David Boaz

Tonight at midnight EDT (11 p.m. Illinois time, 9 p.m. Bel Air time) Turner Classic Movies will broadcast “Knute Rockne, All American.” Win one for the Gipper!

Tonight (5/12) at midnight EDT (11 p.m. Illinois time, 9 p.m. Bel Air time) Turner Classic Movies will broadcast “Knute Rockne, All American.” Win one for the Gipper!

BlogEditor’s note: An additional reason for liberty-lovers to tune into TCM: Cato H.L. Mencken Research Fellows Penn & Teller will serve as TCM guest programmers on May 22nd. Among the films they have spooled up: The Marx Brothers’ oft-overlooked 1939 gem At the Circus.

So a court confirms that, under the McCain-Feingold law, it’s illegal to run ads urging a senator to vote for a bill in Congress if the bill is coming to the floor within 30 days of a primary election in which the senator is running unopposed. Because letting a grassroots …

So a court confirms that, under the McCain-Feingold law, it’s illegal to run ads urging a senator to vote for a bill in Congress if the bill is coming to the floor within 30 days of a primary election in which the senator is running unopposed. Because letting a grassroots group contact voters on a proposed constitutional amendment would compromise “the integrity of the electoral process.”

John McCain often takes the lead on economic freedom, and Russell Feingold was the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act, but they should both be sorely ashamed that they have so effectively blocked the voters from the sacred “electoral process.”

The Washington Post reports:
President Bush’s crop of political appointees includes fewer women and minorities than did President Bill Clinton’s at comparable points in their presidencies, according to a new report by House Democrats.

Women made up about 37 percent of the 2,786 political appointees in the Bush administration in 2005, compared …

The Washington Post reports:

President Bush’s crop of political appointees includes fewer women and minorities than did President Bill Clinton’s at comparable points in their presidencies, according to a new report by House Democrats.

Women made up about 37 percent of the 2,786 political appointees in the Bush administration in 2005, compared with about 47 percent in the Clinton administration in 1997, according to the report and supplemental data released last week by the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee. Similarly, about 13 percent of Bush administration appointees last year were racial minorities, compared with 24 percent in the fifth year of Clinton’s presidency.

Unlike the Democratic report [.pdf], the Post noted that Bush is the first president to appoint a minority to any of the top four Cabinet posts: State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice. And he has appointed three minorities to those jobs.

But there’s another problem with the Democratic analysis. Presidents usually draw their appointees from the ranks of their supporters, and they tend to reward constituencies that support them. Get more support from the South, and you’ll likely appoint more Southerners to office. If Catholics vote heavily for one party, that party is likely to appoint more Catholics. That’s partly a matter of rewarding your voters, and partly a reflection of the pool of supporters you can draw from. If blacks vote 9 to 1 Democratic, it’s likely that a Democratic president will have more blacks among his campaign workers, contributors, and party faithful. By that criterion, Bush has lived up to the demands of affirmative action better than Clinton.

In 1996, about 58 percent of Clinton’s voters were women, 11 points higher than the percentage of women among his appointees. In 2000, about 47 percent of Bush’s voters were women, about 10 points higher than the percentage of women among his appointees.

More dramatically, Clinton got 27 percent of his votes from minorities, compared with 24 percent of his appointees. Bush got only 9 percent of his votes from minorities, but 13 percent of his appointees were minorities. So an identity-politics advocate would say that Clinton under-rewarded his minority supporters while Bush over-rewarded his.

The people who are going to manage vital services ought to be selected on the basis of their qualifications, not their race and gender. (Appointees who are merely going to be involved in useless and unnecessary federal programs can, I suppose, be selected on some other basis than ability and experience.) But to the extent that we’re going to look at “diversity” criteria, it seems appropriate to note that Bush has appointed more women and minorities in proportion to their presence in his coalition than Clinton did.

Bolivian president Evo Morales has nationalized his country’s natural gas industry. He sent soldiers to occupy the gas fields on May 1, celebrated by socialists worldwide as May Day. This May Day was also the 25th anniversary of Chile’s Social Security privatization. As Jose Pinera wrote in the New York Times:
Since …

Does the Wall Street Journal think the Constitution is suspended on the weekends Two weeks ago on Saturday, April 15, the Journal claimed on its front page that ââ?¬Å?the Constitution guarantees a public-school K-12 education for every child in the U.S.ââ?¬Â Then this past Saturday, April 29, the Journalââ?¬â?¢s usually …

Bolivian president Evo Morales has nationalized his country’s natural gas industry. He sent soldiers to occupy the gas fields on May 1, celebrated by socialists worldwide as May Day. This May Day was also the 25th anniversary of  Chile’s Social Security privatization. As Jose Pinera wrote in the New York Times:

Since the system started on May 1, 1981, the average real return on the personal accounts has been 10 percent a year. The pension funds have now accumulated resources equivalent to 70 percent of gross domestic product, a pool of savings that has helped finance economic growth and spurred the development of liquid long-term domestic capital market. By increasing savings and improving the functioning of both the capital and labor markets, the reform contributed to the doubling of the growth rate of the economy from 1985 to 1997 (from the historic 3 percent to 7.2 percent a year) until the slowdown caused by the government’s erroneous response to the Asian crisis.

Perhaps 50 years from now, we will know whether Chile’s privatization or Bolivia’s nationalization brought a higher standard of living to citizens.

It might also be noted that Pinera is sometimes criticized for having engineered the privatization as part of a military government (although such critics rarely acknowledge that successive Social Democratic governments have not abolished the pension reform). But  how free is a country in which a president, just back from a summit with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, can unilaterally send soldiers to seize an industry from its legal owners? Morales is taking very little time to earn the attribution “increasingly authoritarian.”

Does the Wall Street Journal think the Constitution is suspended on the weekends? Two weeks ago on Saturday, April 15, the Journal claimed on its front page that “the Constitution guarantees a public-school K-12 education for every child in the U.S.” Then this past Saturday, April 29, the Journal’s usually reliable editorial page deplored the “states’ rampant noncompliance with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act” and the “lax enforcement of NCLB” by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

In both cases the Journal seems to have forgotten that the U.S. Constitution grants no authority over education to the federal government. Education is not mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, and for good reason. The Founders wanted most aspects of life managed by those who were closest to them, either by state or local government or by families, businesses, and other elements of civil society. Certainly, they saw no role for the federal government in education.

Once upon a time, not so very many years ago, Congress understood that. The History of the Formation of the Union under the Constitution, published by the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission, under the direction of the president, the vice president, and the Speaker of the House in 1943, contained this exchange in a section titled “Questions and Answers Pertaining to the Constitution”:

Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?

A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the states.

Not only is the Constitution absolutely silent on the subject of education, but the U.S. Supreme Court has also refused to recognize any right to a taxpayer-funded education. As Timothy Sandefur, author of Cato’s forthcoming book Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21^st-Century America, points out, in San Antonio Independent School Distict v. Rodriguez (1973), the Court specifically declared that education, though important, “is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution. Nor do we find any basis for saying it is implicitly so protected.” Nine years later, in Plyler v. Doe, the Court held that if a state chooses to give such an education to citizens, it must also offer it to the children of illegal aliens. But it has consistently recognized that taxpayer-funded education is a privilege, and not a right.

And as I wrote in the Cato Handbook for Congress a few years ago, the argument against federal involvement in education

is not based simply on a commitment to the original Constitution, as important as that is. It also reflects an understanding of why the Founders were right to reserve most subjects to state, local, or private endeavor. The Founders feared the concentration of power. They believed that the best way to protect individual freedom and civil society was to limit and divide power. Thus it was much better to have decisions made independently by 13–or 50–states, each able to innovate and to observe and copy successful innovations in other states, than to have one decision made for the entire country. As the country gets bigger and more complex, and especially as government amasses more power, the advantages of decentralization and divided power become even greater.

And that’s why it was a mistake to further centralize the control of our local schools in the No Child Left Behind Act. And why our friends at the Wall Street Journal, who are usually committed to the virtues of federalism and decentralization, should be applauding the several states’ resistance to federal intrusion, not calling for a crackdown.