I was even willing to let this confused blather slip by unaddressed:

America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.

Bono is referring to some recent remarks by President Obama and trying, by definition futilely, to justify his absurd, outrageous and offensive winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever — generally speaking, I only value musicians' opinions when they're discussing music.

But a few minutes later I came across a blogpost praising some other thoughts about "America as an idea" — also in the context of a Nobel Prize:

[I]t is all too apparent that financial obligations associated with social entitlements intended to solve welfare problems and advance public welfare threaten the viability of basic monetary and financial institutions. In my judgment, American democracy is at risk. Why has a flood of crises inundated the United States of America and other democracies in the contemporary world?

Perhaps the answer is to be found in the superficial way we think about citizenship in democratic societies. How people conduct themselves as they directly relate to one another in the ordinary exigencies of life is much more fundamental to a democratic way of life than the principle of "one person, one vote, majority rule." Person-to-person, citizen-to-citizen relationships are what life in democratic society is all about. Democratic ways of life turn on self-organizing and self-governing capabilities rather than presuming that something called "the Government" governs.

That is Vincent Ostrom, husband of the co-winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and written in 1997, long before the current "flood of crises" in American "basic monetary and financial institutions."

These two quotes — Bono and Ostrom — both verbatim, reminded me of another quote — well, misquote — that circles around libertarian cyberspace every so often.

Ostrom is basically re-stating that infamous faux quote repeatedly (and incorrectly) attributed to de Tocqueville, that "the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

Stated differently:

"How people conduct themselves as they directly relate to one another in the ordinary exigencies of life is much more fundamental to a democratic way of life than the principle of 'one person, one vote, majority rule.'"

Which is to say that "America qua idea" (cf., Bono's op-ed) is less about raw democracy for its own sake, and more about freedom — freedom to own and control property, freedom of contract (including the freedom to refuse a contract, such as health insurance), freedom to decide one's own charitable giving (rather than to have it forced upon you via taxes and subsidies), freedom to experiment entrepreneurially, freedom to take risks (but not subsidized risks), etc.

Which, yes, includes the reciprocal freedoms: freedom to fail, freedom to regret one's choices, freedom to be gullible, freedom to be weak-willed. Etc.

All of which is fundamentally incompatible with unbridled democracy — which, one more time, is at the end of the day nothing more than mob rule. The fact that the mob — or Bono — may consider itself "well-intended" or "enlightened" is utterly irrelevant.

America is indeed an idea. Or at least it was. Once upon a time…

Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety. The panel said that without such a plan, conditions would continue to deteriorate and inmates might regularly die of suicide or lack of proper care.
…
Federal judges have already ruled that the state's failure to provide medical and mental health care is killing at least one inmate every month and has subjected inmates to cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Constitution.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, who has no shortage of creative views regarding constitutional law and the role of the judiciary, denounced the ("activist"?) judges and vowed an appeal to the Supreme Court if necessary.

From a libertarian perspective, there are distinct pre- and post-Bayesian lessons from the overcrowding fiasco. The initial question must of course be why California is putting so many people in prison — especially people whose release "would have no adverse impact on public safety" — in the first place? Could it be the War on Drug Users? Could it be anything other than the War on Drug Users?

Meanwhile, taken strictly as an un-libertarian fact that these prisoner-creating laws are on the books in California, the next question becomes why the state is not adequately funding the legitimate public good of "prisons"?

Yet again we see government, especially state and local government, funding any and every illegitimate expenditure that any and every two-bit moral defective activist legislator can concoct, but when it comes to one of those rare true public goods — prisons — suddenly the money runs out. Compare to NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, in the midst of a fiscal collapse, proudly showing off taxpayer-funded "NYC-brand" condoms and Barney Frank's relentless Sunday-morning hysterics about his district laying off police and firefighters.

Two wrongs make, not a right, but a very-wrong. This pathetic situation is one anti-libertarian government failure after another: Too many crimes, too many prisoners, too many distractions from proper public goods, too many excuses to violate the Eighth Amendment.

But at least they're eradicating gay marriage, right?

The case is Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, NO. CIV S-90-0520 (E.D.Cal., February 9, 2009) (PDF – 10 pages). More thoughts at Sentencing Law & Policy.

Previously:
–Libertarianism on the Retreat!
–Splitting the Ninth Circuit, Revisited
–U.K. Runs Out of Jail Cells
–Are Juries "Too Expensive"?

There is also a Bayesian question of sorts: Take a commitment to a stimulus package as a given (for better or worse). The subsequent debate — which seems to be the dominant debate at the moment — is how best to undertake such a stimulus. One-time tax rebate checks, ongoing reductions in marginal tax rates, business credits, "shovel-ready" public works projects, or something else entirely?

President Obama and most Democratic politicians — enabled by high-profile Keynesian talking heads, including Paul Krugman — seem to have settled mostly on everybody's new favorite word: infrastructure.

The stimulus apologists like "infrastructure" because it includes a built-in talking point for the economically illiterate: the notion that "at least something's there when you're done." As Mark Thoma notes, with a hint of snark:

Tax cuts won’t build schools, or any other public good.

Of course, whether something constitutes a legitimate public good is a question generally independent of general economic conditions. If Project X* is a legitimate public good today, then it was likely also a public good yesterday — so why didn't the "enlightened" politicians build it yesterday? A recession does not turn a boondoggle into a public good.

Meanwhile, the pro-infrastructure crowd also likes to ignore some other issues with regard to public works projects. As I noted in comments at Fly Bottle and Austrian Economists:

The pro-infrastructure crowd is also treating all infrastructure spending as: (1) homogeneous, (2) exempt from political influences, rent-seeking, corruption, etc., and (3) exempt from the law of diminishing marginal utility.

It is true, for example, that "tax cuts won't build schools."

It is therefore also true that tax cuts won't build schools that are too big, or too close to an already existing school, or have an Olympic-sized pool "because it would be nice," or a top-of-the-line football field "because the other school has one," or…

And a second Hoover Dam right in front of the first one is hardly a worthwhile infrastructure project.

Simply chanting "Infrastructure!" as if it were a get-out-of-debate-free card is hardly Nobel or Ivy League thinking.

Another commenter responds:

Are you suggesting that private enterprise wouldn't do this, either? Look, go around and find some private schools and I'm sure you'll find some that are too big, too close to an already existing school, wasting money on an Olympic pool.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that because private enterprise tends to be more efficient than government, private enterprise is usually efficient. No one who's ever worked at a poorly run company would say that — even if it was a successful poorly-run company, and they certainly exist.

Talk about context-dropping!

The funny thing about private enterprise is that it's private. If I want a television in every room of my home, then I am free to buy them — but not with your tax dollars. If I build a private school with private money, and it happens to be too big, then only those with whom I deal privately are affected — and they have recourse.

A poorly-run company eventually goes out of business. A poorly-run government merely reaches deeper into your pocket for more "infrastructure."

(*With all due respect to the original Project X.)

—

Speaking of "schools as infrastructure" —

School spending accounts for about one-sixth of the $825 billion economic recovery package, which also includes money for health care, energy, highway projects and tax cuts.

Is anyone seriously going to suggest that there will be no waste, no politicking and no diminishing marginal utility after over $100 billion in new spending on schools, on top of all the old spending on schools? Seriously?

UPDATE: Ahem —

Milwaukee Public Schools would reap $88.6 million over two years for new construction under the economic stimulus package just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives — even though the district has 15 vacant school buildings, a large surplus of property and no plans for new construction.
…
The amounts for MPS are particularly eye-catching, and not only because they are the largest in the state. Enrollment is declining every year, and the last major wave of construction in MPS — the $102 million Neighborhood School Initiative launched in 2000 – resulted in projects that are underused, have not met enrollment projections or have closed.

So let us indeed agree: A tax cut can't build a school. Thank goodness.

Previously:
–On the Calls for an Infrastructure Stimulus
–More on Obama's "New WPA"
–On Krugman on "Niggling"

New York State's perpetually mismanaged Metropolitan Transportation Authority, along with its bought-and-paid-for lackeys in Albany, are unfortunately now leapfrogging even further away from this rudimentary principle of fiscal propriety:

The regional mobility tax — 33 cents on every $100 of payroll — would provide $1.5 billion a year, and the tolls would produce $600 million in net revenue a year ($1 billion a year in gross revenue minus expenses)[.] The new revenue streams would help finance borrowing for a $30 billion-to-$35 billion M.T.A. capital plan for 2010 to 2014 that would help stimulate the economy while maintaining vital infrastructure.

Read that again: A bureaucrat is actually brazen enough to suggest that imposing a new tax "would help stimulate the economy." The Great Liberal Delusion™: that an economy can ever tax its way into prosperity.

And not just any tax — a payroll tax. A tax that specifically targets the working poor that New York's off-the-scale liberals pretend to care about (in much the same way that Washington's off-the-scale liberals pretend to care about the working poor when they cheer on Social Security).

Be sure to reject outright of course any flunk-the-final insistence that "businesses will pay the tax and not workers." Businesses never pay taxes; they only remit them. Only individuals pay taxes — either through higher prices, lower wages or reduced profits. With a payroll tax, that burden of course falls on the workers. To help "stimulate" them. Somehow.

The other fraud that apologists are foisting upon the economically illiterate is that this disconnected payroll tax is justified by the future growth that expanding and improving mass transit will generate. Consider the ever-reliable defenders of ever more and ever bigger tax-and-spend governance — the New York Times editorial board:

The cost of a vibrant city, fed by its daily influx of commuters, should be shared by others who benefit. That means drivers, who face less traffic because so many other people leave their cars at home. And businesses that can draw employees from across the metropolitan area should also contribute.

Again, a city cannot tax itself into "vibrancy" and businesses will not "contribute" the new payroll tax — employees will.

But there is another aspect to this con, a sort of intertemporal bait-and-switch. If expanding or improving mass transit makes a city more "vibrant" tomorrow, or allows a business to attract more customers tomorrow, then government revenues should increase — tomorrow. More people riding subways and buses means more fares paid, more business means more sales taxes and business taxes, more employment means more income taxes. Tomorrow. So overlaying an entirely new tax today, based on (purported) benefits tomorrow, is simply illegitimate — because those (purported) benefits will now be taxed twice: today via the new payroll tax and tomorrow via the boring old taxes that we already know and hate.

In conclusion, let's go back to the Times and first principles:

Almost every commuter recognizes that a fare increase is inevitable, but [a 23% increase] is unnecessarily onerous.

Why is it "especially onerous" to expect those who use infrastructure to be the ones who pay for it? Raising the subway and bus fare from the current $2 to $3 would be a 50% increase — and yet still far from "onerous." (Again, if the concern is the poor, then the answer is means-tested vouchers, not new taxes that transfer wealth from all non-users, including the poor, to all users, including the non-poor. It's absurd.)

Previously:
–Who Should Pay for Mass Transit? (Part One)
–Who Should Pay for Mass Transit? (Part Two)
–If You Don't Live in NYC…
–Why Should There Be Municipal Golf Courses?
–Are Public Libraries Really Public Goods?

"You can't run a museum if you have to accept everything, right?"

Right — Which is exactly why the government should not be running museums in the first place.

As for the outcome of this bizarre case, I think Chief Corky Roberts summed it up best:

"You're really just picking your poison. The more you say that the monument is 'government speech' to get out of the Free Speech Clause, the more you're walking into a trap under the Establishment Clause. … What is the government doing supporting the Ten Commandments?"

See also Dalia Lithwick's apocrypha:

Summum isn't before the court as a religion case. It was brought as a free speech case, and, as Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice learns about three minutes into oral argument this morning, if he wins this case as a result of the court's free speech jurisprudence, he will be back in five years to lose it under the court's religion doctrine. The more zealously the city claims ownership of its Ten Commandments monument, the more it looks to be promoting religion in violation of the Constitution's Establishment Clause.

Sounds exactly right. Stay tuned…

Previously:
–Linkfest: Two More Decalogue Cases

The high cost of fuel, along with traffic and airport congestion, is drawing travelers back to trains for commuting and for travel between cities as much as 500 miles apart.

Californians are considering selling billions of dollars worth of bonds to start on an 800-mile system of bullet trains that could travel at 200 miles per hour, linking San Francisco and San Diego and the cities in between. In the Midwest, transportation officials are pushing a plan to connect cities in nine states in a hub-and-spoke system centered in Chicago.

The public is way ahead of policymakers in recognizing trains as an attractive alternative to cars and planes, said Representative James L. Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. "I think we're at a transformational point in intercity passenger rail service," Mr. Oberstar said.

Representative Oberstar does a lot of thinking about transportation and infrastructure — and most of his thinking is wrong. But that's a whole other blogpost.

The point here, while still in "freshman economics" mode, is to remember that fuel costs are irrelevant to the core question of whether passenger rail is a public good. It isn't.

To be a public good (i.e., worthy of government provision and taxpayer funding), the good must be non-excludable. But of course passenger rail is excludable — you need a ticket. This is not a complicated concept.

At most, passenger rail approaches the status of "club good," because service is, to some extent, non-rivalrous: my boarding a train does not prevent you from boarding it to (ignoring capacity constraints, of course).

Furthermore, since a passenger train only truly benefits those who actually use it, it is fiscally perverse to force taxpayers, most of whom will not use it, to pay for it.

The absurdity of taxpayer-subsidized non-public goods reaches its apex when the taxpayers not only "do not use" the non-public good, but actually "can not use" it:

Critics say it is unfair to require people in areas where there is no Amtrak service or infrequent service to subsidize the train travel of people in the few corridors where there is frequent, fast service. "I do not think you can justify many, perhaps most, of the routes Amtrak is running," Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, said in a Senate debate last month.

Sessions' lament is true enough, but it's more of a sufficient condition for impropriety rather than a necessary condition. Someone who lives in, for example, New York City, with its Amtrak hub, but who still doesn't use Amtrak, is as much a victim of the fiscal perversion of taxpayer subsidization as a taxpayer in the backwoods of Alabama where there is no Amtrak station anywhere in the vicinity. To tax anyone who does not use a non-public good to subsidize anyone who does use it is an illegitimate government action.

(Progressives, and perhaps even some classical liberals, might suggest that taxpayer subsidization of the poor who use a non-public good is appropriate as part of a general "social safety net" program. But the way to implement that kind of subsidization would be personal vouchers to lower-income riders, not broad subsidies to the entity itself. In the case of passenger rail, the more likely outcome of general subsidies if of course to redistribute income from lower-income taxpayers to higher-income taxpayers. After all, who is more likely to ride Amtrak or a commuter train — the lower-income taxpayer or the higher-income?)

The status of an enterprise as a public or non-public good is wholly independent of the market for substitutes, "general economic conditions," or any other rationalization by Amtrak's apologists to tax one (politically disfavored) constituency for the sake of another (politically favored) constituency. The fact that passenger rail is becoming more attractive in the wake rising fuel costs is, if anything, an argument for ending its subsidies.

Being in New York, I neither know nor particularly care whether splitting the Ninth Circuit is either wise or urgent.

But I do know that this gobbledygook from California senator Dianne Feinstein is not a legitimate reason to oppose it:

The split would also initially cost an estimated $100 million, because two new and expensive bureaucracies would be needed to administer the courts. And it would cost $16 million more in annual operating expenses.

The only legitimate response to Feinstein is: so what?

I rebutted this non-argument that "courts are too expensive" back in November 2004 when Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski put forth the same nonsense (WSJ – $). As I blogged then:

We can't afford courts? A demographically logical courts structure is a luxury? The federal government spends $2.3 trillion dollars per year and we can't afford courts?

Is this how far the current thinking has deteriorated in terms of what government should and should not do and where budgetary priorities should lie? We can afford every pork-barrel program imaginable for every two-bit senator and representative, we can have marginal income tax rates that would have made the Founders vomit, but we can't afford courts?

And remember, this was before the disgraceful pork-laden transportation bill and the "Bridge to Nowhere." A year has passed, and the debate about the Ninth Circuit (not to mention the debate about pork-barrel spending) is stuck on stupid.

I repeat: Maybe there are reasons not to split the Ninth Circuit. But "we can't afford courts" is not one of them.

But can someone please explain to me why the City of New York has any business providing free taxpayer-subsidized flu shots?

If you want a flu shot, then why not pay for it yourself, the same as you should pay for your own aspirin or NyQuil? The externalities of mass immunization are not so great in the case of the flu (note: not the avian flu) as to make it a public good in need of taxpayer underwriting.

And even if it did, then why should free taxpayer-subsidized flu shots be provided at the local level? Shouldn't it be a national, or at least a state program? The City should stick to providing city services. Warm-fuzzy-feeling socialized preventative medicine doesn't qualify.

Incidentally, you don't need to be poor to partake of the free taxpayer-subsidized shots, so even that pseudo-justification doesn't exist. You don't even need to be a city resident — just show up and stay flu-free, courtesy of my city income taxes, city sales taxes, city property taxes, etc.

And that makes me ill…