The Heritage Insider: Gaza's lost opportunity, Australia's carbon tax, Goldwater's extreme program for liberty, and more
Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
July 19, 2014
Latest Studies: 33 new studies, including a Mercatus Center report on how certificate-of-need regulations increase health care costs and restrict access, and a Competitive Enterprise Institute report finding that right-to-work laws are good for a state’s economy
Notes on the Week: Gaza’s lost opportunity, Australia repeals its carbon tax, Goldwater’s extreme program for liberty, and more
To Do: Discover where the Israel hatred comes from
Budget & Taxation
• Keeping the Promise: Securing Retirement Benefits for Current and Future Public Employees – Center of the American Experiment
• Sugar Shakedown: How Politicians Conspire with the Sugar Lobby to Defraud America’s Families – The Heritage Foundation
• Our Democratic Debt – Hudson Institute
• The US Export-Import Bank: A Review of the Debate Over Reauthorization – Mercatus Center
• Overprotecting Public Employee Pensions: The Contract Clause and the California Rule – Reason Foundation
• Citizens’ Guide to Seattle Proposition 1: To Create a Parks Taxing District – Washington Policy Center
Crime, Justice & the Law
• When Judges Make Law – Hoover Institution
• Is Delaware High Court Ruling an Ace for Merging Companies? – Washington Legal Foundation
Economic and Political Thought
• Intolerance as Illiberalism – The Heritage Foundation
Economic Growth
• Time to Shift to the Supply Side – American Enterprise Institute
• Why the “Rich” Can Get Richer Faster than the “Poor” – National Center for Policy Analysis
Education
• Education and Opportunity – American Enterprise Institute
• Education Reform from the Grassroots – American Enterprise Institute
• School District Partnerships Help Colorado K-12 Blended Learning Take Flight – Independence Institute
• Is the Tax Code the Proper Tool for Making Higher Education More Affordable? – Tax Foundation
Elections, Transparency, & Accountability
• How the United States Government Lost Its Liberalism – The Heritage Foundation
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Indispensable Partners—Re-energizing U.S.-Indian Ties – The Heritage Foundation
• Lessons in Foreign Policy and National Security – The Heritage Foundation
Health Care
• Establishing New Payment Provisions for the High Cost of Curing Disease – American Enterprise Institute
• Do Certificate-of-Need Laws Increase Indigent Care? – Mercatus Center
• Public-Private Partnerships in Correctional Health Care – Reason Foundation
• Innovation or Institution? The Washington State Health Care Innovation Plan As Signed Into Law – Washington Policy Center
Immigration
• Border Crisis: Emergency Budget Request Misses the Mark – The Heritage Foundation
• Children Illegally Crossing the U.S. Border: Responding Requires Policy Changes – The Heritage Foundation
Information Technology
• How Fast Are Semiconductor Prices Falling? – American Enterprise Institute
Labor
• An Interstate Analysis of Right to Work Laws – Competitive Enterprise Institute
• What Do Workers Want? Union Spending Does Not Reflect Member Priorities – The Heritage Foundation
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Dodd-Frank at 4: More Regulation, More Regulators, and a Sluggish Housing Market – American Action Forum
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Gas Heat – Philanthropy Roundtable
• CTS Corp. v. Waldburger: How Will Judges and State Lawmakers Respond to High Court’s State of Repose Ruling? – Washington Legal Foundation
• Shell v. U.S.: Court Holds Government to its World War II-Era “Grand Bargain” with Aviation Gas Refiners – Washington Legal Foundation
Retirement/Social Security
• How Social Security Reform Could Benefit Workers – National Center for Policy Analysis
Transportation/Infrastructure
• Infrastructure Investment: A State, Local, and Private Responsibility – Cato Institute
Notes on the Week
In Gaza, they tore down paradise and put up a launching spot. Israel invaded Gaza because the folks running Gaza don’t want peace, Charles Krauthammer reminds us:
It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli left in Gaza.
And there was no blockade. On the contrary. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce. […]
And how did the Gaza Palestinians react to being granted by the Israelis what no previous ruler, neither Egyptian, nor British, nor Turkish, had ever given them—an independent territory? First, they demolished the greenhouses. Then they elected Hamas. Then, instead of building a state with its attendant political and economic institutions, they spent the better part of a decade turning Gaza into a massive military base, brimming with terror weapons, to make ceaseless war on Israel.
Where are the roads and rail, the industry and infrastructure of the new Palestinian state? Nowhere. Instead, they built mile upon mile of underground tunnels to hide their weapons and, when the going gets tough, their military commanders. They spent millions importing and producing rockets, launchers, mortars, small arms, even drones. They deliberately placed them in schools, hospitals, mosques and private homes to better expose their own civilians. (Just Thursday, the U.N. announced that it found 20 rockets in a Gaza school.) And from which they fire rockets at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. [Washington Post, July 17]
As Krauthammer points out, Hamas puts its own civilians in harm’s way because it believes civilian casualties will bolster its support around the world. To the extent that the media refuse to call Hamas to account for its aggressive behavior and shameful tactics, it is complicit in creating the incentives for Hamas to behave this way.
Australia has repealed its carbon tax. It was a bad policy on many levels, writes Sinclair Davidson:
Ironically, a tax is the theoretically correct market-based economic solution to a long-lived stock pollutant such as carbon dioxide. An emission trading scheme (ETS) – what the carbon tax was due to evolve into – is not. Politicians, however, have been loath to be seen to be introducing new taxes, and so had chosen an ETS mechanism over a tax. That is the first major defect of Australia’s carbon tax (and indeed of every other such mechanism).
The second major defect – arguably the most important – is that our carbon tax was a local tax. If global warming is a problem, then it requires a global solution. A local tax will do nothing to address global warming, apart from imposing high costs on the local economy.
Let’s not kid ourselves; the costs associated with the carbon tax are high. They are meant to be high. After all, avoiding the costs associated with the carbon tax was meant to drive our economy away from its reliance on fossil fuels, drive innovation in alternate energy, and avoid the apparently even higher mitigation costs of global warming.
That is why the tax needed to be repealed and not just kept as a revenue raiser[.] [The Drum, July 17]
EPA still wants to garnish wages without a court order, but it’s willing to wait a little longer. Here is a small win for transparency, due process of law, and the idea of government playing by the same rules as everyone else:
The Environmental Protection Agency bowed to fierce criticism Wednesday and announced that it had hit the breaks on a fast-tracked plan to collect fines by garnishing paychecks of accused polluters.
The agency, which has come under withering attacks from Republican lawmakers for attempting a “power grab,” said it still intended to pursue the new authority to garnish wages without a court order. But now it will follow a more typical and longer review process. […]
The EPA quietly floated the collection power July 2 in a notice in the Federal Register, announcing it as a “direct final rule” that would take effect automatically Sept. 2 unless the EPA received adverse public comments by Aug. 1.
In response to adverse comments, the EPA has changed the “direct final rule” to a regular proposed rule and extended the comment period until Sept. 2, the official said. [Washington Examiner, July 16]
The problem with the rule, as Rob Gordon reported the day after it was published, was that it provided little opportunity for putative debtors to appeal the garnishment. Further, the EPA would have the power to garnish not just the paychecks of those with unpaid loan obligations but also the paychecks of those who are fined via EPA compliance orders. Those orders themselves have due process issues which are only compounded by the administrative garnishment set-up. [Daily Signal, July 3]
Concerned citizens should note, as the Examiner points out, that the EPA still intends to pursue the power to garnish paychecks without a court order. The EPA will now accept comments on the rule until September 2.
Happy birthday, Stan Evans! Sunday is Stan Evans’s 80th birthday, and we’d like to wish him a very happy one.
Evans was not only present at the creation of modern conservative movement, he was one of its creators. He wrote the Sharon Statement, adopted by Young Americans for Freedom as its statement of founding principles on September 11, 1960. It remains the best statement we know of the fusionist conservative philosophy. And as chairman of the American Conservative Union during the 1970s, he helped conservatives take control of the Republican Party and nominate Ronald Reagan for President in 1980.
Last August, Evans gave a talk at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in which he discussed the parallels between the behavior of the Internal Revenue Service under President Obama and the efforts by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to use the IRS against internal enemies.
The talk is worth hearing again for its relevance to continuing controversies, but we’d like to draw out two other points he makes. The first is: “Somebody has said that history is written by the victors. I differ from that. History is written by people who write history.” The second is: “The answer to spin from the Left is not spin from the Right. […] If I have to support my point of view by suppressing some of the facts, there must be something wrong with my point of view. […] We need more honest journalists practicing journalism.”
Evans is an example of those credos in action. He has written several works of history that correct the liberal narrative with facts. In The Theme Is Freedom, for example, he showed how American freedoms came not from abstract, enlightenment theories but from the tradition of religious faith that informed the Founders’ ideas about politics. And in Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, Evans dug into the archives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other official records to show that there really were agents of the Soviet Union seeking to harm the United States from within its government in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—and that Joe McCarthy had the goods on them.
The other way Evans has lived those credos is by training many thousands of journalists—not to be right-wing ideologues but to do good journalism. He did this by founding the National Journalism Center in 1977. Tim Carney, John Fund, Michael Fumento, Maggie Gallagher, Dan Griswold, Greg Gutfeld, Steve Hayward, John Hood, William McGurn, and Martin Morse Wooster are just some of the journalists and writers trained by Evans and his team at the NJC.
For all that and more, thank you, Stan Evans, and happy birthday!
A grievance-based pedagogy: History is written, as Stan Evans says, by those who write history, but it will be the curriculum writers who decide what narratives citizens know if the Left succeeds in federalizing high school history. The latest push comes from the College Board, reports Stanley Kurtz:
[T]he College Board has created a lengthy and detailed “framework” for their AP U.S. History test. That framework effectively forces teachers to adopt an ideologically left-leaning approach to American history, heavily emphasizing our country’s failings while giving short shrift to our founding principles.
George Washington […] barely makes an appearance in the new AP U.S. History Guidelines. Figures like Benjamin Franklin and James Madison are completely omitted. The Declaration of Independence is presented chiefly as an illustration of the colonists’ belief in their own superiority. Slavery and the treatment of Native Americans are at center stage. At times, the presentation of the New Deal and the Reagan era seems to come straight out of a Democratic Party press office. If you want your child to be admitted to a top quality college, you may soon feel pressure to parrot this line.
And here is the connection to Common Core:
This attempt to nationalize a leftist American history curriculum by way of the College Board has been in the works for years. The Board made its move, however, shortly after selecting David Coleman, architect of the Common Core, as its new president. I and many others have been concerned that a de facto federalizing of the K-12 curriculum through the Common Core would create an opening for those seeking to nationalize leftist indoctrination in our schools. Coleman’s role in formally authorizing and supervising the AP U.S. History changes only heightens these concerns. Coleman hasn’t fully revealed his plans for linking up the Common Core and the College Board’s testing regime. At this point, however, Coleman has lost the benefit of the doubt.
If the new AP U.S. History framework is allowed to take root unopposed, we can expect analogous changes in other AP tests. The College Board could use its AP tests to effectively federalize nearly the whole of America’s high school curriculum, with all of it “aligned” to the Common Core. This, of course, would be a back-door way around the Constitution, which by withholding power over education from the federal government reserves control of it to the states. [National Review, July 7]
Some words from Goldwater: Fifty years ago Wednesday, Barry Goldwater delivered his speech accepting the Republican nomination for President in San Francisco. Here is a sampling of candidate Goldwater’s vision of a free America:
“[T]he America I envision in the years ahead will extend its hand in health, in teaching and in cultivation, so that all new nations will be at least encouraged to go our way, so that they will not wander down the dark alleys of tyranny[.]”
“[T]here must be room for deliberation of the energy and talent of the individual[.]”
“We must assure a society here which, while never abandoning the needy or forsaking the helpless, nurtures incentives and opportunity for the creative and the productive.”
“[T]his again will be a nation of men and women, of families proud of their role, jealous of their responsibilities, unlimited in their aspirations – a Nation where all who can will be self-reliant.”
“We do not seek to lead anyone’s life for him – we seek only to secure his rights and to guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed.” [Video of the entire speech is available at C-Span.org.]
Many know Goldwater’s most famous line from that night: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” As Goldwater himself understood, an agenda based on the ideas of self reliance, free enterprise, and constitutionally limited government was considered extremist in 1964.
More evidence that minimum wages cost jobs: Proponents or raising the minimum wage keep claiming there is no evidence that minimum wage hikes cost jobs by pricing low-skilled labor out of the market. And those proponents keep being wrong.
According to a new analysis by Ben Gitis, the 13 states that raised their minimum wages in January all experienced lower job growth in the retail and restaurant sectors—the sectors most likely to employ minimum wage workers—than the states that did not raise their minimum wages. Job growth in the retail and restaurant sectors in those 13 states was 0.6 percent in May compared to 2.0 percent in the states that did not raise minimum wages. The 0.6 percent growth rate for May was also lower that the rate of job growth in the rest of the economy for those same states. According to Gitis, the 13 minimum wage hikes cost those states 129,000 jobs. [American Action Forum, July 8]
Video of the week: Some cities welcome people with new ideas; others don’t. A Tale of Austin and Chicago:
To Do: Discover Where the Israel Hatred Comes From
• Find out what has changed world opinion about Israel in the last 40 years. Joshua Muravchik will speak at The Heritage Foundation about his book Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. Muravchik’s talk will begin at noon on July 22.
• Get ready for another election season by reviewing where the conservative movement has been. The Family Research Council will host a talk by George Nash on the post-World War II history of the American conservative movement. His talk will begin at noon on July 23.
• Showcase your video-making talents and win $10,000. You have until July 31 to get your entries in for the Reason Magazine 2014 Video Awards, which “honors short-form, online video, film, and moving pictures that explore, investigate, or enrich libertarian beliefs in individual rights, limited government, and human possibilities.”
• Learn what the history of gun control in the Third Reich teaches us today. Stephen P. Halbrook will talk about his book Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State” at the Independent Institute Conference Center in Oakland, Calif. The event will begin at 6 p.m. on July 24.
• Discover how the federal criminal justice system prosecutes American citizens for things that are not crimes and fails to hold prosecutors accountable for malfeasance. At the Cato Institute, Sidney Powell will talk about his new book Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. Powell’s talk will begin at noon on July 24.
• Get the conservative view from the European Parliament. The Pacific Research Institute will host a talk by Daniel Hannan, Conservative Party Member of the European Parliament Representing South East England. Hannan will speak at the Omni Hotel in San Francisco at noon on July 21.
(Want more stuff to do? Check out InsiderOnline’s Conservative Calendar.)
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