From DC Examiner:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats, acting last week behind closed doors, cobbled together a temporary spending bill to keep the federal government running past Oct. 1st. The continuing resolution was needed because Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid simply have not done their jobs.

The 2008 budget year ended yesterday, but Congress hasn’t approved a single one of a dozen annual appropriations bills needed to keep the federal government functioning on a day-to-day basis. Hence the $630 billion stop-gap measure, nearly the size of the failed Wall Street bailout. It passed the House on a 370-68 vote even though, as Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., candidly admitted, “very few people have any idea what’s in it.” Cornered House members had less than 24 hours to review the 357-page bill and 752 pages of accompanying material before being forced to either pass it - or shut down most of the federal government today….

…House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, D-WI, who helped Pelosi craft the earmark-stuffed bill, admitted that the Democratic leadership deliberately decided to “kick the can down the road” and wait for a new president who presumably won’t veto future earmark-laden legislation….

….Obey defended the Democrats’ lack of transparency, saying “you’re damn right it has [been secretive] because if it’s done in public, it would never get done.”…

That’s $630B money spent, worse than the $700B proposed for buying illiquid securities (i.e. good chance that $700B is recovered in time).

Politicians are convinced this is a time for extreme measures, and we must risk putting a massive obligation on taxpayers to “save” still solvent financial institutions. 

Pretty much everyone can agree that Congress has handled this poorly, and most informed people recognize political corruption and cronyism are largely responsible for the mess in the first place.

So why isn’t this the time to finally pass Congressional term limits? I might even vote for Obama if he promised that kind of real “change”.

From This Is London:

His name is Matthew, he is 26 years old, and his supporters hope to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

But he won’t be able to give evidence on his own behalf - since he is a chimpanzee. Animal rights activists led by British teacher Paula Stibbe are fighting to have Matthew legally declared a ‘person’ so she can be appointed as his guardian if the bankrupt animal sanctuary where he lives in Vienna is forced to close….

It may sound nice to propose that a chimps should have the same rights as humans. But what then about the corollary: that a human’s rights should be equivalent to those of a chimp? And if a chimp then why not any other animal? How about plants? While we’re at it, lets propose humans have no rights whatsoever.

I think a related question should be considered by anyone suggesting enemy combatants in foreign war zones should have the same rights of US citizens under our Constitution.

More rights for everyone - why not? Seems like a nice enough concept.

But again, the corollary: under our laws should US citizens be treated the same as enemy combatants in foreign war zones? When you are brought up on charges of running a stop sign do you want to be treated like a Al Qaeda operative trying to blow up an airplane?

Extending the notion of human rights or constitutional rights to a limitless degree is equivalent to destroying those rights all together.

The Mexican border state of Sonora, that is. From the Tuscon Sun:

A delegation of nine state legislators from Sonora was in Tucson on Tuesday to say Arizona’s new employer sanctions law will have a devastating effect on the Mexican state.

At a news conference, the legislators said Sonora - Arizona’s southern neighbor, made up of mostly small towns - cannot handle the demand for housing, jobs and schools it will face as illegal Mexican workers here return to their hometowns without jobs or money.

The law, which took effect Jan.1, punishes employers who knowingly hire individuals who don’t have valid legal documents to work in the United States. Penalties include suspension or loss of a business license…

…”How can they pass a law like this?” asked Mexican Rep. Leticia Amparano Gamez, who represents Nogales.

“There is not one person living in Sonora who does not have a friend or relative working in Arizona,” she said in Spanish.

“Mexico is not prepared for this, for the tremendous problems” it will face as more and more Mexicans working in Arizona and sending money to their families return to hometowns in Sonora without jobs, she said.

“We are one family, socially and economically,” she said of the people of Sonora and Arizona…

Family or not, Mexico has a problem. It could be called collectivism or socialism, but in Mexico’s case its most accurately called statism. The Mexican government consumes nearly half of the country’s economy (in the US its about 35.4%).

The Mexican economy should benefit from enormous structural advantages. 90% of its exports are to the US and Canada with almost no trade barriers. It is blessed with abundant natural resources - its the world’s 5th largest oil producer (right behind Iran). Their proximity to the US means they can get by with almost no military (the US spends 20% more on the Coast Guard than Mexico spends on its entire military).

A couple straightforward changes to Mexican law would help a lot. First, they need to dump their Expropiación Petrolera law. In 1932 Mexico nationalized (aka socialized) all foreign assets involved in oil exploration and extraction. It was good politics (domestically), but it has had a devastating impact on their petroleum industry. Pemex is run through a system of patronage and graft. There is no competition for natural resources, so the company is wasteful and inefficient - with side effects including environmental destruction and long term damage to reserves (by, for example, excessive injection of sea water). Opening the industry to foreign capital and competition would mean more exploration, more modern methods, more oil exports, and more domestic jobs for Mexicans.

The other thing they need to dump is Article 27 of their constitution. The Article stipulates that all land is property of the Mexican government, and that private property is a un privilegio creado por la nación. (”a privilege created by the nation” - ie not a right). This is a serious problem that reflects the country’s Continental legal heritage (as opposed to one derived from British common law). A more specific problem with Article 27 is the last sentence of Section I:

En una faja de cien kilómetros a lo largo de las fronteras y de cincuenta en las playas, por ningún motivo podrán los extranjeros adquirir el dominio directo sobre tierras y aguas.

Roughly, foreigners cannot under any circumstances own land within 100km of the border and 50km of the ocean.

One immediate impact of this law is obvious in this satellite photo of the area around Imperial Valley.

Click to enlarge:

Can you guess where the border is?

What’s going on here - is the difference in agricultural development an issue of labor or capital? Well, since a good portion of the laborers on the north side of the border are Mexicans, its probably not a labor problem. Why the capital problem? Because the people owning and developing the land north of the border are legally barred from doing so on the other side. They look pretty crammed in to the valley up there - no doubt some would look south if they could. And with NAFTA their produce could easily be sold in the same markets.

Same thing goes for coastal development. How many thousands of Mexicans are employed building vacation homes for American baby boomers just a few hundred miles inside the US in places like Tuscon, or on the CA or FL coasts? Why don’t more Americans build retirement homes in places like Ensanada, or Playa del Amor, or Cancun? Because they effectively cannot.

Changing property ownership laws and privatizing (including international capital) Pemex would go a long way toward helping Mexico create more domestic jobs. Fewer of their hardest working, most ambitious citizens would working illegally inside the US and would instead be helping grow their own economy. Win-win.

But I think Hillary Clinton has probably the best solution for illegal immigration.

She’s already promised $800B in new annual federal spending (will take our government spending to >40% of GDP), she wants to nationalize parts of our petroleum industry, and she wants to slow our economic growth with increased taxes. She will simply make the US more like Mexico.

 United States Constitution, Ammendment 1: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  

Oklahoma State Constitution, Article II, Section 3: The people  have the  right peaceably to assemble  for their own good, and to apply to those invested with the powers  of government for redress  of grievances by  petition, address, or remonstrance.

Oklahoma generally votes GOP in national elections (voted Bush/Kerry 66/33, 4 of 5 congressmen are GOP along with both senators).  But OK has a long Dem tradition in the state government. Twenty one of the state’s 25 governors have been Democrats. As in many states, a few successful political families have retained power across time regardless of their party affiliation. In Oklahoma the Boren and Edmondson families have fielded Democratic Governors, Senators, Congressman, a current State Supreme Court Justice, and the current Attorney General.

That AG, Drew Edmondson, son of a Congressman, nephew of a Governor, and brother of a State Supreme Court Justice, has never had a job outside government. He knows a thing or two about government power and is using his authority as AG to stick it to three people who dared question how the state is spending their tax dollars.

From PM:

In 2005, Oklahomans in Action launched a campaign to put a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) measure on the November 2006 ballot. The measure would have put a cap on state spending increases, giving voters and taxpayers—instead of politicians—the power to override the cap.

A similar measure was enacted in neighboring Colorado in 1992.

The group gathered enough signatures to get the measure on the ballot, but the AG got it blocked on a technicality - the State Supreme Court determined that three of the petition’s organizers were not OK residents and thus the petition was invalid. Seven of 9 justices on the court, including the AG’s brother, were appointed by Dems.

Read this article and decide for yourself whether or not “The Oklahoma Three” were indeed state residents - seems they lived there and had declared residency, but the court thinks they had not lived there long enough, or something.

Regardless, it seems a rather minor point. The three weren’t the only organizers of the petition, and there was no challenge to the authenticity of the tens of thousands of signatures. A public opinion poll at the time showed 66% of voters favored the measure - it only needed 50% to pass.

But the AG wasn’t content blocking from the ballot this obviously popular measure. He has filed felony charges against The Oklahoma Three, with accusations including “conspiracy to defraud the state”. If found guilty each could go to jail for 10 years.

Voters in OK obviously need to dump their AG. But more importantly, how is it possible three people could face 10 years of prision for petitioning their government? Where are the constitutional protections?

Two great pieces in this quarter’s Claremont Review of Books.

First, Crisis of the Old Liberal Order consider’s Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s legacy. Schlesinger (died in February) was one of the most important public intellecutals among Democrats in the 2nd half of the 20th century.

Excerpts:

…E.J. Dionne eulogized Schlesinger in a column, reassuring his readers that “reports of liberalism’s death are always premature,” because the commitment to problem-solving—”the search for remedy,” in Schlesinger’s phrase—is “the antidote to social indifference and to despair about our capacity to act in common through government.” As ideologies go, problem-solving is better than problem-causing. It is, however, a framework that defeats every effort to make distinctions and draw boundaries. There is never any basis in the doctrine of muddling through for saying the government lacks the capacity, wisdom, or legitimate authority to solve a particular problem, or even that some “problems” are really aspects of the human condition that we might ameliorate but cannot eliminate. Incapable of discovering a single dissatisfaction that is not a problem the government might—hence must—solve, the search for remedy easily becomes the search for new afflictions in need of remedy….

…The need for capable public officials, however, cannot explain or justify the arrogance that so frequently mars Schlesinger’s writing. Schlesinger did not limit himself to being snide to people who disagreed with him. He had no important policy differences with Harry Truman, for example, but the unprepossessing, accidental president lacked FDR’s pedigree and polish, reason enough for Schlesinger to call Truman “a man of mediocre and limited capacity” who had “managed to surround himself with his intellectual equals.” In print continuously over seven prolific decades, Schlesinger never had an unpublished sneer…

…According to Fred Siegel, the “political and cultural snobbery that informs The Vital Center” lives on in the hauteur of those “who expect, given their putative expertise, to be obeyed”—and this attitude has proven to be “the undoing of American liberalism.”…

…This liberalism was for the people, but not quite of or by them. It preferred them to be objects of an affirmative government directed by their betters rather than agents of an affirmative government able to challenge their betters. It’s one thing to favor a bad policy, as liberals did in the controversy over busing in the 1970s. It’s something else to castigate all opponents of busing as racists, and deny even the possibility that decent, intelligent people might have legitimate misgivings about that dubious policy. This “punitive, ram-it-down-their throats quality,” in Nicholas Lemann’s phrase, belonged to a politics that antagonized people on purpose, because they were deemed to have it coming…

…Finally, Peters declared, “the snobbery that is most damaging to liberalism is the liberal intellectuals’ contempt for religious, patriotic, and family values.” This contempt is “the least appealing trait of the liberal intellectuals,” many of whom “don’t really believe in democracy.”

Arrogant, snide, distrustful of democracy, wrong - Schlesinger was all of them. He was also one of the intellectual fathers of the modern Democratic Party.

Second, Taming Big Government discusses the erosion of the constitutional separation of powers and rise of an expansive, bureaucratic “administrative state.”

Excerpts:

…Ever since Woodrow Wilson set pen to paper, liberals have expressed frustration with, if not outright scorn for, the separation of powers. They read it almost exclusively in terms of its checking-and-balancing function, i.e., as a barrier that for many decades prevented the national government from enacting progressive social and economic policies. The other half of James Madison’s elegant argument for separating powers—energizing government through the clash of rival and opposite ambitions—seems to have escaped their attention altogether, as has the framers’ understanding that government powers differ not only in degree, but in kind. Transfixed by their own deconstruction of the founding as an effort to frustrate popular majorities, liberals find it hard to believe that the framers could have imagined the need for powerful government…

…The result of Wilson’s vision is the administrative state we know today. Although it has retained the original Constitution’s structural appearances, the new order has profoundly altered its substance. The arguments that once supported the ideas of federalism and limited government have fallen into desuetude: state power today is exercised largely at the national government’s sufferance, and if there is a subject or activity now beyond federal reach, one would be hard-pressed to say what it might be. As for the separation of powers, while the branches remain institutionally separate, the lines between legislative, executive, and judicial power have become increasingly blurred. The idea that government power ought to be differentiated according to function has given way to the concept that power is more or less fungible…

…The short history of the administrative state since at least the New Deal is a tale of protracted conflict between Congress and the president for control of its ever-expanding machinery. After initial resistance, which remained formidable until roughly 40 years ago, Congress has finally learned to love big government as much as, if not more than, presidents do. As political scientist Morris Fiorina has shown, Congress loves it because it pays handsome political returns. The returns come from greasing the wheels of the federal establishment to deliver an increasing array of goods and services to constituents and interest groups, who reward congressional intervention with campaign contributions and other forms of electoral support. Such political benefit as may accrue from enacting carefully crafted legislation is much less, which is why legislators devote far more time to pleasing constituents and lobbyists than they do to deliberating about the details of laws they enact. Congress is generally content to delegate these details, which often carry great policy significance, to departments and agencies, whose actions and policy judgments can forever after be second-guessed by means of legislative “oversight.”…

The essay goes on to quote a piece by Boston University law professor Gary Lawson on the Federal Trade Commission:

The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters both of fact and of law.

From The Telegraph:

Has anyone noticed, either, that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as “middle-class”, but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state. Its supposed family units are not as the rest of us might define the term. It lapses routinely into criminality and lives in largely self-inflicted squalor. It has low educational attainment and is bereft of ambition. It is what we now call the underclass.

We have an underclass because we pay to have one. I do not mean that to be a glib remark, from which it could be inferred that, if we were to stop paying for one, it would magically disappear. What I mean is that 60 years of welfarism, far from raising people out of poverty and of the vices that sometimes (but not inevitably) go with it, has simply trapped them there. Welfarism has smashed the traditional, and vital, family unit. The state readily takes responsibility for families if those who should be running them decide, in part or in whole, to abdicate it. The huge outlay of money that allows this to happen is represented by politicians - and not exclusively those of the Left - as a great act of humanity and philanthropy…

…That welfarism should allow people to pass their duties to the state was certainly not envisaged by Beveridge when he drew up his blueprint for a welfare system in 1942. As a Liberal of the best sort, Beveridge saw his job as to design a safety net for those who, in distressing scenes in the 1920s and 1930s, had lived in dire poverty owing to mismanagement of the world’s main economies after the First World War. The Attlee government interpreted Beveridge differently, and ensured that welfare instead would provide a career structure for those who chose not to work, or not to provide for their families.

That was bad enough; but real toxicity has been created by combining this destructive profligacy with a liberal experiment in criminal justice that has now utterly failed, and with the sacrifice of our state education system on the altar of Marxism. Given how many of our young grow up without any moral example in their lives, without discipline or serious learning at school, and in the knowledge that the police will not confront them or, if they do, that the courts have little power to punish, it is small wonder we have pockets of lethal anarchy throughout the green and pleasant land…

…Many of the “solutions” to our social problems that have been trotted out since Rhys Jones was killed are right. Given the mess we have allowed to be made, a dose of authoritarianism is needed: more police being more vigilant, catching more criminals and putting them in more prisons.

But our politicians remain too cowardly to implement the prescription. The grammar schools that once helped the poor out of poverty are reviled even by the leader of the Conservative Party, who went to Eton. The scaling down of benefits to the undeserving poor, hand-in-hand with a drive to help people into work and to take responsibility for themselves and their own, is too terrifying for any political party to contemplate.

Collectivism is a slippery slope.

Expansive central planning projects that promise to help people more often do the opposite. The government creates a program to help indigent people, creating more indigent people in the process, thus increasing the demand for programs to help indigent people - repeat until society implodes (e.g. Zimbabwe, USSR, Red China, North Korea, Cambodia…)

These programs can easily emerge from democratic processes since in the short term they are often so popular. Thus many European democracies that had freer economies than the US after WWII have slid into socialist stupor.

How can democracies protect themselves? - a strong constitutional foundation. Governments must not be permitted to claim limitless authority simply because they are elected. Basic principles - individual rights, protection from coercion, enforcement of contracts, defense of property rights - must be upheld regardless what some temporary majority may vote for.

Update 8/29/07:

On a related note, from WF Buckley Jr. this morning:

…democracy, provoked, can act outside the bounds of reason. It was an old saw seventy years ago that the impoverished farmer in the Soviet Union next door to the successful farmer worked not to replicate the practices of his neighbor, but to urge the state to confiscate his neighbor’s harvest. Venezuela’s hatred of the United States generates the equivalent of calls to confiscate the successful harvest.

In certain quarters in Venezuela the hatred of the superpower to the north can be all consuming. When Hugo Chavez, a demagogue of surrealistic extremes, came along, many saw a racy attractiveness in the totality of his iconoclasm. In 2002, the United States, we have been given to believe, had a hand in an attempt to dethrone Chavez. But it didn’t work, and the result of it was a democratic reelection in which Hugo Chavez got a higher percentage of the vote than Abraham Lincoln did when he ran for a second term.

What will happen now?

What always happens when policies are set in flat collision with reality. Venezuelans will become poorer, the political scene will close its door on freedom of the press, and some day down the line, the people will be rescued from the exorbitant lengths to which, acting on democratic license, they took themselves.

Oped by Professor Gar Alperovitz in today’s NYT:

 SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.

Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California’s governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable….

…If the scale of a country renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization of power…

Alperovitz has merely discovered what advocates of a smaller federal government have been saying for 50 years. What he calls “a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula” is not a flaw at all. The problem has been the misinterpretation and misapplication of our carefully crafted constitutional, one designed to limit the central government’s influence over states and citizens. And the issue is not “little discussed,” it was the focus of the Reagan revolution.

“Radical decentralization of power” is indeed what we need, and its nice to have Professor Alperovitz on board. But he will find little interest among his leftist fellow travelers in making government smaller, more responsive, and less intrusive into citizens’ lives.

Part I

Part II