Tag: Cato Institute

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Accountability general freedom local leaders term limits

Freedom in Granite

Governor Sununu, New Hampshire

“In the past two years,” the Cato Institute announced last January, “Governor [Chris] Sununu and the State of New Hampshire have topped Cato’s rankings for both our Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors and our recently released Freedom in the 50 States report.”

How? Why? 

The governor points to “a long history of local control,” insisting that “town meetings matter.” 

He also cites the state’s executive council which, along with the governor, publicly debates “every contract over $10,000,” as well as a two-​year gubernatorial term that “sucks” for him but gives citizens “all the say.”

Most of all, consider the sheer size of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives.

“When you have one of the largest parliamentary bodies in the free world with 400 members representing only 1.4 million people,” Gov. Sununu explains, “by definition” it has to be “one of the most representative bodies of government in the world.”

He elaborates that “they only get paid a hundred bucks a year. I mean, it’s like herding cats. Don’t get me wrong, it has its ups and downs. But that’s one state representative for about every 3,000 people. Like town selectmen, your representative in Concord is going to be somebody you know, somebody you see at the grocery store, somebody you can easily reach and who can hear you. It’s very different from other states where you have one person representing a district with tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

“Which means the control is really at the individual level,” Sununu adds, and “an individual citizen has much more say on how their taxes are spent or what’s going on in their schools or whether that pothole is going to get filled or not.” 

Sounds like citizens are more in charge.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government video

Video: No Child Left Behind

It’s been ten years. Federal government intervention into America’s local-​and-​state-​run public schools has spent a lot of money, but not resulted in much good, down at the student level:

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Bankrupted by Cushy Pension Contracts

Central Falls, Rhode Island, is not a large city. It is a town of under 20,000 people. And its government is broke, facing likely bankruptcy.

Municipal bankruptcies are not common. But they might become so. Why? The blame is easy to place: the proverbial gun-​under-​the-​table contracting foisted on small localities by state governments.

That’s what happened in Central Falls, anyway.

Even the New York Times has an idea of the underlying problem:

The city, just north of Providence, is small and poor, but over the years it has promised police officers and firefighters retirement benefits like those offered in big, rich states like California and New York. These uniformed workers can retire after just 20 years of service, receive free health care in retirement, and qualify for full disability pensions when only partly disabled.

Walter Olson, of the Cato Institute, elaborates on this account: “‘Promised’ is a word of art here, because the city wasn’t really making all of these concessions on a voluntary basis.…” The concessions to unions were, instead, forced on the town by “public-​sector arbitration” (which has almost nothing to do with private arbitration) that has led to a widespread “crisis in municipal finance,” which, the Times states, has brought one in four Rhode Island municipalities to the brink.

Olson makes the reasonable case that public-​sector employee unions are a very bad idea to begin with. The end comes either with serious reform or bankruptcy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

Ideas Semi-​Move the World

Ideas move the world. Want a better world, spread good ideas as widely as possible.

If you can expose enough people to the right ideas, everything will work out for the best, with an ever-​wider vista of freedom and achievement as the inevitable consequence. Right?

Well … not quite. Ideas and values don’t have any kind of independent existence. Individuals must accept and apply them. Hillary Clinton once admitted to being inspired by Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel celebrating freedom and entrepreneurship and attacking socialism. Yet Hillary still ended up trying to ram socialist health care down our throats. And she ain’t done yet.

Or take Vladimir Putin, the repressive semi-​post-​Communist Russian leader whose government just invaded the former satellite country of Georgia. The autocratic Putin is no Stalin, but he’s no Jefferson either … even if he did attend a Cato seminar on the values of a free society.

It’s true! I recently stumbled across a 2004 issue of Cato Policy Report, published by the libertarian Cato Institute. Ed Crane, Cato’s president, reported that during a long meeting with Putin, Crane and others discussed the benefits of a free press and concerns that the Russian government was repressing the media. Putin seemed open to a more across-​the-​board freedom. He even said he wanted to “make Moscow the center of liberal debate in Europe.”

Really? Try a little harder, Vlad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Bad for Monopolists

The political class hates term limits. It’s official. A new Cato study, “Defining Democracy Down: Explaining the Campaign to Repeal Term Limits,” shows how relentlessly career politicians and their allies have opposed legislative term limits over the years.

The career politicians hate term limits because under term limits their legislative monopolies collapse. Basham observes that “the absence of term limits severely limits the competition for legislative seats. In Idaho, for example, the 2000 election saw 66 percent of state senators and 50 percent of state house members elected without opposition.” No opponent at all. But in states that do have term limits, electoral competition happens regularly.

Basham says repeal efforts usually fail “because they have been led by those who are seemingly intent on preserving their professional advantages and institutional perks regardless of ‘common good’ considerations. Only once have such efforts passed voter inspection.” But the “voter inspection” in question, a referendum in Idaho, was clouded by a confusingly-​worded ballot question.

The experience in Idaho suggests that term limits need to be passed as constitutional amendments, rather than as mere statutes. Legislators can repeal a term-​limits statute unilaterally, but they must ask voters to roll back a constitutional amendment. And voters tend not to play along. And that, for the political class, is what makes term limits and robust democracy so very bad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.