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 3, 2015
Latest Studies
42 new items, including a Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis of how to fix road funding, and a National Center for Policy Analysis report on how to fix health care now
Notes on the Week
ObamaCare is still flawed, the other harms of the marriage decision, Ex-Im closes but damage to economy still to be determined, and more
To Do
Say Happy Birthday, America!
Latest Studies
Budget & Taxation
• The Effect of State Taxes on the Geographical Location of Top Earners: Evidence from Star Scientists – Cato Institute
• Congress Should Only Make Changes to Repatriation Policy When Establishing a Territorial System – The Heritage Foundation
• Ending Illinois’ Budget Crisis: No More Business as Usual – Illinois Policy Institute
• California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis – Independent Institute
• Bringing Financial Transparency to Michigan’s Public Sector Unions – Mackinac Center for Public Policy
• US Federal Budget Restraint in the 1990s: A Success Story – Mercatus Center
Economic and Political Thought
• Individualism: A Reader – Cato Institute
• Magna Carta: Talisman of Liberty – Centre for Independent Studies
• Islam and Free Speech – Encounter Books
• Understanding Tyranny and Terror: From the French Revolution to Modern Islamism – The Heritage Foundation
Economic Growth
• Economic Crisis: The Global Impact of a Greek Default – American Enterprise Institute
• An Analysis of Public and Private Sector Employment Trends in Canada, 1990-2013 – Fraser Institute
• Pakistan’s Economic Disarray and How to Fix It – The Heritage Foundation
• Puerto Rico Needs Economic Freedom, Not Bailouts – The Heritage Foundation
Education
• The Student Experience: How Competency Based Education Providers Serve Students – American Enterprise Institute
• Wisconsin High Schools Learn from New PISA Test – Education Next
• The Education Apocalypse – Encounter Books
Family, Culture & Community
• A Red Family Advantage? Marriage and Family Stability in Red and Blue America – American Enterprise Institute
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Latin America: Impressions of a Troubled Region – American Enterprise Institute
• Putin’s Russia as a Revisionist Power – Hudson Institute
Health Care
• Women’s Surgical Center v. Reese – Goldwater Institute
• Reforming Obamacare: How Congress, and the President, Can Win after King v. Burwell – National Center for Policy Analysis
• The ACA and the States – Private Enterprise Research Center
Immigration
• Countering Executive Amnesty, Part 3 – Center for Immigration Studies
Labor
• Overtime Pay Expansion: Who Will the DOL’s New Rule Impact? – American Action Forum
• Local Right to Work – Capital Research Center
• Scott Walker vs. the Unions – Capital Research Center
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• A Chronology of the Financial Crisis – National Center for Policy Analysis
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Fear Itself – Capital Research Center
• The New “Useful Idiots” – Capital Research Center
• FY 2016 House Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill: Right on Regulations, Wrong on Spending – The Heritage Foundation
• Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation – Property & Environment Research Center
Philanthropy
• The Clinton Foundation: A Cauldron of Conflicts and Cronyism – Capital Research Center
Regulation & Deregulation
• Thatcher: The Myth of Deregulation – Institute of Economic Affairs
• The Nanny State Is Expanding—And Private Property Rights Are Decreasing – Public Interest Institute
• The Great Windstorm Divide: Isolating the Texas Coast – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Retirement/Social Security
• Is Social Security Wealth? – Private Enterprise Research Center
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• No Ordinary Garment? The Burqa and the Pursuit of Tolerance – Centre for Independent Studies
• The Battle of Indiana and the Promise of Battles to Come – Hillsdale College
• Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom – Regnery Publishing
Transportation/Infrastructure
• Reimagining Surface Transportation Reauthorization – Competitive Enterprise Institute
Notes on the Week
ObamaCare is still flawed. And one of its main problems is that it will shift people from private health insurance to public health insurance, which is going to be bad for their health. Scott Atlas explains:
The 107 million people on Medicaid or Medicare in 2013 will increase to 135 million by 2018, a growth rate tripling that of private insurance, according to projections by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. At the same time, private health-care insurance premiums are expected to skyrocket in 2016, many by more than 30%.
This will not improve American health care. Private insurance is superior for both access and quality of care. Reforms should therefore be focused on how to maximize the availability and affordability of private insurance for everyone, regardless of income or employment, rather than put more people into government insurance while causing private insurance to become unaffordable to all but the affluent.
Why is private health insurance so important? Insurance without access to medical care is a sham. And that is where the country is heading. According to a 2014 Merritt Hawkins survey, 55% of doctors in major metropolitan areas refuse new Medicaid patients. The harsh reality awaiting low-income Americans is dwindling access to quality doctors, hospitals and health care.
Simultaneously, while the population ages into Medicare eligibility, a significant and growing proportion of doctors don’t accept Medicare patients. According to the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, 29% of Medicare beneficiaries who were looking for a primary-care doctor in 2008 already had a problem finding one.
Numerous reports in the top medical journals like Cancer, American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, and Annals of Surgery clearly show that patients with private insurance have better outcomes than similar patients on government insurance. It is highly likely that restrictions in access to important drugs, specialists and technology account for these differences.
Of the many negative effects of the Affordable Care Act, the increasing unaffordability of private insurance might be the most damaging. Thanks to its regulations on pricing and coverage, the law has already forced termination of private health insurance for more than five million Americans. The Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that as many as 10 million people will be forced off their chosen employer-based health insurance by 2021—a tenfold increase in the 2011 projections at the onset of the law. [Wall Street Journal, June 28]
The other harms of the marriage decision: The Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which it ruled that states must grant marriage licenses to same sex couples, harms more than just the institution of marriage. As Ryan Anderson writes, by taking the issue out of the democratic process, the Court has undermined both American self-government and religious liberty.
How it undermines self-government:
As Justice Antonin Scalia points out in his dissent, “It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.” Constitutional democratic self-government is vitally important; indeed it is our first right.
Scalia continues: “This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: The freedom to govern themselves.”
Of course, democratic self-government isn’t unlimited. That’s why I’ve referred to constitutional democratic self-government. For We the People placed limits on the authority we delegated to the political branches of government. That’s what a constitution is all about. Scalia therefore notes that the “Constitution places some constraints on self-rule—constraints adopted by the People themselves when they ratified the Constitution and its Amendments.” But apart from the limits We the People placed on ourselves, “those powers ‘reserved to the States respectively, or to the people’ can be exercised as the States or the People desire.”
So the question before the court was “whether the Fourteenth Amendment contains a limitation that requires the States to license and recognize marriages between two people of the same sex. Does it remove that issue from the political process?”
Scalia’s response: “Of course not.” And that’s why judicial activism has done harm to self-government.
How it undermines religious liberty:
The ruling, as Roberts notes, “creates serious questions about religious liberty.” He observes that “many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is—unlike the right imagined by the majority—actually spelled out in the Constitution.” When marriage was redefined democratically, citizens could accompany it with religious liberty protections, but “the majority’s decision imposing same-sex marriage cannot, of course, create any such accommodations.” [Daily Signal, June 30]
Ben Wattenberg, R.I.P. Ben Wattenberg, the neoconservative public intellectual who wrote books charting the progress of American society and its economy, died Tuesday at the age of 81. Wattenberg was considered a center-right Democrat, a category that is now significantly smaller with his passing. He was a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson, adviser to Hubert Humphrey, and author of The Real Majority, which became a political blueprint for President Richard Nixon and the Republicans in 1972. Presidents Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointed him to various commissions and committees. He was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and from 1994 to 2010, hosted the show Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg on PBS. Andrew Walworth writes about the uniqueness of Wattenberg’s contribution to television:
For all of his intellectual accomplishments, he also understood the power and importance of television and he was a near constant presence in the green rooms and studios of Washington DC. In a one-industry town where almost everyone thinks they should have their own TV show, Ben was one of the few who actually deserved one.
For 15 years, until he retired from television in 2010, I was Ben’s producer. He called himself the “immoderator” of our little show – a PBS series called “Think Tank.” Ben came up with the idea of hosting a program that featured scholars and authors exclusively, with each half-hour focused on a single important topic. “No journalists, no politicians, no kidding,” became the watchword for the series.
Ben believed that data, social science and statistics revealed essential truths about society. And – most importantly for television- he was able to tease the data into stories that people could understand.
What made Ben interesting – and always “good TV” – was that his fascination and facility with data was paired with a passionate advocacy for those issues in which he believed. He was pro-immigrant, pro-private enterprise, and pro-democracy. He was unwaveringly pro-American. [Real Clear Politics, July 1]
Offensive speech is good for society. Offensive speech, as Tom Bell explains, actually helps makes society smarter, which is why government should not suppress it:
Boeing’s bank closes and its damage is still being calculated. The Export-Import Bank, an 81-year-old government agency that subsidizes the financing of foreign purchases from U.S. companies, is out business—at least temporarily. The Bank’s authorization expired at midnight on Tuesday. Doug Bandow explains why we should hope the expiration is permanent:
ExIm exists to borrow at government rates to provide credit at less than market rates for select exporters, mostly corporate behemoths. The bank claims to be friendly to small business, but cherchez the money: it goes to Big Business.
According to Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center, the bank subsidized $66.7 billion in sales by Boeing between 2007 and 2013. In 2013, the top ten ExIm beneficiaries accounted for two-thirds of the bank’s total activities.
The bank charges fees and interest and claims to make a “profit”—more than $1.6 billion since 2008. But economists Jason Delisle and Christopher Papagianis explained that the bank’s “profits are almost surely an accounting illusion.” Most important, there is no calculation for market risk. CBO figures real losses over the coming decade are likely to exceed $2 billion.
Taxpayers also could get hit with a big default bill. Total outstanding credit is $110 billion, yet the agency’s own inspector general warned that bank practices create the risk of “severe portfolio losses.”
The agency is supposed to create jobs by throwing cheap money at purchasers of American products. However, the bank backs only about two percent of U.S. exports. There is plenty of private money available for such deals.
No one knows which contracts are sealed only with ExIm funding. Often, customers would have bought anyway; everyone in the process has an incentive to claim that ExIm assistance was vital. [Cato Institute, July 1]
Sir Nicholas Winton, R.I.P. Sir Nicholas Winton, the man who got 650 Jewish children safely out of German-occupied Czechoslovakia in the months leading up to World War II, died on Wednesday at the age of 106. In 1939, Winton arranged for the children to be taken from Prague by train and resettled with host families in Britain. Had the children remained in Czechoslovakia, they would almost certainly have been sent to the Nazi death camps, where an estimated 155,000 out of Czechoslovakia’s pre-war population of 180,000 Jews were killed between 1941 and 1945. The New York Times carries some details of Winton’s exploits:
It involved dangers, bribes, forgery, secret contacts with the Gestapo, nine railroad trains, an avalanche of paperwork and a lot of money. Nazi agents started following him. In his Prague hotel room, he met terrified parents desperate to get their children to safety, although it meant surrendering them to strangers in a foreign land.
As their numbers grew, a storefront office was opened. Long lines attracted Gestapo attention. Perilous confrontations were resolved with bribes. Eventually he registered more than 900 children, although he had names and details on 5,000. In early 1939, he left two friends, Trevor Chadwick and Bill Barazetti, in charge in Prague and returned to London to find foster homes, raise money and arrange transportation.
He and a few volunteers, including his mother, calling themselves the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, Children’s Section, enlisted aid from the Refugee Children’s Movement, had photos of the children printed and appealed for funds and foster homes in newspaper ads and church and synagogue bulletins.
Hundreds of families volunteered to take children, and money trickled in from donors — not enough to cover all the costs, but Mr. Winton made up the difference himself. He also appealed to the Home Office for entry visas, but the response was slow and time was short. “This was a few months before the war broke out,” he recalled. “So we forged the Home Office entry permits.”
In Prague, Mr. Chadwick quietly cultivated the chief of the Gestapo, Karl Bömelburg — they called him “the criminal rat” after his inspector’s rank of kriminalrat — and arranged for forged transit papers and bribes to be passed to key Nazis and Czech railway officials, who threatened to halt trains or seize the children unless they were paid off. The Gestapo chief proved instrumental, clearing the trains and transit papers, Mr. Chadwick said. [New York Times, July 1]
What makes us free? On the Fourth of July, we celebrate our freedom. And we celebrate the constitutional set-up that ensures that freedom. And, in case we forget, Ed Feulner reminds us there’s something else needed for freedom, too:
As John Adams stated: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In the United States, government requires not merely the consent of the governed. It rests ultimately on the ability of the people to govern themselves. Thus, the first role—the first duty—of the people is to ensure that they remain virtuous and free.
That is why the American system is based on the rights of the individual, but not on individualism. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “it is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor,” he captured a vital truth of American freedom. The Founders placed great hopes in the Constitution, but they knew that no paper constraints could preserve liberty. That duty rested ultimately with the American people.
The role of the Constitution was to restrain and to check, and—as Washington wrote—to “raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” The words of the Declaration, the lives of the Founders, and the design of the Constitution can inspire, but on their own they cannot preserve the American republic.
Only the American people, steeped in the principles that inspired the Founders and animated the Declaration, can do that. Almost 240 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, it’s worth asking: Are we up to the task? [Washington Times, June 29]
To Do: Say Happy Birthday, America!
• Celebrate America’s birthday on July 4!
• Meet your friends at the Leadership Institute’s 44th National Fourth of July Conservative Soiree, featuring barbecue, bluegrass, balloon artistry, and moonbouncing. And a few speakers. 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Bull Run Regional Park in Centreville, Va. [Leadership Institute]
• If you are tired of the Left’s America bashing, then help the Eagle Forum tell the story of American exceptionalism. The Eagle Forum’s America Proud project includes a contest that you can win by making a video, writing an essay, or taking just the right photo. You can also tweet your American pride with the hashtag #americaproud. Check out @_americaproud, and AmericaProud.us for more information. [Eagle Forum]
• Figure out what Congress should do now about ObamaCare following the Supreme Court’s decision that “established by the State” also means “established by the federal government.” The Cato Institute will host a briefing featuring Michael Cannon, Ilya Shapiro, and Christie Herrera. Noon on July 9 at 2168 Rayburn House Office Building. [Cato Institute]
• Learn how North Carolina can become a richer state. The John Locke Foundation will host Jonathan Williams talking about the findings in his book Rich States, Poor States. Noon on July 6 at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. [John Locke Foundation]
• Explore the libertarian mind. The Show-Me Institute will host a talk by David Boaz. 6 p.m. on July 7 at the Kansas City Public Library in Kansas City, Mo. [Show-Me Institute]
• Examine the important decisions of the Supreme Court’s just ended term. The Heritage Foundation will host a panel of scholars analyzing the decisions and then a panel of scribes who do the same. 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on July 9. [The Heritage Foundation]
• Go to the largest gathering of free minds and free markets. FreedomFest will feature the dream debate of the century between Steve Moore and Paul Krugman, a trial of the Fed, plus Peter Thiel, Sen. Mike Lee, Sen. Marco Rubio, Glenn Bleck, Lee Edwards, John Stossel, and the founder of Lavabit. July 8 to 11 at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas. [FreedomFest]
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