The AEA’s Annual Meeting: plus ça change

By
Steve H. Hanke

The American Economics Association, the granddaddy and most prestigious of professional economic organizations, opens its annual meeting in San Diego today. Even though not all of its 18,000+ members will show, it will certainly be a big affair.

One of the AEA’s founders was Prof. Richard T. Ely, an ardent Christian Socialist and prominent faculty member of The Johns Hopkins University. Ely and five other “young rebels,” as Ely describes them in his autobiography Ground Under Our Feet, were fresh from graduate studies in Germany when they founded the AEA in 1885. The young rebels had studied at the feet of the leaders of the German historical school of economics, who were at war—the great Methodenstreit—with members of the Austrian school of economics and others who harbored laissez-faire attitudes.

The AEA’s founding fathers saw themselves as social reformers. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that Prof. Ely described the primary motivation for the founding of the AEA as “a protest against the system of laissez faire, as expounded by the writers of the older ‘orthodox’ American school of economics.”

While they would probably frown on what their baby has become, Prof. Ely and the other rebels would certainly rejoice at the fact that their ideas are now en vogue in American political culture.

Topics: 
Political Philosophy

Our Rushed Debate on NSA Spying

By
Julian Sanchez

While the news media were obsessing over the Fiscal Cliff, President Obama quietly signed a five-year reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act, which the Senate hastily approved after defeating a string of common-sense amendments that would have provided a modicum of additional protection for the civil liberties of Americans.

Our resident video ninjas, Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg, assembled this short video explaining just what happened using footage from that all-too-brief Senate debate—and revealing how little interest Congress seems to have in protecting us from dragnet surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

The El-Masri Case

By
Tim Lynch

Robyn Blumner’s 2012 award for civil liberties:

Typically at year’s end I give out the “Freeby” award to the person or institution that did the most to advance civil liberties. This year I look beyond our borders to a courageous stand against the CIA’s mistreatment of prisoners. The European Court of Human Rights gets the “Freeby” for finally giving Khaled El-Masri a measure of justice.

Earlier this month the court handed El-Masri, a German national, a victory against Macedonia for its complicity in his torture within the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program nine years ago. America was not directly on trial, but our guilt was clear.

On Dec. 31, 2003, El-Masri was detained after his name was found similar to that of an al-Qaida suspect. Macedonian security officials held him incommunicado for 23 days at America’s request. After that he was turned over to the CIA at Skopje Airport, where, the court found, he was severely beaten, stripped and forcibly sodomized with a suppository and flown to Afghanistan. For months El-Masri was held in a cold, unheated cell at the “Salt Pit,” a secret CIA-run prison. Even after it became evident his detention was a mistake, El-Masri wasn’t immediately released. Finally at the end of May 2004, he was taken and dumped at a roadside in Albania, left to find his way home to Germany.

Since then, El-Masri’s efforts to get justice in U.S. courts failed. The “state secrets” defense defeated any consideration of his claim. Astoundingly the United States has never apologized for what happened to him or even publicly acknowledged it.

Read the whole thing.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Who Needs William and Kate When You Have Jong-un and Sol-ju?

By
Doug Bandow

The United States was born in revolution, as some unruly colonists revolted against the world’s greatest power. The latter empire no longer is so great, but it retains a strange hold over Americans; witness the media frenzy when it was revealed that Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge and wife of Prince William, is expecting a baby.

Another royal pregnancy and perhaps birth is also receiving attention: Ri Sol-ju, wife of North Korea’s Great Successor (and many other titles, even more than possessed by William) Kim Jong-un, may have been pregnant and, even more important, may have given birth.

Little is known about anything in the modern Hermit Kingdom, but rumors recently swirled both north and south of the border that Ri was pregnant. In December she was seen “wearing a billowing black dress that covered what appeared to be a swollen belly,” according to one Associated Press report. But the news service went on to report that “The seemingly pregnant belly sported by the wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in mid-December appeared to be gone by New Year’s Day.”

This has created great excitement in South Korea. And if there is an appealing baby to go along with the more telegenic “Cute Leader,” we are likely to hear a new round of speculation about the likelihood that Kim is a committed reformer determined to pull his desperately poor, isolated, and repressive nation into the 21st century.

Unfortunately, this belief reflects the continuing triumph of desperate hope over depressing experience. Talk of economic liberalization so far has yielded few practical results. There is no evidence of political reform: The Workers Party of Korea, the North Korean communist party, appears to be exerting its control over the military, not relaxing its hold over the people. And Pyongyang actually has tightened border security to prevent escape across the Yalu River into China.

Some day the North’s bizarre system of monarchical communism will come to an end. Unfortunately there is no evidence yet that Kim Jong-un is an agent of “hope and change” for the North Korean people.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, International Economics and Development, Law and Civil Liberties

How Trade Agreements Stray from Free Trade

By
Simon Lester

I’ve mentioned before on this blog my concern that some provisions in trade agreements have little to do with free trade. Here’s a good example, from the specialty trade publication Inside U.S. Trade

U.S. labor unions are keeping an eye on the U.S.-European efforts to deepen economic ties, and believe a potential U.S.-EU trade agreement could provide an opportunity to raise some U.S. labor standards to the level prevailing in EU member states, according to labor sources.

…

This source noted that the EU is a community of nations that tends to have stronger labor laws than the U.S., higher union density and better wage rates. U.S. unions do not want to see a trans-Atlantic trade agreement used as a vehicle to lower labor standards in Europe, and they also view it as an opportunity to try to “raise up” U.S. standards to the European level, this source said.

I’ve talked about the proposed U.S.-EU free trade agreement before. To repeat what I said previously, there are some benefits to these kinds of agreements (although multilateral agreements would be much better). But I would really like to see the negotiators stick to the core issue of reducing protectionism, and not get distracted by domestic regulatory issues like the appropriate level of labor standards.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

Law Prof Argues Against the Rule of Law

By
Ilya Shapiro

Roger’s not the only one who found “strange” Georgetown law professor Mike Seidman’s New York Times op-ed calling for us to ditch that old, antiquated Constitution to which some of us bitterly cling. Here’s a letter to the editor that I submitted:

Louis Michael Seidman wants us to “kick our constitutional-law addiction.” Why? He proclaims our political system “dysfunctional” and our government “broken” but makes no convincing case that the Constitution is to blame for our recurring political breakdowns or that giving up on it would reduce our dysfunction. But malformed though it is, the rickety old structure has served us well over the centuries.

Mr. Seidman offers nothing to suggest how we might go about governing ourselves once liberated from the Constitution, the skeletal structure that frames a living conversation about our relationship with government, not blind worship of “a poetic piece of parchment.”

He confidently predicts that his proposal wouldn’t yield total anarchy. But he doesn’t explain how we could preserve even the “political stability” he values while treating the Constitution’s provisions as mere recommendations, to be accepted or rejected through processes whose constitution-free structure he never specifies.

He tells us that he would preserve free speech and religion, equal protection and limited government, but he never explains how he picks those values over others or how his maddeningly vague proposal would “give real freedom a chance” rather than risk tyranny.

Actually, no, I didn’t write that.  It’s a letter by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe that ran in today’s Times. Tribe is one of the most celebrated and cited legal scholars ever, an old-line liberal lion with whom I disagree on many if not most aspects of constitutional interpretation. Nevertheless, he gets this spot on. We may disagree on what the Constitution means, but we’re in full agreement that it’s this nation’s basic law and must be central to the operation of our legal and political institutions.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

A Compact for America to Rein in Government

By
Ilya Shapiro

In 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that the one thing missing from the newly minted Constitution was some kind of limit on federal debt:

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

Now that Washington has kicked the can on our out-of-control spending yet again, isn’t it time to reconsider Jefferson’s wish?

It may be easier than previously thought, through an ingenious spin on the balanced budget amendment (BBA).  Compact for America, a Texas-based nonprofit advised by the Goldwater Institute’s Nick Dranias, is advancing an agreement among the states — called an “interstate compact” — to transform the constitutional amendment process into a “turn-key” operation.  That is, a single interstate compact can consolidate all the state action involved in the Article V process: the application to Congress for an amendment convention, delegate appointments and instructions, selection of the convention location and rules, and ultimate ratification.  It then consolidates all the corresponding congressional action, both the call for the convention and ratification referral, into a single omnibus concurrent resolution.

The secret to combining so much in just two overarching pieces of legislation is the use of contingent effective dates — also known as “conditional enactments” or “tie-barring” — to ensure that each piece of legislation only goes “live” at the right time.  The Compact for America is thus designed to cut the time and resources needed for states to originate and ratify a BBA, making it possible to achieve in the next six months, with a symbolic target date of July 4, 2013.

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Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Tax and Budget Policy

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