mixed economy — VOICES for REASON

When the Supreme Court ruled that the government has to respect the right of corporations to engage in political speech, opponents of corporate speech (Obama included) put their weight behind the DISCLOSE Act. The Act reads like a grab-bag of policies united only by their intention: to place as many burdens as possible on groups that want to exercise their First Amendment rights.

DISCLOSE has been winding its way through Congress, but it faced strong opposition by the National Rifle Association (one of the groups subject to the proposed law). That is, until the House Democrats agreed to carve out an exception to the bill which–wouldn’t you know it–exempts the NRA from the Act’s speech-squelching measures. The exception was narrowly tailored so that only the NRA and a handful of other organizations (such as AARP) qualify. In return for this special favor, the NRA has agreed not to actively oppose the bill.

The lesson from Washington: free speech is no longer something you preserve by asserting your inalienable Constitutional rights–it’s something you preserve by throwing around your political clout.

What can brown do for you? Well, if you’re FedEx, it can lobby Washington to strangle you with pro-union legislation.

House Transportation Chairman James Oberstar (D., Big Labor) last year slipped 230 words into a spending bill that would make it easier for the Teamsters to unionize FedEx. This ambush was included at the urging of UPS, which has been saddled with the Teamsters for decades and wants FedEx to feel its pain.

On a free market, UPS and FedEx would engage solely in economic competition, trying to outdo each other by offering the best value to customers. But when the government intervenes in markets, as it does today and has been doing for decades, it opens the door to this sort of political pseudo-competition: the attempt to pressure government into using force to provide one’s own business with special favors or one’s competitors with special burdens.

Under economic competition, everyone wins. Even if a competitor “loses” in some particular case, he benefits by living in a free, productive economy. But under political, or pseudo-competition, everyone loses–even those who “win” in some particular case. We’re all forced to pay higher prices, to accept fewer opportunities, to resign ourselves to a lower standard of living.

What we need to be asking is: Why does the government have any say in this matter? Why can’t FedEx and its employees be free to decide voluntarily the terms under which employees can unionize? Why doesn’t Washington put an end to political competition by returning to the role the founders envisioned for it: the protection of individual rights.

Image: flickr

A recent WSJ article provides a stomach-turning play-by-play of the Democrats’ health care coup:

It was dirty deals, open threats, broken promises and disregard for democracy that pulled ObamaCare to this point, and yesterday the same machinations pushed it across the finish line.

And that’s not even the half of it. ObamaCare was the wayward child of every conceivable (and inconceivable) pressure group fighting by any means necessary for whatever short-range benefit it could grab: from health insurance companies looking to gain customers at the point of a gun to businesses looking to foist their health care costs onto taxpayers; from prestige-seeking politicians looking to build an historical legacy to political hucksters who opposed ObamaCare on principle until the price was right. And let’s not forget the largest pressure group behind ObamaCare: those seeking to extract unearned health care from the young, healthy, and rich.

This was pressure group total war.

But pressure groups are only a symptom. The source of pressure group warfare is today’s mixed economy, where the government has expansive power to intervene in the economy. Read the rest of this entry »

My colleague Onkar Ghate was invited to take part in an online debate hosted by BusinessWeek.com. The question posed:

Public university students should stop protesting tuition increases. Cash-strapped states have no choice but to raise fees, and even with the cost hikes, state schools are a huge bargain compared to their private counterparts. Pro or con?

Onkar takes the “pro” side–but from a unique perspective. Read the whole thing.

stock.xchg / lusi

Commentators on both the right and the left have griped about the many conditions in the Senate and House health-care bills that were added to win the support of special interest groups or specific congressmen. The right, for example, has decried the dealing as “cash for cloture,” while the left has assailed the individual mandate as an insurance industry coup.

And indeed, the bills are ripe with provisions that benefit some at the expense of others. Among those in the Senate bill alone (see this article for a more complete list):

• $300 million to Louisiana for the vote of Mary Landrieu
• $100 million to a Connecticut hospital to help the sinking poll numbers of Christopher Dodd
• A permanent expansion of federal Medicare payments to Nebraska (estimated value, $100 million) for the vote of Ben Nelson
• An excise tax exemption for longshoremen in exchange for the support of their union
• A 10 percent tax on tanning salons—added at the behest of the American Medical Association in place of a proposed a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery
• The exemption of Florida senior citizens from Medicare cuts for the vote of Bill Nelson
• $600 million in Medicaid benefits to Vermont for the vote of Patrick Leahy

Where does the money for these favors come from? From the only place it can—the pockets of U.S. citizens who have created that wealth in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the economy is being strangled to death by government spending and controls. And yet its leading economic official, Wesley Mouch, prescribes more government intervention as the solution: “I need wider powers!” he yells repeatedly. Besides the yelling, President Barack Obama sounded an awful lot like Wesley Mouch at his recent “jobs summit,” which was intended to address our 10%+ unemployment.

Consider the context of the summit. The Bush and Obama administrations warned us that if we didn’t fall into line with their trillion-dollar bailouts and industry takeovers, we would be punished by unemployment over 10 percent. We fell into line. Unemployment is over 10 percent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch recently provided a noteworthy lesson in government intimidation. In the days leading up to the congressional hearings on the NCAA college football Bowl Championship Series, the Utah Senator published a letter in Sports Illustrated arguing that the “arcane” and “biased” system used to determine college football’s national champion should be changed to a format which is—by his unstated standards—more equitable.

The lesson comes at the letter’s close, where, after having spent the entire letter laying out the case for bringing antitrust violations against the NCAA, Mr. Hatch writes: “Government intervention into the BCS would be regrettable. There are many issues and challenges competing for Congress’s attention. Those with the power to reform the system should do so voluntarily. If not, legislation may be required to ensure that all colleges and universities receive an equal opportunity.”

Read the rest of this entry »