The View from Right Field

The Left Coast’s Definition of Choice

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that, basically, outlawed Happy Meals.*  Now, there will be an initiative on the ballot in San Francisco in November that would make it illegal, without any exception, to circumcise male babies.**

I assume on the other hand, that choice is preferred position by far in San Francisco when it comes to abortion.

So, it would appear that, in at least certain parts of the left coast, the only time parents will have a choice about their child, is before it’s born.  You can choose whether to have it, but once it’s born, people in San Francisco aren’t going to let you choose what he or she should eat or, if this initiative passes, whether a boy can be circumcised.

An interesting approach on "the right to choose".

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PS Obviously, one response is that some would let you choose Happy Meals and circumcision, but not whether to have the baby.  I’ll let others make that comment.

* The ordinance doesn’t ban Happy Meals by name.  What it does is to ban toys from being given away with meals where the food and drink either exceed 600 calories or more than 35% of the calories come from fat.

** “Against the cut,” The Economist, May 21, 2011; Diane Cole, “Circumcision Save My Life,” The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2011.

How It’s Going With Implementing Our New Healthcare Law

I realize I am old-fashioned and completely behind the times, and really don’t understand how Congress works anymore, but consider this excerpt from “Healthwatch,” which is The Hill’s Healthcare blog, from earlier this week:

“Republicans are also challenging how much authority [Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius has to alter a new long-term care insurance program, which she acknowledges is ‘totally unsustainable’ in its current form.  Sebelius said HHS will consider increasing premiums and tightening eligibility standards to make the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act solvent. …

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) recently sent a letter to Sebelius asking about her statutory authority to alter the CLASS Act. …

‘The secretary admitted the law made CLASS “totally unsustainable,”’ [Rep. Charles] Boustany [Jr. (R-La.)] said in a statement to The Hill. ‘Now she wants to rewrite the law through regulations to exclude individuals who meet the minimum earnings requirement specified in the law President Obama signed. The CRS [Congressional Research Service] report warns this latest overreach could lead to lawsuits.’

But a former congressional staffer who helped design the long-term care program says the CRS report is far from a smoking gun, arguing the CLASS Act was intentionally built to allow the HHS secretary to make adjustments to the program.

‘Until the administration rolls out the program, you won’t know the answer to the sustainability question,’ said Connie Garner, a former top staffer for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.).

‘The legislation does not present you with a program yet — it gives the secretary parameters to design one,’ Garner said.”

So, Congress passed a bill setting up a program that even its supporters now admit is “totally unsustainable,” but that is okay because the bureaucrats of HHS can just rewrite the program.  After all, according to one of Senator Kennedy’s former staffers, the bill “does not present you with a program”.  Apparently, that’s up to the bureaucrats.  Congress just sets broad “parameters.”  The bureaucrats “design” the program, which in this case means setting premiums and eligiblity standards different than those in the bill that Congress passed. 

It seems to me, if Congress passes a bill establishing a program that is “totally unsustainable,” because of the eligibility standards and premiums that Congress set, that Congress ought to fix it, not a bunch of bureaucrats.  How else are we going to know what eligibility standards and premiums Congress wants?  Or whether Congress might decide it doesn’t want the program if the original eligibility standards and premiums don’t work.

But, I guess that’s not the way it works in Washington – especially when the Congress we have today is a little bit different than the Congress that set up the unsustainable program in the first place.

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Update (3/31/11 12:50 pm):  The first name of HHS Secretary Sebelius is "Kathleen," not Catherine.  I have corrected it.

Another Inconvenient Truth from Al Gore: We Can’t Trust Our Politicians

In 2007 Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize (jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for his work on climate change (formerly known as global warming), including his documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth.”  

Doubts have been raised about the accuracy of former Vice President Gore’s film, but Mr. Gore told, or should I say admitted to, another inconvenient truth last month at green energy conference in Athens, and this inconvenient truth is absolutely true.  This truth is simple: we can’t trust our politicians when it comes to giving government subsidies, passing special tax breaks, etc.  But let Mr. Gore explain this inconvenient truth in his own words:

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol.

First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

It's hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.

One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

Some of us realized this was true, but for many people, and for lots of our politicians in Washington, this discloses a most inconvenient truth.  It is a most inconvenient truth for liberals and big government conservatives because they like to think our government knows what it is doing when it supports things like ethanol.  Some people like to think government is smart enough to decide the best way to fuel our cars.  Others like to think government officials can pick winners when it comes to new ways to do things.  Still others think the government can identify the growth industries of the future.  In fact, some of them even like to think there really are shovel-ready projects the government can fund to stimulate the economy.

But in the vast majority of cases, these things are not true.  Government can pick winners now and then.  It can make the right choice every once in a while.  And liberals and big government conservatives use those examples to justify subsidizing more programs, funding more projects, and giving out more tax breaks.  But the law of averages and the law of unintended consequences eventually catch up with those programs and projects and subsidies.  Money is wasted, and outcomes are worse than if the government had just left things alone.

Sometimes these subsidies and projects are done with the best of intentions.  Other times, as former Vice President Gore admitted, they are not.  And that is another reason why we can’t let our politicians make these kinds of decisions.  Not only don’t they know enough to make these decisions, but based on what former Vice President Gore’s said, they can’t be trusted to even try to make the right decision.  We have ethanol because of farmers and Archer Daniels Midland – and because politicians like Al Gore wanted to be president.*

This is definitely an inconvenient truth.  But it also shows us the solution.  The solution is not more rules or better politicians.  That won’t work.  Rules can’t cover everything, and most politicians are no better than the system they participate in.  The solution, instead, is simple:  Stop the subsidies; stop the tax breaks; stop trying to pick winners.  Because our government – and politicians – can’t do it. 

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* In 2008 there was one major presidential candidate who both knew ethanol subsidies were not good and had the courage to oppose them in Iowa.  The rest of the candidates either didn’t know it or they didn’t have the guts to say so.  It was encouraging that this candidate got his party’s nomination.  It was discouraging that he didn’t win.

The Chicago Cubs Ask for a Handout Because … Why Not?

The Cubs are trying to get the State of Illinois to issue $300 million of bonds to help renovate Wrigley Field.  The Cubs claim that no new taxes would be needed to pay off the bonds and that no current tax monies would be diverted to pay off the bonds.  Instead of the bonds would be paid from the additional tax revenue that will come in the future, from the 12% entertainment tax on Cubs tickets, when the Cubs sell more tickets or raise ticket prices.  In other words, the government will still get the same amount of taxes it is getting now from the tax on Cubs tickets, but it won’t get any mores.  Any additional amount would go to pay off the bonds.

Obviously, this is silly, just like the bonds for Soldier Field or Comiskey Park (n/k/a U.S. Cellular Field, a/k/a Cominskey [sic] Park) were silly.  It shouldn’t be done.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about.  In the e-mail Tom Ricketts sent to Cubs season ticket holders and people in the Wrigleyville neighborhood about the idea, he said, inter alia:

“The Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field account for more than $600 million annually in impact to the local economy ….  This spending supports more than 7,000 jobs and generates more than $230 million in annual personal earnings.”

Mr. Ricketts doesn’t say whether the salaries of the Cubs’ players are included in the $230 million.  They probably aren’t, but in any case, consider that just five Chicago Cubs players (Soriano, Zambrano, Ramirez, Fukudome and Dempster) will, by themselves, earn $81,475,000 in 2011, an amount which is over 35% of that $230 million.  (Here.)

7,000 jobs earning $230,000,000.  5 jobs earning $81,475,000.  Amazing.

"Honest Services" Gets a Well-Deserved Slap Down

I wanted to make a short comment on the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Thursday that greatly restricts the ability of prosecutors to use something called the "honest services" statute in prosecuting public and private corruption. First, a little background from Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

"The concept of ‘honest services’ dates to a series of court decisions starting in the 1940s that interpreted fraud statutes to cover what judges considered intangible instances off corruption, such as a kick-back to a politician. The courts recognized that as a crime, even though the scheme might not have cost taxpayers any extra money.

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that the concept went beyond existing law. So the following year, Congress explicitly included the honest-services provision in the federal mail fraud statute."*

Here is the text of the honest services statute, as Congress passed it in 1988: "[T]he term ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’ includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." That’s it.

After the law was passed, prosecutors started to expand the use of the law, "using it as a catch-all charge against allegedly corrupt behavior …. That practice violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee that ‘no person shall be … deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,’ the court found."**

Because the "honest services" statute, in its broadest reading, has been used in a number of Illinois corruption trials, the Chicago Tribune was upset about the decision. In fact, the title of its editorial on this decision in Friday’s paper was "Graft gets break". Here is part of the Tribune said:

"[I]n the future, it will be more difficult for prosecutors to bring some corruption cases now that the court has limited the so-called ‘honest services’ statute to fraud schemes involving bribery and kickbacks.

Over the past two decades, honest services fraud has applied widely to those who misuse their positions of public trust for private gain …. It was the very vagueness and malleability of the law that made it so useful to prosecutors …."

But what the Tribune sees as good in the statute is exactly what is wrong with it. "Vagueness and malleability" are not good things in a criminal statute. Criminal statutes are supposed to be clear. You have a right to know what you can be sent to jail for. That is what the Fifth Amendment is about. "Vagueness and malleability" are the opposite.

The Tribune goes on:

"After Thursday, though, federal prosecutors will have to base some cases on less pliable legal theories than the honest services fraud of yesterday — and develop more specific evidence to convince juries (and judges) that a crime has occurred."

Once again, criminal statutes are not supposed to be "pliable." You have a right to know what the law says and what you can do and what you cannot do. Criminal statutes that are "vague," "malleable" and "pliable" are what they use in countries without the rule of law. It’s what they have in Russia and China and other places without freedom. They are not something we should have in the United States.

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* Michael Rothfeld, "Enron Ruling Dims Prosecution Picture," The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2010. 

** Jess Bravin, "Court Backs Skilling Appeal," The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2010.  Six of the justices held, in effect, that the statute could only apply to kickbacks and bribery. The other three justices would have thrown out the statute entirely.

Update (6/27/10 12:30 am):  Corrected a couple of the citations.

The Enlightenments (French and Scottish) and Their Meaning for Us

Last week David Brooks wrote about the Enlightenment ("Two Theories of Change"), and how the different approaches of the French Enlightenment (which is what most people think of when they hear "Enlightenment") and the Scottish Enlightenment relate to our politics today. Let me comment on a few of the things Mr. Brooks said. (The quotations from Mr. Brooks’ article are indented.)

"When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment …. Their great model was Descartes. … What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution.

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, ‘The Roads to Modernity,’ if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits."

I would call it the Scottish (instead of the British) Enlightenment because so many of those who were part of it were located in Edinburgh.

"[Thomas] Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them."

Thomas Paine was wrong about our revolution. The American colonists believed in universal rights, but the colonists already had those rights, both because their governments were based on the British model and because they were so far away from the center of British power. In fact, being so far from London, new rights began to develop in America The colonists had rights; they revolting in order to keep them once Britain started, in their opinion, to take some of them away.

"Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have."

Instead of the wisdom of the ages "fill[ing] the gaps in our reason," I would say that what we do is merely to try to improve the wisdom of the ages around the edges.

"If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch."

Here is where I get confused. While Mr. Brooks seems to admire Burke, during the 2008 campaign, Mr. Brooks liked Barack Obama, who is an unreconstructed Paine-ian. Obama apparently talks about Reinhold Niebuhr, but Obama has, in Thomas Sowell’s terms, an "unconstrained" view of what man and government can do. President Obama may, from time to time, talk like, or claim, he is a Burkean, but he is not governing that way. People like Mr. Brooks get so excited about the way Barack Obama talks (after eight years of George W. Bush) that they miss what his actions say.

"We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one."

There is no question: We are children of the Scottish Enlightenment. Our founding was a "departure" only in the sense that we were departing from the English king. Abandoning a king had not been done before, at least not often, so it was radical. But it was a radical move to preserve rights the colonists already had, not to gain or create new ones.

"Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics."

The difference is that the "self-described conservative radicals" are just one part, a relatively small part, of the Republican Party, while the "self-confident Democratic technocrats" are in control of Democratic Party, the White House, and the Congress.

"The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance."

The children of the Scottish Enlightenment are in retreat, if that is what it is, only because Barack Obama and the others of the French Enlightenment won the last election. But there are many people, whether in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Tea Party or no party at all, who understand this truth. Where Mr. Brooks goes wrong, as he did with Barack Obama, is to look more at how some of these people talk instead of what their beliefs mean in practice.

"We Can't Run Deficits Forever"

A week ago Steny Hoyer wrote an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with this title. You can read what Representative Hoyer wrote here.

In response to his Representative Hoyer’s article, I wrote the following letter to the editor:

"In ‘We Can’t Run Deficits Forever’ (Op-ed, April 2), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says ‘the single most important thing we can do to get our budget under control is to deal with the costs of our entitlement programs.’[*] We know what we need to do, he says, ‘We simply need the bipartisan will to choose and implement such reforms.’

If Representative Hoyer really wants bipartisanship, instead of the specious kind of ‘you-agree-with-me-and-we’ll-call-it-bipartisan bipartisanship’ that some try to pass off as the real thing these days, then the best idea that has been proposed in a long time has just been reintroduced in the House of Representatives by Cooper (D-TN) and Frank Wolf (R-VA).

Representatives Cooper and Wolf propose a commission, the SAFE Commission (‘Securing America’s Future Economy’), modeled after the federal base-closing process. Everything would be considered. Taxes. Spending. Everything. And Congress would be required to vote, yes or no, on the commission’s recommendations. They couldn’t ignore them, and they couldn’t amend them into meaninglessness with one pork-barrel vote after another.

The base closing process has enabled Congress to save billions of dollars and improve our national defense at the same time. The SAFE Commission would take that same approach and apply it across the whole budget. It’s easy to talk about needing the bipartisan will to pass reforms. The SAFE Commission sets up a process that will actually get the job done."

A very slightly altered version of this letter was published in today’s Wall Street Journal. See here.

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* Note: I think this phrase should have read as follows: ‘you-agree-with-me-and-we’ll-call-it-bipartisanship’. I think there may have been a typo in what I sent to The Wall Street Journal and it got published the way I sent it in.  I'm not sure.

Who Do You Trust? Experts or People?

In their article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, David Shaywitz and Thomas Stossel talk about the difficulty of getting new drugs to market and about the criticism of those in academia who accept funding from and cooperate with pharmaceutical companies in efforts to develop new drugs and new treatments. To read the whole article and the arguments Drs. Shaywitz and Stossel make on this subject, see here. I just want to focus on this one quote from the article:

"Human biology is maddeningly complex, laboratory models are necessarily simplistic, and scientific understanding remains painfully limited."

This statement states the essential problem that many of us have with many of the Obama administration programs. The underlying premise of much of what the President is proposing is that government knows best and can do things best. The best and brightest experts can design programs to deal with problems, or perceived problems, as diverse as global warming, what cars to build, how to turn around our economy while at the same time making sure nobody makes more than they are entitled to, how to provide more health care for more people at lower cost, etc.

But what the Obama administration is missing is the same thing that the financial whiz kids with their superfast computers and super-complicated formulas missed in the housing bubble and subprime crisis: People and what they do and how they react are much more complex than any group of experts, no matter how smart, or any computer program, no matter how sophisticated. The programs may be faster and the experts may be individually smarter, but people are more complex and their decisions and interactions are more complicated and more varied than those programs or those experts can predict or control. The knowledge of the experts and the decision-making capability of the programs are inherently more limited and simplistic than the knowledge and decisions of people themselves.

Whether or not you agree with the last sentence in the prior paragraph is probably a pretty good indicator of whether you think President Obama’s various plans and programs will work or whether they won’t.

President Obama Decides to Solve Education, Too

The banking system is broken, and the Treasury Secretary can’t seem to figure out how to fix it. The economy is in the toilet, and the stimulus plan is too back-loaded to do as much good as it could be doing. We are losing the war in Afghanistan, the good war that candidate Barack Obama told us we needed to win.

And so, with all those urgent problems that need his attention, what is President Obama doing? Telling us how the federal government is going to improve our education system. Which is exactly wrong.

If President Obama really wanted to solve the problems with our schools, he should have taken Arne Duncan’s job – in Chicago. He could have run for mayor or governor or president – of the school board. Not President of the United States.

There are a lot of problems with our education system, and President Obama has some good ideas on how to fix them, but he needs to do his job, i.e., fixing the banking system, doing what he can to get the economy started, figuring out how to win the war in Afghanistan, and let other people do their jobs.

The President of the United States does not need to solve all of our problems. He doesn’t even need to solve all of governments’ problems. And in any case, he can’t. Just because there is a problem does not mean the President needs to be the one to try to solve it.

But then I have said this all before. I guess that just shows I am bipartisan. I am criticizing President Obama for the same things I criticized President Bush for.

No Problem Left Behind

This is from the lead editorial in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, "When schools fail our kids":

"When schools fail, as they do too often in Illinois and other places, their students are not the only ones who suffer. The rest of us pay the price: a less productive economy and more social ills. So voters this fall need to ask which presidential candidate is likely to do more to improve American education.

Unfortunately, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain has done nearly enough to chart a path to better schools for all."

The Tribune is right; the problem with some of our public schools is serious. While arguments about solutions go on and on, kids’ lives are being wasted.

But does the solution really lie with Barack Obama and John McCain, as the Tribune seems to think? No, it doesn’t. Our national government is big and it has a lot of money, but it cannot solve all of our problems. First, not all of our problems can be solved by government. But even when it comes to those problems that government can solve, the federal government cannot solve them all.

I understand the desire of people to look to Washington to solve our schools’ problems. For those who think the solution is more money, Washington has a lot of it (along with a printing press for even more). For those who think the teachers unions are too powerful and we need more competition in education, the hope is that they can get what they want by winning one battle in Washington instead of having to fight separate battles in every state. But both of these views are wrong.

Education is not a one-size-fits-all kind of problem that the federal government should handle. Local people in local districts know what is best for their schools. They are the ones who should be deciding.

Besides, both Senator Obama and Senator McCain have other things they will need to worry about if they become President, things that need a national answer and can’t be done at the state level. Senator McCain has said he needs to know more about economics. He should spend some time thinking about that. Senator Obama needs to do a lot of studying on foreign affairs and military matters to make up for what is a pretty thin record in those areas.

The United States has different levels of government so that not every problem needs to be solved in Washington – and because not every problem can be solved in Washington. Local governments and state governments need to solve our education problems, and the voters need to make sure they do. Our leaders in Washington have other things they should be doing.