David Kennedy and John Yoo, with Jeffrey Rosen moderating, discussed “The Presidency and the Constitution”. It was brave of Yoo–a principal architect of the Bush administration’s constitutional-law doctrines–to appear in front of an audience as hostile to the White House as the liberal Aspen crowd. He did well, partly I think through seeming like a normal, even likeable, human being, something few in the audience were prepared for. As one questioner put it towards the end (I’m paraphrasing), “You don’t seem like Darth Vader at all.”

Continue reading "Notes from Aspen 3" »

On the Creative Capitalism website, Brad DeLong attacks Milton Friedman’s position on the social responsibility of business as “weak toast”–an expression I was unfamiliar with, but a good one which I intend to start using. Friedman famously argued that it was better for shareholders to decide what good causes to support than have managers of the companies they own decide for them. Brad asks, why? Continue reading "Creative capitalism 2" »

In a new column for National Journal, I discuss an article by Isabel Sawhill and Emily Monea of the Brookings Institution, which calls for America’s “intergenerational contract” to be rewritten:

The current contract, Sawhill and Monea say, was written in the 1930s when Social Security was born, revised in the 1960s with the addition of Medicare and Medicaid (which pays nursing home benefits), and then revised again in the current decade with passage of the prescription drug benefit.

The authors point out that this contract takes several things for granted: that workers will continue to retire at 65; that most seniors are too poor to support themselves in retirement or to pay for their own health care; and that younger Americans are, on average, better off than elderly Americans. Those assumptions, they argue, need to be challenged.

The poverty rate among the elderly (partly thanks to Social Security, of course) fell from 35 percent in 1959 to 9 percent in 2006. The poverty rate among working-age households is much higher, at 13 percent.

Some 80 percent of the elderly own their own homes, and three-quarters of those have paid off their mortgages. Social Security and Medicare have succeeded almost too well. The fiscal cost of that success keeps rising, and it is falling on working-age Americans who feel beleaguered–and who in many ways are worse off than the contract’s beneficiaries.

A new deal needs to be struck, they say. But what should be the terms of this revised compact? And what are its chances, politically? You can read the column here (the link expires in a fortnight).

I meant to say something about Walt Mossberg’s session (on Tuesday) on “The Future of the Internet and the Rise of the Cell Phone”–though I acknowledge a slight impediment, having arrived late to find the session packed out and impossible to get into. Sources tell me it was about how devices like the iPhone constitute an entirely new computing platform, and are as momentous a turning point as the PC was in its day.

Well, sure. As a devoted reader of Mossberg’s Personal Technology column in the WSJ, I was already familiar with that notion. Like the throngs of listeners overflowing into the hallway, I expect, I never miss his column, even though I cannot remember a single occasion when it told me something I didn’t already know. (There must have been some; they just don’t spring to mind.) Do not misunderstand me: Mossberg’s popularity is entirely deserved. There is something very satisfying about reading an engaging, straightforward, intelligible treatment of familiar facts. It is a rare treat. They should teach that in journalism school.

A disappointment for me on Wednesday was the cancellation of the session on “The Dumbing Down of American Culture: Fact or Fiction?”, apparently due to the non-appearance of some of the speakers. I had been looking forward to listening to the always interesting and multi-faceted Joel Achenbach (the putative moderator) navigate that terrain. I was curious to know if anybody would attempt to argue that American culture is not being dumbed down. What might such an argument look like? Next time, I hope. In the meantime, there is Joel’s blog.

All the speakers–Sandra Day O’Connor, Judith Kaye, Ted Olson, and Stephen Carter– showed up for “How Do We Choose Our Judges?” Concern was expressed about the dangers of judicial elections–which 39 states now hold. (As an illustration of the dangers of mixing election money and the courts, Olson recounted the remarkable tale of West Virginia’s chief justice, who was pictured vacationing on the French Riviera with a CEO whose company had a case pending before the court.) But the discussion moved quickly to the appointment of Supreme Court judges. Carter would prefer the justices to be less visible. He deplores confirmation hearings and thinks that televising the court (as suggested by Olson, since people who see the court in action usually have a higher opinion of it) would be a disaster. To make them visible is to subject them to political pressure, Carter believes: they should be kept apart from politics, which means apart from the public.

Would making justices less visible make them less political? I don’t know that it would. Politics and the court are hard to keep apart. The decisions the justices have to make are often politically freighted, and sometimes politically momentous: it cannot be any other way. Given this, a public confirmation process seems desirable–and so does televising the court. Shrouding the court in secrecy is just too undemocratic. I think you get the right kind of court not through invisibility, but through judicial modesty. It falls to the president to nominate justices inclined to exercise a particular kind of restraint–capable, that is, of deferring to elected politicians when the law’s meaning is disputed, and when they (the justices) are themselves closely divided.

I’m in Aspen for the Ideas Festival. I’ll write a daily note, updated now and then, on things that strike me as interesting.

One thing that already keeps coming up—in this environment rich in high-tech executives and entrepreneurs—is the unfathomable bone-headedness of a US immigration policy that discriminates against the skilled. Intel’s Craig Barrett railed against this at a session last night and University of Maryland’s Dan Mote picked the theme up again this morning. What other country, Dan asked, deports its freshly minted science PhDs? Every PhD should come with a green card attached, he said.

A session featuring Sean Wilentz on his new book about the Age of Reagan disappointed me. I wanted to know how a card-carrying liberal commentator came to conclude that Reagan was a great president. He dealt with this perfunctorily at the beginning—saying (a bit oddly, I thought) that he wrote the book as a historian, thus using only a part of his brain, and setting his prejudices to one side. Are we to conclude that he writes his political commentary with the other part of his brain, letting his prejudices rip and suppressing his sense of historical detachment and disinterestedness? Anyway, I came away with no sense at all of why he thought Reagan was a great president despite (on Wilentz’s view) being wrong about most things.

A session on “Where will the next technological breakthroughs come from?”, featuring the aforementioned Dan Mote, was valuable even though the panel ignored that interesting question entirely. The brilliant Danny Hillis (pioneer of parallel processing) described three levels of innovation: building blocks (lasers, microprocessors), products that bundle them together (iPods, etc), and adaptation to innovations of the second kind (think of the way the telephone transformed business and society). Intriguing to think of the third level as itself a kind of innovation. America has great strengths in this area of adaptation—a flexible and relatively lightly regulated economy, an ability to reinvent itself—but perhaps some weaknesses too, at least as compared with rising Asia. Installed infrastructure can make adaptation difficult. In some ways it helps to have a blank slate—the better to leapfrog a technology (think of the way rural India and Africa are moving directly from no phones to cellphones).

Mike Kinsley and Conor Clarke have outsourced production of a book on “creative capitalism”–the subject of a much-noted speech by Bill Gates earlier this year–to the internet. Gates, if you recall, jumped on the corporate social responsibility bandwagon and argued that ordinary capitalism will no longer do. We need a new kind. The new website invites posts and comments on the subject, and the discussion appears to be thriving. I recently posted a note with my own first take on the issue.

When somebody says “Microsoft,” my first thought is unlikely ever to be “good corporate citizen.” I am more likely to think, “world-transforming innovator,” “awesome creator of wealth,” and “ruthless competitor.” (Sorry, Bill, no disrespect.) One wonders what would have become of this company if in its first decade or two its founder had spent significant time and effort—as he urged his audience at Davos—on good works not directly related to his goals for the enterprise. My main reaction to Bill’s speech was that it was a comical instance of “Do as I say, not as I did.” Microsoft’s shareholders and the world at large can thank their lucky stars that Bill did not follow his own advice.

You can read the rest of that post, and all the others, here.

When the US Supreme Court makes important rulings, discussion ensues on the intent of the constitution’s draughtsmen and how far their purposes should guide the court more than 200 years later. The designers of this miraculously durable constitution would have wished there to be such debate. But I do not think they would be impressed by much else they see. In fact I am sure they would be dismayed and even disgusted by what the court has become.

Its handling of Bush v Gore in 2000 marked a dangerous low, whether you see that as reckless bungling (as I do) or an outright power-grab. But it was no isolated instance. Despite learned claims to the contrary from all its members, the Supreme Court has become an intensely political body. It is a squabbling panel of legislators in robes – partisan and unelected, selected for their politics and appointed for life.

The court is as polarised as the branches of government it oversees. Far from standing above day-to-day politics and defending the system’s integrity, the justices are down in the dirt throwing punches with the rest, pausing now and then to wipe themselves down, write an opinion and reflect on their dignity.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

It was unsurprising, and in practical terms maybe not very important, that the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s blanket ban on handguns. In yet another 5-4 decision (the four conservatives plus Justice Kennedy against the four liberals), it ruled that the Second Amendment enshrines the right of individuals–as opposed to individuals serving as part of a militia–to keep and bear arms. It also affirmed that this right is qualified, and that all manner of (unspecified) restrictions on gun ownership and use are constitutional. There will have to be further litigation to test the limits, but in most of the country the ruling will make no difference. The DC law failed because it was an outright ban on handguns, including weapons kept in the home for self-defence, and (the majority said) upholding this law would have meant rendering the Second Amendment defunct.

This is how Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, summed it up:

We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns… But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home. Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.

Actually I have no objection to my neighbours in DC defending their homes with handguns. I’m all for making burglars anxious. But is this ruling as ruthlessly logical as it purports to be?

The Second Amendment has already been substantially hollowed out–and the Court says it has no problem with that, only with taking it to DC’s extreme of outright prohibition. For the sake of argument, then, let us suppose–as Scalia invites us to–that the Second Amendment is indeed outmoded, for the somewhat plausible reasons he mentions. Let us suppose, again for the sake of argument, that hollowing out the Second Amendment all the way to nothing would save hundreds of lives a year. And further suppose that public opinion in DC was solidly behind DC’s law. Even if all that were true, the majority says it would not be the Court’s job to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct–to do that, Congress and the states would have to climb the mountain of repealing it.

The baffling implication is that the Court can properly take the law all the way from “shall not be infringed” to the tight (and apparently constitutional) controls now exercised in many jurisdictions, but that the last small step to prohibition, however beneficial to the locality concerned, is beyond its competence and demands extraordinary if not impossible political exertions. What am I missing?

An excellent column by George Will, on a subject close to my heart:

Two-thirds of doctoral candidates in science and engineering in U.S. universities are foreign-born. But only 140,000 employment-based green cards are available annually, and 1 million educated professionals are waiting — often five or more years — for cards. Congress could quickly add a zero to the number available, thereby boosting the U.S. economy and complicating matters for America’s competitors.

Suppose a foreign government had a policy of sending workers to America to be trained in a sophisticated and highly remunerative skill at American taxpayers’ expense, and then forced these workers to go home and compete against American companies. That is what we are doing because we are too generic in defining the immigrant pool.

Barack Obama and other Democrats are theatrically indignant about U.S. companies that locate operations outside the country. But one reason Microsoft opened a software development center in Vancouver is that Canadian immigration laws allow Microsoft to recruit skilled persons it could not retain under U.S. immigration restrictions. Mr. Change We Can Believe In is not advocating the simple change — that added zero — and neither is Mr. Straight Talk.

John McCain’s campaign Web site has a spare statement on “immigration reform” that says nothing about increasing America’s intake of highly qualified immigrants. Obama’s site says only: “Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should.” “Where we can”? We can now.

While browsing Greg’s blog (see previous post) I also noted his item on “starve the beast”–the idea, popular with conservatives, that cutting taxes forces public spending lower. He says that a recent column by Paul Krugman implicitly endorses the theory, much as Paul may deplore its application, since it argues that the Bush tax cuts will tie the hands of the next administration. (Yes! That is what they were supposed to do, the White House would say.)

Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but Greg’s point seems to be that Paul has somehow contradicted himself by endorsing “starve the beast”. How so? One can perfectly well believe that the “starve the beast”/”poison pill” theory is true, and still deplore big tax cuts, so long as you also think that big increases in public spending are warranted (as Paul does). Indeed, the theory, if true, is the best reason for liberals to oppose tax cuts, just as for conservatives it is the best reason (or maybe second-best) to advocate them.

Question: Is the “starve the beast”/”poison pill” theory in fact correct? There is evidence pointing both ways–including the fact that Obama is promising to extend almost all of the Bush tax cuts, which would tend to support the idea. Still, on the whole I don’t buy it. Here is a piece [pdf] on the subject I did for National Journal last year, which says why. It references a study by Christina and David Romer, which although certainly not the last word on the subject is for now, I think, the most authoritative word. The abstract of the Romers’ study says this:

The hypothesis that decreases in taxes reduce future government spending is often cited as a reason for cutting taxes. However, because taxes change for many reasons, examinations of the relationship between overall measures of taxation and subsequent spending are plagued by problems of reverse causation and omitted variable bias. To deal with these problems, this paper examines the behavior of government expenditures following legislated tax changes that narrative sources suggest are largely uncorrelated with other factors affecting spending. The results provide no support for the hypothesis that tax cuts restrain government spending; indeed, they suggest that tax cuts may actually increase spending. The results also indicate that the main effect of tax cuts on the government budget is to induce subsequent legislated tax increases. Examination of four episodes of major tax cuts reinforces these conclusions.

I hope the Romers are right, as my NJ column explains:

The worst thing about “starve the beast” is the idea that a straightforward argument for low taxes and spending cannot be pressed successfully. You have to cut taxes, which the voters will like, and let them think they can have high spending, too. Later, if all goes according to plan, they will see they were mistaken. It is a strategy based not only on outwitting the Democrats, but on outwitting the electorate as well. It would be a pity if it worked.