David Boaz

David Boaz: There seems to be a dearth of prominent atheists in America. Can there really be just one in Hollywood?

There seems to be a dearth of prominent atheists in America. Can there really be just one in Hollywood?

There seems to be a dearth of prominent atheists in America. Can there really be just one in Hollywood

Great headline in the Washington Post today –

Dozens in GOP Turn Against Bush’s Prized ‘No Child’ Act

The good news is that

More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate — including the House’s second-ranking Republican — will introduce legislation today that could severely undercut President Bush’s signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.

The bad news is that even

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said that advocates do not intend to repeal the No Child Left Behind Act. Instead, they want to give states more flexibility to meet the president’s goals of education achievement, he said.

So even a small-government federalist like Jim DeMint isn’t willing to say that education is a family, community, or state responsibility, but not a federal responsibility. Still, weakening the mandates would be a real victory for decentralization and competition.

I particularly liked the comment from Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), author of the proposed House bill: (more…)

For the past six years Democrats have railed against President Bush’s gimmicky, deceptive, wildly unbalanced budgets. Now that they control Congress, they have the power to write their own budgets. And what have they come up with As the Washington Post explains,

Senate Democrats unveiled a spending blueprint yesterday that envisions a massive expansion of the nation’s health-insurance program for children, as well as billions of additional dollars for other domestic priorities such as public education, veterans’ health care and local police.

Despite the additional spending, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the proposal would virtually erase the federal deficit within four years without raising taxes and produce a surplus of $132 billion by 2012.

It’s not true that politicians never learn anything. Conrad and his colleagues have learned a great deal from Bush and his budget spinners.

The Washington Post reports,

“Three of the last five years, there’s been no budget for this country,” [Sen. Kent] Conrad said in an interview.

Actually, for the past 218 years, there’s been no budget for this country. The country is a vast, sprawling nation of 300 million people, millions of businesses, and more than 100 million households. The country is not a corporate entity, and it has no budget.

On the other hand, there is supposed to be a budget for the federal government, and Congress is indeed derelict in failing to pass one. But politicians should not forget the distinction between the country and the government.

Russell Roberts of George Mason University writes about Japan, China, and the trade deficit scare in the Wall Street Journal. Along the way he notes:

The story of the baseball off-season is the Red Sox spending $100 million to bring Daisuke Matsuzaka from Japan to the United States. Dice-K, as he’s known, is the ultimate import. He takes away a job from an American pitcher.

Russ is mocking the protectionist argument, of course. But he could have drilled in on this point more than he did. We often hear that immigrants “take American jobs.” But really, when America welcomes software engineers from India or magazine editors from England or the laborers who built my house from El Salvador, they don’t necessarily take anybody’s job. An expanding economy–expanding partly because of the immigrants–may well need more engineers, editors, or laborers than it would have needed in the absence of immigration.

But Dice-K actually is taking someone’s job. He’s going to pitch in the major leagues. There’s a fixed number of major league teams, and pretty much a fixed number of pitchers on each team. If the Red Sox hire Dice-K, they’re going to fire or not hire some other pitcher. Probably some good ol’ boy from the American South, whose next best alternative is, yes, being a greeter at Wal-mart. Maybe even one of my Kentucky relatives. Hey, maybe Pat Buchanan’s onto something here…

Bloomberg’s Singapore-based columnist Andy Mukherjee writes about the private-education boom in China:

At the end of 2005, some 15 million students were enrolled in 77,000 non-state schools. That’s 8 percent of the 197 million Chinese children aged 5 to 14 years. Privately funded schools in India have twice as large a share of the total market.

Expect the gap to close quickly.

Nine years ago, Ma Lei of Fudan University wrote about the growth of private schools in China for Cato Policy Report:

In Wenzhou, more than half of the 600 million RMB spent on education comes from the private sector. That’s a claim that few, if any, communities in the United States can make. …There are more than 2,300 privately run kindergarten classes in Wenzhou, in which more than 90 percent of all children of kindergarten age are enrolled. In addition, there are 21 private high schools, which educate about a quarter of the total high school student population.

James Tooley has also written at length about private education for the poor in Africa and India. His work, and its exciting new directions, are discussed in this Atlantic article.

Los Angeles Times reporter Nancy Vogel has a roundup of nanny-state bills pending in the California legislature:

Enjoy fast food? Like to light up while you watch the waves? Forget to sock away money for your kids’ education?

Some California lawmakers want to change your ways. They’ve planted a crop of proposals this year — “nanny” bills, as they’re called — that would:

•  Restrict the use of artery-clogging trans fat, common in fried and baked foods and linked to heart disease, in restaurants and school cafeterias.

•  Bar smoking at state parks and beaches, and in cars carrying children.

•  Open a savings account, seeded with $500, for every newborn Californian to use at 18 for college, a first home purchase or an investment for retirement.

•  Fine dog and cat owners who don’t spay or neuter their pets by 4 months of age.

•  Require chain restaurants to list calorie, saturated fat and sodium content on menus.

•  Phase out the sale of incandescent light bulbs, which are less energy-efficient than compact fluorescent bulbs.

Read more…

On Sunday the New York Times Book Review ran a review of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution by Michael Tanner. Reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn wrote

By exposing Bush and the Republican leadership as apostates who foolishly believe big government can be employed for conservative ends, Tanner hopes to persuade the right to return to what he sees as its original ideals of limited government and individual responsibility….Tanner is a lucid writer and vigorous polemicist who scores a number of points against the Republican Party’s fiscal transgressions.

On the same day, the Washington Post Book World reviewed On the Wealth of Nations, the latest book from Cato’s H. L. Mencken Research Fellow P. J. O’Rourke. And in the Post and hundreds of other papers, George Will took note of John Samples’s new book:

According to John Samples of the Cato Institute (in his book ” The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform“), congressional Democrats began the process that culminated in criminalizing large contributions — the kind that can give long-shot candidates, such as Vilsack, a chance to become competitive. Yes, the initial aim of campaign “reforms” was less the proclaimed purpose of combating corruption or “the appearance” thereof than it was to impede the entry of inconvenient candidates into presidential campaigns. In that sense, campaign reform is a government program that has actually worked, unfortunately.

Finally, the Times Book Review also reviewed Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who spoke at Cato’s Annual Benefactor Summit a week earlier. Benefactors who attended the Summit got to hear from three authors a week before their books hit the big time. Don’t miss it next year!