Law

The new CIA scandal

by on March 12, 2014 at 8:11 am in Current Affairs, Law, Political Science | Permalink

I don’t feel I have an original or substantive point to make on this matter, but it is worthy of note nonetheless.  I was favorably impressed with Dana Milbank’s opinion piece today.  This is a Richard Nixon-kind of scandal, the CIA does report to the Executive Branch, and so far I haven’t seen the attempt to set things right or even clarify what has happened.  Milbank writes:

If the White House wishes to repair the damage, it would declassify without further delay the report done by Feinstein’s committee — along with the Panetta Review. If the White House won’t, Feinstein’s panel and others would be justified in holding up CIA funding and nominations and conducting public hearings.

Obama also should remove those people involved in spying on the Senate panel and in harassing Senate staffers. First out should be Robert Eatinger, the CIA’s acting general counsel. Previously, Eatinger had been a lawyer in the unit that conducted the interrogation program at the heart of the Senate’s probe. Eatinger, Feinstein said, filed a “crimes report” with the Justice Department suggesting that congressional staffers had stolen the Panetta Review.

If somehow you haven’t been following the issue, here is what is up:

California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, has been an ally of Obama and a staunch defender of the administration during the controversy over the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. So her credibility could not be questioned when she went public, reluctantly, to accuse Obama’s CIA of illegal and unconstitutional actions: violating the separation of powers by searching the committee’s computers and intimidating congressional staffers with bogus legal threats.

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John B. Judis on *Genesis*

by on March 12, 2014 at 7:29 am in Books, History, Law, Political Science | Permalink

The subtitle of his book is Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.  I am finding this book interesting, here is one good bit:

The call for a greater Syria reflected the prevailing sentiment among Palestine’s Arab intellectuals.  Some notables who were active in the Muslim-Christian Associations wanted an Arab Palestine within the British Empire, but many of the activists and intellectuals, inspired by Faisal’s success, envisaged Palestine as “Southern Syria.”

…There was a good geographical as well as political argument for greater Syria.  As subsequent events would reveal, Palestine lacked natural boundaries, especially in the north and south.  There were looming disputes over water rights that could be avoided by combining Palestine and Syria.

…The British, fearful that the movement for a greater Syria would undercut their hold over Palestine, encouraged Palestine’s Arabs to think of themselves as Palestinian.

Overall the text offers a strongly non-sentimental account, does not whitewash any of the participants in the disputes, and it communicates how much early American policymakers , including Truman, were skeptical about what ended up happening.  Today’s often-unquestioned assumptions were very often historically quite contingent.  You can buy the book here.

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The John Goodman health care plan

by on March 12, 2014 at 3:14 am in Economics, Law, Medicine, Uncategorized | Permalink

Here is one part of it:

There is something else we could do to promote universal health insurance: We could allow everyone — regardless of income — to enroll in Medicaid, and at the same time allow everyone on Medicaid to leave the program, claim the tax credit, and buy private insurance. This, of course, is the “public option” that the Left has been clamoring for. It’s hard to understand why conservatives are so resistant to it: If a private insurer can’t outperform Medicaid, it doesn’t deserve to be in the market.

The specific tax-credit levels I am proposing are the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the cost of enrolling new people in Medicaid. Under my proposal, people who are already eligible could use their tax credit to buy in, no questions asked, but people with higher incomes might have to pay a premium on top of their tax credit if they have higher-than-average expected costs. Health status wouldn’t be considered, but age and other factors would be. To prevent gaming of the system, no one would be able to move from one plan to another at a premium that is way below his total expected costs. (See below.)

This proposal may appear to be unconservative, but in fact it is consistent with minimizing the role of government. Medicaid would be an insurer of last resort, but, beyond their uniform tax credit, people who are not poor but enroll in Medicaid would not be getting an entitlement. They would have to pay their own way.

The full post is here.

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Summers, Lomborg, Tabarrok, and Cowen on climate change

by on March 11, 2014 at 1:41 am in Economics, Law, Science | Permalink

There was a brief symposium, here are the results:

Larry Summers

President Emeritus of Harvard University, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank

My sense is that cap and trade is not the route to the future. It did not make it politically in the US at a moment of great opportunity in 2009. And European carbon markets have been plagued by constant problems. And globally it’s even harder. My sense is that the right strategy has three major elements. First, as the G20 vowed in 2009, there needs to be a concerted phase out of fossil fuel subsidies. This would help government budgets, drive increases in economic efficiency and substantially reduce global emissions. Second, there needs to be assurance of adequate funding for all areas of basic energy research. As a practical matter my guess is the world will produce non fossil fuel power in the next 25 years at today s fossil fuel prices or it will fail with respect to global climate change. Third, there is a strong case for concerted carbon taxes to further discourage greenhouse gas emissions. But this is a follow-on step for after the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.

Bjorn Lomborg

Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School

The only way to move towards a long-term reduction in emissions is if green energy becomes much cheaper. If it cost less than fossil fuels, everyone would switch, including the Chinese. This, of course, requires breakthroughs in green technologies and much more innovation.

At the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate (fixtheclimate.com), a panel of economists, including three Nobel laureates, found that the best long-term strategy to tackle global warming was to increase dramatically investment in green research and development. They suggested doing so 10-fold to $100bn a year globally. This would equal 0.2% of global GDP. Compare this to the EU’s climate policies, which cost $280 billion a year but reduce temperatures by a trivial 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Alex Tabarrok

Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University

Neither the developed nor the developing world will accept large reductions in their standard of living. As a result, the only solution to global climate change is innovations in green technology. A carbon tax will induce innovation as people demand a way to avoid the tax. A carbon tax, however, will be more politically acceptable if technologies to avoid the tax are in existence before the tax is put into place. Prizes for green innovations can blaze a path down a road that must be traveled, making the trip easier. The L-prize successfully induced innovation in LED technologies, the X-Prize put a spacecraft into near space twice within two weeks and Google’s Lunar X prize for putting a robot on the moon is close to being awarded. Prizes have proven their worth. To speed both the creation and diffusion of green technology, green prizes should be awarded at the rate of $100-$200 million annually.

Tyler Cowen

Professor of Economics, George Mason University

This is a problem we are failing to solve. Keep in mind it is not just about getting the wealthy countries to switch to greener technologies, but we also desire that emerging economies will find green technology more profitable than dirty coal. A carbon tax is one way forward but the odds are that will not be enough and besides many countries are unlikely to adopt one anytime soon. Subsidies for technology could occur at a very basic level and we could make a gamble that nuclear fusion will finally pay off. We also need a version of green technology that will fit into existing energy infrastructures and into countries which do not have the most reliable institutions. The most likely scenario is that we will find out just how bad the climate change problem is slated to be.

There are further responses at the link.

Addendum: Ashok Rao adds comments.

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Constitutions Quantified

by on March 8, 2014 at 7:31 am in History, Law, Political Science | Permalink

The Comparative Constitutions Project has collected data from 720 of the 800 or so constitutions written since 1789. The shortest constitution, for example, is that of Jordan at 2,270 words while the longest is that of India which at 146,385 words is more than twice as long as the next longest constitution and considerable longer than the US File:Magna charta cum statutis angliae p1.jpgconstitution at 7,762 words. The New Zealand constitution grants the fewest rights, namely zero, while the Bolivian constitution grants the most rights at 88.

Among the rights in the Bolivian constitution are “Every person has the right to health.” That does seem ambitious, although I cannot guarantee the translation perhaps it says health care in the original? There are also rights to homes, sewers, and telecommunication services. I cannot go along with those but I do think this is an advance:

Neither the public authority, nor any person or body may intercept private conversations or communications by an installation that monitors or centralized them.

Venezuela offers almost as many rights in its constitution as Bolivia, 81 according to the data. Nevertheless, I think I would feel more secure in my rights living in New Zealand than Bolivia or Venezuela. A constitution with a long list of rights is a bit like a prenup with a long list of rights, looks good on parchment but parchment does not a marriage or a constitution make.

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Your porn is not Canadian enough

by on March 8, 2014 at 6:10 am in Film, Law, Television | Permalink

For failing to broadcast sufficient levels of Canadian-made pornography — and failing to close-caption said pornography properly — a trio of Toronto-based erotica channels has earned a reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television & Telecommunications Commission.

Wednesday, the CRTC issued a broadcast notice saying AOV Adult Movie Channel, XXX Action Clips and the gay-oriented Maleflixxx were all failing to reach the required 35% threshold for Canadian content.

Based on a 24-hour broadcast schedule, that translates to about 8.5 hours of Canadian erotica a day.

There is more here, and for the pointer I thank TH.

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Sentences to ponder heroin markets in everywhere

by on March 8, 2014 at 3:57 am in Economics, Law | Permalink

Stephanie Predel, a stick-thin 23-year-old freshly out of jail, said she was off heroin. But she knows precisely where she could get more drugs if she ever wanted them — at the support meetings for addicts.

“I can get most of my drugs right at the meeting,” she said. “Drug dealers go because they know they’re going to get business.” She added, “People are going into the bathroom to get high.”

Bennington, a pre-Revolutionary town of 17,000 people, presents another face of the heroin epidemic that has swept through Vermont.

There is more here.  This article suggests that the crackown on prescription drug abuse helped fuel a surge of interest in heroin.  And here is a story on Vermonters for a New Economy.

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Daniel Drezner on sanctions against Russia

by on March 7, 2014 at 1:24 pm in Current Affairs, History, Law, Political Science, Uncategorized | Permalink

The piece is here, here is one excerpt:

The only case of economic coercion succeeding in a similar case in history was the 1956 Suez crisis. In that case, Britain, France, and Israel withdrew their forces from the Suez Canal following a U.S.-inspired run on the pound sterling. Except that the Suez case is not at all similar to Russia/Crimea. Britain was a treaty ally of the United States; not so much with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Suez was far away from British soil; the Crimea is just across the Sea of Azov. And, perhaps most importantly, Britain was in a fragile economic state trying to protect a fixed exchange rate. Russia’s economy has its problems, but a shortage of hard currency reserves ain’t one of them.

So the conditions under which sanctions would force Russia’s hand in Ukraine are far from ideal. The proposed sanctions coalition is equally flawed, however, as my FP colleague Colum Lynch has noted. European Union leaders are not exactly keen on the idea of broad-based economic sanctions, for understandable reasons. Britain needs Russian finance capital; the rest of Europe needs Russian energy. France is traditionally the most hawkish country in Europe, but that country is too busy planning to export warships to Russia to organize European sanctions.

And here is Dan’s conclusion:

Sorry, but the fact remains that sanctions will not force Russia out of the Crimea. This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be imposed. Indeed, there are two excellent reasons why the United States should orchestrate and then implement as tough a set of sanctions on Russia as it can muster. First, this problem is going to crop up again…

Second, while sanctions cannot solve this problem on their own, they can be part of the solution. Over the long term, Russia does need to export energy to finance its government and fuel economic growth. Even if planned sanctions won’t bite in the present, the anticipation of tougher economic coercion to come is a powerful lever in international bargaining.

My earlier post on Drezner on sanctions is here.

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How many of the previously uninsured have signed up for Obamacare?

by on March 7, 2014 at 4:40 am in Current Affairs, Economics, Law, Medicine, Uncategorized | Permalink

Amy Goldstein reports:

The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal, according to a pair of new surveys.

Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the newmarketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look.

…The McKinsey survey shows that of people who had signed up for coverage through the marketplaces by last month, about one-fourth described themselves as having been without insurance for most of the past year. That 27 percent, while low, compares with 11 percent a month earlier.

There is more here.  You will note that a low rate of sign-up is distinct from a rate of sign-up skewed toward the elderly and the sick.  In this sense we still do not know how the new law is doing, though in a broader sense a low rate of sign-up should not be considered good news.

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The History of Ethno-National Referendums 1791-2011

by on March 7, 2014 at 2:03 am in Current Affairs, History, Law, Political Science, Uncategorized | Permalink

That is the title of a useful article by Matt Qvortrup (or here, both possibly gated).  Here is one excerpt:

To be sure, the British were not adverse to using the referendum as a tactical means of international politics (for example, in the case of the referendum in Moldova in 1857 — where the referendum was a convenient excuse to curb the influence of the Russian Empire after the Crimean War).  Here at the request of the British, a poll was held to unify the two territories Moldavia and Walachia (previously an area that had been under Turkish Suzerainty, though often dominated by Russia) under the name Romania.  However, it should be noted that the referendum was anything but free and fair; “Intimidations and arrests were not infrequent” and up to “nine-tenth of the population were denied the right to vote,” and that the vote only was held after some “bizarres manoevres diplomatiques.”

Here is an older (free) historical book on the employment of plebiscites to determine sovereignty.  Here is the new, well-timed, and not free March 2014 book by Matt Qvortrupp, on same topic.  Qvortrup, by the way, helped design the referendum for South Sudan.

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Bureaucracies can act swiftly when they wish to

by on March 6, 2014 at 10:43 am in Current Affairs, History, Law, Political Science | Permalink

Russia’s takeover of Crimea is already so complete that commercial flights to Kiev from the region’s main airport, located outside Simferopol, the regional capital 50 miles from Sevastopol, now leave from the international terminal instead of the domestic one as they did until last week.

There is more here.

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Strange sentences about Mexico and China (and other places too)

by on March 6, 2014 at 4:31 am in Current Affairs, Economics, Law | Permalink

Mexican security officials this week launched a major crackdown on the cartel’s business smuggling iron ore to China, which another senior government figure confirmed had become more profitable for the Knights Templar than drug running.

There is an FT article here.  The smuggling accounted for 44 percent of the iron ore produced in Mexico.  And why smuggle iron ore?  The New York Times adds:

Chinese buyers, law enforcement officials have said, have been pressured into buying ore from the gang under threats.

Furthermore many of the mines were not legally registered or the iron ore was stolen.  There is more detail here, and here is another exotic sentence:

In a scene that could have been imagined by Gabriel García Márquez, last Christmas three Sinaloa drug cartel members were arrested in a cock fighting farm close to Manila.

The broader question here is whether “drug gangs” could find new outlets for their shenanigans, if drugs were to be legalized or decriminalized.  For more on that you can read this older MR post.

By the way, via Craig Richardson, here are photos of a Chinese ghost town in Angola.:

Kilamba is an enormous and largely empty housing development 30 km (18 miles) from Luanda,the capital city of Angola, designed to accommodate 500,000 people, with a dozen schools and other facilities. As of July 2012 only 212 houses had been sold, due to difficulties in obtaining mortgages. The cost is reported as US$3.5 billion, financed by a Chinese credit line and repaid by the Angolan government with oil.  The city of Kilamba is a government project that coincides with President Jose Eduardo dos Santos 2008 election pledge to build one million homes in four years. (He just didn’t promise people would live there.)

And what happened to Hong Kong and Tibet?

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Markets in Everything: Prostitution for Beginners

by on March 5, 2014 at 2:48 pm in Economics, Law | Permalink

The Guardian: An enterprising association of sex workers in Barcelona has angered some of Spain’s most prominent feminists by offering an “intro to prostitution” course in response to what its members say is a growing number of women turning to sex work in the wake of Spain’s financial crisis.

…Four hours was too little time, she said, to cover a list of topics such as dealing with the stigma of prostitution, sex tricks, filing tax returns and marketing. A second day will be held this month because of high demand. “Nobody else can teach these things,” said Borrell. “Not psychologists, anthropologists or political scientists – only prostitutes.”

In related stories, this piece on the legal, mega-brothels of Germany is well produced.

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Can too much cultural similarity cause war?

by on March 5, 2014 at 1:35 pm in Current Affairs, History, Law, Political Science | Permalink

Akos Lada has a new research paper (pdf) on this question:

Does sharing the same religion, civilization or racial proximity lead to more peaceful relations between countries? This paper argues that cultural similarity can actually cause wars, which occur to combat diffusion. This new theory of war combines the models of Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) and Fearon (1995), and shows that cultural similarity can lead to more warfare when old elites are afraid of losing their position to a newly inspired citizenry, as these elites try to destroy the external source of inspiration. The microfoundation for inspiration is derived from revealed information about the income level under given institutions, which are assumed to have positive correlation with cultural proximity. On the empirical side, I present case studies on the 1848 Revolutions, the 2013 Korean Crisis (using content analysis of official North Korean articles) and on the First World War, as well as statistical analysis on all the wars of the last two centuries.

Here is Lada’s blog post on Ukraine and Russia.  Excerpt:

Perhaps because a more democratic Ukrainian government may serve as an example to Russian citizens of how culturally-similar people can be alternatively governed. As history shows, a dictator with an army does not wait for this to happen.

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Should we extend EITC to childless workers?

by on March 4, 2014 at 1:19 pm in Current Affairs, Economics, Law, Uncategorized | Permalink

Jason Furmans says yes, here is one bit:

Looking back at the history of poverty and the tax code in the last several decades reveals some important lessons for expanding opportunity and combating poverty going forward, including the value of having a pro-work, pro-family tax code. The most important new prospect in this area is expanding such an approach for households without children, a proposal that President Obama included in his 2015 budget, and an idea that is also being advanced across the political spectrum, from Senator Marco Rubio to Bush Administration economist Glenn Hubbard to Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution.

It becomes more analytical after that.  Here are some further basic facts about EITC extension.  Here is a 2009 study (pdf).

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