Cheerful or not

Why We’re Losing: How free market ideas suffer from being counterintuitive || Reason

People don’t understand the private sector. They don’t like it. Intuitively, it seems selfish. Most people are busy trying to run their own lives. They’re grateful to politicians who want to take charge. It seems intuitive to think that a smart group of planners concerned about the collective good can accomplish more than free people pursing their own interests individually in the private sector. But history is filled with examples of how the solutions politicians propose create new problems without solving the old. Urban renewal wiped out entire neighborhoods without improving cities, mortgage subsidies created a damaging financial bubble, the war on drugs created a prison-industrial complex while barely taking a dent out of drug abuse. The list goes on and on.

The few politicians who manage, often against overwhelming odds, to successfully expand the sphere of private action rarely get rewarded for their trouble. Margaret Thatcher saved Britain—and got thrown out. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) may get recalled for trying to cut the budget and push back against public sector unions. Hong Kong went from Third World to First World in just 50 years because it had economic freedom. But when I went to Hong Kong and interviewed people, they didn’t know why they were prosperous. They just talked about their problems and how government should solve them….

Liberty is counterintuitive. It takes hard work to overcome the brain’s attraction to simple-sounding solutions. It’s not easy to convince people that sometimes the best way for governments to address a problem is to do less, not more. It’s easier to admire the activist or politician who talks about helping the less fortunate than it is to cheer on a hustler who wants to get rich by selling you stuff. Those of us who see expanding the private sphere as the best way to help the most people have an uphill battle in making our case….  Most people see a world full of problems that can best be tackled via wisely applied laws. They assume it’s just the laziness, stupidity, or indifference of politicians that prevents the problems from being fixed. But government is force, and government is inefficient. The inefficient use of force creates more problems than it solves….

Economics is complicated. That’s one more reason to be grateful for the Constitution: With its relatively simple rules, it helps keep government within bounds. Some Tea Party activists understand that, and it’s one reason they call for a return to constitutional, limited government. 

But getting the majority of America to sign on to these ideas might require an impending crisis. Looking around the world, the next flashpoint after Greece will probably come elsewhere on the periphery of Europe or in Japan. The populations of those countries are graying—young workers are shrinking relative to the retirees they’ll need to support—faster than America’s. Watching their problems, we will get an advance look at the financial poison we are foisting on America’s young people.

But I’m not sure voters will pay attention. If Americans didn’t learn the folly of central planning from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stagnation of socialist economies around the world, they may not learn about the danger of unsustainable budgets from the catastrophes in Greece, Spain, and Japan….

There is nothing that government can do that we cannot do better as free individuals—as groups of individuals, working together voluntarily, not at the point of a gun or under threat of a fine. Without big government, our possibilities are limitless.

But it’s a hard sell. Things continue to get better in a free society, but nobody is out in front of the camera saying, “Yay for the marginal improvements that come with free markets!” It’s not as compelling or newsworthy as a report on someone who goes bankrupt because he got sick. If we are to foster prosperity, we must find better ways to promote the virtues of liberty.

America and the Value of 'Earned Success' || Arthur Brooks (Wall Street Journal)

In the end, I concluded, what set the United States apart from Spain was the difference between earned success and learned helplessness.

Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to measure your life’s “profit” however you want, be it in money, making beautiful music, or helping people learn English. Earned success is at the root of American exceptionalism.

The link between earned success and life satisfaction is well established by researchers. The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, for example, reveals that people who say they feel “very successful” or “completely successful” in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy than people who feel “somewhat successful.” It doesn’t matter if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.

The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.

During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: “We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”

Learned helplessness was what my wife and I observed then, and still do today, in social-democratic Spain. The recession, rigid labor markets, and excessive welfare spending have pushed unemployment to 24.4%, with youth joblessness over 50%. Nearly half of adults under 35 live with their parents. Unable to earn their success, Spaniards fight to keep unearned government benefits.

Meanwhile, their collective happiness—already relatively low—has withered.

Communism Still a Horror; People Still Flee || Via Meadia

May Day, that great holiday of the international communist movement, and news comes from Miami that two young actors have joined more than a million other Cubans in fleeing the Castro dictatorship to the United States….

[Some] of this world persist in seeing something romantic and attractive in the most squalid ideological failure and the most grotesque system of mass repression devised in the history of the world. I am, of course, referring to communism. Cuban communism, for all the murders, repression and systemic failure attending it, is not the worst communist government ever built. The North Koreans, the Cambodians, Mao, and of course the great architects Stalin and Lenin themselves, were more murderous than the Castro brothers and did more harm….

Communism is a system that, whatever noble intentions may animate some of its delusional followers, places petty and tyrannical bureaucrats in charge of the life of a people. Artists, writers, thinkers, entrepreneurs, mystics, social reformers, advocates of liberty: all these people are the particular targets of the baying, vindictive and irrational hatred of the narrow, cramped souls and power-crazed fanatics this sorry system empowers.

Communism is an engine for putting the worst people in a society in charge of the best and the most creative; the results are the awful charnel houses and environmental disaster scenes that mark the communist and formerly communist worlds everywhere the virus spread.

That Javier and Anallin had to get out of this stale and stultifying world to stretch their creative vision and try their wings is no surprise. That they have had to leave friends and families behind is a tragedy, and just one more of the injustices that stains the record of this failed regime.

Britain weighs proposal to allow greatly increased Internet ‘snooping’ || Washington Post

Under daily observation from thousands of surveillance cameras mounted everywhere from street corners to taxicabs to public parks, Britons rank among the most-watched people on Earth. But a new government plan is poised to take the gaze of this nation’s security services dramatically deeper: letting them examine the text messages, phone calls, e-mails and Web browsing habits of every person in the country.

The “snooping” proposal set to be presented in Parliament later this year is sparking an uproar over privacy in Britain, fueling a debate over the lengths to which intelligence agencies should go in monitoring citizens — a debate that has resonance on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Supreme Court Weighs ObamaCare || Wall Street Journal

On Monday, the Supreme Court will begin an extraordinary three-day hearing on the constitutionality of ObamaCare. At stake are the Constitution’s structural guarantees of individual liberty, which limit governmental power and ensure political accountability by dividing that power between federal and state authorities. Upholding ObamaCare would destroy this dual-sovereignty system, the most distinctive feature of American constitutionalism.

ObamaCare mandates that every American, with a few narrow exceptions, have a congressionally defined minimum level of health-insurance coverage. Noncompliance brings a substantial monetary penalty. The ultimate purpose of this “individual mandate” is to force young and healthy middle-class workers to subsidize those who need more coverage….

Congress’s reliance on the Commerce Clause to support the individual mandate was politically expedient but constitutionally deficient. Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce is broad but not limitless.

First among the limits is the very nature of congressional authority, which is based on specifically enumerated powers. As the Supreme Court has consistently acknowledged, the Constitution denies the federal government the type of broad public health and welfare regulatory authority known as a “general police power,” which is reserved exclusively to the states. The court has also repeatedly held that preservation of this division between federal and state authority is a matter for supervision by the courts, and its precedents make clear that congressional Commerce Clause regulation must be subject to some judicially enforceable limiting principle….

Congress has crossed a fundamental constitutional line. Neither the fact that every individual has some discernible impact on the economy, nor that virtually everyone will at some point in time use health-care services, is a sufficient basis for federal regulation. Both of these arguments, advanced by ObamaCare’s defenders, are flawed because they admit no judicially enforceable limiting principle marking the outer bounds of federal authority.

On the left and right, legal thinkers too often forget that Congress has no constitutional power simply to regulate the economy. Rather, that power comes from a series of discrete authorities—to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, to tax, spend and borrow, to coin money and fix its value and so forth—that together allow it broad control over the nation’s economic affairs. As a result, congressional efforts to address national problems may well be less economically efficient than would a more straightforward exercise of police power. The Constitution subordinates efficiency to guarantee liberty.

The Constitution divides governmental power between federal and state governments so that one may check the other. This requires that the electorate be able to tell, especially on Election Day, which government is responsible for which policies and regulations with which we live.

It's Time to Clean House || The Atlantic

America is mired in a tarpit of accumulated law. Reformers propose new laws to fix health care, schools, and the regulatory system, but almost never suggest cleaning out the legal swamp these institutions operate in. These complex legal tangles not only set goals but allocate resources and dictate the minutest details of how to meet those goals. Most are obsolete in whole or part.

Nothing important can get fixed without remaking a coherent legal framework.

The flaw is not one that can be solved by deregulation. Almost no one, for example, would disagree about the need to provide education for disabled children. But special education law, enacted in 1975, was structured as an open-ended mandate, and soon spun out of control. Today, special ed consumes 20 percent of the total K-12 budget in America. Programs for gifted children get less than half of one percent, and pre-K education gets almost nothing. Is this a sensible allocation of education dollars? No one is even asking the question.

Congress treats most laws as if they were the Ten Commandments — except they’re more like the 10 million commandments. Most legislative programs do not codify timeless principles of right and wrong. They are tools of social management. These laws allocate social resources — almost 70 percent of federal revenue in 2010 was consumed by three entitlement programs enacted a half century or more ago. Congress almost never goes back to rationalize these programs. Running government today is like trying to run a business using every idea every manager ever had….

The problem of obsolete law is not theoretical. It’s concrete, affecting daily choices across the country. It adds to cost, and slows productive activity to a crawl.

A Genius for Subject Changing || National Review

The Obama administration issues an edict regarding birth control that is a) blatantly unconstitutional, b) economically absurd, and c) completely unmatched to any national need, and what are we talking about? The “Republican war on women.”

Democrats are geniuses at muddying the waters and twisting the debate in a direction they find congenial. They’ve been at this a very long time….

Today we are again invited to believe that to deny a taxpayer subsidy is to withhold a right. For no discernible reason, the Obama administration has decreed that all contraceptives must be provided “free” to those who want them (which of course means that everyone else’s insurance rates must rise). 

The administration demands this despite the fact that 1) most Americans can well afford their own contraception (it’s less than the cost of a weekly trip to Starbucks); 2) inexpensive contraceptives are widely available at every supermarket and pharmacy; 3) Medicaid recipients already receive them free; 4) the feds also spend another $300 million annually to provide free contraceptives to those who are low-income, uninsured, or otherwise do not qualify for Medicaid; and 5) Planned Parenthood and state and local public health clinics distribute contraceptives free around the nation.

That even Catholic institutions, who object to this command on religious grounds, are to be bullied by the federal government into violating their consciences, ought to have provoked an outcry from liberals, allegedly firm guardians of the First Amendment.

[emphasis added]

Myanmar’s startling changes: Pragmatic virtues || The Economist

Another day, another milestone: there appears to be no let-up in the frenetic pace of Myanmar’s political transformation. In early February, for the first time in memory, the finance minister revealed details of the government budget. In a speech to parliament (of all places: the place had been considered a joke), he also divulged how much Myanmar owed in foreign debt ($11 billion). Then, a couple of days later, the hitherto secretive and repressive dictatorship told a UN human-rights envoy that it will now consider allowing monitors into the country for by-elections on April 1st.

It would be an extraordinary step. These will be the first parliamentary seats to be contested by Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), since it was unbanned by the government just a few months ago….

Yet the question remains why an entrenched military regime, in power since 1962, is doing all this now, and so fast. In comparison with the bloody political upheavals in the Middle East, Myanmar’s political revolution has been top-down and largely peaceful. The changes may yet prove to be more profound than in Libya or Egypt.

Long-term anxieties contributed to the generals’ change of heart. After decades of failed socialist planning followed by a few more of military crony capitalism, the regime became increasingly aware that once-rich Myanmar had in its hands fallen embarrassingly far behind the neighbours. At some point, this humiliation trumped the ability of a few to make very corrupt fortunes.

In the spirit of openness now sweeping the country, officials acknowledge that the economy was in no shape, for instance, to prosper after Myanmar’s planned entry into a single market among the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations in 2015. What is more, many in government badly want their country to be reconnected to sources of international finance, especially the IMF and the World Bank. Myanmar has been denied this under Western sanctions. If prisoners must be freed to get sanctions lifted, so be it.

Many presumed that these sanctions did not worry the generals because they could rely on Chinese aid instead. Not so. Particularly in northern Myanmar, the often arrogant and sometimes brutal behaviour of Chinese companies in the end alienated even the government. What is more, the sort of technical and educational assistance—“capacity-building” in the jargon—that Myanmar now craves is just what China does not do. Thus the generals have been obliged to turn back to the West, and political reform.

Government types now acknowledge that other factors were at work, too. One high-up official concedes that the reform process was greatly accelerated last year by the Arab spring. This scared the generals: “it was a very critical time for us”. The regime was afraid that opposition groups would take to the streets again, as they had done in 1988 and 2007, maybe in conjunction with the many armed groups, including among the Karen and Kachin minorities, fighting ethnic insurgencies in the border regions. It was time, this official says, to pursue national reconciliation.

ObamaCare's Great Awakening || Wall Street Journal

The political furor over President Obama’s birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn’t be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

***

In late January the Health and Human Services Department required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and liberals from the likes of Planned Parenthood, amid government promises of compromise.

In the end, Planned Parenthood won. HHS chose to draw the rule’s conscience exceptions for “religious employers” so narrowly that they will not be extended to religious charities, universities, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other institutions that oppose contraception as a matter of religious belief.

The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion. What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what “health care” must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions….

Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius’s ministry. That may explain why her staff didn’t notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment’s protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed.

Bad call. The decision has roused the Catholic bishops from their health-care naivete, but they’ve been joined by people of all faiths and even no faith, as it becomes clear that their own deepest moral beliefs may be thrown over eventually….

The HHS diktat isn’t something unique to President Obama. It is the political essence of government-run medicine. When politics determines who can or should receive what benefits, and who pays what for it, government will use its force to dictate the outcomes that it wants—either for reasons of cost, or to promote its values, which in this case means that “women’s health” trumps religious conscience….

The White House is now trying to cauterize the political damage and saying it is open to some “compromise” on its own contraception decision. But the rule is already final. HHS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama’s second term. Religious liberty won’t be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.

Who Really Stopped SOPA, and Why? || Tech Freedom

The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as currency, and sees any obstacle to its free flow as inefficient friction to be engineered out of existence.

Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet–are developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements.