Readers of this space will recall that there was a leak of an internal NASA document a couple weeks ago that showed what a waste of money the Senate Launch System is, by presenting an analysis that using existing launch systems and orbital storage of propellants will cost tens of billions less and accelerate by several years the schedule under which we could be sending humans beyond earth orbit. If this gets publicized much, it is a huge threat to the Senate Launch System, particularly given that NASA is going to have to be looking for places to cut, in the current and future budgets, because it makes it a very attractive to target to anyone who has been paying attention to what’s going on.
Accordingly, defenders of the status quo are desperately fighting back. On Thursday, there was an op-ed at Space News by former NASA administrator Mike Griffin and former associate administrator and current head of the Space Policy Institute at GWU (and former colleague and longtime friend of mine) Scott Pace, defending the SLS and sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt with multiple straw men and disingenuous cost analyses about alternate approaches. While I’m hoping to get a response to it into Space News some time this week, on Friday, I deployed four thousand words or so to mercilessly fisk it over at the Competitive Space Task Force website. If you want to understand the technical and cost issues of human spaceflight, I urge you to read it.
The Department of Labor (DOL) doesn’t need to loosen financial disclosure for union bosses to take advantage of union members’ dues. Yet, this is exactly what the Obama administration has done. On October 26, DOL published a regulation that would weaken union members’ protections against fraud and corruption by union leadership.
Under the new regulation, DOL’s union financial reporting document, the Form LM-30, will no longer require financial disclosure reporting by union stewards, leave for workers performing union activities while being paid by their employer, financial dealings with credit institutions (such as loans), and union officials’ payments from union trusts.
It’s not as if these requirements served no purpose. Numerous major cases of union corruption last month bring the timing of the rulemaking into question. Here’s a quick rundown for October:
In Chicago, former Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon, along with two union lobbyists, were found to be double-dipping pensions. They secured six-figure pensions from the city of Chicago, based on calculations from their inflated wages for carrying out union activities, rather than from their wage from government service.
Union bosses were found greasing the wheels on the Long Island Railroad Workers’ billion- dollar disability pension scam. Ten NYPD officers, who are union officials in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, were charged for their role in a widespread ticket-fixing scam.
The United Food and Commercial Workers’ New York local president, former president, and treasurer were arrested for racketeering, extortion, money laundering, and witness tampering.
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Here’s a letter I sent to the New York Times.
To the Editor:
Mr. Krugman is correct in pointing out (Bombs, Bridges and Jobs; Oct. 31, 2011) the obvious hypocrisy of Republicans who decry cuts in “job-creating” defense spending while yet maintain that stimulus spending is waste.
However, it is unfortunate that Mr. Krugman falls into the same Keynesian trap as his rightward colleagues. He asserts, “Military spending does create jobs.” How true. But what use is a job if it doesn’t create a good or service that a consumer wants to buy?
Government-induced war production is not stimulative. Rather, it crowds-out private production. History bears that out.
Private investment, the keystone of economic growth, didn’t recover until after World War II had ended. Keynesians warned that cutting post-war military spending by 65 percent would result in a double-dip depression. Instead what followed was a period of historic prosperity.
MATTHEW MELCHIORRE
Adjunct Analyst, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington, Oct. 31, 2011
A fresh batch of regulatory bloopers:
- Rochester, New York, prohibits children from walking on tight-ropes.
- Police officers in Maine are not allowed to arrest dead people.
- If you’re in Helena, Montana, never tie a horse to a fire hydrant. It’s against the law.
- Massachusetts law forbids frightening pigeons.
- It is Alaskan state policy that “emergencies are held to a minimum and rarely found to exist.”
- If you don’t return your books to Salt Lake City, Utah, public libraries within a month, hide. You can be arrested.
- You need police approval to own a burglar alarm in Pinecrest, Florida.
- Bees may not enter Kentucky without certificates of health.
In a recent column, Michelle Malkin explained how Obamacare price controls, FDA and DEA rules, and Obama administration policies have contributed to shortages of crucial life-saving drugs, relying on (and linking to) sources as varied as ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Earlier, law professor Richard Epstein, a leading authority on property rights, explained how Medicare regulations and price controls are helping spawn shortages of cancer drugs needed by chemotherapy patients and others. As biotech expert Greg Conko has noted, the FDA contributes to critical drug shortages because it “requires manufacturers to seek approval just to increase production,” thus artificially limiting production, and “it continues to shut down facilities for minor infractions,” further exacerbating shortages. If shortages are a problem, why on Earth would an agency require permission — and cumbersome red tape — before a manufacturer can expand production of that drug? In spite of its role in causing the life-threatening drug shortages, the Obama administration has sought to demagogue the issue and place the blame entirely on drug makers.
Earlier, CEI filed an amicus brief challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, arguing that the 2010 healthcare law unconstitutionally exceeds Congress’s powers under the Commerce and Spending Clauses. Regardless of whether it is constitutional, Obamacare is also harmful to the economy, medical innovation, and the health care system. Earlier, I discussed some of the bad effects of Obamacare on patients, employers, consumers, and the insurance market.
CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
November 4, 2011
>>Featured Story
Last week, CEI hosted a Capitol Hill briefing on E-Verify, the electronic employment verification system that may soon become mandatory for American businesses if some Congressmen have their way. After an engaging panel discussion, legislative staffers in the audience sparked a long debate on the merits of E-Verify which eventually led one panelist to call the briefing the best he’d ever been a part of. Watch the highlights of the briefing here. The full video of the event is here.
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Voters in Colorado this week repudiated a slew of proposed tax increases, even those targeted for “education.” The Associated Press reports:
Voters [in Colorado] resoundingly rejected the only statewide tax hike on ballots this November, a slight temporary increase in sales and use taxes to shore up public schools decimated by years of budget cuts. In all corners of the state Tuesday, Coloradans also swatted down proposed local tax hikes on dozens of local questions on everything from building a new recreational center in a Denver suburb to hiring a second full-time police officer in a small western Colorado town.
No sooner had Coloradans of all political stripes spoken than liberals who lust for your money began their hand-wringing. “How could they,” you could hear left-wing commentators across the nation lament. “Don’t they know it’s for the children?”
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When I moved into my suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood three years ago, the nearby town center was a thriving hub of restaurants, shops and theaters, where boutique dealers of furniture and knick-knacks rubbed shoulders with high-end eateries of all kinds.
But lately, when I’ve stopped by some of these shops and eateries, with a meal or a gift in mind, I have increasingly encountered a sickening sight: Closed doors.
In fact by my own informal tally, at least a half dozen businesses within a few blocks of my front door have gone belly up since my arrival — a lot, it seems to me, especially given such a small area in such a short amount of time. It remains to be seen how many new businesses will rush in to fill the void, but so far some windows have remained dark for more than a year.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still a nice neighborhood, and there’s still lots to do. But the closing of shopkeeper’s doors is always a symptom of a creeping and chronic condition.
Then I get news from my hometown in Colorado, where my family and many friends still live. There, as in much of the country, it is the same, but worse. Unemployment is high; underemployment is higher. Once-bustling businesses are on life support. A friend of mine who owned a highly successful electrical company recently had to shut down for lack of work. And on, and on. From the suburbs of the nation’s capital to its deepest heartlands, the Great Receding has begun.
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F.A. Hayek is an unlikely conservative hero. After all, this is a man who titled one of his most famous essays “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He self-identified as a liberal — in the original sense of the word, which more or less means what we would today call libertarian. Since liberalism took on an entirely different meaning during the 20th century, Hayek wrote that he would settle for being called an Old Whig. But he could not stand to be called a conservative.
For one, he believed that “the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not be too much restricted by rigid rules.”* Sounds an awful lot like the Bush years.
Sure, No Child Left Behind will radically grow federal involvement in education, which is properly a state and local issue. But we have good intentions! Sure, the PATRIOT Act could easily be abused. But it’s OK, because our guys are in charge! They’d never overstep their boundaries.
Conservatism, Hayek argued, is not a rigorous philosophy. It is “essentially opportunist and lacks principles.”**
That’s why I was surprised to see that the Heritage Foundation, a proudly conservative think tank, published an abridged edition of Hayek’s classic 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. Heritage’s economic policies are reasonably free-market, at least when Democrats are in power. So it makes sense that they would be Hayek fans, even though they aren’t ideological soulmates. But I am wary that they are promoting him as a conservative thinker; he was not.
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