Jeffrey Alan Miron

Reduced Privacy Does Not Mean Increased Security

Dale Carpenter at the Volokh conspiracy calls our attention to an article by Bruce Schneier on the NSA domestic surveillance programs.  Schneir claims the programs are ineffective at detecting terrorist activity, so they are all cost and no benefit.  Schneier begins:

Collecting information about every American's phone calls is an example of data mining. The basic idea is to collect as much information as possible on everyone, sift through it with massive computers, and uncover terrorist plots. It's a compelling idea, and convinces many. But it's wrong. We're not going to find terrorist plots through systems like this, and we're going to waste valuable resources chasing down false alarms. To understand why, we have to look at the economics of the system.

This is a partial answer to the question raised in my earlier post on the NSA:

But how do we know whether anti-terrorism measures in fact prevent terrorism?

If Schneier is right, we know because we can undertake a basic statistical analysis of the programs in question, and this analysis shows the programs are utterly useless.

Federal versus State Education Vouchers

Andrew Coulson has a nice piece at Cato on state versus federal education vouchers.   He begins:

President Bush wants to help kids in failing public schools. That's good. He wants to do it by giving them federal vouchers to attend private schools. That's bad.

And the key paragraph is:

But if you study the subsequent 25 centuries of education history, you are driven to an inescapable conclusion: government funding of private schools brings with it government control – and the higher the level of government involved, the more serious the problem.

I am not sure I agree with Coulson that state-level tax credits are better than state-level vouchers; both require the government to define "education"  and thus create the potential for excessive control.  But that is a detail; Coulson's overall message is dead on.

States Rights, Abortion, and Gay Marriage

Jonathan Rauch has a superb column in Reason on the proposed Marriage Protection Act.  A crucial paragraph:

Two questions for anti-gay-marriage, anti-abortion Republicans: If states can be allowed to go their own way in defining human life, why not allow them to go their own way in defining marriage? Where constitutional amendments are concerned, why is preventing gay couples from marrying so much more urgent than preventing unborn children from being killed?

Who ever said politicians were supposed to be consistent. 

20 Million Extra Immigrants?

Robert J. Samuelson says the immigration bill just passed by the Senate increases legal immigration by 20 million over the next twenty years relative to current law.  Samuelson is concerned that this fact has received hardly any mention in news account of the bill:

The Senate passed legislation last week that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) hailed as "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history." You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Yet the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

One job of journalism is to inform the public about what our political leaders are doing. In this case, we failed. The Senate bill's sponsors didn't publicize its full impact on legal immigration, and we didn't fill the void. It's safe to say that few Americans know what the bill would do because no one has told them. Indeed, I suspect that many senators who voted for the legislation don't have a clue as to the potential overall increase in immigration.

Samuelson's claim that politicians and the press have neglected their duty to publicize the bill's impact is fair enough.

Yet this news is the only cheery thing I have heard during the recent immigration debates.  If Congress expands legal immigration enough (whether via a guest worker program or permanent residency), all the nonsense about fences and border patrol becomes irrelevant.

Forbidden Snickers and Forbidden Fruits

Concern over "unhealthy" foods in schools is increasing, and schools, local governments, and even Congress are reacting with more policies designed to ban or limit these foods.   For example, the author of the article writes:

Earlier this year, our small Midwestern school district joined the food wars, proposing a new policy that would discourage all food in classrooms, ban nuts and sugary foods and do away with vending machines.

These measures are certainly well-intentioned.  Like many other good intentions, however, they face the hard reality that paternalistic measures often fail to change behavior, or do so in counter-productive ways.  Indeed, this reporter's experience suggests that even when practiced by well-intentioned parents, paternalism can backfire:

Early in my children's lives, I was a no-sugar, no-fat mom, the legacy of my own childhood with a constantly dieting mother. I thought I was doing the right thing, until a friend told me that every time my children stayed at her house, the first thing they did was ask for ice cream. With sprinkles. And chocolate chips. And gummy worms. By rigidly restricting their sugar intake, I had made it a highly sought out pleasure — the last thing I'd intended.

I can attest to such adverse consequences from my own experience.  My parent forbade all TV on weekdays, and often on weekends.  I am now a total addict.

I do not mean to imply that parents should not try to guide their children toward sensible decisions.  But less is sometimes more.  And that applies far more cogently when the deicision maker is government.  In that case the decisions impact people with different preferences, needs, and abilities, so the right outcome likely varies enormously.

Richard Cohen On English Only

Richard Cohen argues that non-English speaking immigrant groups always convert to English within a generation, so English-only laws are unnecessary:

Still, the larger culture remains English-speaking and its pull is like an ocean tide. It may take a while, but it will get its way.

I agree with Cohen.  Both economic and social incentives mean the children of immigrants are always English speakers; laws designed to protect English are irrelevant.

Hiring Procedures in Public versus Private High Schools: An Anecdote

A friend who teaches high school physics was over for dinner last night.   He recently lhad to leave his current position at a public school due to budget cuts and had just finished finding a new job.  He reported on the differences in hiring procedures at the public versus private high schools where he interviewed.

At the public schools, the interviews lasted an hour.  The interviewer checked some basic facts, such as whether my friend had experience in teaching the relevant courses, and whether he was certified.  The public schools did not ask him to guest teach a class, or meet with other faculty, or make any serious attempt to get to know him or check they quality of his teaching.  They seemed interested in filling a slot.  Period.

At the private schools, the interviews lasted a day.  My friend guest taught in several classes.  He met lots of people.  He got to know the school, and the school got to know him.   The schools seemed genuinely interested in determining whether my friend is a good teacher.

My friend got offers from both publics and privates.  Guess which one he chose.

Liberals and Free Speech

Robyn Blumner, columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, has an excellent column on liberals, campaign finance regulation, and free speech:

Why don’t liberals understand the freedom-crushing nature of campaign finance reform?

How come it is easy for liberals to see the First Amendment interest in other overheated free speech issues, such as reporting on the classified operations of the National Security Agency or displaying Robert Mapplethorpe nudes, but when it comes to political discourse during an election season, they’re all for government restraints.

This is the same question that famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams raises in his autobiographical book Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment. In one chapter, Abrams recounts a speech he gave to a Unitarian church congregation in New York City in 2000. The audience was very friendly toward his discussion of the Pentagon Papers case and the Brooklyn Museum case in which Abrams defended the museum after then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sought to cut its funding. The mayor had been deeply offended by a Nigerian artist’s use of elephant dung in a painting of the Virgin Mary that the museum exhibited.

But when Abrams said that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform measure would likely put unconstitutional limits on political activity and promote censorship of political speech, his audience audibly objected.

The only thing I would add to Blumner's analysis is that conservatives have been totally complicitous in the adoption of campaign finance regulation and the erosion of free speech.  John McCain, for example, is the co-sponsor of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.  More generally, conservatives as well as liberals recognize that campaign finance regulation protect the jobs of incumbent politicians, so they happily sign on.

Exporting Chaos

Rami Khouri, Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star in Beirut, provides a perspective on Anglo-American interventions in the Middle East.  He begins as follows:

Many of us in the Middle East instinctively hold our breath in fear when American and British leaders get together to discuss our region and its evolving politics and nations, as U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair did last week in Washington. They heaped accolades on the new Iraqi government headed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and proclaimed yet another beacon of hope and change for the entire Arab world. Bush applauded the "watershed event." Blair, during a fleeting visit to Baghdad, called it "a new beginning" that will let Iraqis take charge of their own destiny.

Say what?

The view from the Arab world is rather different, based on our own history rather than imagined futures. Since Napoleon's conquest of Egypt two centuries ago, most of us have doubted the sincerity, legitimacy and efficacy of the Western armies that regularly march into our lands to deliver modernity through the muzzle of a French musket or the barrel of an M-1 tank. While Anglo-American politicians proclaim historic strides to replace Arab despotism and darkness with freedom and democracy, people who actually live here and know something about the Middle East shudder. For they witness Iraq and other Arab countries descending into an ever more fractious maelstrom of ethnic, religious and tribal violence. The link with U.S. and British policies is as clear and consistent as it is dangerous and destructive.

Well worth reading.

Marijuana and Lung Cancer

A new study finds no evidence that marijuana smoking causes lung cancer:

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

These results are interesting and presumably welcome to marijuana smokers.  They also undermine one of the standard arguments for prohibiting marijuana.

But the possibility of negative health effects should never have been a reason to prohibit marijuana: alcohol, tobacco, saturated fat, chains saws, and automobiles are all legal products.

And even if smoking marijuana does increase the risk of lung cancer, users can avoid this risk with alternative consumption methods.  One is vaporization, which heats marijuana enough to release the THC without combustion. Another is cooking the marijuana into brownies.  In a legal market these methods would be readily available if the evidence suggested a risk from smoking.  So, even if there is a lung cancer risk, prohibition increases rather than decreases this risk.