David Boaz

An illuminating way to measure the vastness of government regulations:

Another way to measure the government’s size is by the length of its rule book, the Code of Federal Regulations. It is now as long as 95 King James Bibles….

In all, the Code of Federal Regulations has grown by 16,500 pages under Obama. Nine Bibles.

Rep. Tom McClintock tells David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post what economists mean by “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs”:

This Congress has also indulged in the habit of letting “temporary” giveaways become effectively permanent. A prime example is the Essential Air Service, a $240 million program that subsidizes flights to 161 small airports.

It was supposed to die in 1988. It didn’t.

Congress has renewed the program, again and again. Now it subsidizes flights to places such as tiny Glendive, Mont., where the government pays for a 19-seat aircraft to visit twice a day.

On average, two people get on each day. The subsidy works out to $836 for each of their tickets.

“If we can’t cut this, we can’t cut anything,” said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), who sponsored an attempt to kill the program last summer.

They can’t cut this.

McClintock’s amendment lost by 74 votes. Then he tried again this summer. And lost. Many members explained their “no” votes by saying they were unwilling to sacrifice the subsidies to airports in their districts. “It’s that old problem of concentrated benefits with diffuse costs. The benefits are lavished on a few select communities, and the costs are diffused across the entire tax base,” McClintock said afterward. The beneficiaries, he said, are the only ones who care enough to fight.

David Fahrentold reports in the Washington Post:

[P]ork, the habit of using taxpayer money for a legislator’s pet cause…. appears to be stronger even than death.

That’s clear from the story of the Robert C. Byrd Highway, a decades-old road project in West Virginia that had received earmarked funds for years from Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest-serving senator in history, who died in 2010.

The highway has been maligned as a wasteful road to nowhere. But, now, it has outlived earmarks. It has even outlived Byrd.

This year, with continued support from Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) the highway got $40 million in federal money. It will need about that much every year, state officials say, until it’s finished in 2035.

“What’s important for the libertarian movement in general is to develop and promote the principles of liberty and limited government.”

David Boaz told this year’s Cato University that libertarians have a record to be proud of, and a record to build on.

In a report on the latest of President Obama’s attempts to circumvent Congress and govern by decree – this time by getting the Federal Communications Commission to raise “fees” on cellphone users by billions of dollars to expand federal subsidies for high-speed Internet access in local schools – the Washington Post also lets us know what the president thinks of revelations that the National Security Agency is scooping up all our emails and Internet traffic. We found out only later, though the president presumably knew back on June 6, that contrary to what we were told at the time, government officials also read some of the email. 

And what does the president think of these revelations that set off the “debate” he’s so supportive of? He thinks they’re “noise” getting in the way of announcements of programs that are, though of dubious constitutionality, “real and meaningful”:

On the same day of Obama’s visit [to a school to announce his ConnectEd program], news reports were dominated by details of a wide-ranging National Security Agency surveillance program that has since become one of the major controversies of the president’s second term.

As Air Force One flew toward North Carolina that day, Obama lamented to his education secretary that one of the administration’s biggest ideas was going to be overtaken by other news.

“I remember him sort of saying, ‘It’s a shame that there’s going to be a focus on the noise rather than something that’s real and meaningful,’ ” [Arne] Duncan said.

Taxpayers in the District of Columbia have agreed – well, their agreement has been attested to by the mayor – to pony up $150 million to build a new stadium for D.C. United, the Major League Soccer team owned by Indonesian media magnate Erick Thohir. And just in case money isn’t enough to get the job done, the city administrator has made clear that the mayor has other tools in his kit:

A top District official reiterated Wednesday that the city is prepared to seize land in court to build a new soccer stadium after questions emerged over the ownership of a key plot needed for the project backed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray and D.C. United’s owners.

City Administrator Allen Y. Lew said the District was ready to exercise eminent domain should it be unable to come to terms with the current owners of the proposed site. “That’s always out there, that the mayor has the power to do that,” he said at a news conference Wednesday. “We’d like to work this out in an amicable way.”

Eminent domain. That is, taking land by force. For a soccer stadium. 

I am reminded of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s scathing dissent in the case of Kelo v. New London:

Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded–i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public–in the process….

The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory….

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.

The Founders may well not have intended this perverse result. But alas, O’Connor was writing in dissent. Five justices of the Supreme Court upheld the taking of Susette Kelo’s home to give it to Pfizer. And now, the owners of the Super Salvage scrap yard know that “nothing is to prevent the State” from taking their property to benefit “citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process.”

It’s one thing to argue that the Founders intended to give the government the power to take private property “for public use,” such as a military installation, a road, or a school. But for a corporate office park? Or a soccer stadium? The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.

David Boaz - http://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz

Books:
The Politics of Freedom: Taking on the Left, the Right, and Threats to Our Liberties
Libertarianism: A Primer

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