to kill U.S. citizens, and agitates for war with Iran is insufficiently martial. A Quinnipiac poll taken in March showed Obama leading Romney by 50 percent to 42 percent.

Why would a president who gave America vast unemployment, soaring inflation, a moribund economy, record deficits, and a manically ill-conceived energy policy be coasting toward re-election? For the same reason Dianne Feinstein (who, like Romney, generates little excitement in her base but is considered electable) is a lock. Republicans have spent so long in ideological hibernation that the only challengers they can field are clones of the Democratic incumbents. And who would choose a clone when you can buy the original?

Tim Cavanaugh is managing editor of reason online.

Islamist Extremism Is Not Driving Egypt's Presidential Election

2012-05-22T07:00:00-04:00

There is no predestination in human affairs, so it is impossible to predict what a post-Arab Spring Egypt will ultimately look like. It might well degenerate into a totalitarian theocracy more odious than the secular autocracy that the Egyptian people overthrew, as some neoconservative worrywarts warn. But the run-up to the presidential elections this week suggests that Egyptians are desperately looking for a system of checks and balances to keep authoritarians of every stripe at bay.

This itself is reason to be cautiously optimistic about Egypt’s future.

Commentators like Samuel Tadros of the neoconservative Hudson Institute have been saying “I told you so” ever since the Muslim Brotherhood and its more extreme Islamist Salafi cousins together won 65 percent of the seats in parliament last December. Egyptian liberals, who had actually led the rebellion against the Mubarak dictatorship, by contrast won only 15 percent.

As far as Tadros and his ideological bedfellows are concerned, this offers proof positive that elections and democracy won’t lead to an enlightened liberalism that protects the rights of women and minorities (after all, 80 percent of Egyptians allegedly support capital punishment for apostasy). Rather, they’ll simply legitimize a reactionary and retrograde form of sharia-based government that is hostile to Western values.

But if such fears were well-founded, then Islamist hardliners would not only be ahead in Egypt’s presidential race, they’d be trumpeting their Islamist credentials from rooftops. The exact opposite, however, is happening. Both the front-runners—Aboul Fotouh, an Islamic liberal, and Amr Moussa, an outright secularist—are bending over backwards to distance themselves from extremist ideologies. The more extreme Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, is running a distant third or fourth.

Fotouh, whom the Muslim Brotherhood kicked out of its fold last year, is a genuinely interesting guy. He has managed to win the support of folks as diverse as Wael Ghonim, the young, liberal Google executive credited with spearheading the Tahrir Square uprising, and the Salafis, the ultraconservative Muslims—despite declaring that he’d prefer a good Christian to a bad Muslim as president. Like every other candidate, he supports the provision in the Egyptian constitution that recognizes sharia as the ultimate source of law. But his interpretation of sharia, interestingly enough, requires rulers to implement the freely expressed will of the people.

Fotouh’s moderate views are diluting the secularist credentials of Moussa, the former secretary-general of the Arab League whose Achilles’ heel is that he is a remnant of the despised Mubarak regime. Moussa is trying to distract from his checkered past by drawing attention to Fotouh’s previous alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. In the first presidential debate ever in the Arab world last week, Moussa depicted Fotouh as a stealth candidate who, once elected, would spring his hardline Islamism on Egypt, something Fotouh hotly denied. But the fact that Moussa hopes to win political points by outing Fotouh as an Islamist rather than trying to “out-Islam” him suggests that the Arab Street ain’t exactly pining for the Ayatollah.

So why would the Egyptian public that gave Islamists a decisive victory in the parliamentary elections six months ago now be turning to Islamically challenged candidates? And why would the Salafis choose to back Fotouh over Morsi, their spiritual bro? The reason may be that Egyptians—even Salafis—don’t blindly apply a religious litmus test to their candidates. If anything, having felt the boot of a dictatorship on their neck for over half a century, they fear an autocratic regime far more than they crave an Islamic one.

Egyptians initially were attracted to the Muslim Brotherhood not because it is a Muslim outfit, but because it is a Muslim outfit that shares their experience of persecution and would therefore be less likely to persecute them. What’s more, the Brotherhood has a track record of resisting Egypt’s military-backed rulers, and was regarded as the only actor capable of standing up to the military that has been consolidating its chokehold on the government and the economy. (The military controls anywhere between 5 and 45 percent of Egypt’s industry, including water-bottling plants!)

However, the Muslim Brotherhood has proven a huge disappointment after its decisive parliamentary victory, displaying a disturbing power-hungry streak. It packed a panel tasked with writing the next constitution with its own followers. It has used its legislative powers not in the national interest, but for naked cronyism. It has lost major street cred by contesting the presidential elections after having pledged not to. Even worse, there are widespread suspicions that rather than standing up to the military, it’s cozying up to it. Hence, the prospect of the Brotherhood controlling both the executive and legislative branches is terrifying ordinary Egyptians.

All of this suggests that Egyptians are engaged in a complicated and delicate balancing act, using the Islamists to check the military and vice versa. They are intuitively acting on Lord Acton’s maxim that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and are using the upcoming elections to divide power among the country’s major—though problematic—political players.

Whether they’ll ultimately succeed, Allah only knows. But if they fail and pave the way for something odious like a theocracy or a military dictatorship, it’ll be despite—not because of—their true desires. Trying to understand their entire struggle from the narrow standpoint of whether they want sharia law both cheapens and oversimplifies the epic events unfolding on the ground.

Shikha Dalmia is a Reason Foundation senior analyst and a columnist for The Daily, where this column originally appeared.

Eduardo Saverin And Echoes of the Reichsfluchtsteuer

2012-05-21T16:30:00-04:00

Call it the return of the Reichsfluchtsteuer.

The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, did not use the term. But that is what Mr. Norquist was talking about when he spoke to The Hill newspaper about the legislation proposed by Senator Schumer, the Democrat of New York, to tax at a 30 percent rate the $2 billion capital gains of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who renounced his American citizenship before Facebook’s initial public offering.

"I think Schumer can probably find the legislation to do this. It existed in Germany in the 1930s and Rhodesia in the ’70s and in South Africa as well,” Mr. Norquist said. “He probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German."

The Reichsfluchsteuer, or Reich flight tax, that the Nazis imposed on Jews trying to flee in the 1930s was 25 percent; Mr. Schumer and his Senate colleague Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, want 30 percent. Give Mr. Schumer some credit for creativity, Mr. Norquist; the New Yorker did not just translate, he also raised the rate.

(Mr. Norquist’s own comment, like Mr. Schumer’s legislation, had its precedent; it was a variation on Molly Ivins’ comment that Patrick Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention had sounded better in the original German.)

Mr. Schumer is an easy target, but the blame for this one is bipartisan, as is so often the case in Washington. The speaker of the House, John Boehner, a Republican, told ABC News’ “This Week” program that Mr. Saverin’s exit from America was “outrageous” and that he would support Mr. Schumer’s legislation if it is necessary to prevent people from leaving America to avoid taxes. The law that imposed the exit tax Mr. Saverin was trying to avoid, the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008, was signed into law by a Republican president, George W. Bush, after being passed in the Senate by unanimous consent and in the House by a vote of 403 to 0.

Mr. Schumer would surely bridle at having his exit-tax policy compared to that of the Nazis, as would Mr. Boehner, so let me be clear: The Reichsfluchsteuer was originally imposed not by the Nazis, but, rather, on December 8, 1931, by the pre-Hitler, centrist government of Heinrich Brüning, who had a doctoral degree in economics.

As Howard Ellis wrote in Exchange Control In Central Europe, published in 1941 by Harvard University Press, “it is worth remarking that the National Socialists inherited it from Social Democrat supported coalition governments after nearly two years of elaboration.”

Others have observed that it is not the only parallel that can be drawn between today’s era and the Weimar Republic, which featured high unemployment, deficits, and the threat of inflation.

Ellis writes that the exchange control policy remained in place “because it was an instrument par excellence of political power,” and concludes, “the political predecessors of Hitler nurtured an institution which paved the way for totalitarianism.”

Ellis’s account was later challenged by Frank C. Child, who was chairman of the economics department of the University of California, Davis, from 1963 to 1980. In his 1958 book The Theory and Practice of Exchange Control in Germany, Child complained that critics of the German policies “reflect prejudices based upon distaste for Nazi political, social, and idealogical [sic] tenets.” Moreover, Child wrote, the critics suffer from “an apparent preconception that free trade and free markets guarantee the best of all possible worlds and that any departure from free and impersonal markets, by definition, reduces the welfare of each and every nation. This is a demonstrably false proposition.”

As Holman Jenkins noted in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Schumer’s sally against Mr. Saverin comes amid the implementation of the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which makes it harder for Americans to get money out of the country.

The left will already be furious about this column for its mention of Nazi Germany in the context of capital gains taxes. Let me conclude by getting the right angry, too, by invoking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a product of the United Nations. It says, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own” and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” What meaning does a right to leave have if the government is going to help itself to 30 percent of the migrant’s property on the way out?

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of Samuel Adams: A Life.

DC Capitol Hemp Shutting Down: Obama's War on Drugs to Blame

2012-05-21T15:00:00-04:00

America’s Small-Business Fetish

2012-05-21T12:00:00-04:00

On February 12, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent a message to his 62,550 followers on Twitter: “Small business is the job growth engine in this country and we need to pursue policies that reflect that reality to create jobs.” Cantor was wrong on both counts. Despite overwhelming conventional wisdom to the contrary, small businesses are not the engine of growth. And the small businesses that do create jobs rarely stay small for long, which makes crafting policies that favor those fast-growing firms both difficult and unnecessary.

The cult of the small business is so prevalent that you are treated like a heretic in Washington if you don’t pledge to do something nice for the little guys. Targeted tax credits, special regulatory exemptions, preferential access to government contracts—nothing is too good for America’s DIY manufacturers and social networking startups. Support for the Small Business Administration (SBA), a federal agency tasked with handing out goodies to the modestly sized, remains strong, despite dozens of compelling studies demonstrating that its efforts amount to little more than poorly targeted corporate welfare.

In his 2011 budget, President Barack Obama requested $1.4 billion to fund SBA programs. Most of the agency’s money is spent on special credit programs for small businesses that have difficulty getting loans from regular banks. In fiscal year 2011, the SBA guaranteed $30 billion in such loans, which theoretically don’t cost taxpayers anything. In practice, however, whenever the economy goes south, the SBA can’t cope with the number of small businesses that default on the loans. In 2011 the SBA ended up spending $6.2 billion, a $4.8 billion increase over its requested amount, mainly because so many small businesses couldn’t make their payments.

The idea that small is glorious or that small businesses are the engine of growth is based on bad economics, and the result is bad policy.

The government’s definition of a small business has become absurdly broad. The category officially includes the “mom and pop” firms with fewer than 10 employees that most people think of when they hear the term. But companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees (depending on the industry) are also eligible for benefits and other preferences; they win the coveted designation by virtue of the fact that they are small relative to other firms in their industry. Based on the federal government’s bizarre classifications, 99.7 percent of firms in America qualify as small.

The percentage of people who work at these small companies has remained constant during the last decade, holding steady at about 50 percent of the private sector work force. This fact alone should cast doubt on the claim that small businesses account for the bulk of new jobs. If that figure was accurate, it would mean that half of American workers are employed by 0.3 percent of firms. Shouldn’t we instead be cheering the tremendous job creation record of those powerhouse companies?

The ubiquitous statistic that small businesses create 70 percent of all net new jobs is also misleading. The source of this figure is none other than the Small Business Administration itself. In a 2005 study published by the American Enterprise Institute, I noted that to arrive at this figure, the SBA divides net small business jobs—a figure that includes every single current employee of a small business—by the net job creation from all businesses combined. This is not an accurate way to determine the share of new jobs created by small businesses.

The results can be comical: One table published by the SBA in 2005 showed that small businesses created more than 100 percent of new jobs, a truly heroic (if fantastical) result. We should stop using this junk statistic.

Our national obsession with small businesses misses the point. It’s not micro-firms that drive our new, entrepreneurial economy. Young firms—the startups that will grow to be the next Facebook—do tend to be small. But their newness is the relevant factor, not their size.

A 2010 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by University of Maryland economist John Haltiwanger and researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau found there was no consistent link between net job growth rates and the size of a business. Instead, the researchers found that firms younger than 10 years, particularly startups, are the real sources of job growth.

Another study, published the same year by economist Tim Kane of the Kauffman Foundation, came to the same conclusion after examining more than 30 years of data from the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics. Both large and small firms continuously create jobs, Kane found, but also continuously destroy them. The Kauffman report found that without startups—defined as firms younger than one year old—there would be no net job creation in the United States. As Kane writes in the study, “Startups aren’t everything when it comes to job growth. They are the only thing.”

Former Obama administration economic adviser Jared Bernstein explained this concept concisely in an October 2011 New York Times op-ed. “It’s not small businesses that matter, but new businesses, which by definition create new jobs,” Bernstein wrote. “Real job creation, though, doesn’t kick in until those small businesses survive and grow into larger operations.”

Today, according to Haltiwanger and his co-authors, businesses younger than a year account for 3 percent of U.S. employment but almost 20 percent of new gross jobs. Furthermore, 60 percent of small businesses that have been around more than five years act as a slight drag on the number of jobs available. These older small businesses cut about 0.5 percent more staff than they add in a typical year, according to Haltiwanger.

Real job growth comes not from people dreaming of being small but from entrepreneurs committed to building large and sustainable companies. This shouldn’t be news. A seminal 1987 study by David L. Birch, a former MIT researcher, explained that small-firm job creation occurs within a relatively few firms, the ones he calls “gazelles.” Gazelles are high-growth entrepreneurial companies that start small and quickly grow larger. This subset of small firms, not small firms in general, is the powerful job creator of every central planner’s dreams.

Which means that even if it were the government’s role to create jobs, it wouldn’t be able to. No one can identify a gazelle before it leaps. The label can be applied only by looking at past growth, long after the firm has created those sought-after new jobs. Since no one knows where true innovation will come from, it is impossible to accurately pinpoint the job-creating firms in advance.

In other words, we should value innovation, not smallness. The conventional wisdom that all small businesses deserve special attention is flawed. They do not merit preferential government treatment by virtue of their size. In fact, such policies can have perverse consequences. In a 1995 National Tax Journal article, economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin explained that if the tax code favors small firms over large ones, it will make it more profitable to stay small rather than grow. This disincentive to grow will lead to a misallocation of resources away from their most productive uses and will interfere with the natural growth and evolution of firms. Preferential regulatory treatment has the same effect.

Firms lose most small-business benefits when their employment, assets, or receipts surpass a certain limit specified by law. If a firm stays smaller than 50 employees, it avoids mandatory family and medical leave. If an employer does not hire more than 10 employees, he is exempt from most Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements for recording and reporting injuries and illnesses. Such policies discourage growth.

Instead of preferential policies, the government should establish an environment that encourages businesses with strong growth potential to evolve into successful large enterprises. This means low tax rates, low levels of regulation, and a stable legal structure that protects property rights.

Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

China and the Lure of the Status Quo

2012-05-21T07:00:00-04:00

BEIJING—A rising Asian power with an unstoppable export machine, rapidly growing wealth and a sense that our time is past and its time has come: China in 2012? Yes—but also Japan in the 1980s.

Back then, many Americans thought Japan was destined to dominate the world economically. Japanese leaders had the same idea, and some were not reluctant to let Americans know. But the past is not always prologue. When things go well, they can distract from things that can go wrong.

Japan got blindsided. The magic formula stopped working, and the country couldn't find a new one. Its economic fortunes have come to be summarized in bleak phrases: the lost decade, the great stagnation.

It's not the world's biggest economy, as people expected. In fact, it's gone from No. 2 to No. 3, falling behind China.

Over the past 30 years, China has been an economic success story without parallel in modern history. By abandoning the disastrous policies of Mao Zedong's era and embracing the market, it attained growth averaging a stunning 10 percent a year, lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. It became the world's biggest exporter.

But all is not well. Thanks to the malfunctioning economies of the United States and Europe, demand for China's exports is shriveling. Under pressure from Washington, it has had to let its currency decline, which puts a drag on its sales abroad.

Inflation is up and could soon approach double digits. Growth is down—and anything the government does to combat rising prices may depress it further.

Meanwhile, the real estate market, says Tsinghua University business professor Patrick Chovanec, "is in the process of crashing." That process, as you may recall from the U.S. experience, can wreak havoc on banks. In the first quarter, GDP rose at the slowest rate since 2009.

Not all of the country's troubles are economic. The national leadership transition scheduled for this fall has been thrown into turmoil by a scandal involving a powerful member of the Politburo, former Chongqing Communist Party chief Bo Xilai. A blind dissident embarrassed the government by taking refuge in the U.S. embassy.

Domestic discontent is increasingly public: In 2011, there were an estimated 100,000 organized protests in various places, or more than 250 a day. The government felt the need to crack down on dissent to make sure the Arab Spring did not spread east. But the rise of mobile communications and social networks has left the censors constantly playing catch-up.

Having abandoned the communist ideology of the past, China's rulers have managed to retain power partly by delivering ever-increasing prosperity. If the economy suffers a "hard landing," the people may be less willing to indulge autocracy.

A serious slowdown of that kind is no longer out of the question. China can't keep selling abroad if the rest of the world can't afford to buy its goods.

It's common wisdom in Beijing that the economy needs to shift away from its traditional engines, exports and investment, and toward greater consumer spending at home. But saying it and doing it are not the same things.

Americans, after all, know they need to put the federal government on a sustainable fiscal footing to avoid runaway debt or crushing tax increases. But that understanding hasn't yet forced the budget choices that must be made. We find it easier to put off the pain in hope of a miracle.

China faces the same temptation to avoid what needs to be done. Chovanec explains why: "The shift is disruptive at a micro level. There are winners and losers. You wouldn't want to be an exporter or a real estate developer or a heavy equipment manufacturer."

Nor would you want to be a worker at a company that is forced to downsize. Change means uncertainty, unemployment and hardship.

It's particularly hard to embrace change when the old way of doing things has worked so well. Not long ago, the assumption in America was that we no longer had to worry about severe recessions. That assumption held up, until the day in 2008 when it didn't.

The Chinese should keep in mind that there are two occasions when a country has to brutally acknowledge its errors and correct them: when it fails, and when it succeeds.

Steve Chapman blogs daily at newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/steve_chapman.

King-Sized No More

2012-05-20T13:00:00-04:00

In 1998 a Colorado handyman got swept up in an avalanche that buried his snowmobile and left him stranded in a blizzard. For five days and four nights, rescue teams struggled to locate him. Luckily, the Snickers bar he had in his pocket was a king-sized version. Every one of its 510 calories helped him survive his ordeal.

Future avalanche victims had better hope for a faster rescue team. Mars Inc., the manufacturer of Snickers, is phasing out chocolate products that exceed 250 calories per portion as part of an agreement with Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA). Founded in 2010 in conjunction with the Let’s Move! program, First Lady Michelle Obama’s government initiative aimed at shaping up the nation’s youth, PHA has a mandate to “monitor and publicly report on the progress” of partners such as Mars and, more generally, to “make the healthy choice the easy choice.”

Call it “yes, we can’t!” progressivism. Under the mantle of “choice,” Mars and the PHA are eliminating consumer options. While this tactic may help avid Snickers eaters shed a few pounds and improve corporate profits (don’t expect Mars to reduce its prices when it cuts its standard 280-calorie bar to 250 calories), the Orwellian doublespeak is sure to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth.

Is There a Libertarian Case for Organized Labor?

2012-05-20T08:00:00-04:00

Who do you imagine said this?

“[Trade-unions] seem natural to the passing phase of social evolution, and may have beneficial functions under existing conditions. . . .”

If you guessed some wily labor leader or social democrat, you are wrong. British laissez-faire advocate Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) wrote those words in his Principles of Sociology (1896). Spencer was the most prominent and respected individualist philosopher of his time. To this day his voluminous scholarly and popular writing remains an important resource for adherents of the freedom philosophy.

Spencer’s statement, then, may surprise some readers. It shouldn’t. Our libertarian forebears put the plight of workers at the top of their concerns. In England feudalism had not entirely disappeared, many people had been pushed off the land through enclosure, and true laissez faire was nowhere in evidence. Neomercantilism, or what Albert Jay Nock called the “Merchant-state,” was the rule. For example, early in the Industrial Revolution worker “combinations” were outlawed in England and people were not free leave their home parishes in search of better employment opportunities, something decried by Adam Smith. When these laws were finally repealed, workers were hampered by other state interventions, such as land engrossment, patents, government-backed banking cartels, and tariffs. To be sure, living standards improved, but to the extent that government stifled free competition, workers were deprived of bargaining power and their full free-market reward.

Spencer is famous for setting out a theory of social evolution, according to which society was moving from the rigidly hierarchical “militant” type to the open, contract-based “industrial” type. Society was still in transition and had a long way to go. (See my “Austrian Exploitation Theory.” )

Suppressed Competition

Spencer begins his discussion of unions by noting that worker guilds (like employers) historically preferred suppression of competition to the uncertainties of market rivalry. He criticizes the hypocrisy of workers who applaud competition that lowers the price of bread, but oppose competition that lowers the price of labor. He also argues that agitation for higher wages, if successful throughout the economy, would do workers no good because prices and hence the cost of living would rise as a consequence. (This analysis requires some assumptions that may not in fact hold.)

But he also notes that “[u]nder their original form as friendly societies—organizations for rendering mutual aid–[unions] were of course extremely beneficial; and in so far as they subserve this purpose down to the present time, they can scarcely be too much lauded.”

Nevertheless Spencer asks: “Must we say that while ultimately failing in their proposed ends [higher wages], trade-unions do nothing else than inflict grave mischiefs in trying to achieve them?”

His response: “This is too sweeping a conclusion. . . . There is an ultimate gain in moral and physical treatment if there is no ultimate gain in wages.” For example:

Judging from their harsh and cruel conduct in the past, it is tolerably certain that employers are now prevented from doing unfair things which they would else do. Conscious that trade-unions are ever ready to act, they are more prompt to raise wages when trade is flourishing than they would otherwise be; and when there come times of depression, they lower wages only when they cannot otherwise carry on their businesses.

Knowing the power which unions can exert, masters are led to treat the individual members of them with more respect than they would otherwise do: the status of the workman is almost necessarily raised. Moreover, having a strong motive for keeping on good terms with the union, a master is more likely than he would else be to study the general convenience of his men, and to carry on his works in ways conducive to their health.

He thinks unions are necessary because: “Everywhere aggression begets resistance and counter-aggression; and in our present transitional state, semi-militant and semi-industrial, trespasses have to be kept in check by the fear of retaliatory trespasses.”

Spencer, however, is not satisfied with this state of affairs. Recall that he says trade-unions belong to “a passing phase of social evolution.” Passing to what?

Worker-Owned Firms

He is attracted to alternatives to the standard “master-and-workman type of industrial organization” and discusses at length profit-sharing arrangements, pointing out both their advantages and disadvantages. (On a related issue, see this and this.) But these too leave him unsatisfied.

Thus he foresees the emergence of “self-governing combinations of workers,” which, while not without problems, would avoid most of the drawbacks of traditional firms:

Evils like those arising from antagonistic interests [between master and workman], cannot arise where there are no antagonistic interests. Each cooperator exists in a double capacity. He is a unit in an incorporated body standing in the place of employer; and he is a worker employed by the incorporated body. Manifestly, when, instead of an employing master, alien to the workers, there is an employing master compounded of the workers, the mischiefs ordinarily caused by piece-work can no longer be caused.

He elaborates how cooperative organizations would encourage productivity, cut costs, and permit the division of larger profits. For instance:

Resentment against a foreman, who ranks some above others, no longer finds any place. Overlooking to check idleness becomes superfluous: the idling almost disappears, and another cause of dissension ceases. Not only do the irritations which superintendence excites decrease, but the cost of it decreases also. . . .

For Spencer, this would signify the pinnacle of social evolution:

Here we reach a form in which the coerciveness has diminished to the smallest degree consistent with combined action. Each member is his own master in respect of the work he does; and is subject only to such rules, established by majority of the members, as are needful for maintaining order. The transition from the compulsory cooperation of militancy to the voluntary cooperation of industrialism is completed. Under present arrangements it is incomplete. A wage-earner, while he voluntarily agrees to give so many hours work for so much pay, does not, during performance of his work, act in a purely voluntary way: he is coerced by the consciousness that discharge will follow if he idles, and is sometimes more manifestly coerced by an overlooker. But under the arrangement described, his activity becomes entirely voluntary.

Slave and Slave-Driver

“So long as the worker remains a wage-earner,” Spencer concludes, “the marks of status do not wholly disappear. For so many hours daily he makes over his faculties to a master, or to a cooperative group, and is for the time owned by him or it. He is temporarily in the position of a slave, and his overlooker stands in the position of a slave-driver.”

Spencer acknowledges that “the practicability of such a system depends on [personal] character,” but he anticipates that the existing successful cooperatives “might be the germs of a spreading organization. . . . [T]he growth would become increasingly rapid; since the master-and-workmen type of industrial organization could not withstand competition with this cooperative type, so much more productive and costing so much less in superintendence.”

Of course, Spencer’s prediction could—and should—be tested: by freeing the market and ending all state-based privileges, each one a remnant of the militant type of society. Libertarians should hope that Spencer is proven right, since individualists more than anyone will see the merit in any arrangement which minimizes the chance that one will be subjected to the arbitrary will of another—even in consensual relationships.

Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, where this article originally appeared.

The Swing Vote: Why Independents Will Decide the 2012 Election

2012-05-19T13:00:00-04:00

Opt Out of School Lunch

2012-05-19T08:00:00-04:00

Happy Food Revolution Day! In case you didn’t know, Saturday, May 17 19 has been dubbed thusly by none other than British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. One of the main goals of the day, according to Oliver, is “to get the world to focus on food issues and rally our efforts to bring food education back into schools.” That mission comes as no surprise because, as I discussed in Reason two years ago, Oliver originally brought the Food Revolution concept to America with the express mission of improving school lunches.

School food is always a hot topic, and is perhaps more so now than it’s ever been. From a publicity standpoint, school food has taken off as an issue largely due to the efforts of Oliver and First Lady Michelle Obama. But viewed from the standpoint of edibility, cost, and healthiness, food served by public schools via the USDA’s National School Lunch Program was already an issue because that program and its food have a decades-long track record of sucking. And in spite of the best efforts of Oliver and Mrs. Obama, along with new rules set to take effect in the coming months, I’m not optimistic that the quality of school food is likely to change anytime soon. Why?

If you’re one of those who thought all this talk about the National School Lunch Program had translated into better food, think again. Contrary to any visions you may have of expensive reforms leading to school kitchens serving as virtual clearinghouses for fresh fruits and vegetables, that just isn’t the case. Expensive reforms? You bet. They crop up every few years. But schools are still serving kids nachos. And sometimes—as happened last week at a public school in Ohio—those nachos are full of ants.

Issues like ants in food are hardly rare. And other systemic problems persist.

For example, special interests help define foods standards for school lunches. Echoing the Reagan Administration’s declaration of ketchup as a vegetable, Congress recently declared that pizza (because of its tomato sauce and the tomato and institutional frozen pizza lobbies) counts as a vegetable.

(Article continues below Reason.tv's "The Case Against Jamie Oliver.")

School lunches also neuter the ability of families to make dietary choices their children. Consider the pink slime controversy earlier this year. Whether you were up in arms over chemically treated meat or thought it was completely fine to eat, the truth is if you’re a public school parent whose child eats a school lunch you still have little say over whether or not your child eats pink slime—or genetically-modified foods, sugars, starches, and a whole host of other foods about which decent parents (and experts) disagree.

Another good example of how school lunches usurp family decision-making took place in Chicago last year, where a seventh grader named Fernando Dominguez helped lead a revolt against his school’s six-year-old policy that banned students from taking their own lunch to school. According to the Chicago Tribune, the principal argued that the policy was put in place “to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.”

A similar story played out earlier this year in North Carolina, where a public school forced a Pre-K student to eat the chicken nuggets that were part of the school lunch because school cafeteria monitors didn’t feel the student’s lunch (a turkey sandwich) was healthy enough.

Where does a school get off acting this way? We don’t know because, according to documents obtained by the nonprofit that exposed Nuggetgate in the first place, the principal allegedly stonewalled a state investigator looking into the issue, saying he “would not respond to any questions” the investigator asked of him.

Another glaring problem with school lunches is their cost. In Philadelphia, closing 26 school kitchens—as part of an effort to help staunch a nearly $700-million city deficit—will save the city $2.3 million dollars. New York City’s decision to cut its hot lunch offerings from two to one is expected to save the city an astonishing $20 million a year. But these savings are minimal compared to the nationwide cost—currently $11 billion, but expected to climb to $14 billion once new rules take effect this summer—of the National School Lunch Program. (That figure doesn't include the cost to taxpayers of subsidizing many of the agricultural products that are produced in surplus and go on to become school lunch.)

And then there are the often confusing and sometime punitive rules that come with taking part in the school lunch program. This month, for example, a public school in Salt Lake City was fined $15,000 for selling soda outside of approved hours (in apparent violation of USDA rules). The principal appears unhappy and confused:

“Before lunch you can come and buy a carbonated beverage. You can take it into the cafeteria and eat your lunch, but you can’t first go buy school lunch then come out in the hallway and buy a drink,” said Davis High Principal Dee Burton.

Principal Burton said he does not understand the law with rules that seem to be contradictory.

“We can sell a Snickers bar, but can’t sell licorice. We can’t sell Swedish Fish, we can’t sell Starburst, we can’t sell Skittles, but we can sell ice cream, we can sell the Snickers bar, Milky Ways, all that stuff,” said Burton.

Got that?

These anecdotes help illustrate the point that food served in public school cafeterias has—along with prison food—long been one of the best arguments against the singular notion that big, mean corporations are responsible for all of the food problems we face in America. After all, public-school lunches are government creations. They’re subsidized by government, provided by government, served by government, and paid for by government. And they’re often gross, unhealthy, and wasteful.

But supporters of the National School Lunch Program, not surprisingly, argue that what’s needed are reforms, improvements, rejiggering, and—of course—more money.

For example, I appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show yesterday and debated Janet Poppendieck, the author of the book Free For All and one of the leading voices in the school lunch reform movement. In her book, Poppendieck argues that all students in pubic schools should be force to eat USDA food free of charge to reduce what she calls the "stigma" of free food that low-income kids currently face.

While Poppendieck backtracked from that goal on the air yesterday—saying that kids who choose not to buy a school lunch might not in fact "undermine" and "stigmatize" the school lunch program, as she's previously claimed—any talk of a free, universal, USDA-funded school lunch for all demands an alternative.

Is there another way? I say yes.

This week my nonprofit, Keep Food Legal, launched a new project we’re calling Opt Out of School Lunch. The project urges families to take back control of what their kids are eating by preparing a simple brown-bag lunch for each child, every school day. We want families to stop fighting for the unreachable goal of having the USDA provide food that is both objectively “better” and that appeals to everyone. There are too many special interests (including the government itself) involved in deciding what “food” ends up on a child’s plate.

We’re appealing to students, educators, businesses, nonprofits, and taxpayers to work together to find solutions for kids whose parents may not be able to afford to bring a lunch every day. And we’re calling on restaurateurs, caterers, and grocers who often throw away food good enough to bring home and serve to their own families the next day as leftovers to end the senseless and needless food waste and to donate that food to families in need.

In addition to giving control back to families, Opt Out of School Lunch has many other benefits. The program can help improve childhood nutrition, reduce childhood obesity, let schools focus on what should be their core mission of educating students, control federal spending, reduce state and local overhead and costs, attack USDA subsidies, and help the environment by eliminating food waste.

These changes won’t be easy, and they won’t happen overnight. But it’s this sort of transformative change that I think can rightly be labeled as a food revolution.

Please visit Opt Out of School Lunch, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Baylen J. Linnekin, a lawyer, is executive director of Keep Food Legal, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates in favor of food freedom—the right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, cook, eat, and drink the foods of our own choosing.

NATO Comes to Chicago

2012-05-18T16:30:00-04:00

The NATO summit set to start Sunday in Chicago will be the first such gathering in the United States since the alliance met in Washington for its 50th anniversary in 1999. Atop the agenda this weekend will be Afghanistan, where America is embroiled in its eleventh year of war. Lip service to austerity, in the form of “smart defense” and “burden sharing,” will also be given at the summit, which is expected to cost the city of Chicago about $55 million (but don’t worry, the federal government will likely be footing a good portion of the bill, as it often does for much of NATO's business). The alliance will look outside the North Atlantic region to build “partnerships” that would facilitate future missions, using the template of NATO’s intervention in Libya last year, which was requested by the Arab League, as NATO’s boosters are wont to repeat.

Topics that won’t be broached include the structural dependency on foreign intervention that NATO is fostering in Afghanistan thanks to its decade-plus involvement in that country’s even longer internal strife. Don't expect to hear anything about the consequences arising from NATO’s Libya intervention either.

NATO was formed in the aftermath of World War II as a mutual defense alliance for Western European and North American countries. Forty short years later, the Cold War ended, and with it so did much of NATO’s raison d’etre. Yet NATO soldiered on, inserting itself into the breakup of Yugoslavia, which culminated in the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo. “Remember how controversial that was as an ‘out of area’ operation?” American University’s School of International Service dean James Goldgeier asked reporters at a press preview on Tuesday. Even Human Rights Watch’s report that NATO air strikes in Libya killed 72 civilians last year (at least a third of them under the age of 18) was interpreted as a sign of progress for the alliance. Ambassador James Dobbins, director of the RAND Institute’s Defense Policy Center, characterized HRW’s figure as “remarkably low,” saying NATO leaders would “probably be congratulating themselves on having less collateral damage than any such effort in world history” if the number held up to scrutiny.

While last year’s Libya mission will still be useful for NATO as a model for future “humanitarian interventions” that fall outside the organization's stated mission of “mutual defense,” NATO’s defining mission so far in the 21st century remains the war in Afghanistan. Yet as Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer (ret.), of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, told me, “We won the war in 2001. With 500 Americans in three months, the war in Afghanistan was won.” Returning to that kind of limited, special operations war, Shaffer says, is what NATO ought to be considering this weekend. But don’t count on it.

Instead, NATO leaders will be hammering out details of an Afghan drawdown, which might sound like welcome news at first, but “drawdown” in the sense NATO leaders use the term doesn’t mean an end to Western intervention. Far from it. The United States has already arranged a bilateral agreement with the Karzai government in Afghanistan on a U.S. presence beyond 2014, and NATO will remain involved in nation-building in order to ensure “stability” past the 2014 date. However, as CATO foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent pointed out to me, “this is a region that has been incredibly unstable over the last 40 years. To think we can make it stable in 18 months is a pipe dream.”

And on top of the problem of history is the problem of financing. Innocent has crunched the numbers: The cost of training the 230,000 to 350,000 Afghan personnel needed to transfer security responsibility from NATO to Afghanistan’s civilian government could run up to $6 billion a year. The Afghan government only collects $2 billion a year. And there’s no guarantee Afghanistan’s civilian government will last once U.S. combat troops are out. “Karzai’s not going to survive, we might as well accept that,” Shaffer says. But in fact the United States and NATO have not accepted it. Instead, they’ve pinned their drawdown and transition plans on the survival of the Karzai government.

Unforunately, most of these uncomfortable details will go unmentioned at the NATO summit this weekend, which Senate Foreign Relations European Affairs Subcommittee Chair Jeanne Shaheen says will provide an opportunity to “reaffirm the importance of NATO” and “recognize its continuing influence around the globe.” Said Shaheen to reporters on Tuesday: “NATO has been the most successful military and security alliance in modern history, and it continues to have that role, and for those who question whether it’s still functional, whether we continue to have interests in our transatlantic partnership with Europe; I think [this summit is] an opportunity to reaffirm and reconfirm those important relationships.” The fact that NATO is losing the war in Afghanistan, or that NATO’s mission in Libya had the alliance acting as the de facto air force for the Libyan rebels, doesn’t jive with the positive image NATO will be trying to project to the world from Chicago.

As for the weekend’s wildcards, they include the participation of Pakistan’s president as well as the demonstrations expected outside. President Asif Ali Zardari was invited to the NATO summit only in the last week, likely after the Pakistani government indicated it would lift its blockade of supplies headed to NATO troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence service remains one of the Taliban’s most powerful patrons, while the Pakistani government has often been left out of the West’s discussions on Afghanistan. That, Shaffer told me, was a mistake. “Pakistanis should’ve been key contributors from day one in whatever happens in Afghanistan. They’re going to look at this as an insult.”

Meanwhile, protesters are coming from as far as Portland and cops are coming from as far as Philadelphia to meet them. And although the G-8 Summit was initially planned to immediately precede the NATO Summit in Chicago, the G-8 gathering was moved to Camp David at the last minute. Which raises the question of why both summits weren’t just scheduled for Camp David in the first place, thus sparing Chicago residents of the security-related hassles they're bound to face. But then again, if Chicago wasn't playing host to NATO, the city wouldn't be able to “highlight its economic vitality, its arts and architecture, and its can-do spirit,” as Chicago’s NATO Host Committee boasts. Who cares about shutting down half of a metropolis when the city government's can-do reputation is at stake?

Ed Krayewski is an associate editor of 24/7 News at Reason.com.