Cato Unbound on Assisted Suicide

By
Jason Kuznicki

Last month, a Massachusetts ballot initiative that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide in that state narrowly failed. It was only the latest in a decades-long set of legal and electoral battles over what we might call the last choice: when and how we may end our own lives, and with what forms of assistance.

Cato Unbound this month features a lead essay on physician-assisted dying by Howard Ball, a Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont and author of At Liberty to Die: The Battle for Death with Dignity in America.

Joining him are Patrick Lee, the John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Chair in Bioethics at Franciscan University of Steubenville, who argues that assisting suicide devalues the intrinsic good of human life; and Philip Nitschke, the Founder and Director of Exit International, a leading group advocating for end-of-life rights, who questions whether the act of deliberately terminating one’s life really needs a doctor – and by extension, the state – at all.

Powerful ethical and legal questions surround this choice. While a libertarian might be tempted to affirm that physician-assisted suicide is an exercise in personal autonomy, the matter is by no means so simple. The legal and constitutional traditions of our country have only occasionally affirmed such a right, and the potential for abuse in various assisted-suicide regimes may be unacceptably high. Add to this the concerns raised by those who argue for the essential dignity, not of a painless death, but of a natural one, and we confront a vast terrain of ethical issues.

As always, Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes, and enter into the conversation on their own websites and blogs, or on other venues. We also welcome your letters. Send them to jkuznicki at cato dot org. Selections may be published at the editors’ option.

Topics: 
General, Political Philosophy, Regulatory Studies

Gerard Depardieu Goes John Galt

By
Marian L. Tupy

Few Frenchmen are more recognizable at home and abroad than the movie star Gerard Depardieu. Last week, Depardieu caused a great controversy in his native land by moving to Belgium – partly to avoid the 75 percent income tax on the wealthy that was introduced by the socialist President of France, Francois Hollande. Depardieu’s move was condemned by the French political establishment, including the Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault who called the actor’s action “pathetic.”

Depardieu shot back and, in an open letter to Monsieur Ayrault, wrote, “I’m leaving because you think success, creation, talent and anything different should be punished. I am sending you back my passport and social security, which I have never used.” The French actor claims to have “paid 85 percent taxes on his revenues this year [2012] and estimated that he had paid €145m ($189m) in total since he started work as a printer at the age of 14.”

The lessons from Monsieur Hollande’s debacle should be obvious. The rich are a mobile lot and there are plenty of countries that will welcome them with open arms. The British Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, has promised to “roll out a red carpet” for the French tax refuges. Moreover, as my colleague Alan Reynolds reminds us, high tax rates on income may discourage many wealthy people from remaining in the labor force, since, to use economic jargon, their elasticity of taxable income is much higher than that of low and middle income earners. Translated into English, people like me have to work even if our tax rates go up, because we have to come up with money to pay our mortgages, student loans, etc. The rich people don’t.

The French government was warned of the negative consequences of tax increases. It chose to ignore those warnings. Instead, the French socialists assumed that they could go on plucking the golden goose indefinitely. (Then again, the socialist grasp on reality has never been very good.) Of course, when idiotic policies backfire, politicians feign surprise and then shift the blame onto others. Thus, French Labor Minister Michel Sapin asked in a radio interview “What is more normal than those who earn enormous amounts of money paying lots of tax?” The French Culture and Communication Minister Aurelie Filippetti bemoaned Depardieu’s action by stating that “We shouldn’t be receiving moral lessons from people who abandon the battlefield when we need everyone to be mobilized.”

So, there you have it. A great actor who started with nothing and built a spectacular career that revived the French movie industry and filled the coffers of the French state is condemned for finally standing up for himself by a member of parasitic political elite that has brought a great country to the edge of fiscal ruin. Straight out of Ayn Rand’s novel. 

 

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, International Economics and Development, Tax and Budget Policy

We Need More Growth and Prosperity to Boost Charitable Contributions, not Bribery in the Tax Code

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

I’m a strong believer in fundamental tax reform. We need a system like the flat tax to improve economic performance.

No tax system is good for growth, of course, but the negative impact of taxation can be reduced by lowering marginal tax rate(s), eliminating double taxation of saving and investment, and getting rid of loopholes that encourage people to make decisions for tax reasons even if they don’t make economic sense.

While the general public is quite sympathetic to tax reform and would like to de-fang the IRS, there are three main pockets of resistance.

  1. The class-warfare crowd is opposed to the flat tax for ideological reasons. They want high tax rates and punitive double taxation – even if the government winds up collecting less money.
  2. The lobbyists and special interest groups also are opposed to tax reform, along with the politicians that they cultivate. The tax code is a major source of political corruption, after all, and there would be a lot fewer opportunities to game the system and swap loopholes for political support if the 72,000 page tax code was tossed in a dumpster.
  3. Beneficiaries of certain tax preferences such as the mortgage interest deduction, the charitable deduction, and the state and local tax deduction are worried about tax reform, either because they are taxpayers who utilize the preferences or because they represent interest groups that benefit because the government has tilted the playing field.

This post is designed to allay the fears of this third group, specifically the folks who worry that tax reform might be bad news for charities.

The Wall Street Journal today published a pro-con debate on the charitable deduction. As you might expect, my role is to argue in favor of a simple and fair system that would eliminate all tax preferences.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

Lasers: The End of Privacy?

By
Jim Harper

Gizmodo points to some outré technology on the Department of Homeland Security’s drawing board.

Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 164 feet (50 meters) away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body—agents will be able to get any information they want without even touching you.

I don’t know about each of the technologies in this article, but the one I do know of—Raman spectroscopy—works by exciting a molecule with a laser. When the molecule returns to its normal state, it gives off a distinct photon that can be treated as a signature of the molecule. Thus, munitions and drug detection becomes “easy.”

Here’s why “easy” is in scare-quotes: At anything other than a very small distance, you have to shine a very high-intensity laser and have very sensitive detection equipment to gather the signature. The laser would fry people’s skin and burn their retinas, and the sensor would probably not work in the noisy, dusty areas where they might use these devices. There may be some new technology that defeats these challenges of physics, of course, but I hope not.

The article says there has “so far been no discussion about the personal rights and privacy issues involved.” Not true!

On page nine of Cato’s brief to the Supreme Court in Florida v. Jardines, we noted this developmental technology as an example of something that could perform quite invasive analysis without being a “search” under the Jacobsen/Caballes corollary to the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test from Katz v. United States.

The doctrine that arose from Katz was that a Fourth Amendment search occurs when one’s reasonable expectations of privacy are upended by government action. When government action only detects only illegal drugs, such as when a drug-detecting dog sniffed Caballes’s car, this is something in which a person can have no reasonable expectation of privacy, so no search has occurred. Get it?

Technologies like remote Raman spectroscopy illustrate the absurd result Katz doctrine produced in Jacobsen and Caballes. Katz and the Jacobsen/Caballes corollary are junk.

Cato’s Jardines brief points out the better way to administer the Fourth Amendment: When government agents use uncommon technology to perceive otherwise imperceptible things, that is searching. If the searching is appurtenant to our persons, houses, papers, and effects, it must be reasonable. In the vast majority of cases, that means getting a warrant.

Lasers won’t be the end of privacy if I can help it.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Advertising, Credit Reporting, and ‘Anti-Objectification’

By
Jim Harper

You need a set of priors that I lack to stay interested in the forthcoming Suffolk University Law Review article, “Selling Consumers, Not Lists: The New World of Digital Decision-Making and the Role of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.” I think the thing animating authors Ed Mierzwinski and Jeff Chester is what I call “anti-objectification,” a desire at the outskirts of the privacy concept. It is bad, anti-objectifiers appear to believe, when a person is treated as a mere object of commerce, observed and communicated with on that basis alone.

Without anti-objectification, I can’t find much of anything wrong in their description of the emerging world of digital data collection and marketing. There is an impressive and complex array of techniques coming online to discover what people want, learn when they want it, and communicate with them in ways that will spur them to act on their desires.

Given the wrongs they perceive in these developments—which, again, I must guess at—Mierzwinski and Chester make a broad pitch to have online marketing drawn under the blanket of Fair Credit Reporting Act regulation. Not only the Federal Trade Commission, but the new, unconstrained Consumer Financial Protection Board, should look at bringing online advertising within the FCRA, they say.

Given the paucity of (apparent) harms to be rectified, one struggles to examine how broadening regulation of the information economy would improve things. But I don’t know why the Fair Credit Reporting Act would be a model anyway. In forty years, the FCRA has not cured the ills that Senator Proxmire (D-WI) recited when he introduced the law—to judge by the words of self-styled consumer advocates, at least. New challenges have emerged, and the FCRA has turned credit bureaus to the government’s use in financial surveillance. The FCRA preempted state common law—you can’t sustain a defamation action against a credit bureau, no matter how wrong its reporting is—replacing it with opaque and unwieldy bureaucratic procedures for those who believe their credit bureau records are inaccurate.

The FCRA already reduces consumer welfare by keeping new entrants out of the credit reporting business. When companies edge toward providing data that might be used for credit decisions, employment screening, housing, and the like, they quickly learn to eschew that market so they can avoid the FCRA’s obligations and regulator inquests. The result? Our economy is making less intelligent decisions about credit, employment, and housing. Efficiences that would lower costs to consumers across the board are not being found.

I drew lessons from the failure of the Fair Credit Reporting Act to fix things in my paper “Reputation under Regulation: The Fair Credit Reporting Act at 40 and Lessons for the Internet Privacy Debate.”

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Today Is Bill of Rights Day

By
Tim Lynch

Today is Bill of Rights Day. So it’s an appropriate time to consider the state of our constitutional safeguards.

Let’s consider each amendment in turn.

The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” Government officials, however, have insisted that they can gag recipients of “national security letters” and censor broadcast ads in the name of campaign finance reform.

The Second Amendment says the people have the right “to keep and bear arms.” Government officials, however, make it difficult to keep a gun in the home and make it a crime for a citizen to carry a gun for self-protection.

The Third Amendment says soldiers may not be quartered in our homes without the consent of the owners. This safeguard is one of the few that is in fine shape – so we can pause here for a laugh.

The Fourth Amendment says the people have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. Government officials, however, insist that they can conduct commando-style raids on our homes and treat airline travelers like prison inmates by conducting virtual strip searches.

The Fifth Amendment says that private property shall not be taken “for public use without just compensation.” Government officials, however, insist that they can use eminent domain to take away our property and give it to other private parties who covet it.

The Sixth Amendment says that in criminal prosecutions, the person accused is guaranteed a right to trial by jury. Government officials, however, insist that they can punish people who want to have a trial—“throwing the book” at those who refuse to plead guilty—which explains why 95 percent of the criminal cases never go to trial.

The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases where the controversy “shall exceed twenty dollars.” Government officials, however, insist that they can impose draconian fines on people without jury trials.

The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishments. Government officials, however, insist that a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense is not cruel.

The Ninth Amendment says that the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights should not be construed to deny or disparage others “retained by the people.” Government officials, however, insist that they will decide for themselves what rights, if any, will be retained by the people.

The Tenth Amendment says that the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states, or to the people. Government officials, however, insist that they will decide for themselves what powers they possess, and have extended federal control over health care, crime, education, and other matters the Constitution reserves to the states and the people.

It’s a disturbing snapshot, to be sure, but not one the Framers of the Constitution would have found altogether surprising. They would sometimes refer to written constitutions as mere “parchment barriers,” or what we call “paper tigers.” They nevertheless concluded that having a written constitution was better than having nothing at all.

The key point is this: A free society does not just “happen.” It has to be deliberately created and deliberately maintained. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. To remind our fellow citizens of their responsibility in that regard, the Cato Institute has distributed more than five million copies of our pocket Constitution. At this time of year, it’ll make a great stocking stuffer.

Let’s enjoy the holidays but let’s also resolve to be more vigilant about defending our Constitution. To learn more about Cato’s work in defense of the Constitution, go here. To support the work of Cato, go here.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy

Blanket Federal Discipline Mandates Reportedly Not on the Table

By
Andrew J. Coulson

I spoke today with Sen. Durbin’s office regarding my concerns over the legislative direction that his “school-to-prison” hearings might take, and was assured that federal mandates such as I feared are not in fact under consideration. Perhaps the recent introduction of other sweeping federal mandates has colored my perception.

At any rate, this is a good sign, and I hope that the Senator and his colleagues come away from their hearings recognizing that thoughtful administration of school discipline cannot be secured via mandates but rather must be achieved by giving educators the freedoms and incentives to serve the interests of children. When teachers’ and administrators’ professional futures depend on their success at keeping kids in school, helping them to realize their individual potentials, and preparing them for the challenges of adulthood, they will constantly search for new and better ways of achieving those ends. And they will find them. That is why parent-driven education markets outperform other types of school systems.

And the best thing the federal government can do to make such education markets universally accessible is to draw attention to state-level programs such as Florida’s and Pennsylvania’s education tax credits that are in the forefront of advancing them. Sometimes federal legislation just isn’t the right tool for the job.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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