Humor break. I’d be equally inclined to see George W. in the photo for giving America both its first $2 trillion budget and its first $3 trillion budget.
Wayne Crews
Freedom Action‘s Myron Ebell, while he isn’t optimistic, answers on a POLITICO forum:
In an ideal world, President Barack Obama would use his State of the Union to admit that America is broke and that his policies have laid the groundwork, not for a robust recovery, but rather for perpetual economic stagnation.
….He is instead likely to continue to claim that his policies of reckless spending and smothering regulation are leading to a bright new future of clean energy, green jobs, and economic security.
…Taken together, all [Obama's] new regulations … constitute an assault on the energy and natural resources foundations of our economy that will impoverish consumers, drive away investment, and further cripple manufacturing for decades to come.
Here’s a sobering read at SmartMoney on how green products that are supposed to save money can take longer than expected for payback. This holds for hybrid cars, solar panels, and high-efficiency washing machines.
Read more: The Hidden Cost of Going Green
They will be a primary way that we learn, teach, produce and advance in the future. Jane McGonigal of Institute for the Future has the ball right now: “We’re going to see games tackling women’s rights. We’re going to see games around climate change. We’re going to see games around medical innovation, that doctors are going to play.”
These few examples are only a taste. We will see much, much more from the electronic gaming industry. The importance of video games is one reason why keeping government out of regulating them is a significant policy issue right now.
Since one day the sun will expand into a red-giant star, humans in the distant multi-millennial future will either have to leave the Earth, geoengineer it, or go extinct. But some current UN leaders have elected to ban geoengineering.
“Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted U.N. consensus,” said Silvia Ribeiro, Latin American director of ETC Group, a grass-roots advocacy organization.
The way Ben Kunz in a new Business Week artcle puts it, “Each device contains its own widening universe of services and applications, many delivered via the Internet. They are designed to keep you wedded to a particular company’s ecosystem and set of products.”
I like Ben’s article a lot because it recognizes that “walling off” and “widening universe” are not mutually exclusive. If only policymakers and regulators acknowledged that. They can’t fail to know it; it’s just that admitting it means acknowledging their limited relevance to consumer well-being and a need to step aside. So everyone pretends.
Many claim to worry about the rise of proprietary services (I, as you can probably tell, often doubt their sincerity) but I’ve always regarded a “Splinternet” as a good thing that means more not less communications wealth. I first wrote about this in Forbes in 2000 when everyone was fighting over spam, privacy, content regulation, porn and marketing to kids.
Increasing wealth means a copy-and-paste world for content across networks, and it means businesses will benefit from presence across many of tomorrow’s networks, generating more value for future generations of consumers and investors. We won’t likely talk of an “Internet” with a capital-“I” and a reverent tremble the way we do now, because what matters is not the Internet as it happens to look right now, but underlying Internet technology that can just as easily erupt everywhere else too.
Meanwhile, new application, device and content competition within and across networks discipline the market process and “regulate” things far better than the FCC can. Yet the FCC’s very function is to administer or artificially direct proprietary business models, which it must continue to attempt to do (and as it pleads for assistance in doing in the net neutrality rulemaking) if it is going to maintain relevance. I described the urgency of stopping the agency’s campaign recently in “Splinternets and cyberspaces vs. net neutrality ” , and also in the January 2010 comments to the FCC on net neutrality.
Eventually the pro-business and pro-consumer cases for splintering and against artificial openness will prevail, because compulsion and deliberately ignoring free markets in infrastructure undermine communications wealth and content options despite the general view. The question is merely do we recognize it now, or decades hence, long after other nations have embraced liberalized communications and bypassed us. Rather than a make-work “National Broadband Plan” like the one being presented to Congress this month, the FCC needs instead to act like Alfred Kahn at the old CAB, and present a case for turning out the lights and ratcheting down most functions over there, since airwave scarcity is increasingly disappearing (or created artificially by the agency itself) and since “public airwaves” doesn’t mean much in tomorrow’s world of limitless content access, customization and Everybody Tube broadcasting. The case for a ruthless, drastic purging of FCC’s involvment in and oversight of most things communications needs to be made rather than conspiracy in a make-believe, Emperor’s New Clothes broadband plan. The FCC is too much an impediment in too many important respects for the concrete plan in play to be one of adding rather than paring responsibilities. It and a naive Congress are on a path to turning at least America’s involvement in the Internet into the C&O Canal of Communications.
Capitalism is still too young historically for us to have had our John Locke for the digital age and its long and thin network (and intangible) properties. The short and fat stuff like houses and cars were far easier. Policymakers already destroyed the prospects of liberalization in the electricity industry by trying to mandate hyper-regulatory “retail wheeling” (same for all intents and purposes as net neutrality) in the name of “competition.” Forced neutrality has wrecked one industry, I hope we don’t do it again; but too many special interests gain from regulation. They don’t, for example, even seem to recognize the ways in which properly liberalized electricity grids would also have turbocharged communications liberalization.
Competition in access to content is only one part of the story; competition in the provision of infrastructure and devices drive communications wealth and free speech too.
They can be saved, however. Dan Hannan in London talks about “privatising” the elephant (and watch the video):
To us, elephants are cuddly. To Africans, they are dangerous neighbours that trample crops and villages. The best way to incentivise the protection of the herds is to allow local people to treat them as a renewable resource, selling their meat, hide and tusks while preserving their numbers. Property rights, in short, will ensure the preservation of natural resources.
Today on the anniversary of Porkulus, President Barack Obama and his staff are defending the massive spending stimulus and sweeping financial, health care, energy efficiency, “green job” and other interventions.
We have called instead for a major “Deregulatory Stimulus” to reject endless political stimulus and liberalize the economy.
Meanwhile, alongside trillions in spending, regulations now exceed $1.2 trillion a year and are growing at the rate of over 3,000 new rules a year.
So the interventions of dozens of Departments, agencies and commissions regulate need rollback too. Along with deregulatory stimulus, the President should review all regulations on the books, and streamline and control the $1 trillion regulatory state.
Here again are things to do, in no particular order:
– Implement a bi-partisan “Regulatory Reduction Commission.”
– Re-discover federalism, that is, circumscribe the federal regulatory role regarding health and safety matters best left to states.
– Improve the ethic of quantifying regulatory costs, and selecting the least-cost compliance method.
– Codify Clinton’s executive order on “Regulatory Planning and Review” (E.O. 12866), or better, Reagan’s E.O. 12291.
– Require OMB’s Regulatory Information Service Center to publish number of major and minor rules produced by each agency, and strengthen its oversight.
– Reinstate the Regulatory Program of the U.S. Government, which used to appear routinely as a companion document to the Budget.
– Enlarge regulatory flexibility and exemptions for small business
– Declare Federal Register notices as insufficient notice to small business
– Hold hearings to boost the scope of the Small Business Administrations’ “r3” regulatory review program.
– Lower the threshold at which a point-of-order against unfunded mandates applies.
– Lower the threshold for what counts as an “economically significant” rule, and improve explicit cost analysis.
– Explore, hold hearings on, and devise a limited “regulatory budget.”
– Establish an annual Presidential address or statement on the state of regulation and its impact on productivity and GDP.
– Sunset regulations after fixed period unless explicit reauthorization is made. (It’s been said that regulations should expire like a carton of milk).
– Implement a supermajority requirement for extraordinarily costly mandates.
– Challenge and reject delegation of legislative authority from Congress to agencies; That is, require Congressional fast-track approval before major or non-quantifiable agency-promulgated regulations take effect.
Clearly many groups contend there’s a “crisis” in journalism, even to the extent of advocating government support of news organizations, despite the dangers inherent in the concept of government-funded ideas and their impact on critique and dissent.
Georgetown is hosting a conference today called “The Crisis In Journalism: What should Government Do,” (at which Adam Thierer is speaking), with the defining question, “How can government entities, particularly the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, help to form a sustainable 21st century model for journalism in the United States?”
We actually resolved the question of “What Government Should Do,” in a manner that influenced the entire world, with passage of the Bill of Rights and its First Amendment. The Constitution was ratified by nine states on June 21, 1788. Georgetown, your conference host, was founded January 23, 1789. As far as I can tell, Georgetown didn’t hold a “Crisis In Journalism” conference that week, even though there was little national media industry to speak of and thus much more of a prevailing crisis situation than today, when you stop and think of it.
Then the Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791–and still no Georgetown conference. Amazingly, at the time, our ancestors thought it appropriate for the federal government to establish a First Amendment and step aside, even though there were no TVs or radios, or Internet and websites, iPods, or stories broken by Twitter. There wasn’t even an FCC yet to ponder a “sustainable 19th century model for journalism in the United States.”
Media at that time barely existed compared to what we have today. Yet there was no crisis. Nor is there a crisis today.
What this feigned crisis signifies is, on the one hand, pure indulgence of a wealthy society struggling with “creative destruction” in media; and, on the other, the desire for more political control of information flows and public opinion rather than enshrinement of the only condition appropriate to a free society—the preservation of competing biases. These are ultimately far more important than pretended objectivity in both the preservation of our liberties and in the creation of “information wealth.” Too often, the class interest of intellectuals is statism (continue reading Schumpeter for details, I’m not doing it here); and the journalism industry, far from alone among myriad economic endeavors, is highly vulnerable to those same collectivist impulses.
Convincing the public and policymakers that media is in crisis is essential for progressives to maintain influence now: while progressives long since successfully established government agencies with broad political control over communications, today they find themselves desperate to maintain that slipping control in the era in which media abundance undermines those agencies’ very reason for being.
Outrageous and demeaning calls for public funding of journalism, public spaces, information commons, artificial “crises” and other such manipulative indulgences draw their energy from the flawed premise that capitalism and freedom are inimical to civil society and the diffusion of ideas, when they are instead the prerequisites. America established a First Amendment precisely because government and political machinery can threaten these precious values. Competition in creation of goods and services creates tangible wealth; competition in creation of ideas (including scientific research, yet another notion to discuss later) ultimately does the same and enhances liberties. Government funding removes the element of competition, on purpose.
This crisis is phony, except obviously for the specific businesses that are being upended. Media, information, journalism, whatever it gets called, can only be irreparably damaged by censorship, the only crisis to which journalism is ever vulnerable. But it also counts as censorship if progressives control information or succeed in funding it politically and prevent proprietary business models in the content, reporting and infrastructure of the future. A Bailout for the First Amendment is catastrophic policy, even if it’s advocates’ stated goals are merely to make us all enlightened (somewhat left-leaning?) citizens.
(Hat tip to my colleague Alex Nowrasteh for helping me find ratification dates.)
Here’s a case for private space exploration in the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, if we can ever get rid of NASA and the FAA, we might actually be able to have a space program. Remains to be seen.
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