Reason Magazine

Killed on a Technicality

2010-09-07T16:30:00-04:00

In 1994 Eddie Lee Howard was convicted of raping and murdering 84-year-old Georgia Kemp. Kemp was found dead in her Columbus, Mississippi, home by firefighters after a neighbor noticed smoke coming from the house. Investigators determined the fire was set intentionally.

Kemp's body was taken to controversial Mississippi medical examiner Steven Hayne, who would later lose his lucrative niche as the state's go-to guy for autopsies after years of criticism for sloppy work that rarely failed to confirm prosecutors' suspicions. Hayne concluded that Kemp died of knife wounds and said he found signs of rape, although the rape kit taken from Kemp turned up no biological evidence that the technology available at the time could test for DNA.

Three days after Kemp was buried, District Attorney Forrest Allgood, the chief prosecutor for the four counties of Mississippi's 16th District, zeroed in on Howard, who at the time was unemployed and living with a relative down the street from Kemp's house, as the culprit. Once Howard was identified as a suspect, Hayne suddenly recalled seeing marks on Kemp's body that could have been made by human teeth (Hayne's original autopsy report makes no mention of the bite marks). So Kemp's body was exhumed and given to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, dentist Michael West, a self-proclaimed expert in bite mark analysis and frequent beneficiary of Hayne's referrals. West confirmed that the marks were indeed bite impressions and that some of them could only have been made by Howard's upper teeth—a puzzling claim, since Howard's upper teeth were a mass-manufactured denture. Howard was convicted and sentenced to death in 1994. The Mississippi Supreme Court later gave Howard a new trial, ruling he was unfit to represent himself at trial. He was again convicted and again sentenced to death in 2000.

West's bite mark testimony is the only physical evidence linking Howard to the crime scene. (The other evidence against Howard includes incriminating statements he allegedly made to a police officer that were not recorded or written down and testimony from an ex-girlfriend that Howard smelled of smoke the day after Kemp's murder.) At the time of Howard's conviction, West was a star forensic witness, claiming to have perfected a method of bite mark analysis no other forensic specialist could duplicate. But since Howard's conviction, West has become the poster boy for forensic fakery.

West, who once claimed he could trace the tooth marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich at a crime scene to a defendant while excluding everyone else on the planet, has had to resign from two professional forensics organizations due to his habit of giving testimony unsupported by science. In 2001 (as I reported last year) a defense lawyer caught West in a sting aimed at revealing him as a charlatan: West matched the dental mold of a private investigator to unrelated photos of bite marks from a crime committed eight years earlier. West even sent back a video in which he methodically went through his technique. Despite all this, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Howard's conviction and death sentence in 2006. With respect to West, the majority concluded, "Just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot, does not mean, without something more, that he was wrong here."

Since then a wave of new revelations (described in more detail below) has confirmed that Steven Hayne and Michael West are not credible expert witnesses. Last month Howard and his attorneys at the Mississippi Innocence Project cited some of that evidence in asking the Mississippi Supreme Court for a new trial. In response, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood does not argue that Michael West is a credible expert or that his testimony in Howard's case had any scientific foundation. Instead Hood argues that because the Mississippi Supreme Court already has upheld West's testimony in the face of criticism, Howard is procedurally barred from again citing West's quackery in a bid for a new trial.

The argument may arguably be legally correct, but Hood is not obligated to make it. Hood, whose duty is not just to win cases but to pursue justice, should have the decency to review every case in which West has ever testified. Instead, in the face of growing evidence that the criminal justice system he presides over has been corrupted by unreliable expert witnesses, Hood is essentially arguing that Eddie Lee Howard should be sent to the death chamber on a technicality.

The new evidence against Hayne and West is compelling. In 2008 Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks were released from the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman after serving nearly 30 years between them. Both were convicted of raping and murdering young girls near Columbus, Mississippi. In both cases, District Attorney Forrest Allgood, the same man who prosecuted Howard, took the girls' bodies to Hayne. In both cases, Hayne found marks on the bodies he declared to be human bite marks, a claim other forensic experts have since disputed. In both cases, Hayne called in West, who matched the bite marks to a dental mold taken from the man Allgood thought committed the crime. Brewer and Brooks were exonerated and released when DNA evidence showed a different man, Albert Johnson, committed both crimes.

Last year I reported on the Louisiana case of Jimmie Duncan, convicted in 1998 of murdering 2-year-old Haley Oliveaux. Once again Hayne and West found bite marks on the victim's body that other doctors didn't see and supposedly traced them to the prosecutor's chief suspect. In that case, there is a video of West repeatedly jamming a dental mold of Duncan's teeth into the little girl's corpse, an act that forensic specialists told me is at best medical malpractice and probably constitutes criminal evidence tampering. Duncan is still on death row.

West used his bite mark magic to condemn Brooks in 1990, Brewer in 1992, and Duncan in 1993. He matched bite marks to Howard in 1992.

There is no question that West's testimony was critical to Howard's conviction. Allgood's laudatory description of West during the second trial was so hyperbolic that it verged on parody, implying that the jurors' grandchildren would read about the daring dentist in textbooks. "Whether we like to think so or not," Allgood said, "the progress of mankind has been carried forward on the backs of people like Michael West. The church threatened to burn Copernicus because he dared to say that the planets didn't revolve around the earth. So it was with Michael West." This view of West is so grotesquely at odds with his real-life quackery that Allgood's confusion of Copernicus with Galileo seems trivial by comparison.

Howard's brief also cites a 2008 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report questioning the quality of forensic science used in America's courtrooms. The report is especially critical of the bite mark analysis performed by specialists like West. The authors found no scientific support for the notion that someone can match bite marks left on skin to one person, certainly not to the exclusion of everyone else on Earth, a claim West frequently made in court. The NAS report, which was commissioned by Congress and reviewed by a panel of scientists, suggests that courts never should have accepted bite mark analysis as evidence and calls into question convictions based on such testimony.

Hood dismisses the NAS report, arguing that "the arguments against bite-mark evidence testimony found in the report are the very ones argued by the petitioner and those that have been argued in the courts for many years." In other words, the conclusions from a panel of respected scientists who confirm the arguments that West's critics have been making for years should be viewed as irrelevant, precisely because West's critics have been making those arguments for years, and Mississippi's courts have rejected them. That the critics were right and the courts were wrong does not matter. Sadly, Hood's argument has legal merit.

It gets worse. The state's brief goes on to claim that the NAS report "itself acknowledged that bite-mark testimony is reliable." To support that assertion, the brief cites this quote from the report: "Despite the inherent weaknesses involved in bite mark comparison, it is reasonable to assume that the process can sometimes reliably exclude suspects." Yes, one can envision a scenario where, for example, a very clear bite mark showing a full set of front teeth could exclude a suspect who has no front teeth. But in Howard's case, West claimed he could trace bite marks left in the victim's skin days earlier to Howard and only Howard. The NAS report clearly states that such a feat is impossible.

One other distinction is worth noting. The NAS report was critical of all bite mark evidence. But even among bite mark analysts, West is an outcast. That is, he is a disgrace even by the standards of a discredited field. Yet Hood is ready to execute a man based largely on West's testimony.

Although Howard's brief doesn't mention it, the credibility of Hayne, West's collaborator, also has been called into question since Howard's last appeal. Hayne was the subject of a 2007 exposé that I wrote for Reason and the target of a 2008 complaint in which the Mississippi Innocence Project asked the state medical board to revoke Hayne's license. In 2008 Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Steve Simpson effectively barred Hayne from doing any more autopsies in the state. Last year Hayne resigned from the National Association of Medical Examiners in the face of a pending ethics inquiry. But as I reported earlier this year, Hood, who also used Hayne when he was a D.A., has resisted any systematic review of old cases that may have been tainted by Hayne's testimony and even led a fight to let Hayne do autopsies again.

In the last few years, Hood has come under fire from The Wall Street Journal and other critics for his cozy relationship with the plaintiff's bar, particularly with convicted felon Dickie Scruggs. Hood's response to the criticism has been that he is merely a fighter for the little guy. That boast must ring hollow for the little guys wrongly sucked into the state's broken criminal justice system.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Reason.tv: Anchor Brewing Company - A conversation with craft beer pioneer Fritz Maytag

2010-09-07T15:00:00-04:00

Obama Motors' Ill-Timed IPO

2010-09-07T12:00:00-04:00

The General Motors IPO, the second largest ever, is arguably this decade's most hyped financial event. But it might also turn out to be this decade's biggest financial fiasco. Its timing is driven not by the financial needs of the company—or the interests of taxpayers who are poised to get royally screwed—but the election-year needs of the Obama administration.

The IPO will allow GM to sell a part of the government's share to investors on the open market. But floating an IPO now is the Obama administration equivalent of declaring "mission accomplished" after two months in Iraq.

It is true that GM is in better shape than it was last year at this time. It has had two profitable quarters in a row and earned $1.3 billion from April to June in contrast to $13 billion in losses the previous year. It has eliminated many superfluous brands, and its remaining product line is getting high marks on quality and dependability. It has done quite well in overseas markets, especially in China, where GM compacts such as Buick Excelle, Regal, and Chevrolet Lova have surpassed competitors.

But the company is by no means out of the woods. For starters, although it managed to negotiate lower wages and benefits from its unionized workers during bankruptcy last year, it did not get meaningful relief from its pension and health care obligations. That's because its bankruptcy was orchestrated by a union-friendly administration that changed the normal rules of the game that would have required GM's unsecured creditors—such as the United Auto Workers—to forgo most of their claims. That didn't happen in this case, so the company has unfunded pension obligations to the tune of $27 billion whose bill is due in 2014. Long term, this puts it at a major competitive disadvantage against its non-unionized overseas rivals: Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, and Hyundai.

Investors might overlook this if the company were otherwise sound and on a growth trajectory. That, however, is not the case. Indeed, in its application to the Securities and Exchange Commission—which, guess what, will come through just in time to make an IPO possible before the November elections!—GM admits that its "disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective." And this "could materially affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plan." Companies include all kinds of outlandish mea-culpas in their IPO applications to cover their derrières in the event of investor lawsuits. However, this one goes to the heart of the information that investors need to determine whether GM is a good investment, especially since it is going public after only two good quarters as opposed to the usual four. If GM can't guarantee its own numbers, how exactly are investors supposed to evaluate its worth?

Furthermore, GM's European Opel unit, which failed to obtain a viable bidder or a bailout from the German government, remains a cash-guzzler, having lost over a billion dollars since the company emerged from bankruptcy last year. Most crucially, however, J.D. Powers last week lowered its auto sales forecast for the rest of the year as well as 2011 because of worries of a double-dip recession.

All of this means that potential investors are likely to take a dim view of the company's prospects right now, making it nearly impossible for taxpayers who still have somewhere between $40 billion to $60 billion "invested" in it to come out whole. For that to happen, the Treasury's 304 million of the company's 500 million common shares would need to average $131 to $197 per share, notes Brad Coulter director at O'Keefe & Associates, a Michigan-based corporate finance firm. That would put GM's implied valuation at somewhere between $65 billion to $98 billion.

To understand just how absurdly high this is consider that Ford Motor Company has a market value of only $40 billion. "There is no rational reason for investors to choose GM relative to Ford right now," notes Francis Gaskin of IPODesk.com. But even if investors valued both companies the same that would still represent a 50% loss for taxpayers. It was always unlikely that taxpayers would ever recover their entire investment, but a more auspiciously timed IPO might at least have limited their losses.

Nor is the IPO's timing good for GM. The company is—rightly—eager to shed the sobriquet of Government Motors. So eager in fact that its outgoing CEO Ed Whitacre launched a campaign this spring misleadingly claiming that GM had paid back its government "loan" in full after returning only $6.7 billion. But even he thinks that the IPO is a dumb idea. He apparently wanted to wait until GM could command a better share price and then have the company go fully public at once instead of in several installments as per the current plan.

Whitacre expressed his misgivings at a recent Management Briefing Seminar in Michigan's Traverse City, according to Sean McAlinden of the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research. "And then 48 hours later he was gone," McAlinden says.

But Whitacre's departure won't change the risk--"a big risk in my mind," says O' Keefe's Coulter—that the IPO could turn into a PR nightmare for GM if its opening price is too low.

Even if the IPO turns out to be less of a disaster, the Obama administration's wanton disregard for both taxpayers and the company shows just how desperate it is getting to deliver some sliver of economic good news to angry voters ahead of the November elections. But its actions only bespeak the dangers of government bailouts. GM has a long way to go before it is truly back on its feet. It might make it—eventually—just as Iraq seems to have stabilized seven years after President Bush first declared victory. But as in Iraq, it will remain an open question as to whether the bailout was worth the risk and cost to taxpayers.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a biweekly columnist at Forbes. This article originally appeared at Forbes.

Reclaiming Rights

2010-09-07T07:00:00-04:00

Our cover story this month describes the historic and stunningly rapid restoration of the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual right that must be respected throughout the United States. As you luxuriate in that momentous victory of individuals over their governments, allow me to direct your attention to a tale that is microscopic by comparison: On page 43, in the midst of a long and remarkable exchange between reason’s finest and the Cleveland City Council, two different city councilors attempt to explain to TV funnyman and Reason Foundation trustee Drew Carey why the owner of a local car wash faced a four-month approval process to install a commercial sign on his own property.

Council President Martin J. Sweeney’s explanation was, alas, good enough for government work: “If you apply for a sign that’s within our regulation, it would take somewhere between three and five days. If it’s outside the regulations, it needs to be [no bigger than] four foot by eight foot, no more than two or three colors. If you want to go 10 by 10, and put it up a little bit higher, and have 10 colors on it, you have to get approval to go outside the variance,” Sweeney said. “The three to five days is if you stay within the regulations, if you agree with them. If you want to go outside, it’s six weeks to put it on the calendar and have it heard. And then all the other steps…because there has to be some type of structure.”

There has to be some type of structure. From this one default setting springs all manner of tyrannies, from the trivial to the profound.

Carey had the best comeback to this Office Space-meets-Kafka gibberish: “You should be able to put up whatever sign you want, man.” But it’s elected officials like Sweeney, from Bakersfield to Bangor, from the statehouses to Capitol Hill, who too often have the last laugh. Every day brings fresh reminders that we are not technically free to go about our business.

In August, Multnomah County health inspectors in Portland, Oregon, shut down a lemonade stand at an art fair because its 7-year-old proprietor failed to obtain the necessary food distribution license. Days earlier, a Quincy, Illinois, man was arrested via a sting operation (for a second time) for the crime of offering free rides home to inebriated bar patrons; the service conflicted with some new taxi cartel–influenced language in the relevant city ordinance. And all summer long, councilmen in recession-ravaged Los Angeles, who earn higher salaries than any municipal lawmakers in the country, threatened to crack down on one of the few interesting and growing business models left in L.A.—food trucks—despite the fact that the only people complaining about them are nonmobile restaurant owners who don’t like the competition.

On the federal level things get even worse. In July the Department of Labor unveiled new child labor regulations that make it a crime for 17-year-olds to clear brush (a classic summer job in timber-heavy states such as Oregon) or for 15-year-olds to wave signs on the roadside, which the last time I looked was about the only job teenagers could still get in Southern California. ObamaCare requires every single vending machine and restaurant chain with 20 or more outlets in the country to list calorie counts for its products, under threat of federal sanction.

The financial regulation bill enacted in July, like the health care law that preceded it, asserted vast new governmental powers over an industry’s operations while delegating to future rule makers the task of telling the industry exactly what is and is not now legal. As Associate Editor Peter Suderman wrote when the law was being passed, “For regulators in Washington, this is a He-Man moment: They get to lift thousands of pages of legislation above their heads and declare, ‘I have the power!’ The trouble seems to be figuring out what to do with that power once they have it.”

There are any number of unhappy consequences from this relentless public push into private activity, not least of which is, as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains on page 11 (“Bono vs. Buttman”), the inevitably arbitrary enforcement of vaguely written laws. People who don’t know if their day-to-day behavior will trigger criminal prosecution are not truly free. As the great civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate observed in a 2009 book of the same name, Americans on average now commit “three felonies a day.” That means our basic liberty exists at the discretion of law enforcement. If cops or motivated government attorneys decide they don’t like you, life can soon become hell.

What’s perhaps more frightening than the existence of such an all-powerful enforcement apparatus is the argumentation supporting it even in the face of public outrage and ridicule. Car wash signs need four months of approval because there has to be some type of structure. Lemonade stands need to be forcibly shut down because, in the words of Portland City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, “The county has the responsibility to fairly enforce the rules on permits.” U.S. News & World Report columnist Mary Kate Cary, while pointing out that ObamaCare is “not fiscally responsible” and “creates a nearly trillion-dollar new entitlement program that doesn’t pay for itself,” nonetheless gushes that the new calorie count requirement “may change American diets.” Once you take it as a given that the government has an important say in what you do with your property or put in your body, a whole universe of appalling actions and apologia becomes possible.

It’s time to change the default setting. Every victory of a citizen over the government in the never-ending struggle to do as we please is worthy of a 21-gun salute, whether on the individual level, as in pornographer John Stagliano’s successful fight against federal obscenity charges, or on a group level, in the case of those who want to own handguns. The battles are usually uphill, as with the 21 states suing the federal government over ObamaCare’s abuse of the Commerce Clause (see “Rogue States,” page 44), but the liberation is exhilarating. We can all learn from the examples of those who fought back and won, such as the 7-year-old lemonade entrepreneur Julie Murphy, who was helped and encouraged at the art fair by a group of Portland anarchists and eventually won an official apology from Multnomah County.

But sometimes it feels like we’re losing a game of whack-a-mole. For every outrage reversed through bad publicity or expensive lawyering, there are untold dozens of quiet capitulations to a rampaging state. Think of all the government restrictions on what you can and can’t do with your own house, to say nothing of the taxes the government collects on it. At some point the burden of proof should shift to the government, which should have to persuasively explain why an industry needs to be managed from Washington or why an individual needs a license to act like a human being.

The U.S. is in an economic, fiscal, and public policy crisis with no end in sight. Indeed, it looks almost certain to get far worse. We can and will talk about what rights need to be reasserted, what programs need to be cut, what sectors of this American life need to be left the hell alone. But until we make a dent in the widespread notion that there always has to be some type of government structure or some taxpayer-financed watchdog to police every imaginable peaceable transaction, any contemplated fix to the mess we’re in will be temporary at best.

Matt Welch is reason's editor in chief.

Not Enough Labor Day

2010-09-06T07:00:00-04:00

Today, many Americans will be enjoying a respite from the incessant demands of their jobs. But many Americans will be wishing desperately they could trade the holiday for the incessant demands of a job. This year, given the state of the economy, Labor Day should be called Not Enough Labor Day.

The unemployment rate during the recent recession peaked at 10.1 percent last October, and in August, it was 9.6 percent—an increase from July. Nearly 15 million people are looking for suitable work and not finding it.

Most of the loss of employment is the result of large events: the financial crisis, the housing bust, and the general collapse of demand. Congress, the administration, and the Federal Reserve are straining to stimulate hiring through fiscal and monetary policies aimed at reviving growth.

But that is not all the government does to affect employment. Alas, much of what it does offsets the good it is trying to accomplish.

A sad example is the payroll tax, which impedes job creation in two ways. First, it imposes an extra cost on employers for hiring workers—a cost they don't incur if they decide to replace workers with machinery. Second, it reduces the take-home pay of those hired, making it less attractive for them to work.

Richard Rogerson, an economist at Arizona State University and author of the new book The Impact of Labor Taxes on Labor Supply, says the negative effect of payroll taxes is especially large when the revenues go to programs like Social Security. Evidence from Europe, he says, suggests that "a 10-percentage-point increase in labor taxes used to fund transfer programs leads to a reduction in hours worked of between 10 and 15 percentage points."

Many liberals admire Europeans for their civilized habit of working less than Americans do. But they used to work more. The change came about because higher taxes on that side of the Atlantic have greatly reduced the gains from working.

Generous social welfare benefits were another factor in sapping the European work ethic. But the United States is moving in the same direction. President Obama recently signed a bill extending unemployment insurance benefits, allowing those out of work to collect for up to 99 weeks.

There is something to be said for providing extra help to people who lose their jobs during hard times. But there is an unintended side effect: longer spells of unemployment. In the past year, the average duration has increased from 25 weeks to 34 weeks—far above the average peak duration of 21 weeks during previous recessions over the past 65 years.

What's different this time? "The dramatic expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to 99 weeks is almost certainly the culprit," writes Harvard economist Robert Barro in The Wall Street Journal. The extension provides the longest coverage ever.

Economists disagree on how much jobless assistance aggravates the problem it is supposed to ameliorate. But a study this year by the liberal Brookings Institution estimated that without the additional benefits, the unemployment rate would be at least 0.7 percentage points lower than it is—the equivalent of a million jobs.

The extension makes it feasible for some unemployed workers to put off looking for work longer than they otherwise could—which is why workers without coverage usually find new jobs quicker than workers with coverage. Often, the benefits just postpone the inevitable, depriving the economy of labor without yielding better jobs for those looking.

Then there is the increase in the federal minimum wage that took place last year. In the teeth of the downturn, the government required companies to boost their pay floor to $7.25 an hour, an increase of 70 cents. The intention may have been humane, but the effect was like tossing a struggling swimmer an anchor.

For Washington to dictate higher pay is bound to destroy jobs in the best of times. But the very worst moment to raise the minimum wage is during a period of economic stagnation combined with deflation, as we had last year.

When inflation screeches to a halt, many workers will be compelled to accept lower pay than they once would have taken. (Many already have.) A higher minimum wage prevents some from doing that.

Paying people not to work, barring them from taking wages they would be willing to accept, and penalizing companies that hire them? It's an ingenious formula for destroying jobs, and it seems to be working.

From the Killing Fields to the Tea Party

2010-09-03T16:30:00-04:00

Lowell, Mass.—Sam Meas isn't your typical congressional candidate. For one thing, the Cambodian refugee doesn't know his birthday.

"I tell people I am 38 years old—plus or minus two years." In 1973, Meas's father was sent to be "re-educated" by the Khmer Rouge and was never heard from again. During the chaos following the regime's collapse in 1979, Meas was separated from his mother. He never saw her again. Marching night and day toward the Thai border with a cousin, Meas recalls stepping over corpses and watching bloated bodies float down jungle waterways.

After years in a Thai refugee camp, in 1986 Meas was brought to the United States by the aid organization Catholic Charities. He spent months watching General Hospital and All My Children to improve his vocabulary. Twenty-five years later—after stints as a shoe-shine boy, a grocery-bagger, and a financial adviser—Meas is learning the craft of politics. "Health care should not be in the realm of government," he tells me in carefully accented English at a Cambodian restaurant where he is something of a celebrity. America is "on a slow path towards socialism." And "we need to get government out of managing people's lives."

Meas, who describes this country as "heaven on Earth," is running in Massachusetts' fifth district, currently represented by Democrat Niki Tsongas. Of the four Republicans competing to run against her, only Meas and Jon Golnik have garnered significant media attention. Golnik, a moderate Republican from Carlisle whose media team includes veterans of Sen. Scott Brown's campaign, is widely expected to prevail in the Sept. 14 primary. Meas is hobbled by an almost total absence of campaign money, an inexperienced campaign staff, and the difficulty of being a self-described "social conservative" in a liberal state.

And yet Meas, who calls himself the "new face of the Republican party," has attracted considerable attention from local Republican activists. Though he rejects the "tea party candidate" label, Meas acknowledges sharing many of the "values and ideas" of the insurgent movement, pointing out that he has spoken at tea party events in the state. "I've never met any tea party activists who have fangs or horns," he jokes. Instead, he argues, they are merely "the silent majority of Americans" for whom government has grown too large.

Meas prefers to identify as a Reagan Republican. Unlike the countless other Reagan votaries in the party, Meas offers a convincing claim that the 40th president was quite literally his personal savior. "I owe my life to him; he allowed me to come here and he fought Communism," he says.

Like most in the grass-roots movement, Meas rails against the health-care bill and illegal immigration, and says we need to slash personal and corporate tax rates. But he can also drift into the hyperbolic, declaring that "having lived under a totalitarian regime . . . I know what it is like to have lost all of your freedom"—stopping just short of comparing the Obama administration's policies to those of the Khmer Rouge.

Meas possesses a pronounced libertarian streak. At a recent debate, he struck a rare discordant note when he echoed the heterodox Republican Rep. Ron Paul in arguing that the Federal Reserve needs to be audited, then eliminated. Later in the same debate he waved a copy of the Constitution, declaring it the only document upon which all laws need be judged.

According to local election watchers, Meas is unlikely to emerge victorious: Golnik has more money and better name recognition. But the battle for Tsongas's seat is heating up. "In the absence of polling," says David Paleologos, a pollster at Suffolk University in Boston, "the district looks competitive if independent candidates don't draw significant numbers of votes from the Republicans."

He points out that Tsongas, despite her name recognition (she is the widow of the late Sen. Paul Tsongas), won her seat in a surprisingly tight race against an unknown Republican challenger. Massachusetts Republican Party Chairwoman Jennifer Nassour argues that Tsongas "faces an uphill battle." In 2009, Scott Brown won the district handily. This year, just how disaffected voters are with the status quo is anyone's guess.

Both Meas and Golnik are focusing on jobs. The cities of Lawrence and Lowell have unemployment numbers—17 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively—that are significantly higher than the national average. Meas is relying on the votes of Lowell's 20,000 Cambodian-Americans. His campaign is furiously attempting to un-enroll those currently registered as Democrats, since in Massachusetts voting in the Republican primary is open only to independents and registered Republicans.

Meas sighs deeply when conversation drifts back to his family destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. He says he forgets what his mother looks like and, if she is indeed still alive, would have no way of identifying her. "I'm hoping that after I win this congressional campaign, I'll be famous and I can go back to Cambodia and people will recognize me. Then we can do DNA tests."

But even if he doesn't, this longshot Republican vows to stay involved in politics. "I'm not doing this for glory," he stresses, "for there is no glory in politics." He is doing it, he says, out of a sense of duty.

Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Reason.tv: Life, Liberty & Happiness - Q&A with American Visionary Art Museum's Rebecca Hoffberger

2010-09-03T15:00:00-04:00

Reflecting on the Iraq War

2010-09-03T12:00:00-04:00

As the United States' combat mission in Iraq draws to a close, it is fitting to look back on the war and its legacy so far. In most left-of-center commentary, the folly and criminality of the war in Iraq is now an article of faith, and anyone who ever supported it has a black mark against him. Yet, as someone ambivalently pro-war in 2003, I remain unrepentantly ambivalent and far from certain about history's eventual verdict. Ironically, President Obama's August 31 Oval Office speech marking the war's official end reflects nothing if not ambivalence, Obama's early anti-war stance notwithstanding.

Some facts are undeniable: the weapons of mass destruction of which Saddam Hussein's alleged possession was the ostensible reason for the invasion never turned up. It is also fairly clear that, in the buildup to the war, the Bush White House disregarded evidence that did not fit its casus belli—though it is a far cry from that to the charge that Bush deliberately "lied," and the belief that the Saddam Hussein regime was hiding WMDs was widely shared among Democrats.

Few would also dispute the conclusion that the war and the occupation were badly mismanaged from the start, due in large part to the previous administration's arrogance and incompetence—with tragic results for far too many U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

But what if we had not gone to war? David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, argues in a recent column in The National Post, a Canadian daily, that a Saddam Hussein regime left intact in 2003 would have become far more dangerous due to new wealth from rising oil prices and the probable collapse of sanctions—and would have eventually ended in a violent downfall with massive casualties from sectarian battles. Such suggestions are easy to dismiss as speculation intended to justify the war in hindsight. Yet the truth is that what-ifs stressing the benefits of not going to war can be just as speculative. It is far from certain that if we had not sent troops to Iraq, our forces would have been more successful in Afghanistan or would have captured Osama Bin Laden.

President Obama's speech, as one might expect, stressed the costs—human, social, political, and economic—of going into Iraq. Yet he also spoke in surprisingly positive terms about many aspects of the U.S. mission.

He noted that American troops in Iraq "defeated a regime that had terrorized its people" and, "together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future." He asserted that "because of our troops and civilians—and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people—Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain." He praised the successes of Iraqi elections and emphasized "our long-term partnership with Iraq, one based upon mutual interests and mutual respect."

This must be a bitter pill to swallow for many of Obama's supporters—those who regard the war as an American atrocity against Iraqis (often characterized in left-wing venues in starkly racial terms, as the slaughter of "brown people"). Such a view is now fairly standard on the left: at the height of the controversy of the "Ground Zero mosque," a satirical piece by a Salon.com blogger noted that if an enemy attack that kills thousands of innocents creates a "sacred ground," then the Iraqis should be grateful to the United States for giving them "hundreds of such sites." To people with that mindset, Obama's praise for the American role in Iraq must sound like monstrous hypocrisy—literally adding insult to fatal injury. Never mind that most of the deaths were at the insurgents' hands.

It would be absurd to claim that the war in Iraq was a human rights triumph. Salon.com's Joe Conason has a point when he notes that shocking cases of detainee abuse in Iraq have compromised our moral standing. To take on the role of an occupying force places the military in an extremely tough quandary: being too aggressive in dealing with the local population creates the risk of backlash and resentment; not being aggressive enough creates the risk of a anarchy, causing resentment toward the troops for failing to protect the population. U.S. troops have faced Iraqi anger and disappointment for both reasons.

Despite all these problems, polls conducted in Iraq since the war began have shown a complex picture that does not fit into the left-wing narrative of the war any more than it does into a pro-war script of U.S. soldiers being greeted as liberators. Survey after survey has showed Iraqis more or less evenly split on whether the 2003 invasion was right or wrong. (In a 2009 survey, only 28 percent said that it was "absolutely wrong.") This is a remarkable fact considering than it is a natural human instinct to strongly oppose the invasion of one's country by another power—particularly one with a different culture and a different majority religion—and that the respondents included people who held privileged positions under the Saddam Hussein regime. When the question is phrased differently, between 60 and 75 percent of Iraqis have agreed that Saddam's ouster was worth it despite the hardship. Only a quarter prefer the way things were in prewar Iraq.

Do these findings give us a mandate to depose oppressive regimes everywhere? Of course not. They do, however, put our actions in perspective. Whether or not Operation Iraqi Freedom was a blunder, only time will tell—as even some strong critics of the war, such as former Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean, concede. But it is not too early to say that Americans are not the villains in this story. That role belongs to the dictator who drove so many of his subjects to welcome a foreign invasion, and to the extremists who unleashed carnage on their own.

Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She blogs at cathyyoung.wordpress.com. This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.

Friday Funnies

2010-09-03T07:00:00-04:00

The Ruling Class

2010-09-02T16:30:00-04:00

Few essays attracted as much attention from right-wing readers this summer as "America's Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution," an extended argument that an incestuous social set "rules uneasily over the majority of Americans." Written by Angelo Codevilla of the Claremont Institute and first published in The American Spectator, this very long article has now been expanded into a very brief book, called The Ruling Class. If you're interested in the state of the American right, it's an instructive document—a book that strives mightily to marry conservative cultural complaints to the libertarian case against an intrusive central government.

The book argues that most of America can be split into two categories, a ruling class and a country class. The ruling class is everyone, "whether in government power directly or as officers in companies," whose "careers and fortunes depend on government." The second category consists of civil society: all those businesses, families, and community groups that don't subsist on subsidies and privileges. Codevilla believes the rulers' power is expanding at the expense of the country class, and he warns of a world where crony capitalism replaces free markets, unaccountable administrative agencies replace self-government, and the rule of professionals replaces popular participation. He hits the last point particularly hard, at times sounding more like a decentralist radical in the mold of Ivan Illich or Christopher Lasch than a conventional conservative Republican. Indeed, Codevilla says the GOP is part of the problem, arguing that the party "has zero claim to the Country Class' trust because it does not live to represent the Country Class." He has more enthusiasm for homeschoolers than for any political party.

So far, so good. But odd ideas periodically slip into the story. There are dubious digs at Darwinism, glib legal arguments, and sweeping statements that do more to flatter right-wing resentment than to describe the world as it is. ("Every December," the author announces at one point, we "are reminded that the Ruling Class deems the very word 'Christmas' to be offensive.") Codevilla acknowledges that the country class is "heterogeneous" and "speaks with many voices, which are often inharmonious," but his portrait of it feels more uniform than those words imply. He conveys his comradely solidarity for traditional parents whose rights have been restricted but not gay couples who want to adopt kids of their own, for the fellow who wants to use a high pressure shower head but not the fellow who wants to use a bong, for Middle Americans who prefer Branson to Hollywood but not Middle Americans who prefer the local underground music scene (not to mention the many Middle Americans who are quite happy with Hollywood and keep the stars well-fed). He doesn't attack those other people, mind you. He just leaves them out, as though the set of citizens who make up the country class is indistinguishable from the set of citizens whose lives reflect the author's cultural preferences.

That much is forgivable. Unfortunately, the book's portrait of the ruling class is overly narrow as well, with Codevilla contriving to exclude even a president from the ranks of the rulers. (The absent executive is Ronald Reagan, apparently on the grounds that he was mocked in the media and in a private comment attributed to his vice president. With such standards, you might as well subtract Bill Clinton from the ruling class too.) "Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust," Codevilla writes, with educational institutions imposing a "remarkably uniform...social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints." It's not clear how he reconciles this statement with his critique of crony capitalists. Does the average beneficiary of the bank bailout fit that description? How about the heavies at Halliburton, or at the company formerly known as Blackwater? Enron's execs were fluent in eco-speak, but did the managers there really think in terms of "sins" against "the environment"? Given their ability to build coal plants in the Third World while pushing for stricter regulations on their coal-based competitors at home, I'd say Enron was playing the greenwashing game on its own terms.

I don't usually seek wisdom from David Brooks columns, but Mr. National Greatness had a point when he wrote this:

Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.'s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.'s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.'s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.'s.

Brooks is no foe of elite rule, and his aim was to discredit populism of any kind. But you don't have to agree with his larger intent to recognize that his sketch of the ruling classes, oversimplified as it is, still has more nuance than the model in this book. There isn't much room for those MBAs in Codevilla's caricature of the upper crust.

When you describe your political foes as though they're a single stock type and in effect do the same thing to your allies, you run the risk of reducing a broad-based cause to identity politics, with cultural solidarity supplanting serious challenges to the nature and distribution of power. George W. Bush (MBA, Harvard Business School) sent all the right signals to Codevilla's target audience to tell them he was one of them, and more than one liberal figure inadvertently assisted the president with complaints about his "cowboy" ways. In the meantime the man's administration was, in Codevilla's words, different from Obama's "in degree, not kind." Lesson: People with Bush's background—or Dick Cheney's, or John McCain's—can be members of the ruling elite too.

When you confuse culture war with class war (are we allowed to call this "class war"?), it's easier to mistake a symbolic battle for a meaningful revolt of the oppressed. It's the mirror image of those folks on the left who'd rather scold someone for being politically incorrect than advance the interests of the underclass. Already we've seen Spectator editor-in-theory R. Emmett Tyrrell dragging Codevilla's thesis into the most inane culture-war controversy of the year: the outrage over Park51, a proposed Muslim community center near the site of the old World Trade Center.

Now, you could certainly use Codevilla's arguments to illuminate this debate. His book decries the reign of administrative bureaucracies, objects to the abuse of eminent domain, and worries that religious expression is being suppressed. With Park51, the leading Republican gubernatorial candidate has called for the Public Service Commission to keep a prayer space from being built—and his rival for the nomination only disagrees to the extent that he'd use eminent domain to stop the project instead. The two of them are a Codevillan nightmare come to life.

But that isn't Tyrrell's concern. "The Country Class," he wrote in an August editorial, "has come down against the mosque," while "the Ruling Class wants to place a mosque at the site of September 11." So much for defending the voluntary sector; on with the ginned-up outrage of the month. That's where the culture war will get you.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

Reason.tv: Give Us Liberty? - Q&A with Dick Armey & Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks

2010-09-02T15:00:00-04:00

Good Intentions Gone Bad

2010-09-02T12:00:00-04:00

You own a business, maybe a restaurant. You've got a lot to worry about. You have to make sure the food is safe and tastes good, that the place is clean and appealing, that workers are friendly and paid according to a hundred Labor Department and IRS rules.

On top of that, there are rules you might have no idea about. The bathroom sinks must be a specified height. So must the doorknobs and mirrors. You must have rails. And if these things aren't right—say, if your mirror is just one inch too high—you could be sued for thousands of dollars.

And be careful. If you fail to let a customer bring a large snake, which he calls his "service animal," into your restaurant, you could be in trouble.

All of this is because of the well-intentioned Americans With Disabilities Act, which President George H.W. Bush signed 20 years ago.

The ADA was popular with Republicans and Democrats. It passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities, 377 to 28 in the House and 91 to 6 in the Senate.

What does it do? The ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, requiring businesses to provide the disabled "equal access" and to make "reasonable accommodation" for employees. Tax credits and deductions are available for special equipment (talking computers, for instance) and modifying buildings to comply with the accessibility mandate.

The ADA was supposed to help more disabled people find jobs. But did it?

Strangely, no. An MIT study found that employment of disabled men ages 21 to 58 declined after the ADA went into effect. Same for women ages 21 to 39.

How could employment among the disabled have declined?

Because the law turns "protected" people into potential lawsuits. Most ADA litigation occurs when an employee is fired, so the safest way to avoid those costs is not to hire the disabled in the first place.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the Overlawyered.com blog, says that the law was unnecessary. Many "hire the handicapped" programs existed before the ADA passed. Sadly, now most have been quietly discontinued, probably because of the threat of legal consequences if an employee doesn't work out.

Under the ADA, Olson notes, fairness does not mean treating disabled people the same as non-disabled people. Rather it means accommodating them. In other words, the law requires that people be treated unequally.

The law has also unleashed a landslide of lawsuits by "professional litigants" who file a hundred suits at a time. Disabled people visit businesses to look for violations, but instead of simply asking that a violation be corrected, they partner with lawyers who (legally) extort settlement money from the businesses.

Some disabled people have benefited from changes effected by the ADA, but the costs are rarely accounted for. If a small business has to lay off an employee to afford the added expense of accommodating the disabled, is that a good thing—especially if, say, customers in wheelchairs are rare? Extra-wide bathroom stalls that reduce the overall number of toilets are only some of the unaccounted-for costs of the ADA. And since ADA modification requirements are triggered by renovation, the law could actually discourage businesses from making needed renovations as a way of avoiding the expense.

A few disabled people speak up against the law. Greg Perry, author of Disabling America: The Unintended Consequences of the Government's Protection of the Handicapped, says that because the disabled now represent an added expense to businesses, many resent them.

Finally, the ADA has led to some truly bizarre results. Exxon gave ship captain Joseph Hazelwood a job after he completed alcohol rehab. Hazelwood then drank too much and let the Exxon Valdez run aground in Alaska. Exxon was sued for allowing it to happen. So Exxon prohibited employees who have had a drug or drinking problem from holding safety-sensitive jobs. The result? You guessed it—employees with a history of alcohol abuse sued under the ADA, demanding their "right" to those jobs. The federal government (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) supported the employees. Courts are still trying to sort it out.

More money for the parasites.

John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.

The Pointless Prosecution of Roger Clemens

2010-09-02T07:00:00-04:00

If it were a crime to venture onto Capitol Hill to reveal yourself as a self-absorbed liar with an inability to admit mistakes, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through the vacant halls of Congress. Fortunately for members of the legislative branch, that is not a crime. Unless your name is Roger Clemens.

The eccentric baseball legend is not one to let people disparage him without a forceful response, any more than he was one to let batters crowd the plate without retaliation. A couple of years ago, after being accused of using performance-enhancing drugs, he voluntarily appeared before a House committee to heap scorn on the charge.

His denial was not very convincing, since other witnesses—notably longtime teammate Andy Pettitte—had given statements contradicting him. He was repeatedly reminded by skeptical interrogators that he was under oath. Democratic Chairman Henry Waxman and ranking Republican Tom Davis joined together afterward to advise the Justice Department that "significant questions have been raised about Mr. Clemens' truthfulness."

But never mind if anyone believed him, or if his alleged dissembling made any difference on anything. Federal prosecutors got him indicted for perjury, and he faces trial on charges that carry penalties of up to 30 years in prison.

It's possible to imagine less worthy uses of prosecutorial resources, but not many. Indictments for perjury unaccompanied by other criminal charges are rare, usually employed only when a statute of limitations makes it impossible to prosecute the accused for more significant felonies.

The Rocket, for some reason, is not charged with violating federal law by possessing or using illegal substances. He is charged merely with lying to members of Congress.

Members of Congress, of course, have been known to lie to their constituents and to each other, without fear of going to prison. And it's hard to see what would be lost if Clemens' sworn denial were written off as a risible burst of hot air.

United States attorneys face a nearly endless array of mischief and mayhem. Because of limited resources, they cannot prosecute everyone who breaks the law. Yet those in charge of prosecutions for the nation's capital chose to give priority to an offender who presents no threat to public safety and whose real crime was to disrespect a powerful group of elected officials.

"It's hard for me to see the federal interest in prosecuting Clemens in this kind of case," says Ron Safer, a former assistant U.S. attorney. "Cases that are worthy of prosecution are turned down every day because the federal interest is insufficient."

Perjuries are not all created equal. Rod Blagojevich and Lewis "Scooter" Libby were both convicted of lying to federal agents, but they did so in order to impede criminal investigations into other suspected wrongdoing. Another baseball star, Barry Bonds, was indicted for perjury because he supposedly lied to a grand jury probing illegal drug trafficking—testimony that could have allowed criminals to go free.

Various government officials prosecuted for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal were trying to suppress the truth and block congressional oversight on a matter of grave public concern. In instances like these, prosecution of perjury serves as a deterrent to conduct that interferes with vital government functions.

Clemens' supposed deceit, by contrast, came in a bit of congressional theater. The hearings were not necessary to formulate legislation—and, in fact, no legislation came out of the process. The point was to grab the spotlight and convey the impression of action to gullible constituents. Congress was holding hearings just for the fun of holding hearings.

Reginald Brown, an associate White House general counsel under President George W. Bush, told The New York Times that the committee members were pushing the boundaries of their legitimate authority: "They did this to figure out whether Clemens or his trainer were telling the truth, and that is arguably not a legislative function. It's not Congress' job to hold perjury trials."

All this might be easier to see if the case involved a more sympathetic character than Clemens, whose plight is largely the result of his own gargantuan hubris. But a meaningless act of perjury should not become a criminal case merely because it was allegedly committed by a prize jerk.

In this case, prosecutors seem to be letting their pride and indignation lure them into a fight they would have been better off declining. Sort of like Roger Clemens.

Knowing is Half the Battle. But It's the Easy Half.

2010-09-01T16:30:00-04:00

They say that knowing is half the battle. But it’s the easy half.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times caused quite a stir by releasing individual performance data about 6,000 of the system’s primary teachers after weeks of hyping the story. The paper took the simple but ingenious step of filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the district’s raw math and reading standardized test scores over several years. For each teacher, the paper calculated a score based on the gains shown by his or her individual students from the time they arrived in the classroom in the fall to the time they left—a value-added score—and then rated the teachers’ effectiveness.

Information is power, and the school system and teachers union had access to this data long before the Times. But instead of releasing scores—and thus seizing the opportunity to frame the information and the debate—they sat on the data for years, stalling, hoping no one would notice that it existed at all. Their mindset dates from a time when processing a large amount of data and offering a granular analysis was a difficult and expensive business. But number crunching on this scale is no longer the province of big bureaucracies with major computing power. Anyone can do it, and it was only a matter of time before someone did.

Naturally, the teachers union flipped out. In addition to announcing a boycott of the paper, union reps have condemned the release of the scores to parents as “dangerous.” (To his credit, Obama education chief Arne Duncan backed the release of the scores, saying “What’s there to hide?”)

But all the data in the world won’t do kids or their parents any good if they can’t make choices informed by that data.

In a world where we can get rankings and information about every book, every household appliance, every restaurant, and every manicurist, we are in the habit of casually seeking information and making well-informed choices about the things we buy and the people we contract with for services. But in education (and, for that matter, in medicine) users are mostly working in an information vacuum. One reason doctors and hospitals are frightened of the popularization of information about patient satisfaction and pricing is that people can, with some constraints, take their broken legs, strep throats, or brain tumors elsewhere. But parents don’t have that luxury when it comes to public schooling.

Even if parents know who the good teachers are—and they often do already—it often doesn’t matter, since kids are randomly assigned. They’re allocated to a district, a school, a schedule, and a classroom, all without any input from students or parents. The biggest decision public school parents get to make about their child’s primary education is where they choose to live. Short of staging a mini-sit in at the guidance counselor’s office (something my parents were known to do from time to time) there’s not much you can do once the die has been cast. And if you’re a parent who doesn’t have the luxury of taking a day off from work to spend fighting the school bureaucracy, your kid is stuck wherever he was randomly assigned, no matter what. Teacher data doesn’t do a lick of good if you don’t have input about which teacher you wind up with.

Instituting a small degree of teacher choice wouldn’t be overwhelmingly difficult. Schools at all levels could opt for the kind of first-come, first-served lottery that large colleges use. It's not an ideal system, but it’s an improvement. Again, computers these days, they can do amazing stuff. Once a system is in place, this kind of limited choice would be neither time consuming nor expensive. But it would create one outcome that teachers unions will do almost anything to stop: It would quickly become obvious which teachers aren’t desirable. The teachers with the half-empty classrooms would be ripe for firing. And that’s the scenario that makes teachers unions (and to a lesser degree school boards and other education bureaucracies) fear a flood of data, especially if it’s accompanied by even a little choice.

In today’s Los Angeles Times, this troublingly common sentiment showed up: "As a parent, I think I have a right to know," said [school] board member Nury Martinez, who added that she did not believe that the general public should be able to see a teacher's entire review.” Giving parents all the information that’s available is a bad idea, the argument goes, in part because they might start trying to make the kind of choices for their kids that they make every day about their lunches, their jobs, or their dry cleaners.

Asked about the release of the Los Angeles teacher data at a recent community meeting, reformist D.C. school Chancellor Michelle Rhee replied with a personal story and a similar gut reaction: “I was looking at the data in my own children’s school,” she says. “I could see the teacher data. One good, one not so much. I pride myself on not giving my kids preferences. But as a mother i was like whoa! From an administrative point of view, it’s pretty terrifying.”

There were a lot of mothers in Los Angeles on Sunday who were like whoa. But none of those whoa moments will amount to much in a system starved of choice.

“I’m kind of waiting for the FOIA request in my mailbox,” says Rhee. It’s coming, alright. But it won’t be enough.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Reason.tv: Free the 'Shine! Why It's Finally Time to Legalize Liquor

2010-09-01T15:00:00-04:00

The State of Iraq

2010-09-01T12:00:00-04:00

In the 1959 film The Mouse That Roared, an imaginary European nation called the Duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the U.S. "There isn't a more profitable undertaking for any country than to declare war on the United States and to be defeated," explains the nation's military leader.

So it goes. The staunchly rational New York Times right-of-center columnist David Brooks asked readers this week how the nation-building reconstruction project in Iraq is working out.

Remarkably well, you'll be pleased to learn.

Economically, Iraq is the 12th-fastest-growing economy in the world; oil production is back; living standards are improving; about 20 million Iraqis have cell phones. When it comes to political freedom, Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East—which, let's be honest, is like finishing fourth in the weak NFC West.

Though no one likes to play the part of the Ugly American, isn't there a more pertinent question we should be asking ourselves? Like, "What's in it for us?"

President Barack Obama claims that the end of the combat mission is no time for victory laps. But the president, who once accused the Bush administration of intentionally sending soldiers to die in Iraq to create a political distraction, now asserts that "America is more secure."

Are we? It is far-fetched to believe that 50,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq in a "training and backup role" will be withdrawn by the end of 2011 as scheduled.

Recently, coordinated bombings in 13 cities across Iraq killed more than 70 people and wounded hundreds of others. If the violence continues to escalate, are these 50,000 American troops going to take a "backup role" in Iraq's ethnic and religious wars?

Doubtful. And less secure.

Our long-term presence in Iraq, in fact, is likely to impede any ability to react militarily to genuine threats. Americans don't have the appetite for it. So if the Islamic radical leadership of Iran—which many experts believe filled the vacuum left by the toppling of Saddam Hussein—is, as many believe, an imminent nuclear threat, we are powerless to stop it.

And if every military action in defense of U.S. interests now comes with an obligatory 10-, 20- or 40-year Marshall Plan, you've made it even more politically unpalatable.

There are other questions that make the claim "we're more secure" highly suspect. If we do leave, where is the evidence that Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter) will blossom into a secular democracy and an ally in the war against Islamic radicalism?

Doubtlessly, it is Islamophobic to bring this up, but Americans are dying not only in the war on terror but also to codify Shariah. Brooks claims that in Iraq, "the role of women remains surprisingly circumscribed." Surprisingly? Actually, that's just a polite way of saying—and I quote directly from the Iraqi Constitution—"Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation."

That's one reason many of us regret our support of the Iraq war. Though I am not reflexively isolationist, I am reflexively suspicious of social engineering. And nation building is social engineering on the grandest of scales.

Decent people, no doubt, are pleased to hear that the Iraqi people are doing well. If war makes us more secure, why only Iraq and not Yemen? Or Iran? Or Cuba? Doesn't everyone deserve to live in freedom? Do not all people deserve to own cell phones and have a decent garbage disposal system?

Or do we reserve those perks for those who pretend to have WMD?

The question isn't whether nation building can work. It probably can. The question is whether it was worth it.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his website at www.DavidHarsanyi.com.

Simpson and the Sacred Cow

2010-09-01T07:00:00-04:00

Alan Simpson violated a taboo last week when he likened Social Security to "a milk cow with 310 million tits." But contrary to the dictionary-deprived critics who accused him of sexist vulgarity, the former Wyoming senator's transgression had nothing to do with his use of a perfectly acceptable synonym for teat. Simpson's real sin was "belittling a bedrock program," as the AARP put it—i.e., showing insufficient reverence for a sacred cow.

To Simpson's detractors, it is self-evident that a man who supports entitlement reform has no business serving on, let alone co-chairing, a presidential commission devoted to fiscal responsibility. But anyone who takes an honest look at the federal budget can see how crazy that position is.

Just three entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—account for two-fifths of federal spending, representing 10 percent of GDP. Without reform, they are expected to consume half of the budget and about 20 percent of GDP by 2050.

It's true that the fiscal outlook for Social Security, which has about $18 trillion in unfunded liabilities, is not nearly as bad as the fiscal outlook for Medicare, which has a long-term shortfall five times as big. Simpson's controversial comments nevertheless reflect some important truths.

First, Social Security is neither a pension fund nor a means-tested assistance program for the needy. It is a pay-as-you-go system of transfer payments that takes money from relatively poor workers and gives it to relatively affluent retirees.

Second, despite all the talk of a "$2.5 trillion surplus," Social Security is indeed "in trouble," thanks to a shrinking ratio of workers to retirees and repeated raids on its revenue by legislators looking for easy spending money. The year of reckoning is not 2037, when the program's imaginary "trust fund" is expected to run out; it is now, since the cost of benefits already has begun to exceed annual revenue. There is nothing in the trust fund but IOUs from the federal government, which can be redeemed only through cuts in other programs, more taxes, or more debt.

Third, entitlement reform, including Medicare cuts as well as changes to Social Security, will be fought tooth and nail by the AARP, the National Organization for Women, and other denialist defenders of the status quo. That much was confirmed by the reaction to Simpson's complaints about charges of "ageism" and "sexism," which were cited as further evidence of his ageism and sexism.

Yet this self-hating senior citizen, who turns 79 this week, is right to question a retirement age that was set at 65 in 1935 and has been raised by only two years (for people born after 1959) since then. Meanwhile, life expectancy at 65 has gone from about 13 more years for men and 15 for women to 17 for men and 20 for women, and those numbers are projected to continue rising.

Simpson is also right to point out that Americans receive Social Security (and Medicare) benefits regardless of how wealthy they are. You might think progressives would welcome means testing. But as Trudy Lieberman explained in the Columbia Journalism Review, they worry that targeting benefits to people who actually need them would undermine "the program's social solidarity."

Translation: Voters love middle-class entitlements, but they hate welfare. That's why progressives were so upset about Simpson's cow comparison, with its implication of unseemly dependence. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D- Ore.) claimed to find the simile "beyond comprehension" but nevertheless concluded that it was both "false" and "demeaning."

Transforming Social Security into a true pension program by letting workers invest part of what they now see disappear in payroll taxes is likewise anathema to the "social solidarity" crowd, since it would let people go their own way instead of forcing them to participate in the government's Ponzi scheme. Simpson is not suggesting anything nearly so radical, which makes the silly, sanctimonious storm over his comments all the more depressing.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Gas Prices Explained

2010-08-31T16:30:00-04:00

Good news for American drivers! Just in time for the Labor Day weekend, gasoline prices are falling. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) gas prices peaked in the spring. Gas prices usually rise in the spring because of the supply constraints created by the switchover to specially formulated summer gasoline mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EIA reports that in May the average price for a gallon of regular got up to $2.87. Since then prices have been wiggling downward to around $2.65 per gallon today.

So what determines the price of gasoline? Speculators? Evil conspiring oil companies? Well, actually no. It's demand and supply, of course. On the demand side the American automobile fleet gets better gas mileage than it did a few years ago and Americans, whacked by the recession and high unemployment rates, are driving a bit less than they used to. In addition, thanks to government subsidies, about 9 percent of what goes into our gas tanks is ethanol produced from corn, which also reduces the demand for refined crude. On the supply side, global oil supplies are ample and refiners in the U.S. evidently believed the Obama administration’s rosy “recovery summer” scenarios and stockpiled a lot of gasoline.

So what will happen to future gasoline prices? Let’s review a little a bit of history. World oil prices peaked at about $147 per barrel in July 2008—the highest price ever for crude. Earlier, in May 2008, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report suggesting that a “super spike” would push oil prices above $200 per barrel by 2010. That didn’t happen. Oil prices began a steep decline as the global recession came on. By November 2008, Goldman Sachs had recanted its super spike projections and was predicting that oil could fall as low as $50 per barrel. Actually oil prices collapsed to just above $30 per barrel by December 2008.

In short: Gasoline prices follow the trajectory of oil prices (plus an additional premium due to fluctuating constraints on refining capacity). On July 14, 2008, the Energy Information Administration reported that gasoline prices in the U.S peaked at $4.05 per gallon, up from the low of just 88.5 cents in February 1999 ($1.15 in 2010 dollars). In inflation adjusted terms, the price of a gallon of gasoline in 1999 was the lowest ever in history. Why? Because the price of crude had also fallen below $10 per barrel, its lowest level in real dollars since the end of World War II.

When oil prices collapsed in 2008, the average price for a gallon of gasoline dropped to $1.59 in December, which is just about where it was in December 2004, when the price of petroleum then also hovered in the mid-30 dollar range. Since the crazy price swings of 2008, oil prices have rebounded to between $70 and $80 per barrel. Today, average gas prices are actually slightly below where they were when oil was at about the same price back in September 2007.

So what can American motorists expect for future gas prices? As we’ve seen it all depends on the price of oil. Earlier this year, the international insurance syndicate Lloyd’s of London issued a rather bearish report [PDF] suggesting that “a spike in excess of $200 per barrel is not infeasible” around 2013. “An oil supply crunch in the medium term is likely to be due to a combination of insufficient investment in upstream oil and efficiency over the last two decades and rebounding demand following the global recession,” states the report. “This would create a price spike prompting drastic national measures to cut oil dependency.”

On the other hand, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), one of the world’s leading oil supply consultancies, rejects the notion of imminent “peak oil” and projects a more bullish production increase from about 85 million barrels per day now to over 115 million barrels per day by 2030. Afterwards, the CERA analysts foresee global oil production reaching an “undulating plateau” lasting for several decades, perhaps until 2070, before it begins a permanent decline. In addition, the CERA report speculates that “peak demand” could happen before peak oil is ever reached. Demand for oil peaked in the developed countries in 2005 and the CERA analysis notes that over the next decades improvements in areas ranging from automobile engine technologies and the electric battery to changes in demographics and values could significantly lower the projected demand for oil.

The key variable to keep in mind when looking at future oil prices is how much spare production capacity is available globally. Spare capacity prevents and cushions price shocks. During the 2008 price run up, global spare oil production capacity fell to as low as 1 million barrels per day. According to CERA, current spare capacity is a comfortable 6.4 million barrels per day. However, like the Lloyd’s analysis, the CERA report worries that persistent underinvestment in production combined with recovered global economic growth could lead to a tightening of supplies by the middle of this decade resulting in higher prices.

So there you have it, expert opinion suggests that oil prices, and thus gasoline prices, will fluctuate based on demand and supply. Now fill up your tank and drive somewhere to enjoy your Labor Day weekend.

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

Reason.tv: Nanny of the Month for August 2010 - Police Chief Busts Guy Who Keeps Drunks Off the Street

2010-08-31T15:00:00-04:00

Needs More RAM

2010-08-31T12:00:00-04:00

Two years ago the Chesapeake, Virginia, police made some decisions that led to an officer’s death, then tried to convict a scapegoat of capital murder. In April, following an outcry, the police department announced a change in how it will conduct drug raids. But it wasn’t the change you might have expected.

In January 2008 Chesapeake cops raided the home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick. Days earlier, an informant had broken into Frederick’s house. He spotted several marijuana plants and stole some of them, giving police the probable cause they needed to obtain a search warrant. During the raid, police put a battering ram through part of Frederick’s door. Frederick says he awoke, saw someone breaking into his home, remembered the burglary of several days earlier, panicked, and fired his gun through the broken door. His bullet struck and killed one of the police officers, Det. Jarrod Shivers.

Police and prosecutors claimed that the cops announced themselves and that Frederick killed Shivers intentionally. The state sought to convict him of capital murder. A year later, Frederick was convicted of manslaughter instead and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The case spurred a flurry of discussion in the Chesapeake-Hampton Roads area about the use of informants and of SWAT-like forced-entry tactics to serve marijuana warrants. Readers’ comments on a local newspaper’s website, initially pro-police, soured against the department as details about the shoddy investigation came to light. The police, for example, had done almost no investigation to corroborate their informant’s tip.

So what did the Chesapeake Police Department announce in April? It won’t be reconsidering its policy of sending cops on volatile, forced-entry raids into the homes of low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. Nor will it change the way its narcotics officers deal with drug informants. Instead, the department announced, Chesapeake narcotics officers will be using a new and improved battering ram.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Life for Poker

2010-08-31T07:00:00-04:00

Daniel Tzvetkoff, a young Australian entrepreneur who co-founded the online payment processor Intabill in 2007, had a brief, flashy run as a multimillionaire before his business collapsed amid accusations of financial mismanagement. But his real crime, according to the U.S. government, was doing precisely what Intabill purported to do: facilitate online payments, including bets by American poker players.

When Tzvetkoff was arrested during a visit to Las Vegas in April, it was the first time anyone had been publicly charged with violating the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Enacted in 2006, the law makes it a federal crime for someone “engaged in the business of betting or wagering” to accept a payment in connection with “unlawful Internet gambling.”

Since Tzvetkoff did not run any gambling businesses, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan accuses him of conspiring with others who do, including the operators of such popular websites as PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. The indictment also alleges a conspiracy to violate the Illegal Gambling Business Act. Based on the same transactions, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara threw in two money laundering counts and a bank fraud charge, which alleges that Tzvetkoff misled American financial institutions about where money drawn from their customers’ accounts was going.

When the penalties for the four counts are added together, Tzvetkoff faces up to 75 years in prison, plus more than $2 billion in asset forfeiture, for the crime of helping Americans play poker. All this is based on a New York state offense, “promoting gambling in the second degree,” that is classified as a misdemeanor and arguably does not cover poker.

Tzvetkoff’s unindicted co-conspirators are the same creditors who lined up in Brisbane for the money they said Intabill owed them. Viewed as legitimate businesses in the rest of the world, online gambling companies are treated as criminal enterprises in the U.S., and Tzvetkoff could face life in prison for helping them.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Trust Me: You Can Trust Us

2010-08-30T16:30:00-04:00

In April I wrote a column about the secretive habits of three large police departments in Virginia's Washington, D.C., suburbs: Fairfax County, Alexandria, and Arlington. As Connection Newspapers reporter Michael Pope showed in a series of reports that began in March, they are among the least transparent departments in the country, having interpreted Virginia's Freedom of Information Act in a way that allows them to turn down nearly all requests for information.

Recently there have been a couple of attempts to make Virginia's law enforcement agencies more transparent. As I reported in June, Nicholas Beltrante, an 82-year-old former cop and Navy medic, started the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability. And in January, state Sen. John Edwards (D-Roanoke) introduced a bill that would force police to turn over public records in cases where the investigation has been completed.

Michael Pope's initial attempts to obtain information, even about mundane cases or arrests the department itself was highlighting in press releases, met with astonishing disdain. Police were not only stingy with information; they were smug and arrogant about it. When asked why she couldn't release the name of a Virginia police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man last November, Fairfax County police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings replied, "What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure? I'd be curious to know why they want the name of an officer."

After Pope's first article on the lack of disclosure, Alexandria Commonwealth's Attorney Randolph Sengel, the city's elected chief prosecutor, responded with a sneering, condescending letter to the editor brimming with contempt for outsiders who try to hold law enforcement agencies accountable. "Last time I checked there were multiple safeguards in place to assure the integrity of the criminal justice system," Sengel wrote. "Conscientious and dedicated judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and law enforcement officers work in a system which is as transparent as it needs to be...The sacred 'right of the public to know' is still (barely) governed by standards of reasonableness and civility."

Meanwhile, the elected officials who are supposed to oversee law enforcement in these jurisdictions told Pope they saw nothing wrong with all the secrecy. "I am in the corner of trusting our police department," said Arlington County Board Member Barbara Favola.

Sen. Edwards' bill—which was considered by the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council, a state agency that advises lawmakers and government officials, at a hearing last week—is a partial response to such attitudes. If enacted, it would make Virginia's police departments a bit more transparent, although they would still have the power to routinely deny requests for information about open cases.

In response to fierce opposition from law enforcement, Edwards amended his bill to require that people seeking information about closed cases ask a judge for an order requiring police departments to turn over public documents. But as Pope reported this week, the change did not appease the bill's opponents. Instead of requiring police departments to provide a compelling reason for withholding public records, the latest compromise plan would put the burden on the petitioner to convince a judge that the records should be released. Even that isn't enough for the bill's critics, who prefer that police departments have complete discretion to withhold department records.

Pope reported that "police chiefs, prosecutors, and sheriffs from across Virginia" spoke against Edwards' bill" at last week's hearing, complaining that "incident reports were raw and unedited documents full of accusations and opinions that would reveal police operations to criminals." They also warned that releasing such documents would "create a chilling effect on victims and witnesses," discouraging them from "coming forward to share information." These worries are red herrings. Nearly every other police department in the country releases police reports to the public without compromising investigations, public safety, or the security of witnesses. Sensitive information such as the identity of police informants or the names of witnesses can be redacted.

The real motive for the current policy seems to be preventing watchdogs and journalists from scrutinizing police reports for accuracy and consistency or examining the history, training, and temperament of officers who are involved in shootings. Consider the case of Jonathan Ayers, a pastor killed by undercover narcotics officers during a botched drug sting in Lavonia, Georgia, last year. Ayers, who was counseling a prostitute and low-level drug offender, was unarmed, had no drugs on him, and appears to have done nothing wrong. An internal investigation and a Georgia Bureau of Investigation inquiry cleared the officers involved in Ayers' death of any wrongdoing. But months later, a local TV station and attorneys for Ayers' widow discovered that Billy Shane Harrison, the officer who killed Ayers, not only hadn't received proper training in the use of lethal force but wasn't legally permitted to carry his service weapon. In fact, under state law, he wasn't even permitted to be a police officer. If Harrison had killed Ayers in Virginia, we might still not know his name, much less that he had no business wearing a badge that day.

Alexandria Commonwealth's Attorney Sengel, who insists the criminal justice system does fine on its own without intrusion by nosy outsiders, attended last week's hearing on Edwards' bill to reiterate his opposition to greater transparency. "Other than people out there who want to write books like Truman Capote, I don't think we've heard a compelling need for this," Sengel said, according to Pope's report on the hearing. "It's designed to address a problem that really doesn't exist, and it would create a situation that's much worse than what we have today."

We could just take Sengel's word for it. But the truth is that we don't know if there are problems inside Northern Virginia's police departments, because Northern Virginia's police departments refuse to release any information to the public. When Sengel investigates a business in Alexandria for fraud, he doesn't let its executives off the hook as long as they give him their word that everything is on the up and up. Yet Sengel would have us believe that law enforcement officials are incapable of corruption, collusion, and deceit—because they (and he) say so.

Law enforcement officials are as fallible as the rest of us. The major difference between them and us is that they are entrusted with the most direct and dramatic power we give the government: the power to arrest, to detain, and to kill. Their failures can rob people of their freedom or their lives. That's more than enough reason to hold them at least as accountable as any other government official. And it's more than enough reason to take back their power, their office, and their paycheck when they refuse to make themselves answerable to the people they serve.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason.

The Golden Age of Comic Books

2010-08-30T12:00:00-04:00

Ben Schwartz’s edited volume The Best American Comics Criticism is the first attempt to anthologize and build a canon of short-form history, journalism, and criticism about comics, and it does a fine job. It also self-consciously marks the beginning of a fresh era in acceptance and achievement for non-genre works told in comics form—“lit comics” as Schwartz has it.

In a way though, from my perspective as a comics fan since picking up an issue of Super Villain Team-Up #2 at a 7-Eleven in the summer of 1975, it also marks the end of an era in comics audiences: the end of an era in which one person could be reasonably expected to be interested in everything in this book.

Like the comics form itself, The Best American Comics Criticism is about both now and history (and as I took a swing at explaining in my essay, “Comics Tragedy: Is the Superhero Invulnerable?” the “now” of lit comics is constrained in interesting, curious, and not always obvious ways by the history and concerns of genre comics). And it (rightfully) subsumes under “criticism”—writing that explores and discusses intelligently the value and essence of a work of art—history, the voices of creators, and the art form reflecting on itself—in addition to the more expected “essay explicitly assessing a particular art work or creator.” It surveys successfully a new world in which both the specialty press, the standard literary and news press, political magazines, and books from big New York publishers all accept comics as a legitimate part of our larger cultural discussion.

But before comics had a wide world of interesting minds willing to think about them, it had obsessive fans. I have noticed in my 35-year career of reading comics, reading the comics specialty press, hanging out in comics shops, and chattering about comics with friends and strangers, that among such fans, something akin to a generic “love of comics” holds us in thrall, compelling us toward a wider interest in stories, themes, and techniques as expressed in comics than we are likely to have in other art forms.

For my own self, I would have very little inclination to read 1930s genre fiction about big city cops and plucky orphans; or an “experimental” novel about an architectural academic, or a lesbian coming-of-age memoir, were they not comics; but because they were, I did, and was in every case delighted and enriched: I love (good) comics, with a fervor that is more specialized and hungry than the way I “love good books” in general.

While I am undoubtedly God’s own special snowflake in many ways, I think the very existence of a book like this, and an audience ready to engage it, indicates that this mentality is not that rare. But the specific way that mentality plays out in people who glommed onto comics in the late 20th century seems apt to get rarer, because of the very richness and width of great comics work that The Best American Comics Criticism chronicles and celebrates.

Now a generation of talented smartypants, both readers and creators, are arising, utterly uninfected by any happy memories of childhood affection for X-Men, Daredevil, Batman, The Spirit, Spider-Man, or whoever. The kind of mind that could be expected to understand and care about Kim Deitch, Steve Ditko, Dan Clowes, Will Elder, Joe Matt, Will Eisner, Sammy Harkham, and the early history of pulp comics publishers and the cultural/political backlash to gory horror periodicals all at once, and even somewhat equally, seems inevitably doomed to become rarer and rarer.
While I do believe the book speaks for and defends itself, for most readers, now and in the future, who want to understand that mind—the mind of the “Comics Aficionado” full stop—at the cusp point of the death of the near-unified scene of comics fandom, this book will continue to illuminate.

Is it a vital consumer-protection matter that the book have “of the 21st century” appended to its title, as one critic has alleged? I think that would in fact have proven quite misleading a generation or so down the line, as it seems obvious that the 21st century’s approach to comics, how they are judged, who is considered of canonical interest, what part of the business and art history is continued important, are going to shift in a far more balkanized, less all-encompassing, direction. This is all the better for the normalizing and expansion of what comics can and will do as a storytelling form.

For an account of those (to this reader) happy days when that unified scene of publications and minds were deeply concerned with, and widely loved, whatever people managed to do with the uniquely exhilarating mixture of words and pictures to tell stories (and even, yes, the way that powerhouse minds such as Will Elder and Steve Ditko locked that mixture into weird, constricting, but glorious little niches), this book does a signal service. Those days are undoubtedly going away. I’ll miss them, but The Best American Comics Criticism will help us remember them.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man (BenBella), Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and Gun Control on Trial (Cato Institute). This article originally appeared at The Comics Journal.

Hatching Bigger Government

2010-08-30T07:00:00-04:00

There have been a lot of unsurprising news stories lately. Rod Blagojevich going on TV. Tiger Woods and his wife divorcing. The economy racing along like an elderly tortoise. And the Food and Drug Administration saying the salmonella outbreak proves the agency needs more power.

We should have seen that coming. In the private sector, entities that fall short of doing their jobs find themselves forced to shrink. In the public sector, the opposite is typically true. Failure is an option, and often a beneficial one.

The Federal Reserve Board and Treasury facilitated the 2008 financial crisis? Then obviously we have no choice but to give them even more responsibility. The Securities and Exchange Commission let Bernie Madoff rob investors? A bigger SEC will be a smarter SEC.

Just once, I'd like to see a government official say, "We blew it, and you know what? If you give us another chance, we'll probably blow it again." But so far, my hope has not availed.

It's true that the FDA is charged with assuring food safety. But really, the government can't do that. The task is too big and too complex. Fortunately, it doesn't have to do it, because the pressures of competition force producers to make sure their goods are clean and wholesome.

What goes curiously unnoticed is that egg suppliers and grocery stores have nothing to gain from sickening their customers—and a lot to lose. It doesn't take many obvious hygiene lapses for a company to get a bad reputation, and a bad reputation can be catastrophic.

In 1971, a New York man died of botulism after eating a can of Bon Vivant soup. If you've never heard of Bon Vivant soup, there's a simple explanation: In no time at all, the company was bankrupt and the brand was as defunct as William McKinley.

The farms implicated in this episode are likely to find themselves oddly short of buyers in the coming months, if not years—unless they can prove they have taken drastic steps to clean up their act. But the burden of proof will be on them.

They can also expect to be sued for huge sums of money. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other companies that didn't screw up, whose wares will be more attractive going forward.

Most consumers, however, accept the possibility of getting salmonella as a fact of life. Each year in the United States, there are nearly 175,000 cases of food poisoning caused by this sort of contamination in eggs.

But that's less than it sounds, and in recent years, the problem has steadily declined. Experts estimate that in normal times, the incidence of salmonella is about one in every 10,000 eggs, which means the average person can expect to eat one about once every 40 years.

Even without a federal recall in this outbreak, fewer than one in every 100 eggs would be tainted. It's a level of risk that doesn't cry out for new legions of federal bureaucrats to gallop to the rescue.

Also worth keeping in mind is that the rare encounter with a bad egg need not be unpleasant. For years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has advised consumers to cook all eggs thoroughly and avoid foods (Hollandaise sauce, homemade mayonnaise, Caesar salad dressing) that use raw eggs. Follow those instructions, and you are exempt from harm. Skip them, and you're still pretty safe.

Those consumers who want to be extra-vigilant have another option: pasteurized eggs, in or out of the shell. Widely available in grocery stores, they can be eaten undercooked or raw with impunity.

Most people, however, don't see the need to go an extra mile to eliminate a hazard that is already so small as to be invisible. Why should Washington try to impose a level of safety that buyers can already select for themselves if they feel the need?

Given the chance, the market offers options. Some people would prefer slightly lower prices and a slightly higher risk. Some would pay more to get greater peace of mind. Stricter federal rules may eliminate choices that some competent adults would prefer.

A moment of alarm, however, can be used to justify legislation that may impose unseen costs without solving the problem. That's reason to question any new powers sought by regulators. Granting those powers is as easy as scrambling an egg. Unscrambling is a lot harder.

Reason.tv: What We Saw at the Glenn Beck Rally in DC

2010-08-28T20:18:00-04:00

California’s Gift of Shame

2010-08-27T16:30:00-04:00

How would you like to be running the California Travel and Tourism Commission right now?

The state is generating an almost constant stream of alarming news. “Essential” services from libraries to police hours to public school teaching staffs are being drastically cut. Cities are going bankrupt. This year’s state budget—which currently boasts a $19 billion shortfall—has been delayed for nearly two months, with no agreement in sight between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers. Employees are being furloughed. The state will soon have to start issuing IOUs to cover its obligations. Sacramento announced Monday it would be unable to pay nearly $3 billion in school and county subsidies. Books with titles like Plunder and California Crackup detail how massive financial obligations have rendered the state essentially ungovernable.

In short, California can’t buy decent press these days. (And even if it could it wouldn’t have any money to do so.)

So why is this good news?

Because in a state that has seen three years of nearly solid financial pain, what is going on right now is pain with a purpose. Outgoing Gov. Schwarzenegger is using fiscal emergency as leverage toward a permanent solution to the public employee pension crisis that has gutted California’s budget and hamstrung other states. If he succeeds, the example could point to a solution for the many states that need to get a handle on their public employee commitments.

First, about those IOUs. During a lengthy budget standoff in 2009, the state issued $2.6 billion in IOUs to cover payments to contractors, local governments, and residents in line for tax refunds and college scholarships. This year the budget (which is supposed to have been completed in June) is overdue again, and the differences between Schwarzenegger and the Democrats are even sharper. Last week, Controller John Chiang announced that IOUs would begin coming in late August or early September.

On its face, Chiang’s announcement is an attempt to put pressure on the governor. The two are locked in a long-running legal dispute over another budget-standoff tactic: the governor’s annual attempts to reduce state workers’ pay to Federal minimum wage until the budget is approved—which the union-friendly Chiang claims is impossible due to the state’s antiquated COBOL-based payroll system.

But on the IOU issue, Chiang has been fairly consistent in his comments, and the state will in fact need to put off payments (as it did Monday by deferring subsidies to counties and schools) very soon. In any event, the controller’s comments probably ended up strengthening the governor’s position, which has been refreshingly clear: Schwarzenegger is willing to risk any number of fiscal “black eyes,” to court credit downgrades and bad public relations, even to leave office without a budget passed, in order to get concessions from Democrats and their union supporters.

Among these concessions: a 5 percent increase in employee pre-tax contributions toward retirement funds; changes in pension calculations to prevent pension “spiking”; and more honest disclosure of how pensions are funded. Another item that has long been on the governor’s wish list is a state “rainy day fund” of $20 billion—close to what Schwarzenegger believes the state would have saved in the absence of runaway public-sector pension payouts during the last decade.

Which brings us to the most important concession of all. Schwarzenegger is seeking to undo Senate Bill 400, a 1999 law that vastly expanded pension payouts to government workers. Passed after a mere five minutes of debate, based on some highly misleading documentation and unrealistic expectations from the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), SB 400 paved the way for a nearly 3,000 percent increase in pension liabilities for the state.

That debt is eating into other state funding. Since SB 400’s passage, expenditures on environmental protection and parks have actually decreased relative to inflation. It’s important to remember that Schwarzenegger’s struggle is not motivated by small government principle. His problem is that commitments to government workers are preventing the state from spending on other stuff.

But he has been remarkably consistent on this, and may deserve more credit than he has received for raising the national alarm about public sector union power and the crushing burden of paying for government workers’ plush retirements.

Viewed through this lens, Schwarzenegger’s gambits in the budget battle—alternately described as nonsensical, petulant, and a “gubernatorial ransom note”—begin to make sense.

As of now, state employees are due for furloughs three days a month, which will amount to an average 14 percent pay cut. Critics and the media have questioned whether furloughs save the state’s budget as much as advertised, but the savings are a side benefit. The real aim is to put pressure on the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its clients in the state legislature. Union members see actual pay reductions, and eventually, so the thinking goes, they will demand their leaders work with the governor to do something about it. (That Schwarzenegger has negotiated new contracts—which roll back most of SB400—with six unions suggests the tactic works, though the largest union contract negotiations, including SEIU's, are still unfinished.)

An even clearer use of pressure on government workers has been in the governor’s (so far unsuccessful) attempts to reduce state employee pay to minimum wage for the duration of the budget delay. While Chiang and previous controllers have used the old-software excuse to avoid implementing this plan, the message still comes through: State workers are not innocent bystanders in the budget impasse. Their excessive compensation is the reason California can no longer manage its budgets.

Schwarzenegger has proven to be a master at stratagems like these, declaring states of fiscal emergency, using apocalyptic rhetoric in places, and courting the credit downgrades that would accompany another IOU experience. (Standard & Poor’s already gives the state its fourth-lowest investment-grade rating of A-, and has said it may lower the score if a budget isn’t signed by autumn.) Schwarzenegger’s genius has been to realize that what looks like catastrophe from the outside can be pretty useful in negotiation.

Whether it helps the state’s never small self-image is another matter. But Kathryn Burnside, spokeswoman for the industry-funded California Travel and Tourism Commission, says the trade group has not seen bad news keeping people away from California (though the global recession has cut into tourism). “Certainly, there has been coverage of the state’s financial state, and we’ve seen it in international headlines as well,” Burnside says. “But when people come to California, they’re coming for the beaches, they’re coming for the mountains, for the attractions and the resorts and the sunshine. We’re not worried that political news is deterring people from coming to enjoy all the things California has to offer.”

Tim Cavanaugh is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Reason.tv: If You Think Your State Is Broke Now, Just Wait Until the Public-Sector Pension Bomb Detonates!

2010-08-27T15:12:00-04:00

China's Looming Real-Estate Bubble

2010-08-27T12:00:00-04:00

American enthusiasts of more stimulus have been urging this country to look to China for guidance on how to beat a recession. As they see it, while our politicians debated and dithered and fell short, China's wise autocrats moved quickly to inject a massive stimulus and restore robust growth.

Despite the global downturn, China's economic growth rate remains above 10 percent. But there is mounting evidence that Beijing has misallocated vast amounts of capital, touching off a real-estate crisis that could yet drag the world's second-largest economy down to earth.

When the global marketplace went into meltdown mode two years ago and Chinese exports dropped off, Beijing mounted a stimulus several times bigger relative to the size of its economy than in this country. It announced a four trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus for infrastructure projects and housing developments. Some of the stimulus was used to encourage local governments to lend money to state-owned companies to develop housing complexes, roads and bridges, on the theory that these are big employment generators because they boost heavy manufacturing—steel, cement—and other sectors of the economy.

Beijing also lowered capital reserve requirements for its state-owned banks ordering them to dole out loans to "support growth." Though official data are unreliable, in 2009 Beijing apparently handed out somewhere close to 10 trillion yuan in new loans—more than twice the year before—and expanded the country's total loan portfolio and money supply by one-third, according to Patrick Chovanec, associate professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing.

Prominent progressives in this country hailed the moves. Paul Krugman wrote: "China is doing what I'm constantly urging the Obama Administration to do, which is to reverse the economic decline by a large-scale stimulus." Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote in TalkingPoints Memo last year: "If only we could export our Blue Dogs and deficit hawks to China, we might be able to compete."

But that ignores the nasty side effects. Fueled in part by this massive injection of liquidity, housing prices that had started dropping due to the recession began to soar again. Over the past year they increased nearly 12 percent, according to the latest figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics. So many middle-class Chinese (especially young couples wishing to move out of their parents' home) are being priced out of the market that their travails became the subject of a popular TV series called Dwelling Narrowness. Beijing banned the show, fearing it would cause unrest.

The problem is that government money is going to build homes not for occupancy but for ownership. Speculation, if you will. Andy Xie, a Shanghai-based economist formerly with Morgan Stanley, believes almost 25 percent to 30 percent of private commercial and housing stock in China is vacant. Entire cities, such as Ordos in inner-Mongolia, erected literally from scratch, stand empty.

"Chinese treat homes like gold bars buying multiple units as a store of value," notes Chovanec. Chinese avoid the stock market because it is still volatile and risky, and banks and bonds offer a low yield. Hence, Chinese are content to buy homes and let them sit because, thanks to the absence of property taxes, holding costs are negligible. Having never experienced a housing slump since China privatized its housing market in the 1990s, they believe that home prices only rise.

This can't last, but backers of China's stimulus believe there won't be any serious economic downside when the bubble bursts. Homeowners won't be thrown on the street because Chinese buy their first homes outright through their savings—not loans. And when house prices drop, the excess stock will quickly get scooped up—not boarded up.
While Chinese homeowners are not generally leveraged, those who buy second homes do finance them. And developers, including local governments and state-owned companies, are massively leveraged. This poses a big problem—Shen Minggao, Citigroup's Hong Kong-based China economist, estimates in Bloomberg Businessweek that at least 2.4 trillion yuan of the stimulus is already in nonperforming loans.

China's autocrats understand that they have a bubble on their hands. They've mandated minimum down payments of 50 percent on second homes and are considering property taxes to rein in speculative purchases. However, this will mean that the houses put on the market will find fewer buyers.

Beijing is in a dilemma. It can cut spending and rein in its monetary expansion, releasing over time capital for more productive endeavors (especially if it opens up hitherto closed investment options) and putting the economy on a healthier footing. However, that would mean slower growth, lower home values, rising unemployment and potential political unrest. Alternatively, it can buy a few more years of faux-growth and stability by propping up the real-estate market—and risk making the day of reckoning far worse when it arrives.

Either way, Beijing's mandarins haven't discovered some magical formula to spend and inflate their way out of a recession. Pouring liquidity into real estate is the Keynesian equivalent of digging ditches and filling them with stones. Unfortunately, the Chinese economy has fallen into one—a ditch, that is. The U.S. might have endured a bad recession. But so long as it avoids the second stimulus that China enthusiasts are advocating, it might be up and running while China is still digging itself out.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes.com columnist. Anthony Randazzo is Reason Foundation's director of economic research. Reason Foundation research assistant David Godow provided research support. This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Friday Funnies

2010-08-27T07:00:00-04:00

Taking Economic Liberty Seriously

2010-08-26T16:30:00-04:00

On March 5, 1934, the U.S. Supreme Court declared New York shopkeeper Leo Nebbia to be a criminal because he sold two quarts of milk and a 5 cent loaf of bread for the combined low price of 18 cents. As Justice Owen Roberts explained in his 5-4 majority opinion in Nebbia v. New York, the state’s Milk Control Board had fixed the minimum price of milk at 9 cents a quart to eliminate the “evils” of price-cutting.

As for the constitutionality of this action, which raised the price of milk during the lean years of the Great Depression in an effort to boost the profits of New York dairy farmers, while doing absolutely nothing to improve the health or safety of the milk-drinking public, Roberts simply shrugged. “A state is free to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare, and to enforce that policy by legislation adapted to its purpose." Furthermore, “If the laws passed are seen to have a reasonable relation to a proper legislative purpose, and are neither arbitrary nor discriminatory, the requirements of due process are satisfied.” In other words, when it came to economic regulations, the courts needed only to rubber stamp whatever the lawmakers deemed “reasonable.”

Today, we call this highly deferential approach the “rational basis test,” and as Timothy Sandefur explains in his superb new book The Right to Earn A Living: Economic Freedom and the Law, the results have been disastrous for the judicial protection of economic rights. “Modern government is at liberty to violate a citizen’s right to earn a living almost at will,” Sandefur observes, pointing to a depressing array of occupational licensing schemes, state-sanctioned monopolies, price controls, regulatory takings, eminent domain abuse, and other government misdeeds that receive almost no meaningful scrutiny from the courts.

Expertly weaving legal history with contemporary events, Sandefur shows how this shameful state of affairs violates the text and history of the Constitution and contradicts some five centuries of Anglo-American precedent. The right to earn an honest living, he explains, dates back to the Magna Carta and was cited repeatedly by English judges and legal experts in the 16th and 17th centuries, directly influencing America’s founding generation. In 1615's The Case of the Tailors of Ipswich, for example, Lord Chief Justice of England Edward Coke declared, “at the common law, no man could be prohibited from working in any lawful trade.”

Nearly two centuries later, James Madison, one of the chief architects of both the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, echoed Coke’s words: “That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations.” Similarly, Rep. John Bingham (R-Ohio), the author of the first section of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which applied the Bill of Rights and other unenumerated rights to the states, said that the 14th Amendment included “the liberty...to work in an honest calling and contribute by your toil in some sort to the support of your felllowmen, and to be secure in the enjoyment of the fruits of your toil.”

So what went wrong? According to Sandefur, the blame falls largely on the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who believed that government action should be the primary agent of all social change. To that end, the Progressives enacted a mountain of new legislation that touched on every aspect of human life, from workplace regulations and antitrust statutes to alcohol prohibition, racial segregation, and eugenics.

When conservative state and federal judges began striking down some of these laws, Progressives responded by calling for judicial restraint, which is the idea that judges should defer to lawmakers and let the majority have its way. By the 1930s, leading Progressives such as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis had popularized a selective form of judicial restraint, one that told the courts to uphold economic regulations while aggressively protecting free speech and privacy. That set the template for today’s rational basis test and the second-class citizenship of economic rights.

It’s certainly not a happy story, but if you want to understand today’s illiberal legal landscape and how it got that way, this eloquent and carefully researched book is a perfect place to start.

Damon W. Root is an associate editor at Reason magazine.