David Boaz

In his new book Enlightenment Now and in his McLaughlin Lecture at the Cato Institute this week, Steven Pinker made the point that we may fail to appreciate how much progress the world has made because the news is usually about bad and unusual things. For instance, he said, quoting Max Roser, if the media truly reported the important changes in the world, “they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.”

This is understandable. As Pinker writes, 

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where  a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

And among the things that do happen, the positive and negative ones unfold on different time lines. The news, far from being a “first draft of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary. It focuses on discrete events, generally those that took place since the last edition (in earlier times, the day before; now, seconds before). Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day,  and as they unfold, they  will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.

I’ve noted this myself. I think the mainstream media such as NPR, which I listen to morning and evening, fail to adequately examine the most important fact in modern history—what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Fact, the enormous and continuing increase in human longevity and living standards since the industrial revolution. If you listen to NPR or read the New York Times, you’ll be well informed about the news in general and about problems such as racism, sexism, and environmental disaster. But you won’t often be reminded that we are the richest, most comfortable, best-fed, longest-lived people in history. Or as Indur Goklany put it in a book title, you won’t hear about The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet.

Pinker does point out, “Information about human progress, though absent from major news outlets and intellectual forums, is easy enough to find. The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser’s Our World in Data, Marian Tupy’s HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.” But of course those aren’t the major media. Which is why, he says, “And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.”

So what if the media did report the most important news, the Great Fact? I asked Cato intern Thasos Athens to help me envision that:

Restore honor and dignity to the White House

Free trade

Comprehensive immigration reform

Prudent diplomacy

Defend freedom of speech

Rein in executive abuse of power

Balance the budget

Support the president

The effort to form a coalition government in Germany may finally be coming to an end. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s original plan after last September’s election fell apart when the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) decided to not join a coalition due to the fiscally irresponsible demands if other parties. It’s unfortunate that major American media regularly refer to the FDP as “pro-business” (or occasionally “business-friendly”). See, for instance, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Reuters. It’s not exactly wrong, but it’s incomplete and misleading. The party would be better described as pro-market rather than pro-business, and it’s also liberal on such issues as gay marriage, marijuana legalization, the dangers of surveillance. It pushed its coalition partners, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the allied Christian Social Union, to end conscription in 2011. 

In the United States such a party would be called libertarian, or maybe “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” In the rest of the world it’s called liberal. A helpful description for American readers might be “the free-market liberal FDP.”

In this case Wikipedia does a better job than the journalists: “The FDP strongly supports human rights, civil liberties, and internationalism. The party is traditionally considered centre-right. Since the 1980s, the party has firmly pushed economic liberalism, and has aligned itself closely to the promotion of free markets and privatisation.”

A merely pro-business party might join the European People’s Party (along with most Christian Democratic parties) or the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (along with the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom) in the European Parliament. Instead it’s part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, as well as the broader Liberal International.

The FDP has been part of a governing coalition for most of Germany’s post-1945 history, usually in coalition with the CDU/CSU but during the 1970s with the Social Democratic Party. It is the most pro-trade party in Germany, strongly endorsing projects such as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the European Union, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement between the United States and the EU (on hold since President Trump’s inauguration). It supports the EU but wants to demand more fiscal responsibility among EU member states. It rejects federal minimum wage laws, advocates more competition in heavily regulated industries and professions, and promotes a smaller and more efficient welfare state, perhaps with a negative income tax and individually funded health and retirement systems.  Because of its liberal social policies and support for entrepreneurship and globalization, the FDP did better among 18-to-24-year-old voters in last fall’s election than any other age group.

Unfortunately, the United States lacks a (classical) liberal party, one committed to freer markets and more personal freedom. Germany has one, and “pro-business” doesn’t capture its ideology or its appeal.

Fred Roeder is an economist from Berlin and chief strategy officer of Students For Liberty.

Two news items from recent days are reminders about the dangers of mixing business and government. In 2017 Google outdid itself (and all other companies) in its efforts to influence Washington, spending more on lobbying than any other company that year. Meanwhile in Brazil, the largest-ever corruption investigation in Latin America’s history has spread to 14 countries, due to bribes paid by Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction firm, in efforts to secure government contracts. What’s already known is that Odebrecht paid $29 million to Peruvian officials in return for $12.5 billion in contracts.

These stories are very different. The United States is not Latin America, and Google is not Odebrecht. Nevertheless, they do have something in common. When a government has a lot of money and power, individuals, businesses and interest groups will expend their money and effort to get a piece of it — or simply to be left in peace.

Such aims couldn’t be more different. Notably, much if not all of Google’s lobbying is defensive. It wants to be left alone to innovate and serve consumers. It seeks to resist restrictions on immigration, excessive taxation, antitrust suits and regulation of its advertising. Odebrecht, on the other hand, seeks to get billion dollar government construction contracts, sometimes by bribing high-ranking officials.

But both firms may simply see these expenditures as the cost of doing business. Business people know that you have to invest to make money. Businesses invest in factories, labor, research and development, marketing and all the other processes that bring goods to consumers and, they hope, lead to profits. But businesses can also invest in political processes that may yield profits. If more money can be made by investing in Washington — or Brasilia or Lima — than by developing a new app or drilling another oil well, money will be spent there.

Money spent by politicians in Washington, as with most national capitals, is taken from the people who produced it all over America. Washington produces little real value on its own. National defense and courts are essential to our freedom and prosperity, but that’s a small part of what the federal government does these days. Most federal activity involves taking money from some people, giving it to others and keeping a big chunk as a transaction fee.

Every business and interest group in society has an office in Washington devoted to getting some of the $4 trillion dollar federal budget for itself: senior citizens, farmers, veterans, teachers, social workers, oil companies, construction companies, labor unions, the military-industrial complex — you name it. The massive spending increases of the Bush-Obama years have created a lot of well-off people in Washington. Consulting and contracting exploded after 9/11. New regulatory burdens, notably from Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, are generating jobs in the lobbying and regulatory compliance business.

But both firms may simply see these expenditures as the cost of doing business. Business people know that you have to invest to make money. Businesses invest in factories, labor, research and development, marketing and all the other processes that bring goods to consumers and, they hope, lead to profits. But businesses can also invest in political processes that may yield profits. If more money can be made by investing in Washington — or Brasilia or Lima — than by developing a new app or drilling another oil well, money will be spent there.

Money spent by politicians in Washington, as with most national capitals, is taken from the people who produced it all over America. Washington produces little real value on its own. National defense and courts are essential to our freedom and prosperity, but that’s a small part of what the federal government does these days. Most federal activity involves taking money from some people, giving it to others and keeping a big chunk as a transaction fee.

Every business and interest group in society has an office in Washington devoted to getting some of the $4 trillion dollar federal budget for itself: senior citizens, farmers, veterans, teachers, social workers, oil companies, construction companies, labor unions, the military-industrial complex — you name it. The massive spending increases of the Bush-Obama years have created a lot of well-off people in Washington. Consulting and contracting exploded after 9/11. New regulatory burdens, notably from Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, are generating jobs in the lobbying and regulatory compliance business.

Walk down K Street, the heart of Washington’s lobbying industry, and look at the directories in the office buildings. They’re full of lobbyists and associations that are in Washington for one reason: because, as Willie Sutton said about why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

President George W. Bush increased annual federal spending by a trillion dollars, so it’s no wonder that more money was spent on lobbying in 2008 than in any previous year. And then even more was spent in 2009, when President Obama pushed for a nearly trillion dollar “stimulus” bill and a health care overhaul. With a complicated tax reform bill, along with health care and threats to global trade, lobbying surged again in President Trump’s first year.

Government contracts for construction, IT services, health care delivery, and the like are a particular target for lobbyists. I once got a pitch for a newsletter described as “Your bible for infrastructure spending—where the money is going and how to get your share.”

And as the Odebrecht example illustrates, that’s especially true in countries where government is an even bigger share of the economy. That’s why Odebrecht had a whole department, the Structured Operations Division, dedicated to bribing politicians in Latin America. They spent $788 million on bribes. That was a good investment. According to a court filing, it generated $3.3 billion in profits. Cheap at twice the price!

But at what cost? Some companies benefit by manipulating the levers of power. By definition, that means other companies lose. If Odebrecht has to bribe politicians to get contracts, that suggests that other construction companies might deliver better service for less money, and Odebrecht needed to get an unfair advantage.

And even if a company such as Google starts out lobbying defensively, it can get sucked into Washington’s parasite economy and start using its new lobbyists to game tax laws, tariffs, regulations and subsidies to get an edge on its competitors. And that’s a real problem because the most important factor in America’s economic future - in raising everyone’s standard of living - is not land, money or computers; it’s human talent. And when that talent is spent negotiating with the government for protection or for special favors, that’s a loss for the people such talent really should serve: consumers.

Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), cohosting “Outnumbered” on Fox News Friday, complained that Democrats “make our country look bad” by revealing what President Trump said in a meeting with members of Congress:

“I still have a problem with people in a private meeting going out and saying what the president said….It makes our country look bad. I think the Democrats, in this case, should have used some discretion. And even if he did say something like that, not repeat it for the benefit of the country.”

Her comments reminded me of one of my favorite parliamentary exchanges. 

Helen Suzman, the longtime leader of the parliamentary opposition to apartheid, rarely won any votes in the South African parliament. But she did use her position to advocate for human rights and to ask tough questions. 

In a famous exchange a certain minister shouted: “You put these questions just to embarrass South Africa overseas.” To which she coolly replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa – it is your answers.” 

Republicans who don’t want the country embarrassed by the president’s insult to dozens of countries and millions of Americans should encourage him not to issue such insults.