David Boaz

The Washington Post reports that a federal program to help dairy farmers and ranchers hurt by drought has been expanded to benefit farmers untouched by drought conditions:

In all, the Livestock Compensation Program cost taxpayers $1.2 billion during its two years of existence, 2002 and 2003. Of that, $635 million went to ranchers and dairy farmers in areas where there was moderate drought or none at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post. None of the ranchers were required to prove they suffered an actual loss. The government simply sent each of them a check based on the number of cattle they owned.

It’s a typical story of government handout programs. Under “pressure from ranchers and politicians in a handful of Western states that were hit hard by drought,” the Bush administration in 2002 created a fund to compensate them. Within days members of Congress were demanding that more counties be included, and they were. But that still wasn’t enough, and in 2003 Congress expanded the program to cover any kind of weather-related disaster. And then President Bush declared that the shuttle explosion over Texas constituted a disaster, so that made more counties eligible. County USDA officials were pressured to find any kind of “disaster” that would qualify local farmers for handouts.

The Post has run other articles in this series, with titles like Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don’t Farm and Growers Reap Benefits Even in Good Years. Yet even with front-page stories in Congress’s hometown newspaper, the farm program rolls merrily along, handing out more and more subsidies with less and less plausibility.

It’s enough to make you a public choice economist. So the question is, why doesn’t it make Washington Post and other mainstream-media journalists and editorial writers more skeptical about the benefits of government programs? A great deal of what we know about the failures of government, or way that politics really works, comes from mainstream journalists. Yet many journalists continue to assume that every problem in society suggests a government program to fix it.

That’s the headline House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi managed to get the Wall Street Journal to run after an exclusive interview. She told the Journal’s reporters that if Democrats take control of the House next year and raise taxes, they would use the money to reduce the federal deficit. And she promised to reduce the use of earmarks: “Personally, myself, I’d get rid of all of them,” she said. “None of them is worth the skepticism, the cynicism the public has… and the fiscal irresponsibility of it.”

If Republicans are going to spend like Democrats, it would be nice to think that Democrats might save like Republicans. But let’s take a reality check.

According to the National Taxpayers Union, in the first seven months of this Congress Nancy Pelosi introduced 22 bills that would increase spending and only one that would cut spending. Admittedly a better record than some Democrats: Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), who would be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in a Pelosi-led Congress, introduced 80 spending bills and three cuts, for a net budget impact of $1.6 trillion. Even the misnamed Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) introduced 44 spending bills and one cut. Another NTU report showed that Pelosi voted in the interests of taxpayers only 11 percent of the time on tax and budget votes. And her fiscal conservatism has been declining the longer she has been in Congress. In her early years in the House she sometimes voted for taxpayers as much as 25 percent of the time. But not recently.

For taxpayers, it looks like the fall election will be a choice between the devil we know . . . and another devil we know.

From the Washington Post, July 12:

The Internal Revenue Service headquarters will remain at least partially closed until January while department officials attempt to repair tens of millions of dollars in damage wrought by last month’s storms, the IRS announced yesterday.

Following up on Radley’s mention of Deirdre McCloskey’s article on bourgeois virtues, here’s what I just posted at the Guardian‘s “Comment is free” site: 

At Cato Policy Report the brilliant economist Deirdre McCloskey of the University of Illinois-Chicago and Erasmus University of Amsterdam (formerly the brilliant economist Donald McCloskey) writes about “bourgeois virtues,” the subject of her new book. McCloskey says that in Western civilization we have traditionally recognized two kinds of virtues — the aristocratic virtues such as courage, and the peasant or Christian virtues such as faith, hope, and charity.

But, she argues, these virtues were developed for a pre-capitalist world of defined social classes. In the United States and an increasing part of the world, very few people are aristocrats and no one is condemned to peasant life. Rather, we are all bourgeois now. We live in commercial society, mostly in towns (the root of the word bourgeois). We’re mostly middle class and engaged in business, as entrepreneurs, investors, managers, or employees, and also as customers.

And since the beginning of bourgeois society, the vocabulary of virtues has been used to berate and denounce capitalism. We’re told that business is based on greed, not on virtue. It may be necessary to modern life, but businessmen are still expected to accept their dubious moral standing. Wouldn’t sharing be more virtuous than selling? Isn’t it better to serve society than to produce wealth?

Read more…

From the July 13 issue of The Hill: 

The U.S. Capitol Historical Society will hold a reception next week to honor a select group of lawmakers “for their hard work, service, time and the sacrifices made in upholding the office with which they were entrusted.”

One of the people slated to receive such accolades is former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.).

The disgraced ex-legislator, of course, can’t make the July 19 event or any other social gathering in the near future because he’s serving a prison term of eight-plus years for a bribery scandal you may have heard about….

Another honoree is former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas)….

The co-hosts of the event will include members of leadership, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

(Cross-posted from my one-line blog “To Be Governed . . . “)

So I suppose it’s no surprise that as Gore’s movie is getting credulous reviews from coast to coast, a new opera opens in New York that makes Grendel “likable.”

Who would’ve thunk it? Turns out that former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) doesn’t believe in jail terms for drug users. At least I guess that’s what this story means:

U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a musician in his own right, helped secure the release of Atlanta R&B producer Dallas Austin from a Dubai jail after a drug conviction, the senator’s office confirmed Saturday.

In a statement released through his staff, the conservative Republican said he was contacted by Austin’s attorneys, then called the ambassador and consul of the United Arab Emirates in Washington on Austin’s behalf.

A Grammy winner who has produced hits for Madonna, Pink and TLC, Austin was arrested May 19 and convicted of drug possession for bringing 1.26 grams of cocaine into Dubai.

Surely Hatch thinks regular old Americans are due the same consideration as a Grammy-winning singer. He’d advocate the release of any American convicted of possessing 1.26 grams of cocaine, right?

Or are politicians hypocrites? Could it be that they think average Americans like Richard Paey should go to jail for using large amounts of painkillers, but not celebrities like Rush Limbaugh? Could it be that they laugh about their own past drug use while supporting a policy that arrests 1.5 million Americans a year, as a classic John Stossel “Give Me a Break” segment showed? (Not online, unfortunately, but you can read a commentary here.)

Putting people in jail for using drugs is bad enough. Putting the little people in jail while politicians chortle over their own drug use and pull strings to get celebrities out of jail is hypocrisy on a grand scale.

The New York Times reports that Sen. Rick Santorum…

…distributed a brochure this week as he worked a sweltering round of town hall meetings and Fourth of July parades: “Fifty Things You May Not Know About Rick Santorum.” It is filled with what he called meat and potatoes, like his work to expand colon cancer screenings for Medicare beneficiaries (No. 3), or to secure money for “America’s first ever coal to ultra-clean fuel plant” (No. 2)….

He said he wanted Pennsylvanians to think of him as a political heir to Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York, who was known as Senator Pothole for being acutely attuned to constituent needs.

So . . . the third-ranking Republican leader in the Senate wants to be known as a porker, an earmarker, and Senator Pothole.

Santorum had already dismissed limited government in theory. He told NPR last year:

One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right. You know, the left has gone so far left and the right in some respects has gone so far right that they touch each other. They come around in the circle. This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

He declared himself against individualism, against libertarianism, against “this whole idea of personal autonomy, . . . this idea that people should be left alone.” Now he’s also against the conservative idea that taxpayers matter, that the federal government has a limited role.

No wonder Jonathan Rauch wrote last year that, “America’s Anti-Reagan Isn’t Hillary Clinton. It’s Rick Santorum.” Rauch noted:

In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, “Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.”

They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, “individual development accounts,” publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in “every school in America” (his italics), and more. Lots more.

Rauch concluded,

With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.

At least Santorum is right about one thing: sometimes the left and the right meet in the center. In this case the big-spending, intrusive, mommy-AND-daddy-state center. But he’s wrong that we’ve never had a firmly individualist society where people are “left alone, able to do whatever they want to do.”

It’s called America.

The Washington Post profiles libertarian congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.) — in its Sunday Style section, which is sort of a throwaway placement.

It’s one of those 1970s-style laundry list stories:

The amiable Texas congressman would do away with the CIA and the Federal Reserve. He’d reinstate the gold standard. He’d get rid of the Department of Education.

Rather than really try to present the argument for individual rights and limited constitutional government, drawing on public choice economics and the failures of government programs, the reporter just lists one out-of-the-mainstream position after another. Still, she does make it clear that he’s philosophically principled and not your typical Bush-supporting JFK-lookalike 21st-century congressman.

Here’s an interesting point about Ron Paul that I haven’t seen anyone make: As far as I know, Ron Paul is the only member of Congress who has been elected three times as a non-incumbent. Two of those times he beat an incumbent.

He first won a special election in 1976, then lost that fall. Two years later he came back and defeated incumbent Bob Gammage. After three terms he ran for the Senate, losing the Republican nomination to Phil Gramm. The really bad news was that he was replaced by Tom DeLay. In 1988 Paul was the Libertarian Party nominee for president. Then in 1996, 20 years after his first election and 12 years after he had last won election to the House, he ran again in a differently configured district. He had to beat Democrat-turned-Republican incumbent Greg Laughlin in the primary — against the opposition of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Rifle Association, former attorney general Ed Meese, Senators Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Gov. George W. Bush.

Given that kind of firepower and the incumbent reelection rate of about 99 percent these days, Ron Paul has a remarkable political record. He must be doing something right back in Texas.

Former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham had a bribe menu for lobbyists who wanted government contracts. Amazingly, it wasn’t just an understanding between friends, or a general concept. He actually wrote it down on his congressional stationery. As Brian Ross reported for ABC News:

The card shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required a $50,000 bribe.

The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.

I love the volume discount. And I especially love the fact that Cunningham didn’t think his customers could handle the math involved in “it’s $50,000 for each million.” Instead, he wrote down each increment with “50” next to it. (See the card here.)

Read more…