13 March 2010
Today’s Tabbloid
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Europe’s Weakness: Feature or
Bug? [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 12, 2010 04:47P.M.
By Christopher Preble
The question at National Journal’s Security Experts blog concerning
NATO and the future of Europe has stimulated quite a spirited debate. I
decided to take another bite at the apple.
My response:
Gordon Adams objects to the framing of the question, arguing that
Europe is more important than ever because European governments
have chosen to invest in civilians, not men and women at arms. In this
context, Europe’s military weakness is a feature, not a bug.
Dan Serwer agrees, saying that the “Europeans are on to something,”
that their civilian capabilities are vast, that they’ve been deployed in 22
different operations, and are involved in a dozen currently.
But even if they have such capabilities, all the soft power in the world
isn’t worth much without some military power to back it up. In many of
the places where nation building might be called for, various thugs,
murderers and warlords use weapons to steal food aid, intimidate local
officials, and kidnap wealthy foreigners. Such situations cry out for hard
power: people who pry the weapons from the cold dead hands of the
warlords, and convince the warlords’ followers to get onboard or else
meet a similar fate. The aftermath of this dynamic, played out dozens of
times in the past several decades, is what allows the guys in wingtips and
the gals in sensible pumps to do development assistance, legal reform,
institution building, etc.
In this respect, I agree with Messrs. Killebrew and Carafano. Hard power
still matters. Unlike them, however, I would much prefer that locals be
responsible for adjudicating these internal disputes, and, failing that,
that others beside the U.S. military be capable and willing to deliver that
hard power.
Bob Killebrew, the most emphatic defender of NATO as a concept (even
if he advocates some reforms at the margins) concludes with three
different points:
1. “NATO makes highly unlikely the kinds of European arms races and
alliances that led to war so many times in recent history.”
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In other words, with respect to Gates’s contention that Europe’s military
weakness is a problem (bug), Killebrew still thinks it a good thing
(feature).
2. “Without NATO, the Greeks and Turks would have long had their war,
and perhaps others as well.”
Ummmm, hello? One could argue that NATO prevents small disputes
like the 35-plus year Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus from
spiraling into a major European war, but that is not what Col. Killebrew
wrote (and it would be a very difficult assertion to prove in any case
because there are in fact many things to explain the absence of wars
between traditional enemies).
3. Killebrew concludes that we are, in fact, subsidizing the defense of
other, far more vulnerable, allies, and that we should continue to do so.
“With NATO, the Poles and others feel less pressure to prepare for their
defense. That can, and should, irritate U.S. policymakers, but it’s good
for the U.S. in the end.”
Jim Carafano appears to reject the argument — he wants Europe to get
serious about military power and “join the real world” — but he is
especially dismissive of the claim that greater restraint by the United
States will induce the Europeans to do more. “The less we spend,” he
writes, “the less they spend.”
Evidence please.
To reiterate, the current U.S. posture toward Europe is based on
precisely the opposite premise: many of the defenders of the NATO
status quo believe that if we were to do less, the Europeans would do
more — and that would be bad.
Our intentions are ultimately irrelevant here. In my previous post, I
alluded to the literature showing that even if our policies in Europe were
not intended to discourage other NATO members from spending more
money on their militaries, they would still be disinclined from doing so
simply because it makes sense for each of them to shelter behind the
strongest member of the alliance.
One need not sift through dusty economics journals or boring white
papers to understand that while we have done more, the Europeans have
done less.
• In 1999, NATO defense expenditures (not counting those of the
United States) stood at 2.05 percent of GDP. Today, they spend
1.65 percent. (Table 15, IISS, The Military Balance 2010, p. 110).
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• Over that same time period, U.S. spending as a share of GDP grew
from 3.15 percent to 4.88 percent. (Table 2, IISS, The Military
Balance 2010, p. 22).
It is possible that if we do less, the Europeans will do less, on the
grounds that they don’t see much need for military power of any kind.
That is Gordon Adams’s contention. But if that is true, then why do
Americans pay to discourage Europeans from doing what they are not
inclined to do in the first place? If you think that European military
weakness is a good thing, you shouldn’t much care why they’re spending
less, only that they are. NATO’s defenders have an additional burden,
however: they think 1) it a good thing that Europe is militarily weak, and
2) that NATO is instrumental to that state of affairs.
I don’t. It would be useful for the strongest power in the world to be able
to depend upon regional powers to deal with local problems before they
become global problems. It would be useful that other countries have
both the capacity and the will to act independent of the United States.
We have created a world in which they can’t and won’t.
I don’t fault European governments for preferring not to spend hundreds
of billions of dollars on military hardware and personnel. I fault past
American leaders and strategists (if they can be called that) for thinking
it is a good thing that American taxpayers should pay so that others do
not, and that our troops should answer every 911 call in the world. And I
fault contemporary thinkers for suggesting that this pattern should
persist for another 20 years.
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Weekend Links [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 12, 2010 03:49P.M.
By Chris Moody
• Andrew Coulson on national education standards: “The whole idea
of imposing a single set of age-based standards on all students rests
on a false premise: that children are identical widgets capable of
being dragged along an instructional conveyor belt at the same
pace, benefiting equally from the experience.”
• Question of the day: Would Obamacare end corruption—or expand
it?
• Making things worse: How increasing the minimum wage will kill
even more jobs for black teens, a group already facing 45 percent
unemployment.
• The unintended consequences of a National ID card. (Now with
support from both sides of the aisle.)
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13 March 2010
• Podcast: “Bad Statutes, New Crimes” featuring Marie Gryphon.
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The Census Meets the Patriot
Act [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 12, 2010 02:37P.M.
By Julian Sanchez
The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department recently sent
out a letter to the chairs of the Asian Pacific, black, and Hispanic
caucuses in Congress, reassuring them that the Patriot Act’s expansion of
information-gathering powers, including the controversial Section 215,
does not override federal statutes guaranteeing the confidentiality of
census data. DOJ’s view, according to Assistant Attorney General Ronald
Weich, is that “if Congress intended to override these protections, it
would say so clearly and explicitly.”
Section 215, recall, is colloquially referred to as the “business records”
provision of Patriot, though in fact it permits investigators to obtain “any
tangible thing” from a designated person or entity by obtaining an order
from the secret FISA court, subject only to a showing that the records
sought are “relevant” to a national security investigation. As Weich
observes, §215 does not contain the “notwithstanding any other law”
language present in other parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, which means that it cannot be presumed on face to override other
federal privacy statues establishing a higher degree of protection for
specific categories of sensitive records.
What’s interesting to me, however, is that a similar issue arose several
years ago, not with respect to the census confidentiality statute, but
rather the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (aka FERPA, aka
the Buckley Amendment). Initially, DOJ attorneys similarly opted not to
seek education records under §215 on the grounds that the FISA court
might conclude FERPA trumped Patriot in the absence of language
giving §215 explicit priority, as the Office of the Inspector General’s
initial report on the use of §215 explains. Nevertheless, the Counsel for
Intelligence Policy told OIG that his office “would have been willing to
present an application to the FISA court for educational records if the
FBI considered the information important enough and wanted to press
the issue with the FISA Court.”
Subsequent amendments to the statute alleviated those concerns:
According to [National Secrity Law Branch] and [Office of
Intelligence Policy and Review] attorneys, this legal
impediment to obtaining educational records has been
addressed. Section 106(a)(2) of the Reauthorization Act
amended FISA by ading 50 U.S.C. §1861(a)(3), which
specifically addresses educational, medical, tax and other
sensitive categories of business records. The amendment
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provided that when the FBI is requesting such items, the FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
request must be personally approved by the FBI Director, the
FBI Deputy Director, or the Executive Assistant Director for Ravitch-and-Hirsch-topia. [Cato
National Security. According to several NSLB and OPPR
attorneys we interviewed, because this provision clarifies that at Liberty]
educational records are obtainable through the use of a MAR 12, 2010 01:58P.M.
Section 215 order, the non-disclosure provisions of Section
215 apply rather than the notification provisions of the By Neal McCluskey
Buckley Amendment.

Census records, of course, are not mentioned, and the statutory language
protecting those records from legal process is unusually strong and
unqualified. On the other hand, neither does the amended language
explicitly override the federal statutes protecting the specified categories
of records. Rather, it adds a layer of oversight for several types of
requests that are implied to fall within the scope of §215. Indeed, at the
time, this portion of the Reauthorization Act was publicly portrayed as
increasing protections for sensitive records.

That, at any rate, was the spin the Congressional Research Service gave
it. Based on OIG’s account, it sounds as though a reform that had been
painted as a concession to civil libertarians actually allowed the
acquisition of those sensitive records for the first time, since they’d
previously been regarded as off-limits by statute. So I suppose we should
be glad they didn’t decide to simultaneously “enhance” the safeguards on
census records.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily impossible for those records
to ever be obtained via a §215 order. As Weich’s letter clearly says, the
Census Act prohibits “the Commerce Secretary and other covered
individuals from disclosing protected census information.” But as the
Supreme Court clarified in St. Regis Paper v. United States, that
confidentiality requirement is only binding on specific covered
individuals. If the government is able to get its hands on a copy of a
census record by serving some non-covered individual, the record itself
is not off limits.
Since I know approximately nothing about the fine points of record
handling protocol within the Census Bureau, I can’t really say how much
of a practical difference that makes. Still, given that we’ve seen statutory
records protections effectively stripped away under the guise of
enhancing those protections, I think it’s reasonable to infer that census
records will be considered fair game under §215 if they can be obtained
from a source other than the designated officials.
If you follow education news at all, over the last week or so — until the
national-standards stories took over — you probably saw a lot about
education historian Diane Ravitch’s supposedly sudden determination
that school choice isn’t good after all. That’s one of the major selling
points of her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School
System, and just about every major newspaper has devoted a fair
amount of ink to it.
Now I’ve devoted some ink — okay, pixels — to it, too. You can check out
my review of Ravitch’s book on the brand-new School Reform News
website. When you’re done with that, you can take a gander at my Cato
Journal review of Core Knowledge guru E. D. Hirsch’s new offering, The
Making of Americans. I think you’ll detect a unifying theme: Ravitch and
Hirsch are excellent at their specialties — history and pedagogy,
respectively — but they ignore just about everything they have lamented
for decades about government schooling in order to proclaim that, um,
we somehow need more government schooling.
Go figure!

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Get Ready for a Healthcare
Gagging on SAFRA [Cato at
Showdown [The Club for
Liberty]
Growth] MAR 12, 2010 12:48P.M.
MAR 12, 2010 01:52P.M.
By Neal McCluskey
It looks like the Democrats are going to do the unthinkable.
With national curriculum standards now getting some real attention, I
haven’t been able to give the plan to shove bankrupting student aid
legislation down our thoats via health-care reconciliation the scourging it
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS deserves. I will soon, but until then this “Water Cooler” piece from the
Washington Times should slake your thirst. Here’s a choice quote:
An Inconvenient Tax [The Club
Watching the Democrats create two massive pieces of rotten
for Growth] legislation by themselves is bad enough, but piling them
MAR 12, 2010 01:22P.M. together is like watching someone make an enormous
Dagwood sandwich with mysterious fillings and make you eat
This is from our friends at the Moving Picture Institute: An Inconvenient the mile high concoction in one sitting.
Tax - Trailer from Life Is My Movie Entertainment on Vimeo.
Darn — acckkk! — right!

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This Week in Government
“A Full Range of Views” [“Cato
Failure [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 12, 2010 01:14P.M. at Liberty”]
MAR 12, 2010 12:46P.M.
By Tad DeHaven
By Sallie James
Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this
week: It’s not often (especially these days) that a trade news item makes me
laugh out loud. But, via an article in Inside U.S. Trade today, I saw a
• Six reasons to downsize Washington. letter from United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk to Rep. Michael
Michaud (D, ME) that did the trick.
• The chances of a taxpayer bailout for the FHA are probably larger
than it wants to admit. Representative Michaud leads the House Trade Working Group, which is
indeed working very diligently to stymie any hopes of meaningful trade
• The same people that say Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shouldn’t liberalization. They wrote a letter in January to the USTR outlining their
be on the government’s books are often the same people who once concerns about the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. (I,
dismissed concerns that the two companies were headed toward too have concerns, but not the same ones as the HTWG.) Ambassador
financial ruin. Kirk wrote back a fairly anodyne response that did not commit the
administration to much of anything, except to follow up on the
• Here’s a shocker: the private sector does a better job of fighting comments they have receifed from the Federal Register Notice. Towards
fraud than the government. the end, though, came the punchline:

• Bailing out state and local governments creates a disincentive for We are conducting follow-up meetings with these groups,
state and local policymakers to implement necessary reforms to get including the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers, the Sierra
their budgets and future liabilities under control. Club, Oxfam, and Global Trade Watch, among others, to
ensure we are hearing a full range of views on these

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issues. (My emphasis)
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ObamaCare Sparks Democratic
Revolt [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 12, 2010 11:49A.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
In today’s Washington Post, Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug
Schoen warn that ObamaCare will be a disaster for Democrats:
Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch
Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive
themselves into believing that the public favors the
Democrats’ current health-care plan…
[A] solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-
reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan
strongly oppose it…while only half of those who support the
plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the
legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more
personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never
in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding
misconstruction of survey data…
By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions
of federal government more. This is astounding given the
generally negative perception of insurance companies…
Health care is no longer a debate about the merits of specific
initiatives…[but] about the government and a political
majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people.
This oped reminds me of a Bruce Reed article on the differences between
hacks and wonks:
Strip away the job titles and party labels, and you will find
two kinds of people in Washington: political hacks and policy
wonks. Hacks come to Washington because anywhere else
they’d be bored to death. Wonks come here because nowhere
else could we bore so many to death. These divisions extend
far beyond the hack havens of political campaigns and
consulting firms and the wonk ghettos of think tanks on
Dupont Circle. Some journalists are wonks, but most are
hacks. Some columnists are hacks, but most are wonks. All
members of Congress pass themselves off as wonks, but many
got elected as hacks. Lobbyists are hacks who make money
pretending to be wonks. The Washington Monthly, The New
Republic, and the entire political blogosphere consist largely
of wonks pretending to be hacks. “The Hotline” is for hacks;
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13 March 2010
National Journal is for wonks. “The West Wing” is for
wonks; “K Street” was for hacks.
After two decades in Washington as a wonk working among
hacks, I have come to the conclusion that the gap between
Republicans and Democrats is as nothing compared to the
one between these two tribes. We wonks think we’re smarter
than hacks. Hacks think that if being smart makes someone a
wonk, they’d rather be stupid. Wonks think all hacks are
creatures from another planet, like James Carville. Hacks
share Paul Begala’s view that wonks are all “propeller heads,”
like Elroy on “The Jetsons.” Wonks think the differences
between hacks and wonks are as irreconcilable as the Hutus
and the Tutsis. Hacks think it’s just like wonks to bring up the
Hutus and the Tutsis.
The Democrats’ dogged, bloodthirsty crusade for universal coverage has
been possible only because the wonks have seduced or silenced the hacks
within the Democratic Party.
The hacks may be launching a rebellion, with Caddell and Schoen’s oped
the opening salvo.
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Dovish Fed [Larry Kudlow’s
Money Politic$]
MAR 12, 2010 11:44A.M.
The new Obama Fed is going to be very dovish when it comes to fighting
future inflation and defending the value of the dollar.
The president has nominated Janet Yellen to be vice chair of the Federal
Reserve. Ms. Yellen is a distinguished economist who unfortunately
subscribes to the Phillips-curve model that trades off unemployment and
inflation. In other words, rather than excess money creation as the cause
of rising prices, she focuses on the unemployment rate, the volume of
new jobs being created, and the growth of the overall economy. For Ms.
Yellen, inflation is caused by too many people working and too much
economic prosperity.
And since we have the opposite problem today — high unemployment
and too few people working — she will be the last Fed governor to turn
out the lights on the central bank’s zero interest rate.
There is no evidence in Ms. Yellen’s public opinions or speeches that she
might use a market-price rule — targeting commodities, gold, bond rates,
or the dollar — as a forward-looking inflation (or deflation) signal. So the
absence of a commodity- or dollar-price rule will continue at the Fed.
Bernanke doesn’t use a market-price rule, and Obama’s additional Fed
appointees — whoever they are — will undoubtedly come from the same
Phillips-curve camp.
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Supply-siders like myself who believe that only market prices can
provide accurate signals of the supply and demand for money are going Great Profile Article on Jim
to be very disappointed. If the Fed supplies more cash than markets
want, the inflation rate can go up whether unemployment is high or low. DeMint [The Club for Growth]
We learned this painfully in the 1970s, when high unemployment was MAR 12, 2010 08:16A.M.
accompanied by high inflation.
Jim DeMint is featured in this front page POLITICO
And this is a crucial juncture. The Fed is going to encounter
excruciatingly difficult problems as it deals with the magnitude and
timing of its decisions to start withdrawing excess cash and raising the
fed funds target rate. Markets should be the guideposts for these
decisions, not the unemployment rate.

Janet Yellen, who served as a top economic advisor to Pres. Bill Clinton
and was a Clinton appointee to the Federal Reserve Board, has for the
past six years been the president of the San Francisco Fed. She is a very
able economist. But if you work from the wrong money model, you are
likely to get the wrong money results.

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Why ALL Age-Based Education

Standards Are Bad [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 12, 2010 10:27A.M.

By Andrew J. Coulson

That’s the subject of my op-ed this morning over at Pajamas Media.

Check it out, and discover who realized that education standards tied
strictly to student age were a bad idea… 411 years ago.