November/December 2006 Vol. XXVIII No. 6 Warof … and support the ... nomic change in India and Asia. The Advisory Board for the Center for ... maintains an active Arabic-language

MEDICARE MEETSMEPHISTOPHELESDid the devil design a health-care plan?PAGE 16

ANDREWSULLIVAN

“For chapter and verse on the administration’s betray-al of fiscal conservatism, look no further.” That’s how The Economist described Buck Wild by Stephen

Slivinski in its October 21 issue. Slivinski offers all the dataand a very readable narrative of “how Republicans broke thebank and became the party of big government.”

November/December 2006 Vol. XXVIII No. 6

MORE ON PAGE 16

DAVIDBROOKS

ewspapers and opinion jour-nals are littered these days withapocalyptic predictions of animpending—or even ongo-ing—world war. Former secre-

tary of state Henry Kissinger called onEurope to unite with the United Statesto “deal with the common danger of awider war [in Iraq] merging into a warof civilizations.” Former speaker of thehouse Newt Gingrich warns that WorldWar III has already begun. NormanPodhoretz, publisher of Commentarymagazine, has penned three differentessays on how to fight and win WorldWar IV (the Cold War, in his view, hav-ing been World War III).

The jumping-off point for such dis-cussions is the undisputed world wars,World Wars I and II, which killed per-haps as many as 100 million people.The Cold War claimed far fewer livesbut lasted nearly five times longer thanthe first two world wars combined.

CHRISTOPHER PREBLE is the director of foreign policystudies at the Cato Institute.

Warof theWorlds?BY CHRISTOPHER PREBLE

CONT’D ON PAGE 10

N

Two leading writers square off on faith, freedom, and

conservatismPAGE 13

2 • Cato Policy Report November/December 2006

“Why does America’s prosperity and self-confidence seem tobear so little relationship to the competence of its govern-ment? The obvious answer is that America, founded on alibertarian theory of minimal government, has always hadlow expectations of politicians.”—Times (London), February 2, 2006

rue enough, and thanks to our British cousinsfor recognizing it. On the other hand, lowexpectations are one thing, but this? How lowcan you go? Lord Acton famously warned thatpower tends to corrupt. Indeed, when theDemocrats were in power in Congress for

some 40 years, they grew pretty corrupt (remember theHouse banking scandal?). It took the more efficientRepublicans only a dozen years in power to catch up.The reality is, of course, that the endemic corruption inCongress and more generally inside the Beltway over thepast two years is bipartisan:

■ Duke Cunningham (R-CA) is in the slammer for tak-ing $2.5 million in bribes.■ Frank Ballance (D-NC) is in the slammer for moneylaundering and mail fraud.■ Bob Ney (R-OH) pleaded guilty to conspiracy in con-nection with the Jack Abramoff scandal and will be sen-tenced in January.■ William Jefferson (D-LA) was found by the FBI tohave $900,000 in cash in his freezer.■ Curt Weldon (R-PA) is under FBI investigation forhelping a Russian company with business dealings withhis daughter.■ Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is under investigation for self-dealing with a nonprofit that rented a house he owned.■ Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is under investigation for profitingfrom earmarks he sponsored.■ Tom DeLay (R-TX) has been indicted for moneylaundering.■ Alan Mollohan (D-WV) had to step down as rankingmember of the House Ethics Committee after revela-tions of earmarks designed to enhance the value of hisproperty and failure to disclosure assets.■ Rick Renzi (R-AZ), Harry Reid (D-NV), and DennisHastert (R-IL) are under criticism for using their con-gressional positions to benefit land deals in which theywere involved.

With the exception of Reps. Ballance and Renzi, everyone of those solons had been in office at least a dozenyears. Yet another reason to bring back term limits. You’llrecall that in 1995 the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote,chose to ignore the Tenth Amendment (nothing in theConstitution precludes states from limiting the terms oftheir congressional delegations) by striking down termlimit laws that had been passed in some 23 states.

The two most likely Supremes to step down overthe next two years are Justices Stevens and Ginsburg,both of whom voted against term limits. When thathappens, U.S. Term Limits (on whose board I servealong with Cato Board member Howard Rich) willlook into the possibility of getting a somewhat differ-ent kind of term limit initiative passed with the hopeof bringing term limits back before the Supreme Court.The previous ruling, U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, wasa close decision, and since 80 percent of Americanssupport the idea, it would not be out of the questionthat the Court would revisit the issue.

It has always been my theory that the reason we getso many bad apples in Congress is that the vast majoritywant to be career politicians, which brings to town an inordinate number of power seekers. One of theoverlooked benefits of term limits is that they will attract citizen-legislators—people who would rather live in theprivate sector. That is what we should strive for, particu-larly in the House of Representatives. I’d prefer a lotteryto the system we have now. It’s a system that has createda Congress that a mere 16 percent of Americans approveof, according to the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll.

One more point and I’ll stop beating up on thecongresscritters. Ultimately more important than thecorruption of ethics and larceny is the corruption ofprinciple. Congress today ignores the Constitution,which should the basis for our rule of law. As ChrisDeMuth, head of the American Enterprise Institute,eloquently put it: “Modern political practices have leftthe Constitution in the dust in ways that no one isdebating, and few have even noticed. Slowly andinsensibly, James Madison’s parchment barriers havebeen worn down.” Term limits may be our last, bestchance to restore those barriers.

Since this will be the last Cato Policy Report you willreceive before the end of the year, I want to remind youthat the people holding this newsletter in their handsprovide about 80 percent of Cato’s annual budget. Ihope you’ll choose to be as generous as you can afford.There are few groups as committed to defendingAmerica’s heritage of liberty as Cato. Recently, a groupof wealthy “progressives” announced they had raisedmore than $50 million to support leftist think tanks. Weare in a battle of ideas that will take serious resources towin. Don’t ask why, but Congress in its wisdom willallow people over 70 years of age to give up to $100,000from their IRAs this year and in 2007 to a 501(c)3organization tax-free (think Cato!).

T

President’s Message

America Deserves Better Politicians

BY EDWARD H. CRANE

“

”

One of theoverlooked benefits of

term limits is that they willattract citizen-legislators—people whowould rather

live in the private

sector.

12

November/December 2006 Cato Policy Report • 3

The Cato Institute launched its Centerfor Global Liberty and Prosperity inOctober. The mission of the center isto promote policies that protect

human rights, extend the range of personalchoice, and support the central role of eco-nomic freedom in ending world poverty.

Building on Cato’s extensive work oninternational development issues, the centerwill expand the Institute’s role in promotinga better understanding aroundthe world of the benefits ofmarket-liberal policy solutionsto the problems faced by devel-oping nations.

As part of this expandedmission, Andrei Illarionov, for-mer chief economic adviser toRussian president VladimirPutin, has joined the center as asenior fellow. Illarionov was aKremlin adviser from 2000 toDecember 2005, when heresigned in protest of govern-ment policies. He served as amember of Russia’s first eco-nomic reform team in the early1990s and is an expert on theeconomics of postcommunisttransition. Illarionov is one ofRussia’s most forceful and artic-ulate advocates of an open soci-ety and democratic capitalism.

“We are delighted that sucha champion of liberty as Andrei Illarionovhas joined our new Center for GlobalLiberty and Prosperity,” says Ed Crane,president of the Cato Institute. “For yearsAndrei has spoken truth to power insidethe Kremlin. He is one of the most coura-geous men I have had the privilege ofknowing.”

The director of the center is Ian Vásquez,formerly director of Cato’s Project on GlobalEconomic Liberty, which the centerreplaces. Also joining the team is Indianeconomist Swaminathan Aiyar, who willserve as a research fellow. Aiyar, a regularcolumnist of the Times of India and one ofIndia’s leading market-liberal advocates, willfocus his work at the Cato Institute on eco-

nomic change in India and Asia. The Advisory Board for the Center for

Global Liberty and Prosperity is made up ofa small group of distinguished individuals:Gurcharan Das, former CEO of Procter &Gamble, India; José Piñera, former ministerof labor and social security, Chile; DeepakLal, professor of international develop-ment studies, UCLA; Fred Hu, chief econo-mist, Goldman Sachs, Asia; Pedro-Pablo

Kuczynski, former prime min-ister of Peru; Arnold Harberger,professor of economics, UCLA;and Anne Applebaum, colum-nist, the Washington Post.

In recent years, Cato hasheld major conferences inChina, Russia, and Mexico;published important studies onforeign aid, Africa, malaria, andprivate education for the poor;and published books on global-ization, the water crisis in poorcountries, and economic reform;and copublished the EconomicFreedom of the World reportproduced annually in conjunc-tion with the Fraser Institute in Canada.

The center will expandCato's work on Central andEastern Europe, Asia, Africa,and Latin America. Futurework of the center will include

a book that examines improvements inhuman well-being in most of the world and studies that look at reform priorities for Africa, the state of liberalism in Russiaand Central Europe, corruption, and suc-cessful economic policies in Latin Americaand India.

Under the direction of senior fellow TomG. Palmer, Cato will continue its work inEurasia through its Russian-language web-site (http://www.cato.ru), and held onOctober 25–27 in Tbilisi, Georgia, a majorconference on “Freedom, Commerce, andPeace” in the region. The Institute alsomaintains an active Arabic-language pro-gram (http://www.misbahalhurriyya.org)and recently held a conference in Cairo.

N E W S N O T E S

Cato policy analystRADLEY BALKO mayhave helped free aman from death row.Balko found the caseof Cory Maye whileresearching the Catopaper “Overkill: TheRise of Paramilitary

Police Raids in America.” Maye was sen-tenced to death for killing a police officer inJefferson Davis County, Mississippi, when araiding police team broke into his home lateat night in 2001. He had no criminal record,and only a misdemeanor amount of marijuanain his home. He maintains he thought thepolice were intruders, and the facts of thecase seem to support his side of the story.After Balko began writing about the paper on his personal blog, TheAgitator.com, the D.C. law firm Covington and Burling picked up the case, hiring its own investigators, med-ical examiners, and experts. In September, a circuit court judge in Mississippi orderedMaye off death row, pending a new hearing onhis death sentence. The judge will rule onother motions in the coming weeks. He coulddo nothing, resentence Maye, order a newtrial, or order Maye be freed from prison.Balko’s crucial work on the case has beenwidely recognized in the online media, fromInstapundit and Reason.com to CBS News’sPublic Eye site.

GLEN WHITMAN’S study “Against the NewPaternalism: Internalities and the Economicsof Self-Control” (Policy Analysis no. 563) iscited in the “Recommendations for FurtherReading” column in the Summer 2006 issueof the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Thecolumn is widely read by economists; Nobellaureate Paul Samuelson told its original edi-tor, “When the JEP arrives, I turn first to your further-reading column.” The columnhas recommended other Cato publications,including three articles in the Summer 2003issue of Regulation on smoking and internali-ties, the Cato Unbound discussion kicked offby Nobel laureate James Buchanan, and “Ripefor Reform: Six Good Reasons to Reduce U.S.Farm Subsidies and Trade Barriers” (TradePolicy Analysis no. 30).

Cato Institute Launches Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity

Former Putin economic adviser Andrei Illarionov joins Cato

Andrei Illarionov

Swaminathan Aiyar


C A T O E V E N T S

Court Review Released at Constitution Day ConferenceScholars debate executive power, defend First Amendment

With the end of the Rehnquist Courtand the addition of new justicesJohn Roberts and Samuel Alito, the

October 2005 Supreme Court term wasone of the most anticipated. Many peoplehoped that the new justices would push theSupreme Court in a direction moreamenable to federalism and the originalmeaning of the Constitution, but the resultsseem to be mixed. At the Cato Institute’sFifth Annual Constitution Day Conferenceheld on September 14, some of the nation’stop legal scholars discussed how, although inmany instances recent Supreme Court rul-ings have yielded positive results for liberty,often the reasoning behind those cases doesnot indicate an affinity for the Constitutionas originally conceived. The event was heldin conjunction with the release of the2005–2006 Cato Supreme Court Review.

The Roberts Court took up questions oflimited government, perhaps most funda-mentally in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,which addressed the executive’s powers totry detainees in military commissions. Atthe conference, Martin Flaherty ofFordham University debated John Yoo ofthe University of California at BerkeleySchool of Law on the proper boundaries ofexecutive wartime power. In the pages of the Supreme Court Review, Flaherty praisesHamdan as a victory for the separation ofpowers and the rule of law. Yoo, with a

sharply different view, writes that Hamdanignores the legal tradition of judicial defer-ence to executive decisions in times of war.

In 2005 Gonzales v. Raich became noto-rious for the dramatically expansive readingof the Commerce Clause by the majorityopinion. Two cases in the past term—Gonzales v. Oregon and Rapanos v. UnitedStates—suggested a new direction by limit-ing federal power in the areas of assisted sui-cide and wetlands regulation, respectively.But Ilya Somin of the George MasonUniversity School of Law cautions federal-ists to not be overly optimistic, writing that in those cases “the Court’s reasoning servedto reaffirm more than constrain the virtual-ly limitless nature of congressional power.”

Allison Hayward of George MasonUniversity Law School echoes Somin in hertake on two cases that overturned campaignfinance regulations, Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC and Randall v. Sorrell. Despite recognizing that campaignfinance regulations canthreaten free speech, Hay-ward explains, both casesaccept the framework set byBuckley v. Valeo, the 1976case that upheld the consti-tutionality of federal limitson campaign contributions.Also on the subject of freespeech, Dale Carpenter of

the University of Minnesota Law Schoolexplains why the Court’s unanimous deci-sion in Rumsfeld v. FAIR is “unanimouslywrong.” The decision found that Congresscan constitutionally withhold funding fromuniversities that refuse to cooperate withmilitary recruiters, an act that Carpenterargues violates the First Amendment.

Danny J. Boggs, chief judge of the U.S.Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit,delivered the annual Kenneth B. Simon lec-ture, titled “Challenges to the Rule of Law:Or, Quod Licet Jovi, Non Licet Bovi?” TheLatin phrase translates as “what is permittedto Jupiter is not permitted to a cow.” Boggsexplained that this phrase illustrates a criticalelement of the rule of law: that the law mustnot arbitrarily treat some as Jupiter—that is,as kings endowed with special privileges—and others as cows with lesser legal rights.

The Cato Supreme Court Review canbe purchased for $15.00 in paperbackat catostore.org.

RANDY BARNETT JOHN YOO

DANNY J. BOGGS


Donald G. Smith and Fred M. YoungJr. are the two newest members of the Cato Institute’s Board ofDirectors. Smith runs an investment

firm in New York. He holds a law degreefrom UCLA and an MBA from Harvardand sits on the boards of the Foundation forEconomic Education and the Central ParkConservancy. He and his wife Paula have

been supporters of the Cato Institute formore than a decade and have attendedmany Benefactor Summits and Cato Club200 retreats. The Donald & Paula SmithFamily Foundation cosponsors Cato’s twice-yearly seminars in New York and runs aseries of debate programs. Young, who holdstwo engineering degrees and an MBA fromCornell, was president of Young Radiator

Company, which he sold in 1998. He andhis wife Sandra, a novelist, have attendedmany Cato events, and their son Ryanworks in Cato’s Government Affairs depart-ment. They have provided crucial supportfor such projects as the Center forRepresentative Government and the Projecton Middle East Liberty. Fred Young is also amember of the Reason Foundation’s board.

Board Members and Donors Gather for Cato Club 200 Retreat

Scenes from the Cato Club 200 retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, September 28–October 1:Marlene Mieske and Rebecca Dunn, speaker Zainab al-Suwaij with Ed Crane, Bill Dunn and Lana Hardy with PatMichaels, Charles and Catherine Murray.

José Piñera with Paula Smith and Donald Smith. Fred Young

K. TUCKER ANDERSEN

Senior Consultant, Cumberland Associates LLC

FRANK BOND

Chairman, The Foundation Group

EDWARD H. CRANE

President, Cato Institute

RICHARD J. DENNIS

President, Dennis Trading Group

ETHELMAE C. HUMPHREYS

Chairman, Tamko Roofing Products, Inc.

DAVID H. KOCH

Executive Vice President, Koch Industries, Inc.

JOHN C. MALONE

Chairman, Liberty Media Corporation

WILLIAM A. NISKANEN

Chairman, Cato Institute

DAVID H. PADDEN

President, Padden & Company

LEWIS E. RANDALL

Board Member, E*Trade Financial

HOWARD S. RICH

President, U.S. Term Limits

FREDERICK W. SMITH

Chairman & CEO, FedEx Corporation

DONALD G. SMITH

President, Donald Smith & Co.

JEFFREY S. YASS

Managing Director, Susquehanna International Group, LLP

FRED YOUNG

Former Owner, Young Radiator Company

BOARD OF DIRECTORSOF THE CATO INSTITUTE


Slivinski, Sager, and Sullivan on the Plight of the GOP9/11 panel examines the state of the war on terrorism

C A T O E V E N T S

AUGUST 1: In a speech to a standing-room-only audience at the Cato Institute,Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierreztackled one of the most important domesticissues confronting the United States—

immigration reform—and one of the mostimportant foreign policy issues—U.S. rela-tions with Cuba. At a Cato Policy Forum,“Comprehensive Immigration Reform fora Growing Economy,” Gutierrez pointedout that there are proportionately fewer for-eign-born persons living in the UnitedStates today than in 1890, despite the factthat immigration is a net gain for the U.S.economy. And in the first official U.S. gov-ernment response to Fidel Castro’s transferof power, Gutierrez promised that the U.S.government would assist Cuba to movetoward political and economic liberty oncea free transitional government is in placethere.

AUGUST 8--31: This summer Cato took its philosophy of small government andindividual liberty to the cradle of unfetteredgovernment with Cato University atCapitol Hill. Congressional staffers partici-pated in a series of lectures and discussiongroups conducted by Cato scholars andother libertarian thinkers. Seminars includ-ed “Simple Rules for a Great Society” withDavid Boaz, “A Positive Vision for

Promoting Liberty Abroad” withChristopher Preble, and “Liberty in D.C.:Remaining True to Your Beliefs WhileWorking on the Hill” with Brian Wild, for-mer aide to Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and

vice president of the Nickles Group.

AUGUST 15: At a Cato Book Forum, BuckWild: How Republicans Broke the Bankand Became the Party of Big Government,author Stephen Slivinski described how theRepublicans have betrayed the fans of limit-ed government with whom they claim to beallied. Syndicated columnist Robert Novaksaid that the GOP’s support for big govern-ment has historical precedent withRepublicans such as Teddy Roosevelt,Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon.He also pointed out that, as bad as theRepublicans are for limited government, theDemocrats would probably be even worse ifthey came to power.

AUGUST 22: The norm is for government toperpetually increase, so it was an eventworth remembering when Congress actual-ly cut back an entitlement in 1996 with wel-fare reform. At a Cato Policy Forum,“Welfare Reform Turns 10: A Look Back,A Look Ahead,” which was broadcast fourtimes on C-SPAN, Charles Murray of theAmerican Enterprise Institute and Robert

Rector of the Heritage Foundation agreedthat welfare reform, and not merely a robusteconomy, has led to a decline in welfare rollsand a boost to personal responsibility.Rector said that the goal for future reformshould be to link welfare to incentives thatwill discourage self-destructive behavior onthe part of recipients. Murray argued thatgovernment should merely provide a guar-anteed minimum income and otherwise getout of the way and allow voluntary organi-zations to help the members of the under-class craft meaningful lives.

AUGUST 29: In the past 30 years, the share ofAmericans’ incomes spent on health carehas doubled. At a Cato Book Forum, Crisisof Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay forHealth Care, author Arnold Kling, an econ-omist and Cato adjunct scholar, argued thatAmericans spend so much on health carebecause they don’t have to worry about thecosts. Eighty percent of personal health carespending, Kling explained, comes fromthird parties. He said that the United Statesshould change policies so more middle- andhigh-income consumers pay their medicalexpenses out of pocket. Jason Furman ofNew York University and Washington Postcolumnist Sebastian Mallaby commented.

AUGUST 31: In early 2007 Congress willrewrite the farm bill that last year doled out$20 billion in farm subsidies. At a CatoPolicy Forum, “Prospects for Reform ofU.S. Agricultural Policy—With or withoutDoha,” Secretary of Agriculture MikeJohanns laid out some of the administra-tion’s goals for the bill. He hoped that the

Dan Griswold explains the economics of internation-al trade at Cato University at Capitol Hill in August.

At a Book Forum for Buck Wild, Robert Novak traces the history of big-government Republicans.


United States can craft a more “pro-trade”agricultural policy by making large cuts inthe subsidies that most distort foreign trade.Cal Dooley, president of the Food ProductsAssociation, argued that farm subsidies do not really help farmers, because they cre-ate dependence and make farmers less effi-cient, and suggested that the United Statesunilaterally relinquish its subsidies. RobertL. Thompson of the University of Illinoissaid that the justifications for farm supportare obsolete.

SEPTEMBER 6: Could libertarians be thenext voter swing group? At a Cato BookForum, The Elephant in the Room: Evan-gelicals, Libertarians and the Battle toControl the Republican Party, former Catointern and New York Post columnist RyanSager explained how the GOP is ignoringthe small-government voter at its own peril.The conservative movement behind theRepublican Party’s electoral successes sincethe Goldwater era, he said, was formed byan alliance between social conservatives, rep-resented by the evangelical South, and liber-tarians, represented by the “don’t tread onme” West. Michael Barone of U.S. News &World Report commented.

SEPTEMBER 7: Since the French and Dutchpeoples rejected the European Union con-stitution, the question seems to be not “doesthe European Union need reform?” but“how much reform does it need?” At a Cato

Book Forum, Design for a New Europe,John Gillingham of the University ofMissouri at St. Louis argued that the top-down, centralized approach to EU manage-ment has failed. John Bruton, the EUambassador to the United States and primeminister of Ireland from 1994 to 1997,defended the EU as the world’s only multi-national democracy; he said that its powerto make policy should be expanded.

SEPTEMBER 11: After the 9/11 terroristattacks, many Americans asked, “Why dothey hate us?” At “The War on TerrorismFive Years after 9/11,” a Cato Policy Forum,Robert Pape of the University of Chicagopresented his answer, drawn from researchhe conducted on every act of suicide terror-ism since 1980. Pape argued that, contraryto assumptions behind current U.S. foreignpolicy strategy, Islamism is not the primarymotivation for suicide terrorism. Rather, hesaid, the timing of attacks and the words ofthe terrorist themselves show that suicideterrorism is a strategic tool used against for-eign occupation. Under Pape’s strategy of“offshore balancing,” the United Stateswould minimize its deployment of troopsabroad because they tend to produce terror-ism instead of protecting us from it. A panelof foreign policy experts then commentedon the state of the U.S. campaign against al-Qaeda, including former Bush nationalsecurity aide Flynt Leverett; Dana Priest,reporter for the Washington Post; Andrew

Kohut of the Pew Research Center; andRand Beers of the National SecurityNetwork.

SEPTEMBER 12: If our government tellspolice to fight a “war” on drugs, we shouldnot be surprised when our police officersstart behaving like a military, says RadleyBalko, policy analyst at Cato. At a CatoPolicy Forum, “Overkill: The Rise ofParamilitary Police Raids in America,”Balko described an “epidemic of isolatedincidents” in which SWAT teams break intohomes in the middle of the night on drugraids, often resulting in unnecessary harm tononviolent drug offenders, innocent victimsof mistaken identity, and police officersthemselves. Norm Stamper, former Seattlechief of police, said that, in his experience,use of SWAT for drug enforcement purpos-es is indeed harmful to both the public atlarge and police officers themselves.

SEPTEMBER 14: Cato hosted its 5th AnnualConstitution Day Conference, titled “TheSupreme Court: Past and Prologue—ALook at the October 2005 and October2006 Terms.” Martin Flaherty of FordhamUniversity and John Yoo of the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley squared off in a spirit-ed debate over the limits of executive powerin the war on terror. Erik Jaffe previewedmany of the cases that will be considered in the next Supreme Court term. Randy

Barnett, professor at the GeorgetownUniversity Law Center and a Cato senior fellow, discussed two upcoming cases con-cerning the federal government’s power toregulate partial-birth abortion. He said thatthose cases will almost certainly continue the Court’s recent tendency to grant thegovernment expansive powers under theCommerce Clause.

Cato vice president James A. Dorn met with Shinzo Abe, then chief of Prime Minister Koizumi's cabinetand now prime minister himself, during a visit to Toyko in October 2005 to speak at a conference on"Japan-U.S.-China Relations" organized by the Keizai Koho Center.

Roger Pilon, Timothy Sandefur, and JohnEcheverria at a September 19 Book Forum forSandefur’s book on property rights after Kelo.


C A T O E V E N T S

SEPTEMBER 19: Are the rights enjoyed bypersons granted to them by government, ordo persons have preexisting rights that gov-ernments are meant to protect? At a CatoBook Forum, Cornerstone of Liberty:Property Rights in 21st-Century America,Timothy Sandefur, attorney at the PacificLegal Foundation, said that this question is atthe heart of the debate over private propertyrights inflamed by the 2005 Supreme Courtdecision in Kelo v. New London. Sandefurexplained that, as a result of Progressive legalphilosophy, the judiciary has looked the otherway in cases of eminent domain abuse andregulatory takings that violate the originalunderstanding of economic liberties in theConstitution. John Echeverria of theGeorgetown University Law Center arguedthat compensation for regulatory takingswould amount to an unfair windfall forproperty owners at the expense of taxpayers.

SEPTEMBER 20: At a Cato Book Forum, InDefense of Negativity: Attack Ads inPresidential Campaigns, John G. Geer, pro-fessor of political science at VanderbiltUniversity, argued that negative ads areunfairly maligned. Before someone can castan informed vote, Geer explained, he or shemust be aware of the problems with the candidates and their policies, and negativeads provide that criticism. Negative ads areless superficial, more specific, more issueoriented, and better documented than pos-itive ads. Jeremy Mayer of George Mason University commented.

SEPTEMBER 21: David Hyman, professor oflaw and medicine at the University ofIllinois, believes that when it comes to thedeep-seated problems with Medicare, hewould rather laugh than cry. With that per-spective in mind, at a Cato Book Forum,Medicare Meets Mephistopheles, Hymanphrased his criticisms in terms of the sevendeadly sins, each of which, he argued,reveals a different flaw in the program.Robin Wilson of Washington and LeeUniversity elaborated on the rampant fraudwithin Medicare. Ted Marmor of YaleUniversity argued that the relative stabilityof health care entitlement programs inEurope shows that Medicare can survivewithout significant problems as long as the

right reforms are made.

SEPTEMBER 21: Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)drew on his experience growing up in agri-culture at a Cato Capitol Hill Briefing,“Changing Course: Why Congress ShouldConsider a New Direction for U.S.Agriculture Policy.” He criticized farm sub-sidies as disproportionately favoring the fewat the expense of the many and acting ashurdles to future free-trade agreements.Sallie James, trade policy analyst at Cato,said that being against farm subsidies doesnot mean that one is anti-farmer; rather,ending farm subsidies would be beneficial tomost farmers, as well as consumers.

SEPTEMBER 21: What explains the wealth ofnations, and what hinders it? Two reportshave each gathered a massive amount of evidence to point to answers to those ques-tions. At a Cato Book Forum, “HowNations Prosper: Economic Freedom andDoing Business in 2007,” James Gwartneyof Florida State University presented thefindings of the report of which he was acoauthor, the Economic Freedom of theWorld: 2006 Annual Report. The data heand the other authors of the report havegathered, he explained, underscore the dra-matic increases in economic freedomaround the world since 1980 thanks tolower marginal tax rates, greater monetarystability, and more openness to trade.Simeon Djankov, lead author of the re-port Doing Business 2007: How to Reform,

At a September 11 Policy Forum, director of foreign policy studies Christopher Preble introduces DanaPriest of the Washington Post, pollster Andrew Kohut, former national security aides Flynt Leverett andRand Beers, and University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape.

Distinguished senior fellow José Piñera and his translator attend a rally of 100,000 Montenegrins for inde-pendence from Serbia in the great square of Podgorica. Piñera met with the prime minister and told himhow free-market reforms could make Montenegro “the Chile of the Adriatic.”


published by the World Bank, discussed thestate of regulations around the world thatinterfere with the practice of business.

SEPTEMBER 22: While more than a fewincumbents appear to be unsafe in the 2006 midterm, the overwhelming trend in recent years has been toward very uncom-petitive congressional races. At a Capitol HillBriefing and in a new book, The Market-place for Democracy: Electoral Competitionand American Politics, coeditor MichaelMcDonald of George Mason University andthe Brookings Institution surveyed the vari-ous factors that affect competitiveness inelections, including redistricting, term limits,and campaign finance. John Samples, direc-tor of the Center for RepresentativeGovernment at Cato and coeditor of the book, argued that one of the largest cul-prits in the lack of electoral competition iscampaign finance reform. Limits on cam-paign contributions are more burdensomefor challengers.

SEPTEMBER 25: Parents wants excellentteachers for their kids, but many teachers inU.S. elementary and secondary schools arefar from excellent. At a Cato Policy Forum,“Giving Kids the Chaff: How to Find andKeep the Teachers We Need,” MarieGryphon, a Cato adjunct scholar, arguedthat the political forces that run schools pro-tect bad teachers and drive out many goodteachers. Arthur Wise, president of theNational Council for Accreditation ofTeacher Education, proposed that publicschools could fix some of their problems ifschool districts adopted modern businessmanagement techniques. Gryphon said,however, that any kind of internal reform isdifficult because of the entrenched bureauc-racies that run schools. The answer, shebelieves, is to replace those political forceswith the voices of parents through schoolchoice.

SEPTEMBER 25: One of the most stunningaspects of the post–Cold War era has beenthe extent to which many of the formerSoviet bloc countries have embraced liberalmarket reforms and achieved impressive eco-nomic growth. But reform has been slow orcompletely stalled in many of those coun-tries, leaving many of their citizens behind.

At a Cato Book Forum, Divergent Paths inPost-Communist Transformation: Capital-ism for All or Capitalism for the Few? OlafHavrylyshyn of the University of Torontoattempted to explain this disparity. Hedescribed how delayed reforms can empow-er oligarchic forces in ex-Soviet states, trap-ping them in vicious cycles that furtherenrich those with political connections andprevent the development of a free market.Janusz Reiter, the Polish ambassador to theUnited States, said that some of the blamefor lack of market reform can be placed onthe “gradualist” approach, which often actedas a pretext for avoiding reform.

SEPTEMBER 27: The U.S. Department ofEducation recently released the final reportof its Commission on the Future of HigherEducation. “Ivory Tower Overhaul: Howto Fix Higher Ed,” a Cato Policy Forum,presented a diverse array of perspectives onhow to address issues in higher educationsuch as rising tuition. Charles Miller, chair-man of the commission, said that the mostpressing concern should be the developmentof tools to measure exactly to what extentcolleges are succeeding in educating stu-dents. Anya Kamenetz, a journalist who hastalked to college students across the countryfor her book Generation Debt, said thatfinancial aid should shift to a grant-basedsystem rather than the current predominant-

ly loan-based one, because many potentialstudents are prevented from going to collegeby the prospect of massive debt. Finally, NealMcCluskey, education policy analyst atCato, argued that price inflation driven byfederal aid is fueling rising tuition costs.

FEDERAL RESERVE POLICY IN THE FACE OF CRISES24th ANNUAL MONETARYCONFERENCEWashington ● Cato Institute ● November 16, 2006Speakers include Randall Kroszner, Robert J. Barro,Anna Schwartz, Kristin Forbes, and Lawrence H. White.

19th ANNUAL BENEFACTOR SUMMITNaples, Florida ● LaPlaya Beach & Golf ResortFebruary 21–25, 2007Speakers include Ayaan Hirsi Ali and P. J. O’Rourke.

CATO CLUB 200RETREATLaguna Beach, CA ● Surf and Sand ResortSeptember 27–30, 2007

C A T O C A L E N D A R

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez meets the press after his August 1 speech on immigration policyand the sudden illness of Fidel Castro.


How likely is it that the war on terrorismwill be looked upon through the long lensof history as comparable to the world warsof the 20th century? Not very. The casual-ties caused by international terrorist inci-dents since September 11, 2001, and theprospects for future casualties, pale in com-parison with the death and destruction vis-ited upon the planet between August 1914and November 1918 and again betweenSeptember 1939 and August 1945. The vio-lence and bloodshed that can be unleashedby modern industrial states is an order ofmagnitude greater than that caused by non-state actors.

If there is a historical analogue for theradical Islamist terrorist threat of the early21st century, it is the anarchist movement ofthe late 19th century. Like the modern-dayterrorists, the anarchists spread chaos anddisorder by blowing up bombs in crowdedplaces and by inciting riots. Anarchists suc-ceeded in assassinating a number of worldleaders, including Czar Alexander II ofRussia, Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, and even U.S. President WilliamMcKinley, but they did not achieve any sortof victory.

When an assassin affiliated with a Pan-Slavic terrorist organization killed the heir to the throne of the Austro-HungarianEmpire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, inSarajevo in June 1914, that single event pre-cipitated the global conflict that resulted inmore than 30 million casualties. That pro-vides a useful lesson for the present day, butnot the one that Podhoretz and Gingrichwant you to learn: namely, that the overre-action to threats can have far-reaching, andoften horrific, effects.

After interviewing dozens of counterter-rorism experts over a period of severalmonths, the Atlantic Monthly’ s James Fallowscame to a similar conclusion. Al-Qaeda’s“hopes for fundamentally harming theUnited States,” he writes in the Septemberissue, “now rest less on what it can do itselfthan on what it can trick, tempt, or goad usinto doing.”

Modern technology can make radicalIslamists such as Osama bin Laden andAyman al-Zawahiri more dangerous than

the anarchists. Even though there are per-haps no more than a few thousand al-Qaedaoperatives, there is a small chance that theymay someday get their hands on a mass-casualty weapon. Gingrich argues, “In theage of nuclear and biological weapons, evena few hateful people can do more damagethan Adolf Hitler in the Second WorldWar.”

But Gingrich doesn’t speak to the likeli-hood that al-Qaeda or some other terroristorganization might get its hands on anuclear weapon (much less multipleweapons) and figure out how to detonatethe device in a heavily populated area, andhis apocalyptic warning that “the loss of twoor three American cities to nuclear weaponsis a real threat” strains credulity to the break-ing point. The scope of destruction from anact of nuclear terrorism would be greaterthan anything ever before witnessed on U.S.soil, and we must take steps to ensure thatnuclear material does not wind up in thehands of terrorists. Such efforts requirediplomacy and cooperation with othercountries and might include additionalmeasures to clamp down on nuclear prolif-eration and to enhance security of existingarsenals, but rarely military action. Al-Qaeda might aspire to possess nuclear mate-rial, or even a nuclear device, but suchdesigns can best be disrupted by targetedaction based on timely intelligence.

Lenin, Hitler, . . . bin Laden?

Is the world war thesis useful if we envi-sion Osama bin Laden as the secondcoming of Lenin or Hitler? How likely is

it that bin Laden could seize control of amodern nation-state, complete with anindustrial base and a functioning military,and then use that state as a base for wagingmass murder?

According to President Bush, that is avery real prospect. In his speech to the

nation on September 11, 2006, the presi-dent outlined the terrorists’ goals, articulat-ed as a series of stages by al-Qaeda’s number-two, Ayman al-Zawahiri: “The first stage:expel the Americans from Iraq. The secondstage: Establish an Islamic authority or emi-rate, then develop it and support it until itachieves the level of Caliphate.”

We know that al-Qaeda would like to dothat, but could they? Countless kooks andfanatics have aspired to global domination,but the vast majority of those individualsmerit barely a footnote in history books.

The president emphasizes the excep-tions, especially Lenin and Hitler. “Historyteaches that underestimating the words ofevil and ambitious men is a terrible mis-take.”

We must not underestimate bin Laden,but we also shouldn’t exaggerate his capabil-ities or his appeal. For example, despiteBush’s warning that al-Qaeda might takeover Iraq, that outcome is highly improba-ble. The vast majority of Iraqis do not sup-port al-Qaeda’s methods or objectives. Apoll taken in September by the Program onInternational Policy Attitudes found that 94percent of Iraqis had an unfavorable view ofal-Qaeda, with 82 percent expressing a verynegative view. Al-Qaeda’s standing in Iraqwill not improve after the U.S. militaryleaves. As an Iraqi insurgent leader, AbuQaqa al-Tamimi, told Time magazine,“One day, when the Americans have gone,we will need to fight another war, againstthese jihadis.”

And what of bin Laden’s appeal else-where? A poll taken in late 2005 in six pre-dominantly Muslim Arab countries(Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia,Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates) byShibley Telhami, an expert in Arab publicopinion, found that only 7 percent ofrespondents supported al-Qaeda’s methodsand only 6 percent supported al-Qaeda’sgoal of creating a Muslim state in theirhome country. And bin Laden’s supportwithin the wider Muslim world has actuallyslipped further in recent years. “They keepkilling Muslim civilians,” terrorism expertPeter Bergen told Fallows. “That is theirAchilles’ heel. Every time the bombs go off

Continued from page 1

“

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We must not underestimate bin Laden, but

we also shouldn’texaggerate his capabilities or

his appeal.


and kill civilians, it works in our favor.”When suicide bombers attacked three hotelsin Amman, Jordan, in November 2005,killing 60 people, opinion throughoutJordan turned decisively against al-Qaeda.

What of Muslim extremists more gener-ally? It might be true that bin Laden and al-Qaeda have no reasonable chance of gainingcontrol over a nation-state and of then usingthat territory as a staging ground for futureattacks on the West. And it is true that theirmethods engender hatred and resentment,often among their putative target audience.But might another charismatic leader, onenot prone to strategic miscalculation, suc-ceed where bin Laden is failing? That alsoseems unlikely. While many Muslimsbelieve that Islam should have a prominentrole in political life, solid majorities in predominantly Muslim countries—includ-ing Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, andPakistan—worry about Islamic extremism.A recent National Intelligence Estimatetitled “The Trends in Global Terrorism”explained, “The jihadists’ greatest vulnera-bility is that their ultimate political solu-tion—an ultraconservative interpretation ofshari’a-based governance spanning theMuslim world—is unpopular with the vastmajority of Muslims.”

A Clash of Civilizations?

Tragically, however, some Muslims areembracing radical political Islamism,and a few are resorting to violence to

beat back what they see as Westernencroachments on their politics and culture. The recent National Intelligence Estimateon global terrorism trends reported that“activists identifying themselves as jihadists,although a small percentage of Muslims, areincreasing in both number and geographicdispersion.” If the West and Islam becomefurther estranged, it could lead to a clash ofcivilizations on the order of the world wars.

Such a prospect is hardly inevitable,though. It is exceptionally difficult withinIslam to fashion a single unifying theologycapable of rallying a following that tran-scends ethnic divides and nationalistic pride.But some Western commentators reject thatpoint. They warn that Muslims are already

united, that Islam has traditionally beenspread by force, and that this tradition is aliveand well in the 21st century. For example,when President Bush explains that Islam is areligion of peace, and that a tiny minorityhave hijacked the religion to advance theirevil aims, Robert Spencer, founder of thewebsite Jihad Watch, dismisses such views asnaive. Spencer believes that the judgment ofWestern political leaders with respect toIslam has been clouded by a “fog of politicalcorrectness.”

According to Spencer, the author of sev-eral books, including The Politically IncorrectGuide to Islam (and the Crusades), “Islam isthe only religion in the world . . . that man-dates violence against unbelievers.” Thatmandate, Spencer explained in a televisioninterview, derives from a literalist interpreta-tion of the Koran that constitutes “marchingorders for all believers.”

Spencer is in effect endorsing the inter-pretation of the political Islamists, who con-demn tolerant and peaceful Muslims asuntrue to Islam. But that is precisely the dis-puted issue—whether Islam is compatiblewith liberalism, capable of coexisting withother religions, and accommodating of dis-sent. There are many voices and traditionsthat argue that it is. Islamic civilization hasknown both tolerance and oppression, ashave other civilizations, and the great strug-gle within Islam today is over which path totake.

The intellectual ferment within Islampresents both a challenge and an opportuni-ty for the West. On the one hand, non-Muslims have only a very limited capacity toshape the debate in a positive direction. Asthe 9/11 Commission report concluded:“We must encourage reform, freedom,democracy, and opportunity, even thoughour own promotion of these messages is lim-ited in its effectiveness simply because we areits carriers. . . . The United States can pro-

mote moderation, but cannot ensure itsascendancy. Only Muslims can do this.”

On the other hand, and paradoxically,while we cannot “ensure the ascendancy” ofmoderate Muslims, we do have a greatcapacity for influencing the debate withinIslam in a negative direction, empoweringextremists and marginalizing moderates. AsProfessor Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamicstudies at American University, warns, thedebate within Islam “is shifting away from . . .inclusivity to a more exclusivist tendency,”and he worries about the potential for “pro-ducing a monolith of Islam,” where todayone does not exist. “Your challenge in theUnited States is to understand what’s hap-pening in the Muslim world,” he explainedto C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, “because if youdon’t, and if you treat all Muslims as poten-tial terrorists according to [the thesis] thatthere are no moderates, then . . . you willpush a lot of moderates . . . into the extrem-ist camp.” Even the sole superpower of theworld, he warns, “cannot take on 1.4 billionpeople.” Endorsing the interpretation of thepolitical Islamists and demanding that a bil-lion people choose either our liberal politicsor the faith of their fathers is as strategicallysuicidal as it is philosophically and theologi-cally unfounded.

On Not Making the Problem Worse

The West’s troubles with the Islamicworld are indeed great, and growing,but they do not—at least not yet—

constitute a clash of civilizations. However,some of the policies adopted by the Bushadministration since the 9/11 attacks havecreated ill-will within the Muslim commu-nity, and we would be wise not to repeatthose mistakes. The leading source of resent-ment is the U.S. war in Iraq, which has ledto growing suspicion of U.S. motives in thewar on terrorism.

The war metaphor itself conceals andconfuses the nature of U.S. efforts to huntdown violent extremists. With the excep-tion of the U.S. military operations todepose the Taliban and disrupt al-Qaedacamps in Afghanistan, the most successfulcounterterrorism operations do not involve

“

”

The intellectual ferment

within Islam presents both a challenge and

an opportunity for the West.


the U.S. military. The disastrous invasionand occupation of Iraq—cited in the recentNational Intelligence Estimate as the “causecélèbre” for jihadists, “breeding a deepresentment of U.S. involvement in theMuslim world and cultivating supportersfor the global jihad movement”—stands instark contrast to the successful nonmilitaryoperations that enabled the United States tocapture such al-Qaeda figures as RamziBinalshibh and Khalid Sheik Mohammed,the key plotters of the 9/11 attacks.

There are other things that the West cando that could decrease the likelihood of awar of the worlds. Peaceful, noncoercive,person-to-person engagement can be anenormously effective vehicle for promotingunderstanding. By contrast, policies thatinhibit or preclude dialogue betweenMuslims and non-Muslims can have theopposite effect, allowing caricatures ofAmerica and Americans to gain traction.This process empowers extremists and mar-ginalizes moderates.

The Pew Research Center’s AndrewKohut and his coauthor Bruce Stokes havetracked global attitudes toward the United States for many years. In their book,America against the World, they explain that,whereas foreigners once drew sharp distinc-tions between American policies, whichwere often held in low regard, and the American people and the American wayof life, which they embraced, hostilitytoward U.S. policies is now influencingbroader attitudes toward American cultureand values.

Those trends can be reversed. ManyAmericans have reached out to their Mus-lim neighbors in the five years sinceSeptember 11, 2001. President Bush set thetone in the days immediately after the terrorist attacks. In his speech beforeCongress on September 20, 2001, heassured Muslims around the world thatAmericans respected their faith. “It's prac-ticed freely by many millions of Americans,and by millions more in countries thatAmerica counts as friends. Its teachings aregood and peaceful, and those who commitevil in the name of Allah blaspheme thename of Allah.”

It was hardly a foregone conclusion that America’s leaders would exhibit such resolvein preventing the war on terrorism frombeing cast as a war against Islam. Indeed,some have suggested a campaign of isolationagainst Muslim Americans along the lines ofwhat was done to Japanese Americans dur-ing World War II.

Fortunately, Americans have not resortedto internment camps, nor have they en-gaged in more subtle forms of persecutionand ostracism. We have not, as manyEuropean countries have done, systemati-cally isolated and marginalized Muslimpopulations in ghettoes and enclaves.Notably, the riots in Europe and else-where—including those associated with thepublication of the cartoon depictions of theProphet Muhammad—did not occur in theUnited States. Just as a number of peoplewithin the American-Muslim communityhave stepped forward to fight Islamicextremism, many American Muslims havedenounced the violent intimidation cam-paign directed against the European papersthat published the cartoons.

That suggests that the United States hasmuch to teach, and the Europeans much to learn, about how to reduce or perhapseven eliminate the tension between Muslimsand non-Muslims. Ultimately, however, al-though the West can take steps to ensurethat Muslim communities are not op-pressed or victimized, a reformation of Islamthat will make space for nonbelievers mustcome from within.

Keeping It All in Perspective

As we strive to avoid a full-scale clash of civilizations, it is wise to keep exag-gerated claims in perspective. Com-

parisons between the war on terrorism andthe world wars are among those exaggera-tions. Claims that our national survivalhangs in the balance, or that the terrorists

pose an existential threat comparable tothat of the Nazis or the Soviets, build pres-sure for policies that do not increase oursecurity but do erode the very liberties thatdefine us as a nation.

We now know that similar policies thatdiminished freedom in the name of securi-ty—from the jailing of anti-war critics such asEugene Debs in World War I, to the intern-ment of Japanese Americans in World WarII, to the harassment of American Com-munists during the Cold War—were unnec-essary or counterproductive. And it makes nosense to adopt similar policies today, whenthe threat is far less severe. Terrorism poses afrightening threat, but the casualties thatmight be inflicted in even the worst-case sce-nario do not approximate those incurred dur-ing the two world wars, or that would haveensued had the Cold War turned hot.

We have witnessed over the past halfcentury the dramatic spread of liberalismand free markets around the world. Wewant to see this process continue becausethe peaceful, noncoercive, person-to-per-son contact that flourishes in free and opensystems is inimical to extremism and vio-lence. To be sure, there have been setbacks.Some closed systems have proved excep-tionally resistant to the spread of freedom.At times, the rapid collapse of autocraticregimes has been followed by periods ofchaos and violence. We have even seen freeand fair elections that have empowered theleast liberal elements in societies strugglingto emerge from decades of autocracy andtyranny. And those setbacks have promptedsome people to redouble their efforts topromote liberty.

It would be unfortunate if our zeal forpromoting liberalism around the worldwere seen as merely attempts to extendWestern political and military dominance.It would be ironic if our efforts to isolateand destroy violent extremists had the effectof making the problem of extremism evenworse. Most of all, it would be tragic if weadopted policies that violate our bedrocknational values or precipitate a conflictbetween the West and all of Islam that actu-ally would be on par with the most horriblewars of the 20th century.

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Comparisonsbetween the

war on terrorism and the world

wars are exaggerations.


ANDREW SULLIVAN: What are the funda-mental questions that have made conser-vatism, in America at least, such a funda-mentally divisive and internally quarrelsomemovement?

Part of that is obviously a function ofextraordinary success. Part of it is also afunction of intellectual health: that there isstill so much positive debate on the Rightabout what it means to be conservative andwhat conservatism might mean in thefuture. And part of it is just enormous dis-may among many of us at the incoherenceof the current administration and theCongress and the betrayal of fundamentalconservative principles. Indeed, I wouldargue an actual attack on conservatism as agoverning political philosophy.

I want to talk about the relationshipbetween freedom and doubt. This may notseem to many people an immediately obvi-ous connection. Most people understandfreedom as the freedom to do things, toengage in the world, to make decisions.

Not everybody understands that free-dom is rooted, and Western freedom is par-ticularly rooted, in the very fundamentalunderstanding of the fallibility of thehuman mind and, indeed, the moral falli-bility of the human soul and the need to putfundamental and unalterable restraints onhuman beings, in order to avoid some of thegreat mistakes and some of the great tyran-nies that certainty in human history hasprovided.

Sometimes when I talk to conservativesabout this, I start with a simple point aboutconservatives’ attachment to free markets.Why have conservatives been in favor of freemarkets historically? And I would posit thefollowing:

The critical argument behind free mar-kets is that markets devolve decisionmakingto the people closest to the activitiesinvolved, and those people have the mostknowledge and understanding of what theyare doing. The closer you are to what youare dealing with, the more likely you are toknow what you are doing. And the furtheraway you are from those particular interac-tions on the ground, the more likely you areto get it wrong.

And so conservatism in the 20th centuryhad a very powerful critique, from Hayek toOakeshott, of the insanity of governmentsand of central authorities dictating to large,complex, organic, dynamic groups of peo-ple what was the right way to order theireconomies or societies.

Why? Because one individual, oneexpert, is often wrong. Not only that; whenpeople become certain that they are right,they can create great damage to the fabric ofsociety. This was the essence of Burke’s cri-tique of the French Revolution: You aremessing with things you do not understand.French society is too complex for onehuman mind, however brilliant, to master.

Michael Oakeshott had a greatmetaphor for this particular issue. He called

it governing by the book. When Oakeshottspoke of “the book,” he was speaking pri-marily of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, of thegreat era of liberal triumphalism: We havefigured it all out. We know how to makesociety wealthy. We will abolish poverty. Wewill be rid of war. We have figured it all outat Harvard, and we are just going to imple-ment it all upon the world.

Oakeshott said no at a time when it wasvery unpopular and difficult to say no. Buthe said no for a very simple and powerfulpurpose. He said: If you are governing asociety by a book, and you are actually hav-ing to govern as you are reading and under-standing and writing that book, every nowand again you are going to have to look upfrom the book just to make sure that peopleare behaving according to plan. And verysoon after you have written that book andyou have your idea of what the worldshould be like, you will look up and realizethere are people misbehaving. They are notfollowing the rules in the book. If you aregoing to govern them, you are going to haveto keep looking up from the book just tokeep them all in line. And eventually you aregoing to be looking up from the book sooften that there will come a moment whenyou will have to close the book.

For the book, think of The CommunistManifesto. Think of The Affluent Society.Think of any treatise that declares it con-tains the truth about humankind and wish-es to impose that truth. But now take it to awhole new level and think the Quran, theBible, the Torah. Not just any old book, but“The Book,” containing the truth with acapital T.

And conservatives, for reasons of politicalopportunism, found themselves closely andcontinuously and ever more tightly con-nected with people who believed the worldshould be governed from “The Book.” Andconservatives did not see that they were get-ting trapped in the same trap they wereforced into in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s fromthe Left, except now it is coming from whatwe might call the Far Right.

P O L I C Y F O R U M

Many traditional supporters of Republicans, includ-ing many libertarians, have become quite critical ofwhat they see as the party’s betrayal of conservative

ideals in practice. At an October 3 Book Forum, AndrewSullivan, author of The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It,How to Get It Back, and New York Times columnist DavidBrooks debated the nature of this intellectual crisis.

Faith,Freedom,andConservatism in Today’s GOP


P O L I C Y F O R U M

The critical conservative insight forOakeshott, for Burke, for Hayek, for thegreat titans of conservative thought, is thatwe must know what we do not know. Thatwhen we go from theory to practice, weengage practice with a humility and anempiricism, and a reality-based judgmentthat is always flexible, always intuitive,always looking for what is new, for howsociety is changing, for how human beingsare actually organizing their own lives andforging their own destinies in ways that nocentral planner will ever understand.

And doubt, of course, is the key to this.A conservative stands in the way of the greattheoretician and says: Are you sure? Hestands in the way of the great ideologue andhe says: Do you know this for certain? I likemy way of life. I like my freedom. Why doyou want to take it away from me?

The Constitution of the United States ofAmerica was absolutely clear, and staggeringin its time, that there would be no churchand no religion and no “Book,” to definethe meaning of this new country. Therewould merely be a constitution. And theConstitution would be primarily directedtoward stopping people doing things.

It set up a rule of law whereby peoplecould not affect each other’s property. Andbecause government is always a necessaryevil, it set up a system of checks and bal-ances, of separation of powers, to make surethat if anybody anywhere got the idea thathe knew the truth and wanted to enforce itto remove people’s liberties, to make thembehave according to plan, there would beplenty of opportunities to stop that personand his ideas in their tracks.

Many people regard this as a terriblyinefficient way of doing things. In the early20th century, lots of liberals were ratherfrustrated with this procedure. Our currentpresident is terribly frustrated with the pos-sibility that any other branch of governmentwould interfere with his right to do whatev-er he wants.

But the point is precisely that theFounders knew and understood the dangersof the activist man, the energetic ruler. Theyalso particularly understood the terribledangers of the activist man who is infusedwith the zeal of religious truth and knowsthat it is his divine duty to impose it uponas many people as possible with as muchpower as possible.

And when the Founders set up executiveand legislative and judicial branches tocheck each other, they devolved power tothe states in a great federalist experiment toensure that if there were new ideas or inno-vations, they would not be imposed by oneperson on the whole place at once. Therewould be places to experiment. Therewould be diversity so that errors could becorrected.

It is impossible, I realized, to write aboutpolitics today without writing about reli-gion, because religion has become our poli-tics. People are actually being elected on thegrounds of their religious convictions. Themobilizing political base of one of the par-ties, which actually controls all threebranches of government, by which I mean

the two houses and the presidency, and isfast gaining control of the judiciary, is fun-damentally a religiously motivated group ofpeople.

What I want to argue is that religion isnot always like that. It is, in fact, the great-est lie of our time that the only genuine reli-gious faith is fundamentalist.

Another kind of faith—that is not bornagain but begins and ends in ways that arehard to explain, that is a process and anexperience that interacts with everyday lifeas well as with the divine, and that praysbecause it doubts—is another tradition. Itwas the great tradition of the mainlineProtestant churches in this country for avery long time.

We see our religious development intoan increasingly fundamentalist world mostextremely and terrifyingly in what has hap-pened in Islam, where the most fundamen-talist forces within it have taken over and the

more moderate forces are in completeretreat. And you see it also in Christianity toa lesser extent, not in the kind of violenceassociated with Islamism, but certainlyintellectually and doctrinally. Christianism,the attempt to turn Christianity into anabsolute certain truth that must be imposedpolitically at all times, is the deepest dangerto liberal democratic life.

DAVID BROOKS: I share a lot of Andrew’sessential diagnoses of where we are in thiscountry. I share his sense that the key valuethat the conservatives have abandoned is thetruth of epistemological modesty, the aware-ness of what we do not know.

Nonetheless, here is where the disagree-ments begin. The first is his diagnosis of theproblem. As I look at evangelical Christians,the incredible diversity of 30 million or 40million Americans, I do not seeChristianism. I do not see a lack of doubt. Icertainly do not meet anybody, or manypeople, who thinks that doubt equals sin.

I, for example, just saw the exhaustiveresearch that Baylor University researchersdid on the nature of evangelical Christians.They found that only 1 percent of them callthemselves fundamentalists. Two percentcall themselves evangelicals. And the bestthing the Baylor researchers did was todescribe how the evangelicals view God.They have incredibly diverse views of God.Those people are not detached from main-stream America; they are fully absorbed intomainstream America. The evangelicalChristians are not out there in some paralleluniverse along with the Muslim fundamen-talists.

If you want me to describe what has ledto the present absence of doubt, the aggres-sive “I know best” mentality in this country,it has nothing to do with religion. It has todo with partisanship. It is tribalism, peoplewho think their team is always right and theother team is always wrong. It is those peo-ple who lack doubt and those people wholead to these hyperaggressive errors. Some ofthose people are Christian activists inWashington, but some partisans are notChristian activists in Washington.

When I look around the world, to me,often it is the Christian politicians who arethe most useful, because they understandsomething. They understand that humanbeings are not profit-maximizing creatures

DAVID BROOKS


who respond to incentives. They under-stand the dark aspects of human nature,because the concept of original sin is core totheir being—another key conservative con-cept. So when they look at the Middle East,the idea that somebody would commit sui-cide to kill people is not a surprising thing,because the Bible has prepared them fordepravity.

Turning to Andrew’s second prognosis,his prescription, the conservatism of doubt.I am with Andrew in admiring MichaelOakeshott.

Yet, Michael Oakeshott, while he shouldalways be the voice in the back of your headurging caution, should never be at the frontof your mind, telling you where to go. Thatis because we live in a democracy, and to getelected in a democracy, you have to havecertain plans and visions. And if you arepracticing the politics of doubt, you are notgoing to get elected, and you are not goingto be able to wield authority when you getelected, because doubt does not win elec-tions and doubt does not mobilize legisla-tures. And so the reality is that we live in animperfect world where we have to assertourselves. We have to possess doubts, but wealso have to project with a trumpet.

The second problem I have withOakeshott is that there are some aspects ofhis thought that are aloof from America andAmerican culture. The United States is acreedal country. We believe in a creed,which is expressed in our Declaration ofIndependence. It is an assertion of a univer-sal truth. There is no doubt in that creed.Oakeshott would have been distrustful ofthat creed. He believed in a politics in whichyou sail along, you are buffeted by storms,and all you are trying to do is keep the shipof state balanced.

Well, America’s purpose in the world isnot just to keep stability balanced. Americahas a creed, a creed that states that peopleare endowed with inalienable rights. And ifAmerica abandoned that creed, it would nolonger be the country we know.

SULLIVAN: Let me address two of the pointsthat you make and say why I think I do notentirely agree with you.

The first is about the diversity of evan-gelicalism. I think you are absolutely rightthat actual believing evangelical Protestantsare not in fact a monolithic bloc.

In their faith lives, there is an enormousspan from what one might call extremeinerrantists to evangelicals who are even onthe Left. But when evangelicalism and reli-gion are deliberately marshaled by politicalparties and targeted as a means of politicalsupport, then inevitably the political use ofevangelicalism will home in on its certaintiesand its inviolable truths.

Now, we have clear examples of that. Wealso see it in the belief that gay people areanathema and our relationships so bad that,not only must we ban our ability to marryeach other, but we must actually amend thefederal Constitution to make sure that noone ever, anywhere, in any state, can ever dothat. That kind of certainty was the firstposition these people took on a very com-

plicated issue of social change.Similarly, on issues like contraception or

even on abortion, insisting on a federal con-stitutional amendment criminalizing all of itin all its forms, and insisting that a seconds-old zygote is as fully a human being as any-body in this room as a matter of truth, andhaving the president assert that as some-thing nonnegotiable, is not pluralist,diverse, or tolerant. It is a political manifes-tation of evangelicalism and the cynicismwith which it has been exploited.

Last, yes, America is a creedal nation. Butthe creed is that there is no single creed togovern all Americans. The creed is a mini-malist creed of liberty and legal equality. It isa nonfoundationalist foundation. And Ithink the nonfoundationalist foundation inthe Constitution was deliberate because theFounders had seen societies based on secur-er foundations, and they decided no, we willtry something less.

BROOKS: The core problem with conser-vatism these days has nothing to do withreligion or fundamentalism. It has to dowith a complete absence of a governing phi-losophy. Conservatives had a governing phi-losophy in the 1980s, and it achieved manygreat things. It was replaced by a governingphilosophy that really powered the Gingrichrevolution, which was the idea that weshould reduce the size of government by 25percent. And that was the one idea, reduc-ing the size of government, that united alltypes of conservatives.

That governing philosophy was tried outin the winter of 1995, with the governmentshutdown. And the problems with that gov-erning philosophy are (a) it was unpopularand politically ruinous, and (b) it just didnot fit the country, which wants govern-ment to solve its problems.

And so within three years of the collapseof the government shutdown, you had theRepublican Party, pre-Bush, appropriatingmore money to the Department ofEducation than Bill Clinton even thoughtto ask for, because they had no governingphilosophy.

Bush came in with an attempt at arenewed governing philosophy, after the col-lapse of the anti-government philosophy ofthe Gingrich years. That attempt at a philos-ophy had the name compassionate conser-vatism, and it was the idea of using govern-ment for limited but energetic means to helppeople who were poor, addicted to drugs, etcetera, et cetera, in terms of education.

The problem is that that governing phi-losophy was never fleshed out. What youhad was spending without any sense of pri-orities, without any sense of philosophy. Youjust had a splurge. You had Tom DeLay, act-ing as party hacks always act, using moneyto buy votes. That was the betrayal. It wasnot that conservatives had a bad governingphilosophy. They had no governing philos-ophy. So they became raw partisans.

SULLIVAN: I want to challenge directly thatsomehow Newt Gingrich’s idiotic form ofpolitics discredits the entire notion of limit-ed government forever. It is an absolutenonsense argument. What Gingrich repre-sented at that point was the inability toarticulate the message. And you take fromthat that the entire philosophy is done for

ANDREW SULLIVAN

Continued on page 17


Big-Spending RepublicansC A T O P U B L I C A T I O N S

In Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke theBank and Became the Party of Big Govern-ment, Stephen Slivinski tells the story of

the GOP’s descent from the party of Rea-gan to a mirror image of everything it oncefought against.

Ronald Reagan’s philosophy that govern-ment is a problem and not a solution was anidea that had real consequences. During hispresidency, Reagan was able to decrease thefederal budget’s share of GDP, slow thegrowth of unnecessary agencies, and reducedomestic discretionary spending. When the1994 congressional elections swept Repub-licans into control of the House, the“Contract with America,” which was signedby many Republicans, attempted to contin-ue Reagan’s legacy. But Slivinski recounts indetail how, despite the efforts of a few com-mitted fiscal conservatives, the Republicanseventually abandoned their goals of elimi-nating entire agencies and slashing spendingand instead embraced largesse. By 2000 theRepublican-controlled Congress was madeup of the biggest spenders since the Demo-cratic Congress of 1977–78.

Slivinski finds the current Bush adminis-tration and its philosophy of big-govern-

ment conservatism to be the culmination ofthose trends. George W. Bush could haveused his tremendous political capital afterthe 9/11 attacks to make real strides in thedirection of limited government. Instead,Bush oversaw transportation bills loadedwith record numbers of pork-barrel projectsand a prescription drug bill that was thebiggest expansion of the welfare state sinceLyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Slivinskitells the stories of those and other ways thatthe Republicans in office today betrayedtaxpayers.

Slivinski’s book also explores ways thattrue fiscal conservatives can save the GOPbefore it’s too late. Buck Wild shatters themyth that Republicans need to compromisetheir integrity in order to get votes. Slivinskiexplains that the Republicans who trulycommitted to the principles of the“Contract with America” were generallysuccessful. He cites polls that consistentlyshow the American public’s distaste for biggovernment. Limiting government isn’t justthe right thing to do for the sake of thenation—it’s smart politics as well.

Slivinski explains that when Republicanscontrol both houses of Congress and the

White House, the power of big governmentis available to them, and they abuse it. Butwhen they are the beleaguered minority or acongressional majority against a Democraticpresident, the Republicans vote against theirenemies’ big-spending and agency-expand-ing proposals. Buck Wild is a warning to vot-ers to keep in mind Lord Acton’s famousdictum that “power corrupts and absolutepower corrupts absolutely.” Slivinski con-cludes that those who want to resurrect theprinciples of the party of Reagan shoulddeny greater power to the Republicans andinstead support divided government.

Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank andBecame the Party of Big Government ($25.99 cloth)is available from most major booksellers or fromwww.catostore.org.

Did C.S. Lewis Design Medicare?“T

he safest road to Hell is the gradualone.” In C. S. Lewis’s classic novelThe Screwtape Letters, the senior

devil Screwtape gives those words of wis-dom to his underling demon Wormwoodas he seeks to lead a young man’s soul todamnation. But if Wormwood was incharge of health policy, how would he leadthe American doctor, patient, and taxpayerto damnation? In the new Cato bookMedicare Meets Mephistopheles, DavidHyman, professor of law and medicine atthe University of Illinois and an adjunctscholar at the Cato Institute, argues that theUnited States is on the road to health careHell in the form of one of the largest andmost expensive government programs.

Medicare Meets Mephistopheles makes itssobering policy analysis more readablethrough a heavy dose of clever satire.Hyman presents his criticisms as a letterfrom an underling demon to Satan himself,

discussing the extent to which Medicarepromotes the seven deadly sins. ButHyman’s critique isn’t a moralistic one. Heexplains how each of those sins translatesinto real-world consequences that hurt ordi-nary Americans.

Hyman cites avarice as the worst sin pro-moted by Medicare. Handing so much con-trol of health care spending over to politicalforces, he explains, has predictably led togreedy lobbyists having undue influenceover the quality of health outcomes and thecountry’s fiscal future. Special interestproviders convince Congress to pay forhealth services under the program at a farhigher rate than would prevail in a free mar-ket. Furthermore, Hyman shows that weactually get low-quality returns for this heftyinvestment.

Hyman offers a few suggestions for“exorcizing” Medicare, such as changing itsbenefit structure to one based on cash

vouchers. But his primary goal with thebook is to change the way our political cul-ture views Medicare. Pundits and policyanalysts, committing the sin of vanity,excuse Medicare’s dysfunctions and portraythe program as a moral obligation thatshould be above criticism. But MedicareMeets Mephistopheles reveals that this “sacredbond between generations” is more profanethan people realize.

Medicare Meets Mephistopheles is available in hard-cover for $14.95 and in paperback for $9.95 atwww.catostore.org.


Over the past year, white bands with theinscription “ONE” have appeared onthe wrists of numerous Hollywood

celebrities. The “ONE” refers to 1 percentof the U.S. federal budget—the amount ofthe U.S. federal budget that the MakePoverty History activist campaign urges bedevoted to foreign aid to lift developingcountries out of poverty. But the FraserInstitute’s Economic Freedom of the World:2006 Annual Report, released in conjunc-tion with the Cato Institute, makes the casethat the economic freedom of a marketeconomy, not more aid, is the best solutionto poverty.

In an essay in this year’s report,“Freedom versus Collectivism in ForeignAid,” William Easterly of New YorkUniversity looks at the collectivist logicbehind the modern foreign aid movement.Its chief intellectual figures, such as JeffreySachs, believe that UN-appointed expertscan plan the creation of wealth in the ThirdWorld better than the free market can. Thisassumption about the efficiencies of collec-tivist planning, Easterly argues, drives theproposal that the West increase foreign aidin order to give the Third World a “push”out of a “poverty trap.” But he finds thatforeign aid has empirically failed to havepositive effects on growth in recipientcountries. Easterly instead suggests that“home-grown gradual movements towardeconomic freedom” can use the power of

decentralized knowledge found in the market to alleviate poverty.

But what is economic freedom, and howcan one determine its concrete benefits? The 10th edition ofthe Economic Freedomof the World also con-tains the updated version of the yearly“Economic FreedomIndex,” which ana-lyzes the politicaleconomies of 130nations. With theassistance of thinktanks from all overthe world, James D.Gwartney of FloridaState University andRobert A. Lawson of Capital Universityrate those nations onthe basis of five indi-cators of economicfreedom: size of gov-ernment; legal struc-ture and security of property rights; access tosound money; freedom to trade interna-tionally; and regulation of credit, labor, andbusiness.

The index shows that those countrieswith a high degree of economic freedomoutperform countries lacking in economicfreedom according to many indicators of

human development, such as per capitaGDP, unemployment, life expectancy, andpercentage of children in the labor force. Forexample, in the countries that rank in the

top quartile for eco-nomic freedom, theaverage income ofthe poorest 10 percentof the population is$6,519, comparedto $826 for thecountries in the bot-tom quartile. Thosestatistics challengethe common beliefthat greater free-mar-ket policies breedgreater inequality.

Hong Kong isagain the highest-ranked country inthis year’s index;with Singapore inthe second spot; andthe United States,Switzerland, and New

Zealand tied at third. The countries thathave seen the biggest increases in their levelsof economic freedom since 1980 are Ghana,Israel, Uganda, Jamaica, and Hungary.Economic Freedom of the World: 2006 Annual Reportis available in paperback for $22.95 at www.cato-store.org.The complete text can also be downloadedthere.

C A T O P U B L I C A T I O N S

New analysis shows that freedom, not aid, lifts countries out of poverty

Fraser and Cato Release Economic Freedom Report

and we want big-government conservatism?No. You take from that that Gingrich was aterrible politician. But if you persuade, asReagan and Thatcher did and true conser-vatives did, ordinary people about therestraints of government, you will win amajority.

It was a deliberate decision to changegovernment philosophy to big-governmentconservatism based on evangelicalism. Thatgave conservatives the politics of meaning.

They filled it with religion deliberately,with premeditation, complete cynicism,and, in some parts, complete faith. And in

Bush they found the perfect example ofsomeone who both represented that faithand had never had to balance a checkbookin his entire life and, to use MargaretThatcher’s definition of a socialist, whoseonly real skill was spending other people’smoney.

BROOKS: As you know better than I, therewere 4,000 earmarks in the budget in 1994when the Republicans took over. And whatare there now, 27,000 earmarks? Was it faiththat created those earmarks? It had nothingto do with faith.

SULLIVAN: It was faith that kept conservatives

in power, that allowed them to abuse it. Doyou think Karl Rove, trying to win Ohiolast time, was using government money?No, he was using gay baiting. He was usingthe Religious Right.

Previous conservatives talked about prin-ciples of limited government. And manyevangelicals, historically, in this countryagreed—they did not want governmentrunning their lives. They were suspicious ofgovernment power and its corruption, andthey were part of that coalition. It was theleadership that betrayed it and turned thatpart of religion into a governing philosophyand into a rationale for their power. Andthen they abused it.

Continued from page 15

CATO POLICY REPORT is a bimonthly review published by the Cato Institute and sent to all contributors. It is indexed in PAIS Bulletin. Single issues are $2.00 a copy. ISSN: 0743-605X. ©2006 by the Cato

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CATO INSTITUTEEdward H. Crane .............................................President and CEOWilliam A. Niskanen.....................................................ChairmanDavid Boaz..............................................Executive Vice PresidentTed Galen Carpenter ......V.P., Defense & Foreign Policy StudiesSusan Chamberlin ....................................V.P., Government AffairsJames A. Dorn ...........................................V.P., Academic AffairsWilliam Erickson......................V.P., Finance and AdministrationBrink Lindsey ...........................................................V.P., ResearchRoger Pilon .........................................................V.P., Legal Affairs

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Stephen Slivinski...................................Director, Budget StudiesJohn Tamny.................................................Director, DevelopmentMichael Tanner..................Director, Health and Welfare StudiesJerry Taylor................................................................Senior FellowMarian Tupy....................Asst. Director, Global Economic LibertyPeter Van Doren.................................................Editor, RegulationIan Vásquez............................Director, Global Economic LibertyWill Wilkinson........................................................Policy Analyst

James M. Buchanan.......................Distinguished Senior FellowJosé Piñera.......................................Distinguished Senior FellowEarl C. Ravenal.................................Distinguished Senior Fellow

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The diplomatic crisis over Iran’snuclear program has challengedeven the war on Iraq as the majorforeign policy issue in headlinesaround the world. Ted Galen

Carpenter, vice president for defense andforeign policy studies at Cato, discusseshow the United States should bestapproach this situation in “Iran’s NuclearProgram: America’s Policy Options” (Policy Analysis no. 578). Carpenterwrites that, although none of the availableoptions is perfect, some are much moreflawed than others. Placing economicsanctions on Iran or encouraging internaldemocratic revolt by aiding dissidentgroups would be unlikely to stop nucleardevelopment and could backfire, heexplains. Carpenter then argues thatstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities areclearly the worst option; they would at best only delay nuclear development, atthe cost of marginalizing opponents of thecurrent regime, and might well promptIran to interference with U.S. efforts in Iraq. The best strategy, Carpenter pro-poses, is to offer Iran a grand bargain of normalized diplomatic and economicrelations in exchange for Tehran’s fullcooperation with international nuclearinspections.

A Private Spectrum?One of the most persistent governmentmonopolies in the United States is over theelectromagnetic spectrum on which all ourtelevisions, radio waves, cell phones, andwireless internet connections depend. TheFederal Communications Commissioncontrols ownership of the spectrum andallocates licenses to certain people to useparts of the spectrum. Many economists seethis system as grossly inefficient. In“Toward Property Rights in Spectrum:The Difficult Policy Choices Ahead”(Policy Analysis no. 575), Dale Hatfieldand Phil Weiser of the University ofColorado discuss ways to create a better andmore market-oriented spectrum policy.They explain that privatizing spectrum willnot be easy, because problems such as geo-graphic spillover pose a variety of compli-cated legal issues. A property rights systemof land ownership works, for example,because one can easily set up fences toexclude trespassers, but, Hatfield andWeiser ask, how does one stop a “trespass-ing” radio signal? Their paper engages thoseand other difficulties in hopes of moving ustoward a regime of property rights.

Chicken Littles—Relax!In newspapers and movie theaters and on

television and radio, it seems impossible toavoid apocalyptic cries about global warm-ing. Is our future really that dire, or are themedia leaving something out in order to

create a new scare?Patrick J. Michaels, sen-ior fellow in environ-mental studies at Catoand professor of naturalresources at VirginiaPolytechnic and StateUniversity, argues in “Isthe Sky Really Falling?

A Review of Recent Global Warming ScareStories” (Policy Analysis no. 576) that themedia are not reporting the whole storyabout global warming, to the detriment ofscientific fact. He looks at some of the mostrecent prominent stories: reports ofGreenland and Antarctica disintegrating,the alleged link between hurricanes andglobal warming, and fears of massive speciesextinction. He finds all to be overblown andbased on half-truths that distort the public’sview of global warming.

Culture ShockIt took only a few weeks to topple SaddamHussein’s regime, but neutralizing theinsurgency in Iraq has eluded the world’smost advanced military. Jeffrey Record


C A T O S T U D I E S

Avoiding Both War and a Nuclear Iran

Patrick Michaels

of the Air War College writes in “TheAmerican Way of War: Cultural Barriersto a Successful Counterinsurgency” (PolicyAnalysis no. 577) that it’s not a mere coincidence that nearly all of the UnitedStates’ embarrassing military setbacks havebeen in limited wars against insurgencies.Those conflicts typically do not involvevital national security interests, and so theAmerican public becomes politicallydemoralized at any significant loss ofAmerican lives. Counterinsurgencies alsofrustrate many members of the armedforces, Record argues, because their train-ing is geared for large-scale conventionaloperations against like adversaries. Theerosion of political and military supportmakes counterinsurgencies very difficult tofight, he says. Record concludes that, sinceAmerican political and military culture isnot suited for counterinsurgencies, suchinterventions should be undertaken onlyin specific instances in which vital securityinterests are at stake.

Separating the Wheat from the ChaffIt is common to hear people bemoan thefact that professional athletes in the United

States make so much money, while teach-ers make comparatively little. They oftenimply that our teachers would be as com-petent as our athletes if they were paid a lotmore. But in “Giving Kids the Chaff:How to Find and Keep the Teachers WeNeed” (Policy Analysis no. 579), MarieGryphon, a Cato adjunct scholar anddirector of educational programs at theInstitute for Humane Studies, argues thatthe conventional wisdom is deeply wrong.Increasing salaries for teachers wouldattract as many bad teachers as good ones,she explains—and that is a problembecause politics has so distorted the hiringcriteria in school districts that it is difficultto attract and hire high-quality teachers.The solution, Gryphon proposes, is tointroduce competition through schoolchoice. She argues that if they have to com-pete for students, schools will have anincentive to hire excellent teachers.

Double TroubleIn the dystopian future of Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the authoritariangovernment designs its own language—“newspeak”—to mold the minds of citi-

zens. In “Doublespeak and the War onTerrorism” (Cato Briefing Paper no. 98),Timothy Lynch, director of the CatoInstitute’s Project on Criminal Justice,

investigates the trendtoward Orwellian useof language that masksthe true nature orintent of U.S. policiesin war on terror.Lynch presents severalexamples of this newvocabulary: The exec-

utive can use “national security letters” toobtain evidence without a warrant, butthe issue of whether or not these seizuresare actually in the nation’s national securi-ty interest is assumed away by that termitself. Law enforcement has used “anti-ter-rorism” resources against nonterroristcriminals such as gang members, drugdealers, and political activists. Lynchargues that while we can debate the pru-dence of current strategies in the war onterror, we should all be able to agree thatuse of doublespeak hurts discourse bymaking people less aware of what theirgovernment is really doing.


Timothy Lynch

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BORROW AND SPEND, SPEND AND ELECT[Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY)], withabout $3 million in campaign contribu-tions, has run ads on local television formore than a month, earlier than in pastcampaigns. The first emphasized his sup-port for low taxes and few business regu-lations, ending, “Tom Reynolds—Fightingto save New York jobs.” Another had tworetired military officers hailing his role insaving the Niagara Falls Air ReserveStation from shutdown. The third fea-tured a mother holding her toddler whilerecalling the congressman’s help in forc-ing Blue Cross/Blue Shield to cover sur-geries for the child’s cleft palate. “TomReynolds has a big heart,” she says intothe camera.—Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 2006

MIGHT AS WELL EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRYWithin the next decade or two, [James]Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike herthermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth,he predicts, will be hotter than at anytime since the Eocene Age 55 millionyears ago, when crocodiles swam in theArctic Ocean.“There's no realization ofhow quickly and irreversibly the planet ischanging,” Lovelock says. “Maybe 200million people will migrate close to theArctic and survive this. Even if we tookextraordinary steps, it would take theworld 1,000 years to recover.”—Washington Post, Sept. 2, 2006

WHAT WASHINGTON THINKS OF YOUYou say the average federal civil workermakes more than the average private sec-tor worker. That’s true, but this isn’t evenan apples and oranges comparison—it’smore apples and filet mignon. The feder-al government doesn’t sell fast food oroperate large-scale retail stores using min-imum-wage employees. So yes, medicalresearchers at the National Institutes ofHeath [sic] and the Centers for Diseasecontrol [sic] are paid more than entry-level workers at McDonald’s. Yes, intelli-gence analysts in the Department ofDefense and State Department diplo-mats working under harsh conditionsaround the world are paid more thanWal-Mart greeters. And, yes, the thou-sands of dedicated doctors and nursescaring for our wounded and disabled vet-erans in the Department of VeteransAffairs are paid more than a new barrista[sic] at Starbucks.—Letter from Max Stier, President, Partner-ship for Public Service, Washington, in theWall Street Journal, Sept. 1, 2006

WOW! THAT’S 25 HOMES A DAYQ: How much time do former PresidentCarter and wife Rosalynn devote to theirHabitat for Humanity projects?A: Since 1984, they have spent one weekeach year on Habitat projects, helping toconstruct 2,733 new homes. —“Personality Parade” in Parade, Sept. 3, 2006

COME TO WASHINGTON AND DO WELLThe three most prosperous large countiesin the United States are in theWashington suburbs, according to cen-sus figures released yesterday, which showthat the region has the second-highestincome and the least poverty of anymajor metropolitan area in the country.Rapidly growing Loudoun County hasemerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction inthe nation, with its households last yearhaving a median income of more than$98,000. It is followed by Fairfax andHoward counties, with MontgomeryCounty not far behind.—Washington Post, Aug. 3, 2006

THANK YOU FOR NEVER HAVING SMOKEDSmoking scenes in vintage cartoon episodesof Tom and Jerry, The Flintstonesand Scooby-Doo are being reworked after a viewer com-plained they were not suitable for children.Cartoon editors are painstakingly workingthrough more than 1,500 episodes of thecartoons painting out images of characterssmoking frame by frame.—ITV.com, Aug. 22, 2006

SAVED BY INCOMPETENCEBolivia's government said it was temporar-ily suspending its nationalisation of the oiland gas industry because the state oil com-pany lacks the funds and technical capacityto take over production from foreign firms.—The Economist, Aug. 17, 2006

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