David Boaz

At the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog, I take a look at the new hysteria about "isolationism" in the Republican party. There's lots of hand-wringing at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Sunday morning shows were full of denunciations. But, I note:

What they’re really worried about is not so much the Republican leaders as the people. The country folk just don’t see the British coming any more. Rubin noted “a distinct isolationist streak that was very much in evidence in the questions from the audience last night.” Della Rocchetta’s main concern was “a growing isolationist sentiment espoused by the U.S. public”... But here’s the specter that is haunting the neocons, a graph from the Pew center (using Gallup data) showing a striking rise in “mind our own business” sentiment:

More here.

Cato's panel discussion on Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, featuring Ronald Hamowy, Bruce Caldwell, Richard Epstein, and George Soros, will air tonight at 7:18 p.m. on Book TV, on C-SPAN2. C-SPAN schedule here. C-SPAN listing for this video here. Of course, you don't have to wait for tonight. Watch Cato's video, or read my summary.

E.  J. Dionne Jr. has suddenly discovered the big-government George W. Bush, 12 years late, and he's feeling nostalgic:

Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush.... Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done. Say what you will about his No Child Left Behind education-reform program. It accepted, correctly, that the federal government has to play an important part in reforming our public schools and held them accountable to a set of standards.... And while there are many problems with the way Bush chose to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, he was quite right to believe it had to be done.... Oh, yes, and I really do miss some of Bush’s early rhetoric. I cannot imagine a Republican today giving Bush’s 1999 speech in Indianapolis titled — shades of Barack Obama? — “The Duty of Hope.” Bush criticized the view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” as a “destructive mind-set.” He scorned this as an approach having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than ‘Leave us alone.’?”

Stick with us, E. J. We could have told you this in 2007, when Michael Tanner published Leviathan on the Right; or in 2003, when I complained in the Washington Post about Bush's spending, education program, and entitlement expansion;  or in, ahem, 1999, when Ed Crane wrote in the New York Times:

Bill Clinton's impact on the American polity was never more evident than in the major address that the Republican Presidential aspirant George W. Bush gave in Indianapolis last week. The speech was, well, Clintonesque [in its] assumption that virtually any problem confronting the American people is an excuse for action by the Federal Government.

E. J. likes that view better than we do, but at least readers of the Washington Post will now realize that Obama's out-of-control spending, nationalizations, and health care interventions are an extension, not a reversal, of Bush's policies.

Back from vacation, I'm catching up on things I missed last week. Dan Ikenson did a fine job on President Obama's boasting about how he saved the automobile industry. But a few days later Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," was more brutal:

We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case. What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.

Here's a sample of the specific analyses:

“GM plans to hire back all of the workers they had to lay off during the recession.”

This is another impressive-sounding but misleading figure. In the five years since 2006, General Motors announced that it would reduce its workforce by nearly 68,000 hourly and salary workers, creating a much smaller company. Those are the figures that generated the headlines. Obama is only talking about a sliver of workers — the 9,600 workers who were laid off in the fourth quarter of 2008.

And that's why President Obama's speech was awarded Three Pinocchios.

In today's Britannica column, I write about yesterday's 44th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Loving decision and its relevance to the current Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now actually Perry v. Brown) case. It includes videos from Cato's recent forum, from the American Foundation for Equal Rights, and from the 1967 ABC News report on the Supreme Court decision. You really should watch that one. I also note some of the objections to the Perry case:

When it comes to the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case, there are legitimate federalist and democratic objections. One might say that marriage law has always been a matter for the states, and it should stay that way. Let the people of each state decide what marriage will be in their state. Leave the federal courts out of it. Federalism is an important basis for liberty, and that’s a strong argument. There’s also a discomfiting argument that a Supreme Court decision striking down bans on gay marriage is undemocratic, that it would be better to let the political process work through the issue. Some people, even supporters of gay marriage, warn that a court decision could be another Roe v. Wade, with decades of cultural war over an imposed decision.

For a response, read the column.

At the Britannica Blog I note Sarah Palin's misstatement about President Obama's record on the national debt, and then ask whether that's the real problem:

Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann have both said in recent days that, as Palin put it, ”Look at the debt that has been accumulated in the last two years. It’s more debt under this president than all those other presidents combined.” And they’ve both been rapped by journalistic fact-checkers.... So what’s the real problem here? Is it Bachmann’s and Palin’s exaggeration of Obama’s record on deficits and debt? Or is it President Obama’s unsustainable spending?

The Washington metropolitan area is the only major U.S. housing market where prices increased on an annual basis in the first quarter, according to a 20-city S&P/Case Shiller home-price index released Tuesday. The region was helped by relatively stable employment, fewer foreclosures and an abundant supply of house hunters. Other surveys indicate sales in the area are approaching boom-time levels.

--Wall Street Journal

A study on anti-Semitism in Germany offers the disturbing finding that "communities that murdered their Jewish populations during the 14th-century Black Death pogroms were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews nearly 600 years later," during the Nazi era. But cities

with more of an outward orientation—in particular, cities that were a part of the Hanseatic League of Northern Europe, which brought outside influence via commerce and trade—showed almost no correlation between medieval and modern pogroms. The same was true for cities with high rates of population growth—with sufficient in-migration, the newcomers may have changed the attitudes of the local culture.

Free trade helps lead to peace, prosperity, and the erosion of prejudice.

In Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, when Chancellor Palpatine transforms the republic into an empire, Senator Amidala remarks:

So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.

But it can also happen in silent acquiescence. For decades now, successive Congresses have evaded their responsibility to make decisions about the deployment of U.S. armed forces abroad. I write about the latest instance of this, in Libya, in today's Britannica column:

Presidents have an obligation to obey the Constitution and the law. But one of the ways that separation of powers works is that each branch of government is supposed to jealously guard its prerogatives from usurpation by the other branches. Too often Congress ducks that responsibility, preferring to let presidents make decisions, make law, and make war without the involvement of Congress. As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., explained in his book The Imperial Presidency, the expansion of presidential war-making power has been “as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation.” The president is derelict in his duty to obey the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. And Congress is derelict in its duty to assert its constitutional authority. And I’m still wondering what’s happened to the antiwar movement, which ought to be loudly protesting not just the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the newborn war in Libya.

As George Will said last week, "even if you think the War Powers Resolution is an unwise law—it is a law." And a former law professor who is now the president of the United States should obey the law. Will expanded on that point in his Sunday column, titled "Obama's Illegal War," in the old-fashioned print edition of the Washington Post. Full Britannica column here.

Economist John B. Taylor reviews Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:

The book focuses on two agencies of government, Fannie Mae and the Federal Reserve. The mutual support system is better explained and documented in the case of Fannie, the government-sponsored enterprise that supported the home mortgage market by buying mortgages and packaging them into marketable securities which it then guaranteed and sold to investors. The federal government supported Fannie Mae — and the other large government-sponsored enterprise, Freddie Mac — by implicitly backing up those guarantees and by providing favorable regulatory treatment and protection from competition. These benefits enabled Fannie to rake in excess profits — $2 billion in excess, according to a 1995 study by the Congressional Budget Office. The book then gives examples where Fannie’s executives — Jim Johnson, CEO from 1991 to 1998 [and also top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale, campaign manager for Mondale, head of vice presidential selection for both John F. Kerry and Barack Obama, and chairman of both the Kennedy Center and the Brookings Institution], is singled out more than anyone else — used the excess profits to support government officials in a variety of ways with plenty left over for large bonuses: They got jobs for friends and relatives of elected officials, including Rep. Barney Frank, who is tagged as “a perpetual protector of Fannie,” and they set up partnership offices around the country which provided more jobs. They financed publications in which writers argued that Fannie’s role in promoting homeownership justified federal support. They commissioned work by famous economists, such as Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, which argued that Fannie was not a serious risk to the taxpayer, countering “critics who argued that both Fannie and Freddie posed significant risks to the taxpayer.” They made campaign contributions and charitable donations to co-opt groups like the community action organization ACORN, which “had been agitating for tighter regulations on Fannie Mae.” They persuaded executive branch officials — such as then Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers — to ask their staffs to rewrite reports critical of Fannie. In the meantime, Countrywide, the mortgage firm led by Angelo Mozilo, partnered with Fannie in originating many of the mortgages Fannie packaged (26 percent in 2004) and gave “sweetheart” loans to politicians with power to affect Fannie, such as Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut. The authors write that “Countrywide and Fannie Mae were inextricably bound.”

But don't ignore the role of the Fed:

Early on the authors take on the Boston Fed, and in particular its research director Alicia Munnell, for using a study documenting racial discrimination in mortgage lending to justify the relaxation of credit standards, even though the study’s findings were found to be flawed by other researchers. And they criticize the very low interest rate set by the Fed when Alan Greenspan was chairman and Ben Bernanke was a Fed governor, saying it “contributed mightily to the mortgage lending craze,” adding that “with the Fed on a rate-cutting rampage, demand for adjustable-rate mortgages with relatively low initial interest costs had become incendiary.”

If you watched the HBO movie Too Big to Fail, you wouldn't get much sense that government actions -- easy money, the homeownership mania, HUD and Fannie's push to lend to non-creditworthy borrowers -- played a major role in the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. Sounds like this book would make good supplemental reading for viewers, along with Johan Norberg's Financial Fiasco.