Tag Archives: Reason.com

Election Snafus, Fraud: Invite and They Will Come

12 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Democracy, Pandemic, Voter Fraud

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There is understandable controversy over the prospect of more mail-in voting, but it’s reasonable to believe that some additional mail-in or postal voting may be necessary in light of the pandemic. Social distancing reduces the volume of activity that polling places can handle in a single day, and administrative decisions about the voting process can’t be deferred until late October in order to observe the state of the pandemic and make last-minute changes. Most states already permit voters to request a mail-in ballot for a variety of reasons: travel, illness, or other exigencies are usually sufficient, if a reason is even required. In the context of the pandemic, such a request should certainly be granted to those most concerned about contracting the coronavirus. So the option to vote by mail seems reasonable, at least in the abstract, as long as those who prefer to cast their ballots in person can do so.

“Universal” mail-in voting is another story, but the term first requires some qualification. I construe “universal” in this case to mean voting by citizens of the United States, a right protected and reserved to citizens by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. That also means voters must be registered and must comply with state requirements for identification, if any, before receiving a ballot. In other words, under current state laws, a voter might be required to appear before an election authority to obtain a ballot for return by mail. The proponents of universal postal mail, however, seem to think states should simply mail ballots to the addresses of all registered voters. Many proponents go further, suggesting that all individuals of voting age should be mailed ballots.

The first major problem with a large expansion of postal voting is administrative complexity. It would represent a significant challenge for many jurisdictions to arrange in short order. It’s bound to create major delays in counting and reporting results, and it is likely to create doubt as to the reliability of the official election results. Here are some administrative issues and examples worth considering:

This recent experiment by CBS revealed delays in the official receipt of mailed ballots, a problem that will be more acute given plans in some jurisdictions to send ballots to postal voters only a week prior to the November election. The study also revealed some mis-sorting and misplacement of returned ballots. It concluded that a percentage of voters is likely to be “disenfranchised” by mail-in voting.

In early August, primary balloting by mail in Atlantic County, NJ was said to be especially problematic. Signatures on ballots were difficult to match to DMV records signed on “screen”; there was an extra step in delivering ballots to a central post office location and then on to election officials, causing delays; the voter registration system was plagued by technical glitches related to heavy demand for updated records; and there was insufficient time between sending ballots to voters and the deadline.

New York City’s primary election in June was similarly afflicted with a high rate of invalid mailed ballots. “The city BOE received 403,103 mail-in ballots for the June 23 Democratic presidential primary. … But the certified results released Wednesday revealed that only 318,995 mail-in ballots were counted. … That means 84,108 ballots were not counted or invalidated — 21 percent of the total. … One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone. … The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said.”

From the New York Times, “In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study [NYT link is bad] by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.”

The problem of rejected mail-in ballots is all too common throughout the country. For example, redistricting can cause mail-in voters to cast their votes in the wrong precinct at a higher rate; people move frequently, especially low-income voters, so updating voter rolls is a tremendous challenge; and voters often fail to follow instructions carefully, and there is no one at hand to offer assistance.

Again, these are just the administrative problems. The upshot is that mail-in voting is likely to introduce uncertainties and delays in determining election outcomes, and is likely to result in numerous legal challenges as well.

This piece by Eric Boehm in Reason is skeptical of our ability to vote by mail without major complications of that kind. Boehm then turns to the question of mail-in ballots and fraud, however, quoting a variety of experts who claim that election fraud is a miniscule problem and that fraud has not had a partisan bias in the past. But partisan bias is not really the critical issue… fraud is, party by party, district by district, and state by state.

Despite Boehm’s protestations and widespread denial in the news media, election fraud is a “thing”. More importantly, the risk of election fraud is a thing. It’s instructive that two U.S. Senators (Ron Wyden (OR) and Amy Klobuchar (MN)) have introduced legislation that not only would authorize more widespread voting by mail, but “ballot harvesting” as well. The latter is the practice of visiting homes and “offering” to collect residents’ postal ballots for delivery to collection points. It has been a flagrant form of vote fraud in the past.

So what is our experience with fraud? Here is a “sampling” of 1,290 cases of election fraud, many of which involved absentee ballots and ballot harvesting. Detail on most of these cases can be found here.

The following testimonial reinforces the ease with which fraud can be perpetrated via mail-in voting:”I know because I did it“:

“Last year, a political operative working for North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris was charged with fraud for directing a group of people to fill out as many as one thousand absentee ballot requests on behalf of voters — most of whom were unaware the ballots were being requested. … These people then collected the ballots and filled them out themselves. … 

Also in 2019, a Democratic city clerk in Southfield, Michigan, was arrested and charged with six felonies for falsifying absentee ballot records to say that 193 of the ballots in one election were missing signatures or a return date, when in fact they had both. The correct records were found in the trash can in her office.

… J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) says if states aren’t careful, they’ll be issuing ‘an open invitation to fraud. … There are two big problems with vote by mail,’ Adams told InsideSources. ‘Number one … people voting the ballot for other people through undue influence. … The second one — the voter rolls are a mess.’ … Adams’ organization has sued several states and counties for refusing to maintain accurate voter rolls, allowing the names of thousands of dead voters, felons and non-citizens to remain in the system.”

Fraud risk always exists even if detected and proven levels of fraud are low, and the level of risk scales with the extent to which ballots are cast by mail. The sudden, massive expansion in mail-in voting now contemplated by some would create unprecedented opportunities for fraud.

Consider the 28 million mail-in ballots that went missing between 2012 and 2018, roughly 20% of mail-in ballots issued during those years. According to Logan Churchwell of PILF:

“So what do people that really focus on the election process do about that? They go into ballot harvesting. If there’s so many ballots out there in the wind unaccounted for by election officials, surely some manpower could be dedicated to go bring them in. And that’s another part of the system where you have weaknesses and risk.”

It takes only a small percentage of the vote to swing many elections, so ballot harvesting, enabled by more widespread voting-by-mail, is a serious threat to the integrity of the democratic process. The last link cites a few reports that should give mail voting proponents some pause:

“There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud. A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots ‘is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time.’ According to a Wall Street Journal report on voter exploitation in Hispanic communities in Texas, mail-in ballots have ‘spawned a mini-industry of consultants who get out the absentee vote, sometimes using questionable techniques.’ Poor, elderly, and minority communities are most likely to be preyed upon by so-called ballot ‘brokers.’

Concerns about fraud in mail-in ballots were serious enough that a 2008 report produced by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended that states ‘restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.'”

It’s no coincidence that most countries in the European Union restrict mail-in voting to those who are unable to vote in-person, such as those working or studying abroad, as well as the sick and elderly. There are exceptions, of course, but many of these developed countries reject the notion that mail-in voting is worth the risks.

It’s reasonable to expect many cautious voters to request ballots for return by mail. But at a minimum, any large-scale transition to postal voting should be done with care for the security and integrity of the voting process. It is not an exercise to be done in haste, as proponents now demand. The result of such a drastic change would be significant delays, legal challenges, and reduced confidence in the outcome of elections. And there will almost certainly be fraud. As in almost all things, a voluntary option subject to jurisdictional risk controls is far preferable to either mandatory or “universal” postal voting.

Spanish Flu: No Guide for Covid Lockdowns

25 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Pandemic

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The coronavirus pandemic differs in a few important ways from the much deadlier Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19. Estimates are that as much as 1/3rd of the world’s population was infected during that contagion, and the case fatality rate is estimated to have been 10-20%. The current pandemic, while very serious, will not approach that level of lethality.

Another important difference: the Spanish Flu was very deadly among young adults, whereas the Coronavirus is taking its greatest toll on the elderly and those with significant co-morbidities. Of course, the Spanish Flu infected a large number of soldiers and sailors, many returning from World War I in confined conditions aboard transport vessels. A major reason for its deadliness among young adults, however, is thought to be the “cytokine storm“, or severe inflammatory response, it induced in those with strong immune systems.

It’s difficult to make a perfect comparison between the pandemics, but the charts below roughly illustrate the contrast between the age distribution of case mortality for the Spanish Flu in 1918, shown in the first chart, and Covid-19 in the second. The first shows a measure of “excess mortality” for each age cohort as the vertical gap between the solid line (Spanish flu) and the dashed line (the average of the seven previous seasons for respiratory diseases). Excess mortality was especially high among those between the ages of 15 and 44.

The second chart is for South Korea, where the Covid-19 pandemic has “matured” and was reasonably well controlled. We don’t yet have a good measure of excess case mortality for Covid-19, but it’s clear that it is most deadly among the elderly population. Not to say that infected individuals in younger cohorts never suffer: they are a higher proportion of diagnosed cases, severe cases are of extended duration, and some of the infected might have to deal with lasting consequences.

One implication of these contrasting age distributions is that Covid-19 will inflict a loss of fewer “life years” per fatality. If the Spanish flu’s median victim was 25 years old, then perhaps about 49 life years were lost per fatality, based on life expectancies at that time. At today’s life expectancies, it might be more like 54 years. if Covid-19’s median victim is 70 years old, then perhaps 15 life-years are lost per fatality, or about 73% less. And that assumes the the median Covid victim is of average health, so the loss of life years is probably less. But what a grisly comparison! Any loss is tragic, but it is worth noting that the current pandemic will be far less severe in terms of fatalities, excess mortality (because the elderly always die at much higher rates), and in life-years lost.

Is that relevant to the policy discussion? It doesn’t mean we should throw all caution to the wind. Ideally, policy would save lives and conserve life-years. We’d always put children on the lifeboats first, after all! But in this case, younger cohorts are the least vulnerable.

The flu pandemic of 1918-19 is often held to support the logic of non-prescription public health measures such as school closures, bans on public gatherings, and quarantines. Does the difference in vulnerabilities noted above have any bearing on the “optimal” level of those measures in the present crisis? Some argue that while a so-called lockdown confers health benefits for a Spanish flu-type pandemic in which younger cohorts are highly vulnerable, that is not true of the coronavirus. The young are already on lifeboats having few leaks, as it were.

My view is that society should expend resources on protecting the most vulnerable, in this case the aged and those with significant co-morbidities. Health care workers and “first responders” should be on the list as well. If well-targeted and executed, a Covid-19 lockdown targeted at those groups can save lives, but it means supporting the aged and afflicted in a state of relative isolation, at least until effective treatments or a vaccine prove out. A lockdown might not change living conditions greatly for those confined to skilled care facilities, but much can be done to reduce exposure among those individuals, including a prohibition on staff working at multiple facilities.

Conversely, the benefits of a lockdown for younger cohorts at low risk of death are much less compelling for Covid-19 than might be suggested by the Spanish flu experience. In fact, it can be argued that a complete lockdown denies society of the lowest-hanging fruit of earlier herd immunity to Covid-19. Younger individuals who have more social and economic contacts can be exposed with relative safety, and thus self-immunized, as their true mortality rate (including undiagnosed cases in the denominator) is almost zero to begin with.

Then we have the economic costs of a lockdown. Idle producers are inherently costly due to lost output, but idle non-producers don’t impose that cost. For Covid-19, prohibiting the labor of healthy, working age adults has scant health benefits, and it carries the high economic costs of lost output. That cost is magnified by the mounting difficulty of bringing moribund activities back to life, many of which will be unsalvageable due to insolvency.

The lockdown question is not binary. There are ways to maintain at least modest levels of production in many industries while observing guidelines on safety and social distancing. In fact, producers are finding inventive ways of maximizing both production and safety. They should be relied upon to create these solutions. The excess mortality rates associated with this pandemic will continue to come into focus at lower levels with more widespread serological testing. That will reinforce the need for individual autonomy in weighing risks and benefits. Hazards are always out there: reckless or drunk drivers, innumerable occupational hazards, and the flu and other communicable diseases. Protect yourself in any way you see fit, but if you are healthy, please do so without agitating for public support from the rest of us, and without imposing arbitrary judgments on which activities carry acceptable risk for others.

 

EPA Concedes Puddles, Ditches to Owners

30 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Environment, Federalism, Regulation

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Those who like their government served-up intrusive are reacting hysterically to the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which forbids the federal government from regulating waters that are not interstate waters or waters that aren’t or cannot be used in any way related to interstate commerce. The federal government will no longer have jurisdiction over normally dry, “ephemeral”  creek beds, private lakes and ponds unconnected to interstate waters, and most ground areas where rainwater pools, such as ditches on private property. This is a very good thing!

The emphasis of the new rule on interstate waters hews more closely to the constitutional limits of federal power than did the rescinded rule that had been imposed by the Obama Administration in 2015, which some called the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule (really an interpretation of “navigable waters”, or WOTUS as defined by the 1972 Clean Water Act). Christian Britschgi writes at Reason.com:

“The Obama-era rule was controversial from the get-go, with multiple Red states filing legal challenges claiming it exceeded the federal government’s authority to regulate water pollution. A slew of federal court rulings stayed the implementation of the rule in over half the states.”

Some of the straightforward differences between the new rule and WOTUS were mentioned above, but Anthony K. Francois of the Property and Environment Research Center gets into a bit more detail in his nice summary of these changes in federal authority.

In many cases, state and local governments already have regulatory authority over waters placed off-limits to the EPA. In fact, as Jonathan Adler wrote last summer, some of those state regulations are more stringent than the federal oversight now rescinded. That flies in the face of assertions by activists that states will be patsies in their dealings with property owners (the activists would call them “polluters”). So those who claim that the new rule will cause damage to the environment are really saying they only trust the EPA’s authority in these matters. They are also saying that no private citizen who owns property should be presumed to have rights over the industrial, commercial, or residential use of that property without review by the federal government. Under WOTUS, this represented such a severe abrogation of rights that it interfered with both productive activity and private enjoyment, not to mention the considerable confusion and costly litigation it prompted.

Weighing the costs and benefits of regulatory actions is a difficult undertaking. However, it is far too easy for regulators, with an imbalance of coercive power in their favor, to impose costly standards in locales where there may be little or no net benefit, and where individual property owners have no recourse. Regulators get no reward for protecting individual liberty and property rights, which skews their view of the tradeoff against potential environmental damage. Federal regulatory power is best kept within strict limits. The same goes for state and local regulatory power, but authority at those levels is at least more accountable to local interests on behalf of consumer, business and environmental concerns.

Tax Cuts Yes, Simplification a Mixed Bag

18 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in Taxes, Trump Administration

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President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) this morning, the GOP tax bill with an acronym that simply won’t roll off my tongue. A useful summary of the Act produced by the House -Senate conference, and the full text of the Act, appear at this link. The TCJA hews more toward the earlier Senate bill than the House version. I’ve written about both (the House bill here and both here). Here is a good summary of the Act from Peter Suderman at Reason.com.

In my earlier assessments, I relied upon the principle of tax reform and real simplification as a justification for a tax cut without revenue neutrality. There are a few reforms and partial reforms, and the bill may simplify taxes for a number of individual taxpayers. However, on the whole I’m disappointed with the progress made by the GOP in those areas.

Notwithstanding my disappointment with the overall reform effort, the TCJA cuts taxes for most Americans and is likely to have salutary effects on economic growth and the job market. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about  the Act is the claim made by its adversaries on the Democrat side of the aisle. They apparently believe that the benefits of the TCJA flow primarily or even exclusively to the rich. This is a huge mistake for them. High-income taxpayers will receive greater benefits in absolute dollars, but not proportionally. This is shown by the table above, prepared by Chris Edwards from data produced by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). In fact, the TCJA will extend tax reductions to a larger share of the middle class than either of its predecessor bills would have done. You cannot meaningfully reduce the taxes generated by a steeply progressive tax system without reducing the absolute dollars paid by high-income taxpayers. And you can’t lay the groundwork for sustainable economic growth without improving the investment incentives faced by high-income taxpayers and producers.

Here are some additional additional thoughts on the bill:

Yeah, I like me some tax cuts: The Act reduces taxes for many individuals and families by doubling the standard deduction and reducing tax rates. More importantly, perhaps, it will also reduce taxes for C-corporations, providing some relief from double taxation of corporate income, as will the switch to a territorial tax system on U.S. corporations doing business abroad. The latter is a real reform, while I consider the former a partial reform. Investment incentives are improved via the corporate rate cut and elimination of the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) — a real reform, as well as the ability to write-off spending on new equipment immediately. As I argued last month, lower corporate taxes are likely to benefit both workers and consumers. The actions of few companies (AT&T, Comcast, Wells Fargo, and Fifth-Third) seem to demonstrate that this is the case: they have announced bonuses and increases in their base wage rates in the immediate wake of the TCJA’s massage.

Pass-through tax cuts are iffy: One of the most difficult parts of the TCJA to evaluate involves the implications for pass-through business entities like sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations. Some might not receive significant cuts. The Act includes a maximum 25% rate on business income, but that is dependent on the proportion of the owner’s income deemed to be business income under the new rules. It also allows a flat deduction of 20% against business income. These provisions will be of benefit to very successful and very capital-intensive pass-throughs. Owners of smaller or less profitable firms will get the benefit of lower individual tax rates and the higher standard deduction, but might not have income high enough to benefit from the 25% rate cap.

Simpler for some, but it is not simplification: The doubled standard deduction will mean fewer taxpayers claiming itemized deductions. That sounds like simplification, but many will find it reassuring to calculate their taxes both ways, so a compliance burden remains. The Act retains or partially retains a number of deductions and credits slated for elimination in earlier versions, failing a simple principle held by reformers: eliminate deductions in exchange for lower rates. Along the same lines, the individual AMT is retained, but the exemption amount is increased, so fewer taxpayers will pay the AMT. Again, simpler for some, but not real simplification.

Elimination of the corporate AMT is simplification, as are immediate expensing of equipment purchases and territorial tax treatment. However, most of the complexities of corporate taxes remain, as do certain tax breaks targeted at specific industries. What a shame. And unfortunately, taxes for pass-through entities are anything but simplified under the Act. Complex new rules would govern the division of income into business income and the owners’ wage income.

Reducing deductions and bad incentives: The mortgage interest deduction encourages over-investment in housing and subsidizes the wealthiest homebuyers. The TCJA leaves it intact for existing mortgages, but allows the deduction to be claimed on new mortgage loans of up to $750,000. So the bad incentive largely remains, though the very worst of it will be eliminated. There have been complaints that this change could reduce home prices in states with the highest real estate prices. Good — they have been inflated by the subsidy at the expense of other taxpayers.

The tax write-off for state and local taxes (SALT) will be limited to $10,000 a year under the TCJA, though it adds some flexibility by allowing that sum to be met by any combination of state or local income, sales or property taxes. This change will reduce the subsidies from federal taxpayers residents of high-tax states, and should make leaders in those states more circumspect about the size of government.

The TCJA preserves and even expands a number of individual deductions and credits, subsidizing families with children, medical expenses, student loans, graduate students, educational saving, retirement saving, and the working poor. The interests benefiting from these breaks will be relieved, but this is not simplification.

Yet another case of “simpler for some” is the estate tax: it remains, but the exemption amounts are doubled. The estate tax does not produce much revenue, but it is fundamentally unjust: it ensnares the families of deceased property owners, farmers and small businesses; planning for it is costly; and it often forces survivors to sell assets quickly, sustaining losses, in order to meet a tax liability. The TCJA will significantly reduce this burden, but the tax framework will remain in place and will be an ongoing temptation to ravenous sponsors of future tax legislation.

Individual cuts are temporary: The corporate tax changes in the TCJA are permanent. They won’t have to be revisited (though they might be), and permanence is a desirable feature for sustaining the impact of positive incentives. The individual cuts and reforms, however, all expire within eight to ten years. The sun-setting of these provisions is, as some have said, a gimmick to reduce the revenue impact of the Act, but sunsetting means another politically fractious battle down the road. It is also a device to ensure compliance with the Byrd Act, which limits the deficit effects of legislation under Senate reconciliation rules. Eight years is a fairly long “temporary” tax cut, as those things go; for now, the impermanence of the cuts might not weaken the influence on spending. However, that influence is likely to wane as the cuts approach expiration.

Deficit Effects: The TCJA’s impact on the deficit and federal borrowing is likely to be somewhere north of $500 billion, possibly as much as $1.4 trillion. Deficits must be funded by government debt, which competes with private debt for the available pool of savings and must be serviced, repaid via future taxes or inflated away. In the latter sense, government borrowing is not really different from current taxes, a proposition known as Ricardian equivalence.

Nonetheless, the incentives, complexities and compliance costs of our current tax code are damaging, and the TCJA at least accomplishes some measure of reform. Moreover, the incremental debt is small relative to the impact of prior estimates of government borrowing over the next decade, with or without extension of the individual tax cuts. The most fundamental problem that remains is excessive government spending and its competing demands for, and absorption of, resources, with no market guidance as to the value of those uses.

Administrative Supremacy, Lost Checks and Balances

16 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Regulation

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The two-for-one regulatory order issued by the Trump White House in January raises some practical difficulties in implementation. It requires that federal agencies eliminate two regulatory rules for every new rule promulgated, both in terms of the number of rules and any incremental regulatory costs imposed. Two out for every one in. Questions surrounding the meaning of “a regulation”, how to define incremental costs, and whether a particular rule is actually mandated by legislation are not trivial. Nevertheless, the spirit of this order is admirable and it serves as the leading edge of the Administration’s attempt to roll back the scope and impact of excessive government authority.

The cost of regulation is vast. Economists at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have estimated the total cumulative cost of regulation in the U.S., finding that regulation has reduced economic growth by 0.8 percent per year since 1980. Without the additional regulatory growth since 1980, the U.S. economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it was in 2012. That’s a $4 trillion shortfall, or roughly $13,000 per person.

While regulation and administrative control over the private economy takes an increasing toll on economic growth and human welfare, the problem goes beyond economic considerations: administrative agencies have “progressively” usurped not just legislative but also judicial power. The concentration of executive, legislative and judicial power constitutes a “fourth branch of government“, a development inimical to the principles enshrined in our Constitution and a prescription for slow-boil tyranny. It facilitates rent seeking and corporatism just as surely as it creates a ruling class of individuals who act on their personal and arbitrary inclinations. We are ruled by men backed by police power, not impartial laws.

Glenn Reynolds writes that unelected rule makers and central planners are able to manipulate decisions across a broad swath of the economy and society. He quotes a new book by Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School called “The Administrative Threat“:

“Government agencies regulate Americans in the full range of their lives, including their political participation, their economic endeavors, and their personal conduct. Administrative power has thus become pervasively intrusive. But is this power constitutional?

A similar sort of power was once used by English kings, and this book shows that the similarity is not a coincidence. In fact, administrative power revives absolutism. On this foundation, the book explains how administrative power denies Americans their basic constitutional freedoms, such as jury rights and due process. No other feature of American government violates as many constitutional provisions or is more profoundly threatening. As a result, administrative power is the key civil liberties issue of our era.“

Two previous posts on Sacred Cow Chips have dealt with Hamburger’s work. The first, “Hamburger Nation: An Administrative Nightmare“(1) provides the following explanation of his position:

“Hamburger examines the assertion that rule-making must be delegated by Congress to administrative agencies because legislation cannot reasonably be expected to address the many details and complexities encountered in the implementation of new laws. Yet this is a delegation of legislative power. Once delegated, this power has a way of metastasizing at the whim of agency apparatchiks, if not at the direction of the chief executive. If you should want to protest an administrative ruling, your first stop will not be a normal court of law, but an administrative review board or a court run by the agency itself! You’ll be well advised to hire an administrative attorney to represent you. Eventually, and at greater expense, an adverse decision can be appealed to the judicial branch proper.“

The exercise of rule-making authority, and even extra-legal legislative action by the administrative state, has economic costs that are bad enough. Hamburger also emphasizes the breakdown of the separation of executive and judicial powers inherent in the enforcement and adjudication of disputes under administrative law. This was the subject of the second Sacred Cow Chips post referenced above: “Courts and Their Administrative Masters“. It reviewed an unfortunate standard established by court precedent involving judicial (“Chevron”) deference to administrative agency fact-finding and even interpretation of law. While the decisions of administrative courts, which are run by the agencies themselves, can be appealed to the judicial branch, such appeals often amount to exercises in futility.

“…courts apply a test of judgement as to whether the administrative agency’s interpretation of the law is “reasonable”, even if other “reasonable” interpretations are possible. This gets particularly thorny when the original legislation is ambiguous with respect to a certain point.

…the courts should not abdicate their role in reviewing an agency’s developmental evidence for any action, and the reasonability of an agency’s applications of evidence relative to alternative courses of action. Nor should the courts abdicate their role in ruling on the law itself.“

This paper on Judicial Deference to Agencies by Evan D. Bernick of Georgetown Law makes the case that judicial deference is a violation of the constitutional separation of powers, concluding that:

“… in cases involving administrative deprivations of core private rights to ‘life, liberty, or property,’ fact deference violates Article III’s vesting of ‘[t]he judicial power’ in the federal courts; constitutes an abdication of the duty of independent judgment that Article III imposes upon federal judges; and violates the Fifth Amendment by denying litigants ‘due process of law,’ which requires (1) judicial proceedings in an Article III court prior to any individualized deprivation of ‘life, liberty, or property’; and (2) fact-finding by independent, impartial fact-finders.“

Inez and Jarrett Stepman in Townhall note that there are almost three million well-paid federal employees with job security that would make most private sector workers envious.

“Though the abolishment of the spoils system [which allowed civil service hiring and firing based on political party] was meant to mitigate corruption and incompetence, it has resulted in a toxic combination of enhanced agency power and an entrenched civil servant class with its own institutional—and frequently political—interests, virtually unaccountable to the president or any other elected official.“

The Stepmans discuss legislation that might stem the usurpation of lawmaking power by the administrative state. They are convinced that the administrative state must be reigned-in. Ironically, expanded executive authority means that the process of reversal is not that difficult in many cases. By way of example, here’s a piece on the ease of undoing certain Obama era regulations. Executive orders, or “the pen and the phone” in Obama’s charming parlance, lack legitimate legislative authority and can be reversed by new executive orders. I firmly believe that reversing the earlier orders is the right thing to do at the moment, but the unchecked authority that makes it possible (and the supremacy of the administrative state) is a source of economic instability, and it must end. Eric Boehm makes this point eloquently in Reason at the last link above:

“New policies that affect wide swaths of the economy and reshape entire business models should go through Congress, or at the very least should be subject to the public rulemaking process. Guidance documents and other ‘dark matter’ regulations that by-pass those processes can be un-made as quickly as they were made, leaving businesses to deal with an ever-changing and unpredictable regulatory state that does not really help anyone, no matter which side you’re on in any individual policy fight.“

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(1) The principle title “Hamburger Nation” was intended as a play on Glenn Reynolds’ paper “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime“, in which he discussed the judicial implications of over-criminalization and regulatory overreach.

 

What Part of “Free Speech” Did You Not Understand?

27 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Censorship, Free Speech

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The left has adopted an absurdly expansive definition of “hate speech”, and they’d like you to believe that “hate speech” is unconstitutional. Their objective is to establish a platform from which they can ostracize and ultimately censor political opponents on a variety of policy issues, mixed with the pretense of a moral high ground. The constitutional claim is legal nonsense, of course. To be fair, the moral claim may depend on the issue.

John Daniel Davidson writes in The Federalist of the distinction between protected and unprotected speech in constitutional law. The primary exception to protected speech has to do with the use of “fighting words”. Davidson describes one Supreme Court interpretation of fighting words as “a face-to-face insult directed at a specific person for the purpose of provoking a fight.” Obviously threats would fall into the same category, but only to the extent that they imply “imminent lawless action”, according to a major precedent. As such, there is a distinction between fighting words versus speech that is critical, discriminatory, or even hateful, all of which are protected.

Hate speech, on the other hand, has no accepted legal definition. In law, it has not been specifically linked to speech offensive to protected groups under employment, fair housing, hate crime or any other legislation. If we are to accept the parlance of the left, it seems to cover almost anything over which one might take offense. However, unless it qualifies as fighting words, it is protected speech.

The amorphous character of hate speech, as a concept, makes it an ideal vehicle for censoring political opponents, and that makes it extremely dangerous to the workings of a free society. Any issue of public concern has more than one side, and any policy solution will usually create winners and losers. Sometimes the alleged winners and losers are merely ostensible winners and losers, as dynamic policy effects or “unexpected consequences” often change the outcomes. Advocacy for one solution or another seldom qualifies as hate toward those presumed to be losers by one side in a debate, let alone a threat of violence. Yet we often hear that harm is done by the mere expression of opinion. Here is Davidson:

“By hate speech, they mean ideas and opinions that run afoul of progressive pieties. Do you believe abortion is the taking of human life? That’s hate speech. Think transgenderism is a form of mental illness? Hate speech. Concerned about illegal immigration? Believe in the right to bear arms? Support President Donald Trump? All hate speech.“

Do you support the minimum wage? Do you oppose national reparation payments to African Americans? Do you support health care reform? Welfare reform? Rollbacks in certain environmental regulations? Smaller government? You just might be a hater, according to this way of thinking!

The following statement appears in a recent proposal on free speech. The proposal was recommended as policy by an ad hoc committee created by the administration of a state university:

“… Nor does freedom of expression create a privilege to engage in discrimination involving unwelcome verbal, written, or physical conduct directed at a particular individual or group of individuals on the basis of actual or perceived status, or affiliation within a protected status, and so severe or pervasive that it creates an intimidating or hostile environment that interferes with an individual’s employment, education, academic environment, or participation in the University’s programs or activities.“

This is an obvious departure from the constitutional meaning of free expression or any legal precedent.

And here is Ulrich Baer, who is New York University‘s vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity (and professor of comparative literature), in an opinion piece this week in the New York Times:

“The recent student demonstrations [against certain visiting speakers] should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. … Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.  …

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.“

How’s that for logical contortion? Silencing speakers is an effort to protect free speech! As noted by Robby Soave in on Reason.com, “... free speech is not a public good. It is an individual right.” This cannot be compromised by the left’s endlessly flexible conceptualization of “hate speech”, which can mean almost any opinion with which they disagree. Likewise, to “invalidate the humanity of some people” is a dangerously subjective standard. Mr. Baer is incorrect in his assertion that speakers must balance the “inherent” value of their views with an obligation to be “inclusive”. The only obligation is not to threaten or incite “imminent lawless action”. Otherwise, freedom of speech is a natural and constitutionally unfettered right to express oneself. Nothing could be more empowering!

Note that the constitution specifically prohibits the government from interfering with free speech. That includes any public institution such as state universities. Private parties, however, are free to restrict speech on their own property or platform. For example, a private college can legally restrict speech on its property and within its facilities. The owner of a social media platform can legally restrict the speech used there as well.

Howard Dean, a prominent if somewhat hapless member of the democrat establishment, recently tweeted this bit of misinformation: “Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.” To this, Dean later added some mischaracterizations of Supreme Court decisions, prompting legal scholar Eugene Volokh to explain the facts. Volokh cites a number of decisions upholding a liberal view of free speech rights (and I do not use the word liberal lightly). Volokh also cites the “prior restraint doctrine”:

“The government generally may not exclude speakers — even in government-owned ‘limited public forums’ — because of a concern that the speakers might violate the rules if they spoke.“

If a speaker violates the law by engaging in threats or inciting violence, it is up to law enforcement to step in, ex post, just as they should when antifa protestors show their fascist colors through violent efforts to silence speakers. Volokh quotes from an opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Backmun:

“… a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse rights of speech after they break the law than to throttle them and all others beforehand. It is always difficult to know in advance what an individual will say, and the line between legitimate and illegitimate speech is often so finely drawn that the risks of freewheeling censorship are formidable.”

Markets, Ingenuity and Genuine Sustainability

22 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Environment, Markets, Scarcity

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Will mankind drain the world of resources and ruin the environment? Must we curtail economic growth in order to ensure our long-term survival? Only if we give up on markets and give-in to central economic direction and control. Ronald Bailey at Reason.com covers the technical assumptions underlying a recent piece of neo-Malthusian “research” purporting to demonstrate the impossibility of environmentally-sustainable economic growth. Bailey’s article makes a great follow-up to my last post, “The Greening-Carbon Nexus“, in which I discussed the bloom in vegetation taking place around the globe attributable to greater levels of atmospheric CO2.

Bailey describes the concept of “decoupling” resource use from economic growth as fundamental to long-term environmental sustainability. This is another twist on good old-fashioned growth in factor productivity. In the new research cited by Bailey, Australian hydrologist James Ward and his co-authors assert that population growth and consumption will eventually overwhelm technological advance. However, it has long been recognized by demographers that freedom from need and growth in material comfort reduces fertility. Bailey notes that world population growth has been decelerating for many years, and the global population is likely to stabilize within a couple of decades.

Ward, et al lean heavily on assumptions about how various classes of resources are not substitutable, and that mankind will run-up against hard production requirements for minimum resource use, a point at which many tradeoffs become impossible. Bailey summarizes their results:

“They crank the notion that there are nonsubstitutable physical limits on material and energy resources through their equations until 2100, and they find that eventually consumption of both rise at the same rate as economic growth. QED: Economic growth is unsustainable. Or as they report, ‘Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits.’“

Bailey proceeds to pick apart the assumptions made by Ward and his co-authors. First, even if true, those assumptions would apply with much more force to physical outputs, as opposed to service outputs. The latter are likely to continue on a path garnering an increasing share of world output over time. More fundamentally, Ward, et al give short-shrift to the limitless potential of human ingenuity. A few specific examples of the physical limits they contemplate are already verifiably false, having been overcome by technological breakthroughs. This includes agricultural productivity related to enhancements in plant photosynthesis, new manufacturing methods requiring dramatically fewer raw materials, and methods of energy production that are already available, if not yet heavily relied upon. A glaring assumption made by Ward, et al is that the use of fossil fuels will continue to grow through at least the year 2100. In fact, existing alternatives such as nuclear power might well be more economical. Ironically, greater adoption of nuclear power is held hostage by the political resistance of groups who oppose the burning of fossil fuels.

Bailey also cites the work of Jesse Ausubel, whom I cited at length in a post on “rewilding” in 2015. Ausubel’s work shows that Americans’ use of a variety of productive inputs already has “decoupled absolutely” from production, or is approaching that point. That includes farmland, water, timber, plastics, aluminum and steel. Our use of all of those things has peaked and is now in decline. Ausubel’s work implies that “decoupling” is just a matter of time for many other resources for which use is growing at rates declining relative to production. These trends will spread overseas with continued economic development.

Efficiencies like these are a direct effect of technological advance, but the process of technical change is dependent on incentives, which are, in turn, dependent on market prices, profit opportunities, and secure property rights. First, the funding of research into new techniques and methods is driven in large part by market incentives. That’s the real mechanism at play when we marvel that “necessity is the mother of invention”. Necessity, of course, is often manifest in scarcity of existing productive inputs and high input prices.

New technologies present profit opportunities by promising lower input costs, greater production, or other competitive advantages. The adoption of a new technology nearly always entails short-run costs and long-term rewards, both of which are driven by market prices. As the pace of adoption accelerates, the costs of new technologies tend to decrease along with scale economies and sheer experience, reinforcing the process of diffusion. The driving force in all cases is the competitive market and freedom to trade for one’s own benefit. The increasing efficiency of resource use embodied in the “decoupling” phenomena is dependent on the existence of accurate market incentives and secure rights to the rewards that efficiencies in production can bring.

And what if government responds to political pressure by imposing bureaucratically-established production limits, market quotas, efficiency standards, process rules, regulatory reporting, and tax penalties. Apart from direct confiscation and the additional confiscatory risk these actions entail, compliance requires producers to ignore market incentives to one degree or another. These measures force adoption of  less efficient technologies than the market would dictate and add resource costs that would otherwise be absent. The inescapable fact is that market incentives are blunted or destroyed in the process; the consequent waste of resources prevents the kind of natural improvements in factor productivity that lead to decoupling and sustainability.

Sadly, such regulatory actions are often borne out of private rent-seeking efforts. Dominant market players believe that smaller competitors will struggle under the compliance burden created by regulation, so they work with government officials in an effort to have these rules promulgated. This adds a greater degree of market concentration and monopoly power, which implies an efficiency loss relative to competition. Under the protection of regulators, dominant players can survive for too long using wasteful techniques and inputs. Fortunately, with time, new technologies often outpace even these dominant players and the outmoded regulatory rules they rely upon.

Just as wasteful are authoritarian efforts to promote new technologies before the market is ready to adopt them. Picking technological winners and losers is fraught with peril for society. The government usually lacks the foresight possessed by the market, forcibly redirecting resources from one use to another with little consequence for failure except at the taxpayer’s expense. The premature investment is prone to burdening society with stale or defective early versions of new technology. This is not a reliable way to achieve efficiency in resource use. One of the sure signs that such efforts entail waste is the propensity for insiders to be awarded subsidies for promoting politically-favored technologies. Government is invariably drawn to such opportunities for graft.

I conclude with a quote of my earlier post on Ausubel’s work (linked above):

“It’s worth emphasizing that the nature rebound already taking place in the developed world is largely a product of free market capitalism and the growth in wealth and technology they have made possible. A great benefit of secure property rights for society, and for the environment, is that owners have powerful incentives to husband their resources. Likewise, the profit motive gives producers strong incentives to reduce waste and improve productivity. As economic development becomes more widespread, these incentives are promoting a healthier balance between man and nature.“

 

Hillary’s (C)mail Fail

13 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by in National Security, Privilege

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Clinton email

Hillary Clinton’s classified email scandal might look like a minor distraction once facts about the suspicious dealings of the Clinton Foundation are unraveled. I’ll cover the foundation later this week. In this post, I’ll review some considerations relevant to the email case. This is the second in a three-part series of posts on Hillary’s more recent foibles, following the first installment on her role in the Benghazi disaster.

Hillary Clinton’s “grossly negligent” misuse of classified email during her tenure as Secretary of State was harshly criticized by FBI Director James Comey last week. Nevertheless, the Bureau declined to recommend an indictment to the Department of Justice (DOJ) based on their inability to prove mens rea, or any awareness of guilt or an intent to do harm. It is doubtful that Clinton had any intent to harm the country. At a minimum, however, Comey’s statements implied that she did not take security seriously.

The basis of any claim that Clinton lacked awareness of her security responsibilities is shaky, to say the least. Clinton’s private email stunt was a willful effort to avoid legitimate scrutiny, such as FOIA requests. The IT expert who set up her private servers and other devices pled the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination! There have been reports that Clinton asked aides to remove classified markings (also see here). All we have from the State Department on that allegation is a denial. Clinton repeatedly lied to the public and to Congress (under oath) about classified material and the number of devices she used. She also lied to a federal judge (under oath) about having turned over all work-related emails to the State Department. Many of those emails were deleted, leaving suspicious gaps in the pattern of traffic. Indeed, Clinton’s actions in the case give every appearance of an effort to obstruct justice.

Some of the missing emails will come to light. Wikileaks has released a trove of Clinton’s emails showing additional classified material. There are also pending civil cases related to the emails in which the plaintiffs wish to subpoena Mrs. Clinton. Needless to say, her lawyers are making every effort to stop the subpoenas.

Jacob Sullum at Reason discusses Comey’s decision in the context of mens rea. He notes that Clinton’s offenses were certainly prosecutable under the letter of the law. Despite denials from Clinton apologists, the case of a Navy operations specialist in 1992 is instructive. The defendant in that case claimed that willingness to mishandle classified information was not sufficient for a conviction, but the military court disagreed under the same provision of the law referenced by Comey:

“… the court turned to the subsection at issue in Mrs. Clinton’s case: ‘Section 793(f) has an even lower threshold, punishing loss of classified materials through ‘gross negligence’ and punishing failing to promptly report a loss of classified materials.’”

Nevertheless, Sullum thinks Comey’s defense of mens rea protections for individuals accused of certain violations of law is admirable, and I agree (except Comey’s second clause in the quote below, regarding “in that statute in particular“, is not strictly true). The explosion of federal law, especially regulatory law, makes this more crucial than ever from a libertarian perspective. Here is Comey:

“‘The protection we have as Americans is that the government in general, and in that statute in particular, has to prove before [it] can prosecute any of us that we did this thing that’s forbidden by the law, and when we did it, we knew we were doing something that was unlawful. We don’t have to know the code number, but [the government must show] that we knew we were doing something that was unlawful.’“

For background on the issue of a defendant’s willingness to violate the law, Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation has a great article called  “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse But It Is In Reality“. By that title, Rosenzweig means that there are so many federal crimes today that ignorance of the law very often should be a valid excuse. However, the contention that Hillary Clinton was ignorant of the law regarding her duties in handling classified information is dubious at best.

Unfortunately, Clinton’s interview with the FBI just days before Comey’s announcement was not conducted by Comey, was not made under oath, and was not recorded. That leaves significant doubt about the seriousness of the FBI’s effort to learn the truth about the record, or any contradictions in the record, that might shed light on Clinton’s awareness or intent to violate the law. And Attorney General Loretta Lynch, after a “personal” meeting with Bill Clinton, recused herself and her office from prosecutorial duties prior to Comey’s announcement, stating that she would accept the FBI’s recommendation without examining the case. That step casts doubt on her seriousness as an independent prosecutor. Hillary skates, for now.

 

Bernie, Breadlines and Bumpkins

05 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Capitalism, Socialism

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For sheer stupidity, you can’t top the remarks made in this video by Bernie Sanders, uttered as an adult, praising the fact that consumers in socialist countries must stand in line to receive food rations! Here is his distorted logic:

“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.“

I try to avoid derogation of individuals in favor of demonstrating the weakness of their words or ideas. I must admit that it’s hard to maintain both ends of that policy in Mr. Sanders’ case. He’s never availed himself of the well-known laws of economics that invalidate his primitive views. For example, he doesn’t grasp that the price system in a market economy provides incentives for conservation and for extra production when supplies are short. In Sanders’ mind, that mechanism is unacceptable because it means someone will profit. Of course, the cooperative nature of markets and voluntary exchange is lost on Sanders. Part of that cooperation is the willingness of buyers to reward able sellers, giving them the incentive to meet future demands. And they do!

Sanders doesn’t understand the universal tendency of government to waste resources. The state’s command over resources derives from coercive power, and it lacks the discipline and incentives for efficiency that are always present in markets. Sanders has not reflected on the shackles the regulatory state places on the productive, private sector. He imagines that government can be trusted because good-hearted people, like him, will always be in charge under a socialist state, and they will design the way forward. Yes, with the aid of their coercive power.

As for breadlines, Sanders has never assimilated the fact that the widespread, plentiful food supplies available in capitalist societies are unprecedented historically. Or that socialist systems have always been typified by chronic shortages of food and other consumer goods. Those are simply empirical facts, on one hand, but they are not accidents. Sanders hasn’t noticed these “details”, remaining immersed in a wild fantasy that prosperity is possible under socialism. Don’t point to Scandinavia as a counterargument, as Sanders supporters are wont to do. There, democratic socialism has wrongly been credited for prosperity that owes more to wealth created under capitalism, before those countries began to feed on themselves.

Bread lines are awful, but they aren’t the worst of it. Mr. Sanders has also praised certain tyrannical regimes, as well as the crackdown on the press under the communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Here is a quote in Reason from Michael Moynihan, a former Reason editor who has uncovered a treasure trove of material on Sanders’ past pronouncements:

“When challenged on the Sandinistas’ incessant censorship, Sanders had a disturbing stock answer: Nicaragua was at war with counterrevolutionary forces, funded by the United States, and wartime occasionally necessitated undemocratic measures.“

Well, the First Amendment may be passe, and the revolution is at hand, eh?

Another Reason article by Matt Welch covers ten of “Bernie’s Bad Ideas“, most of which are grounded in an understanding of economics that can only be described as child-like: the “living” wage, free college tuition, universal pre-K education, opposition to international trade, and Medicare for all are just a few of Sanders’ nitwitted plans. I’ve written about many of these topics on Sacred Cow Chips in the past (a few of those posts are linked in the last sentence). Sanders’ supporters are seduced by the falsehood that government can reward the “deserving” justly for something, in some way, by some miracle, without destroying the incredible font of (under-appreciated) prosperity that is the market economy.

To end on a high note, as it were, here’s a fun Facebook page called “Bernie Sanders Bread Line” with some interesting takes on the lunatic ravings of the socialist candidate. All of those memes ring true, including the one at the top of this post.

 

Francis Pontiff-icates In His Fallible Zone

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by in Capitalism, Global Warming, Poverty, Socialism

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Francis Politics

Pope Francis dispenses guidance in matters of faith from his heart. In matters of economics and science, his guidance doesn’t come from a well-informed mind. I’ve devoted two posts to Francis’ political follies this year: “Green Hubris: The Flub of Rome“, and “Francis’ Statist Vision Not Shared By Venezuelan Clergy“. While foreswearing ideology in the pulpit, he nevertheless promotes leftist economic ideology and denigrates capitalism, the single-best form of social organization for lifting mankind from privation. He ignores mountains of evidence demonstrating that his hopes for humanity are best served by free markets and liberty. Francis further confuses the issue of church teachings versus personal ideology by claiming that his views are longstanding views of the Church.

A dark theory of the Pope’s anti-capitalist rhetoric occurred to me. It has to do with an ecclesiastical variant on statism: just as statist elites like President Obama seem to prefer widespread dependence on the state, so too does the Pope wish for widespread dependence on the Church for spiritual nourishment. Karl Marx is often quoted as having said “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” However, the full quote is the following:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.“

Perhaps the Pope understands this all too well. An impoverished world may well be a more pious world, and his condemnation of capitalism might help to lead us there. Is such an ulterior motive too Machiavellian to describe the kind-hearted pontiff? Probably. Perhaps the Devil made me think of it!

Like most on the Left, the Pope does the world’s poor no favor by way of blindly accepting the global warmist agenda, which is based on a hypothesis “proven” only in the sense that a certain class of climate models predict a directional outcome. Those models have accumulated a long track record of bad forecasts. Not only that: the surface temperature records reported by U.S. Government agencies and the media as “evidence” of global warming are not supported by satellite records, and trends have been heavily manipulated via downward adjustments to past temperatures. But even if we stipulate that the carbon-forcing models and the surface temperature records are correct, there are major questions regarding the severity of the outcome and whether it poses a two-sided risk to human welfare. Mediation of this hypothetical risk is extremely costly, requiring diversion of vast quantities of resources, and that takes a real human toll. This is why the policy prescriptions of the warmist community lack internal consistency. For example, they wish to restrict power production from fossil fuels in the developing world, forcing populations to deforest and rely on unhealthy wood burning — indoors! — to meet basic needs like heating and cooking.

Here is the full text of a letter from Don Boudreaux to the Washington Post:

“On the opening page of your website today you ask readers to register their agreement or disagreement with this statement of Pope Francis: ‘This is our sin: Exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to give us what she has within her.’

This claim is laughable. History testifies unmistakably that the earth is extremely stingy in volunteering to humans ‘what she has within her.’ Indeed, what the earth has within her are mere raw materials, by themselves useless unless and until human creativity discovers not only how to transform them into actual resources and outputs that improve human well-being (Ever try fueling your jet with crude oil?) but also how to ‘exploit’ the earth so that she releases her materials to us at a reasonable cost.

The Pope is vocal about helping the world’s poor. I believe that he’s sincere. So I sincerely hope that he comes to realize that the greatest sin of all against humanity would be the suppression of those capitalist institutions that have proven to be the only practical means of transforming what the earth has within her into a bounty of goods and services that allows the masses, for the first time in history, to live lives of material abundance and dignity upon her.“

A few of the comments that follow Boudreaux’s post on Cafe Hayek are good, too.

Stephanie Slade has an excellent piece in Reason entitled “If Pope Francis Wants to Help the Poor, He Should Embrace Capitalism“. Here are some samples addressing the power of markets and capitalism to improve human welfare and eradicate poverty:

“Pope Francis thinks free marketeers have been deluded by a ‘myth of unlimited material progress.’ If we have, it’s because we’ve seen for ourselves the wonders that economic development and technological advancement can bring—from modern medicine stopping diseases that were the scourge of civilizations for centuries, to buildings more able to withstand natural disasters than at any time before, to ever-widening access to the air conditioning he wishes us to use less of.“

“‘Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.’ With those 10 words, spoken to an audience at Georgetown University in 2013, philanthropist rock star Bono demonstrated a keener understanding of economic reality than the leader of global Catholicism.

The U2 frontman clearly has it right—and Pope Francis is wrong to suggest that poverty is growing, or that capitalism, free markets, and globalization are fueling the (non-existent) problem. In just two decades, extreme poverty has been reduced by more than 50 percent. ‘In 1990, almost half of the population in developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day,’ reads a 2014 report from the United Nations. ‘This rate dropped to 22 per cent by 2010, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 700 million.’

How was this secular miracle achieved? The bulk of the answer is through economic development, as nascent markets began to take hold in large swaths of the world that were until recently desperately poor. A 2013 editorial from The Economist noted that… ‘Most of the credit… must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.’“

As Slade explains, far from a scourge on the environment, capitalism is and has been a great blessing:

“Both the economics and the history are clear: The more prosperous the developing world becomes, the more it too will be able to demand and achieve livable conditions. If your goal is to move the world to concern for the preservation of biodiversity, the answer is economic growth. If you want to increase access to clean water, the solution is to increase global wealth, and the consumer power that comes with it. Studies have shown that deforestation reverses when a country’s annual GDP reaches about $3,000 per capita. While some environmental indicators do get worse during the early stages of industrialization, the widely accepted Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis convincingly argues that they quickly reverse themselves when national income grows beyond a certain threshold. If the pope wants a cleaner world, the best way to get there is by creating a richer world—something Pope Francis’ own policy recommendations will make more difficult.“

A theme in Slade’s essay is that Francis is simply confused. On one level, he seems to know that technological advance is of great benefit to mankind, yet he is extremely wary of economic growth and believes that less production and consumption is better. That would make the job of alleviating conditions for the world’s poor much more challenging, if not impossible! He acknowledges that the environment has improved drastically in some parts of the world, but he seems unaware that the same areas are the most economically developed, and have the most well-developed markets. Like most on the Left, he also seems confused about the real meaning of capitalism. And the Pope “often blurs the line between public and private action.”

Slade concludes with some messages for Catholics. First, the Pope’s opinions on matters of faith are said to be infallible, according to Catholic doctrine. But opinions on topics like capitalism and the environment are outside his sphere of infallibility. Second, Slade is rightly offended by the Pope’s attitude that libertarianism and a belief in the efficacy of free markets is not compatible with Christianity.

Thus far during the Pope’s visit to Cuba and the U.S., he has thrilled the murderous Castro brothers and spoken out in favor of Obama’s climate agenda. Raul Castro is so happy about the Pope’s opinions on capitalism “that he might ‘start praying again’ and rejoin the church“. I truly hope that members of the Catholic flock, or any others,  don’t take the Pope’s political exhortations too seriously.