David Boaz

President Clinton’s secretary of labor, Robert Reich, complains on Marketplace Radio that the new immigration bill may encourage immigration by high-skilled people. He argued:

A century ago, America’s immigration policy was best summarized in Emma Goldman’s famous lines on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

It’s a lovely poem, and it’s true that America was the land of opportunity for millions of people. But as Julian Simon pointed out, on the whole immigrants in the 19th century were not tired, poor, huddled masses. He cites findings from economist P. J. Hill:

[I]mmigrants, instead of being an underpaid, exploited group, generally held an economic position that compared very favorably to that of the native born members of the society.

Reich is wrong again. But then, he’s notoriously loose with the facts.

George Will has a thoughtful column titled (in the Washington Post, at least) “The Case for Conservatism.” You might say that it demonstrates that George Will has accepted modernity, because his definitions of liberalism and conservatism are thoroughly modern, not historical. Consider:

Today conservatives tend to favor freedom…. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.

Traditionally, of course, it was liberals who favored freedom and minimal government. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines liberalism as a ”political doctrine that takes the abuse of power, and thus the freedom of the individual, as the central problem of government.” Wikipedia is similar: “Liberalism refers to a broad array of related doctrines, ideologies, philosophical views, and political traditions which advocate individual liberty…. Broadly speaking, liberalism emphasizes individual rights.”

Conservatism, on the other hand, according to Britannica, is a “political philosophy that emphasizes the value of traditional institutions and practices.” In many societies, of course, freedom is not a traditional practice. George Will may be talking strictly about American conservatism, in which case it is plausible to say that a conservative should want to preserve the traditional American institutions and practice of liberty and limited government. I have often wondered, what does it mean to be a conservative in a nation founded in libertarian revolution If it means preserving the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, then a conservative is a libertarian — or what used to be called a liberal.

But what if one wants to conserve something else Who’s to say that the principles of 1776 are the right thing to conserve What if you wanted to conserve Southern plantation society Or the rights and privileges of the British monarchy Or the institutions of the Dark Ages Or the traditional Indian practice of suttee, in which widows are expected to immolate themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre

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Surprising as it is to me, I’ve run into a number of libertarians and libertarian-leaning Republicans recently who think the tax-cutting, pro-choice Rudy Giuliani would make a good president. To those people I recommend my recent op-ed in the New York Daily News:

Throughout his career, Giuliani has displayed an authoritarian streak that would be all the more problematic in a man who would assume executive powers vastly expanded by President Bush.

As a U.S. attorney in the 1980s, Giuliani conducted what University of Chicago Law Prof. Daniel Fischel called a “reign of terror” against Wall Street. He pioneered the use of the midday, televised “perp walk” for white-collar defendants who posed no threat to the community….

As a presidential hopeful, Giuliani’s authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. He defends the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. He endorses the President’s power to arrest American citizens, declare them enemy combatants and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge. He thinks the President has “the inherent authority to support the troops” even if Congress were to cut off war funding, a claim of presidential authority so sweeping that even Bush and his supporters have not tried to make it.

Giuliani’s view of power would be dangerous at any time, but especially after two terms of relentless Bush efforts to weaken the constitutional checks and balances that safeguard our liberty.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater declared it “the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power.” George W. Bush has forgotten that; Rudy Giuliani rejects it.

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post takes a beating around here sometimes, so I want to draw attention to his dynamite column this week on the non-disappearance of the middle class. Drawing on a new book, Social Stratification in the United States by Stephen Rose, Pearlstein demonstrates that

rumors of the demise of the American middle class are greatly exaggerated. In fact, living standards for most Americans are improving. Not everyone is flipping hamburgers or working at Wal-Mart. To the degree that the middle class is shrinking, it is because more people are rising out of it than falling from it.

Pearlstein takes pains to note that Rose “is not your standard-issue conservative market apologist — far from it. He left medical school to get his PhD in economics, then alternated between teaching and community organizing. He served on the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee and in the economics shop of the Clinton Labor Department.” So you can trust him — he worked for Clinton!

And Rose finds, as Pearlstein lays it out, that there’s a lot more good news than the “sky-is-falling rhetoric of the Democratic left” would lead you to believe. Pearlstein notes:

[I]t is often reported that the median household income in the United States is $44,500. Of course, that takes in households of varying size, from singles to the Brady Bunch. It also includes households headed by workers in the prime of their working years (29 to 59), as well as those just beginning or ending their careers, when earnings tend to be lower. So, to get a truer picture of economic well-being, Rose adjusts the data for household size and excludes those headed by people younger than 29 or older than 59. And when he does, it turns out that the median income for the “typical American family” jumps to $63,000, which in most parts of the country buys a pretty comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

This doesn’t mean the middle class isn’t shrinking. In fact, from 1979 to 2004, Rose calculates, the percentage of households in the “middle class” category — those with incomes of $30,000 to $90,000 — fell to 39 from 47 percent. But it would be hard to describe that as bad news when the proportion of well-off households — those with incomes of more than $90,000 — rose by nearly nine percentage points. During the same time frame, the percentage of households that were poor or near-poor remained about the same.

One of the favorite liberal story lines is that the only way middle class families have been able to maintain their standard of living is by forcing mom to work more hours. But that, too, turns out to be an exaggeration. By looking just at married couples at various points in the income ladder, Rose found that for all but the poorest households, inflation-adjusted income was higher in 2004 than in 1979 even after factoring out any increase in spousal work hours.

It is also a myth that the Great American Jobs Machine is producing mostly lousy, low-paying service jobs. Rose simplifies the government data by putting all jobs in three categories: “elite” jobs, encompassing managers and professionals; “good jobs,” such as those held by supervisors, skilled blue-collar workers, craft workers, police, firefighters and clerical workers; and “less skilled” jobs, such as those held by unskilled machine operators, laborers, sales clerks and waiters. Looking at it that way, it turns out that the number of lousy, low-skilled jobs has been on a long, steady decline since 1979, while the number of “elite” jobs has been growing steadily. The number of “good” jobs has declined marginally as skilled office work has replaced skilled factory work.

Rose is concerned, quite properly, about the condition of the poorest people in the American economy, though he and I would probably disagree on the best way to help them enter the economic mainstream. But he’s also brought a healthy dose of reality to the debate over “the declining middle class.”

For more on these topics, see the recent posts by Brink Lindsey at his personal website and the award-winning Cato Institute book Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality by Olaf Gersemann.

Justin Logan discussed the “Travesty in Tehran” – the arrest and incarceration of Haleh Esfandiari — astutely yesterday. As he noted, these actions are a real provocation at a time when reduced tensions between Iran and the United States are devoutly to be hoped for. But more importantly, the unjust imprisonment of a peaceful scholar is a striking affront to human rights. The people of both Iran and the United States who want to see Iran as part of a peaceful and democratic world must deplore these actions.

And of course, to make matters worse, Esfandiari is not the only scholar currently being held by the Iranian government. The regime is also holding Kian Tajbakhsh of the Open Society Institute; journalist Parnaz Azima from the U.S.-funded Radio Farda; and Ali Shakeri, a peace activist and founding board member at the University of California, Irvine’s Center for Citizen Peacebuilding. There is no evidence that any of these people are engaged in espionage or threatening Iranian national security. Indeed, most or all of them have worked to improve relations between Iran and the United States and to turn both countries away from a collision course.

Leading human rights groups and activists have spoken out against these arrests. In a joint statement, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters without Borders, the International Federation for Human Rights, and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi urged Iran to stop “harassment of dual nationals.”

To add insult to injury, Esfandiari’s husband was informed yesterday that Citibank had frozen his wife’s bank accounts ”in accordance with U.S. Sanctions regulations,” which stipulate that U.S. banks are prohibited from servicing accounts for residents of Iran. A resident She’s an involuntary resident of the notorious Evin Prison. Late in the evening, after many phone calls and the intercession of the State Department, Citibank relented and unfroze the accounts. As painful as that experience was, her husband no doubt wishes that a day’s worth of phone calls could persuade an Islamic government to admit its mistake.

Rising property taxes may tear down a beach amusement park that has lasted 117 years at Ocean City, Md., where thousands of Washington and Baltimore families escape the summer heat. The Washington Post reports:

For 117 summers, generations of children have frolicked through Trimper’s Rides on this beach resort town’s signature boardwalk. But this Memorial Day weekend might begin the last summer they circle the antique wooden carousel, fling around the Tilt-a-Whirl and loop through the Tidal Wave roller coaster.

The Trimpers say they are considering closing the amusement park and arcade this year.

Linda Davidson — The Washington Post

As Ocean City has exploded into a megaresort, property taxes have soared for Trimper’s, which operates on the last chunk of undeveloped land on the town’s three-mile boardwalk. In the past three years, family members said, their assessed property value has tripled, from $21 million to $65 million.

You couldn’t blame the Trimper family if they decided to cash in on the value of their land. But it would be a shame if the family wanted to continue operating the oldest continuously owned amusement park in the United States, and rising property taxes forced them to sell. After all, their income isn’t going up nearly as much as the assessed value of the land. So an owner being taxed on the theoretical value of land that he isn’t planning to sell is then forced by the burden of taxation to sell his land after all.

The power to tax is the power to destroy charming old amusement parks.

We might note that the same phenomenon can destroy environmental amenities. A landowner who prefers to leave his land undeveloped even as development happens around or near him can find the assessed value of his land rising, and thus faces a higher tax burden, and thus feels compelled to sell the land to a developer. I have nothing against development if it’s a market phenomenon, but I don’t like the idea of conservation-minded landowners being forced by the property tax into making a decision they wouldn’t otherwise choose.

Of course, one might object that the Trimpers and the conservation-minded landowners have just as much obligation to pay for the state of Maryland’s budget as any other landowner. And you can hardly expect a big modern state like Maryland to subsist on the taxes it can assess on a three-block area valued at $21 million. So that’s part of the problem–governments today do so much that they can’t be supported with modest levels of taxation.

And then–to bring it full circle–the very people who demand bountiful government services that require burdensome taxes then bemoan the loss of cultural and environmental amenities; so they propose that government subsidize amusement parks, or buy up land and keep it undeveloped, or forbid development in designated areas. Thus requiring more government spending, more taxes, more forced sales, and the cycle continues.

So kids, when you see Trimper’s being demolished to build some more oceanfront hotels and condominiums, remember that big government did it.

In Albania, anyway. NPR reports that garbage is piling up in the streets of Tirana, and “It’s something you could blame on the fall of communism.” As reporter Vicky O’Hara explained,

When communism collapsed here in the early 1900s so did the city’s system of garbage removal. Shpresa Rira, a teacher at the foreign language institute in Tirana, remembers that under communism families were ordered to spend part of their weekend picking up trash.

Ms. SHPRESA RIRA: It was called the communist Saturday because people were meant to come to come together and give their services to the community.

O’HARA: Rira says that people were not paid but they turned out anyway, because if they didn’t, the consequences could be dire.

So it was universal compulsory service, like Melvin Laird and John Edwards want for the United States. But it turns out it didn’t work so well in Albania.

The communist tactic, she says, destroyed community spirit in Albania.

Ms. RIRA: We thought that we were closely connected, but as soon as communism was over, you know, we understood that that community spirit didn’t exist at all. It was just a fake.

And like most collectivist systems, it did not “foster a culture of responsibility for our democracy.” Instead, it left people expecting that government would handle everything. So now, the government no longer threatens people with dire consequences for not picking up trash, and no one does. The city has been slow to create a normal garbage collection system. Maybe this forced community spirit stuff isn’t such a good idea after all.

An NPR report on independent voters in Nebraska included this comment from a hospital diversity director: “There’s a large group of people in this country that believe in smaller government, that believe in balanced budget. I think that’s a pretty popular concept. Where [the Republicans] run into trouble is strict adherence to a couple of social issues.” As we’ve been saying.

What does a diversity director do in Nebraska, anyway I’m thinking he tries to persuade people that “the farmer and the cowman should be friends.”

Under the benign headline “Turning Apathy Into Good Deeds,” former secretary of defense Melvin Laird endorses a strikingly authoritarian proposal: “a system of compulsory universal civil service for young people.” Laird recognizes that the military doesn’t need all the recruits a draft would produce and that today’s high-tech military needs longer-term training and commitment. But the drawn-out war in Iraq threatens to discourage future enlistments. So “universal service” might pressure just enough young people to join the army, while also producing a bumper crop of slave labor for schools, Head Start, Peace Corps, hospitals, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the State Department.

Laird thinks such a program would “foster a culture of responsibility for our democracy.” Not among free and responsible people, it wouldn’t. It may be no accident that Laird repeatedly mentions democracy, but the words freedom and liberty–the fundamental values of America, which our constitutional republic was created to protect–do not appear in his piece.

Laird does not address how you square compulsory service with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Laird’s proposed “service” is clearly involuntary.

For generations and centuries, old people have complained that today’s young people just don’t appreciate the sacrifices of their elders. They talk too loud and they don’t care about the community. They need, in the words of William James, “to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”

And meanwhile, they can do a lot of useful things that we older taxpayers would like to have done but don’t want to pay for. After all, in a market economy, if you want more people working in hospitals or day-care centers, you can pay them to do so. And if you don’t think $2.9 trillion is enough to pay for all the useful services of the federal government, you can propose a tax increase. But how much easier it might seem just to commandeer four million free or cheap laborers.

Of course, they’re not really so cheap. You do have to pay them something. And you’ll need massive new layers of bureaucracy to manage four million people (the approximate number of Americans who turn 18 each year).

And then there are the opportunity costs. Workers will be allocated to government make-work jobs instead of the jobs where the market demand is strongest. The economy will be less efficient and less productive. As Doug Bandow writes, “paying young people to sweep floors entails the cost of forgoing whatever else we could do with that money and the cost of forgoing whatever else those young people could do with their time. An additional dollar spent on medical research might be a better investment than one used to add an extra hospital helper; an additional young person who finished school and entered the field of biogenetics might increase social welfare more than one more kid shelving books in a library.”

What kind of message does compulsory service send to young people It tells them that they are national resources, state property, that they do not own themselves. That’s not the message the Founders thought they were sending in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It’s not an attitude appropriate for citizens of a free society. It’s a collectivist, authoritarian concept. It says, with much less charm than the old song, “You belong to me.”

Melvin Laird should be ashamed. So should John Edwards.

“For the past four years, the Clintons have jetted around on Vinod Gupta’s corporate plane, to Switzerland, Hawaii, Jamaica, Mexico — $900,000 worth of travel. The former president secured a $3.3 million consulting deal with Gupta’s technology firm,” according to the Washington Post.

The hot tip Short the stock of any technology firm that values Bill Clinton’s advice at $3.3 million.