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June 2008
IPI senior fellow George Pieler is featured with International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens Laurson with a new op/ed in South Africa’s Business Day, entitled “Urgent Need for Joint Effort to Freeze Mugabe Out.”
Pieler and Laurson write: ROBERT Mugabe has again driven a stake through hope for a civil and propitious future in Zimbabwe. A campaign of violence, terror and murder against the political opposition achieved its goal: Morgan Tsvangirai, the Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC’s) presidential candidate, withdrew from the runoff “election”, giving president-cum-dictator Mugabe his “resounding victory”. No observer should be surprised, but apparently many were. The March 29 elections, in which Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) came in second after Tsvangirai’s MDC, were mistaken for a sign of democracy and a precursor of change . Read More...
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Are American CEOs Overpaid?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says take a look at American athletes.
Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute recently asked how fairly is income distributed in major league sports.
Turns out, not so fair.
For the total U.S. population, the top 20 percent of households makes 51 percent of total family income.
But Malanga says that in football, the top 20 percent of players makes 63 percent of the money—not including all the advertising contracts.
Politicians are increasingly complaining that a small number of Americans make too much money. But they’re talking about CEOs, not athletes.
Apparently, when athletes are well paid, people think it’s because they’re good. When CEOs are well paid, it’s because they’re greedy.
Read More...
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The need to achieve technological breakthroughs to provide cleaner, more efficient sources of energy may indeed be the race-to-the-moon for this generation of American inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs.
Clean energy technologies will come in hundreds of variations and will take billions to develop, test and deploy. To sustain this model there must be a global marketplace where intellectual property (IP) and innovation are rewarded according to economic drivers such as value, quality and demand. In essence, the clean energy revolution will only be as effective in solving our energy needs worldwide as the determination to promote and protect the underlying IP.
A proliferation of national strategies to promote the clean energy industry will develop, but there must also be a global approach that prioritizes real world impact while respecting IP and the innovation process.
What must some of the first steps in this global approach be?
Read More...
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IPI senior fellow George Pieler is featured with International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens Laurson with a new op/ed on Forbes.com entitled, “Ireland’s ‘No’ Gives Europe Breathing Room.”
Pieler and Laurson write: “Parochial polemics, misinformation and propaganda that feed on citizens' ignorance and distrust. These, according to some supporters of the European Union (E.U.), are what caused Ireland's electorate on Friday to vote decisively against the Treaty of Lisbon, a document formerly known as the European Constitution that lays out a number of centralizing governmental reforms, provided it's approved by all 27 member states. Now E.U. officials are convening in Brussels for a two-day summit to tweak the treaty and assuage its critics, which include not only Ireland but also the Czech Republic and Poland.” Read More...
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Evangelical leader James Dobson is under a bit of fire for questioning Barack Obama's fidelity to Christian doctrine and his interpretation of the Bible.
Well, after learning today that Obama apparently carries Hindu idols around in his pocket for good luck, perhaps people ought to give Dobson a bit of latitude. Or at least some credit for having a handle on what Christians believe.
I'm fairly certain that, no matter which of the various Christian denominations you belong to, or which school of Bible interpretation you favor, Christians have pretty much across-the-board rejected idolatry.
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IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara will appear today on the Twin Cities’ based “Jason Lewis Show,” live from 6:05 pm to 7:00 pm CT on KTLK-FM. He will be discussing his recent op/ed, “The Strategy of the Smart Surrender,” featured in the American Spectator.
To listen online, follow the link here. Read More...
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Some thorny problems in constitutional law and public policy arise when it is hard to figure out whether the activity is in the private sector or the public sector. In privacy policy, for example, data about individuals collected by the public sector (the census, say) poses threats to civil liberties that data collected by the private sector (journalists, for example) does not. But when government can easily access the journalist's data, the issue becomes muddled. My free speech rights inside my own home are clear; and it is clear that the government can manage speech inside the courthouse--but rights on the courthouse steps can be fuzzy.
Some would argue, therefore, that the private/public distinction is unhelpful or incoherent or illusory. The European Union, for example, does not distinguish between government collections of data and private collections of data in regulating privacy. Read More...
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Like a lot of men, I'm negligent about going to the doctor regularly. I insist that my family go to the doctor, but somehow I never quite get around to doing so myself.
I've been promising my family for about a year now that I'll make an appointment to have a full physical exam, but today I'm definitely going to make the call, because I have a new goal in life: I want to live long enough to see Dr. James Hansen proven wrong about global warming.
This is James Hansen Week in Washington. This morning he's on NPR's Diane Rehm show, and this week he will be testifying before Congress. Read More...
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On the way to Boston on Thursday, I came across several interesting quotations from the June 14th issue of The Economist.
From page 34, on the politics of Iraq:
Mr. McCain . . . correctly foresaw that the "surge" of troops into Baghdad and its region last summer would produce results. In fact, Mr. McCain had been calling for the surge for three years before it happened.
Mr. Obama, by contrast, joined other Senate Democrats in trying not only to block the surge but to force Mr. Bush into a timetable for ceasing all combat in Iraq within a year.
In common with most Democrats, Mr. Obama is also guilt of having shown little public recognition that the facts on the ground have changed materially in the past months.
. . . come the election, it is likely that no one will be paying that much attention to the war . The Project for Excellence in Journalism compared network news coverage in early 2007 and 2008, and found that the share of airtime devoted to Iraq fell from 22% of the total to 4%. Read More...
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As if we needed more, there is additional fodder today for us Wikipedia-haters.
ctions to Wikipedia go far beyond inaccuracies, of course. Read More...
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The Wall Street Journal reports today that the insurance company Progressive Corp. is harnessing the Internet to facilitate consumer choice among its automobile insurance products and to make premium comparison with competitors an easy one-stop-and-click operation. Shopping customers are presented with a sliding bar on a chart that makes it possible to compare the level and type of insurance coverage available at various prices. Most innovative is a feature of the "Name Your Price" application that allows customers to choose the monthly premium they desire to pay and then compare the coverage they could purchase for that price.
The only hang up, of course is customers are forced by state regulators to purchase insurance only from firms licensed to do business in their state, which requires the insurance company to abide by whatever regulations the local bureaucracy decides to impose. Read More...
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Unimaginable as it may seem in today’s global economy, there exists no true national market for insurance products in the United States. Rather, there are 50 separate state-insurance markets, each one bounded by a state regulatory wall impenetrable to companies not chartered in the state who would like to sell products in the state and impervious to consumers in the state who might desire to reach outside the state to purchase insurance from companies chartered beyond their state’s boundary. It’s a system of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats and for the bureaucrats.
The latest casualty of this archaic arrangement are the 5,000 residents of Mississippi living near the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf Coast who are losing their State Farm wind coverage because the legal and business environment in the state is so hostile to insurance companies. State Farm has not raised premiums in Mississippi since 2004. Read More...
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What’s That Ticking Sound You Hear?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says that’s a financial time bomb—that’s about to go off.
By the end of this one-minute commentary, the federal government will owe an additional $4,800 because our politicians refuse to address the big entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
USA Today reports that last year the government’s financial obligations grew by $2.5 trillion. That’s $4,800 a minute—every minute.
And that’s on top of the $57 trillion the government already needs, but doesn’t have, to pay our lifetime benefits when we retire.
And the problem will only get worse as the baby boomers start retiring in just three years.
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In a new op/ed published today in the American Spectator, IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara responds to Barack Obama’s criticisms of personal accounts and Social Security.
An excerpt:
"For all his talk of a new politics of change and unity across partisan lines, Barack Obama said last week that as President he would deny working people the freedom to choose a better deal for Social Security. No real change for that program, adopted over 70 years ago, following the model adopted by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1889.
Indeed, Obama even voted against legislation to stop the longstanding raid on the Social Security trust funds. The supposedly old and stodgy John McCain, however, voted for the legislation to stop the raid, and supports allowing each worker the freedom to make their own choice regarding personal accounts.
This reveals yet again the sad truth about Barack Obama. Read More...
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In a new op/ed published in the Washington Times, IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses how high-risk pools may offer some hope for ‘The Uninsurable.’
An excerpt:
"While much of the health care reform debate centers on the 47 million uninsured Americans, there is an equally important subgroup that must be part or the solution - the uninsurable - i.e., those who have been denied health insurance coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition, or whose condition results in premiums much higher than the standard.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (and also Hillary Clinton and even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican) has said he would forbid insurers from denying anyone who applied. In health insurance parlance that's known as "guaranteed issue." Read More...
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| The U.S., Japan, the EU and a number of other countries whose economies and consumers are paying a heavy price because of the growing plague of piracy and counterfeiting are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA would establish a high standard for intellectual property enforcement and would hopefully grow over time to include a wide range of countries committed to the fight against illicit trade. Sounds like a reasonable idea and the type of leadership needed, right? Well, there are actually two caveats to that view. First, you have to believe in intellectual property rights in the first place, and second, you have to also support the effort to protect consumers, workers and businesses from piracy and counterfeiting. The anti-IP activists don’t share these priorities and, therefore, are incredibly concerned about the work being done to develop ACTA. Read More...
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On June 10 at the National Press Club, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy organized a forum on technology policy in the Presidential campaigns, featuring former FCC Chair Reed Hundt, tech advisor to Obama and former FCC Chair Michael Powell, advisor to John McCain. One sees in U.S. elections such a fascination with the personal qualities of the candidates that one would think that the President ran the executive branch single-handedly. But, of course, he doesn't, and the teams matter. A relatively inexerperienced candidate might make up for this by having a knack for identifying astute advisors--or find his platform hijacked by a careerist with his own agenda.
Reed Hundt opened with an attack on McCain, including such details as McCain's vote against the e-rate, the provision of the 1996 Telecom Act that funded Internet service to schools and libraries. Read More...
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In 2003 when I first visited Ranbaxy headquarters then located in downtown New Delhi, I was struck by the framed and prominently displayed Ranbaxy mission statement, developed a decade previously, that Ranbaxy would become a billion dollar firm, and an ''international, research-driven, pharmaceutical company.''
The framed statement in the lobby, I later learned, also sits in front of every Ranbaxy senior executive. Since that time, Ranbaxy has accomplished those goals and more through important, early research collaborations with GSK and more recently Merck.
Overnight the big news is that Ranbaxy has more than caught the eye of a major Japanese pharmaceutical company, Daiichi Sankyo Company, that seeks to acquire a major stake in Ranbaxy.
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I'm known in IPI's offices and among friends for my distain for Wikipedia, which knows no bounds and admittedly has become almost irrational. I won't go into the reasons here, but it has to do with our society's rejection of accomplishment and expertise, and obsession with equality which has resulted in an ethic of "anyone can (and has the right to) write an encylopedia."
Anyway . . .
So I have sensitive antennae for criticism of Wikimania, and I've found yet more on Rich Karlgaard's blog, where he mentions publically what has been observed privately for some time; namely, that Wikipedia censors critics and skeptics of global warming. Read More...
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Add Prof. Connie Book (Elon University) to the list of academics who can be counted on to find an atoll of failure in an ocean of success.
Professor Book has released a paper that takes a look at Texas’ 2006 groundbreaking video franchise reform legislation, and she doesn’t like what she sees.
But first consider what Prof. Book grants in her paper:
- Broadband deployment has happened at a breakneck pace since passage of the legislation;
- Smaller companies are able to enter the market faster;
- Cable companies have lowered costs in communities with new competition;
- New investment and job creation is evident;
- Consumers have access to more products and services;
- Polled citizens favor the new competition;
Read More...
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In a new op/ed published today in the Atlantic Community entitled “Expansion Does Not Solve NATO’s Dilemma,” IPI senior fellow George Pieler and International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens F. Laurson say smart energy policy is the key to security in Europe.
An excerpt:
"NATO will not expand to include Ukraine or Georgia - at least not any time soon. There are many reasons - and many good ones - that membership hasn't yet extended to these countries. Alas, it is difficult not to have the impression that it was Russian grumbling that ultimately deterred Western leaders to invite these former Soviet republics into their military alliance.
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What Happens When Tobacco Taxes Are Too High?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says government sometimes encourages a life of crime.
Come July 1, residents of New York City will be paying on average about $9.00 for a pack of cigarettes, according to the Wall Street Journal. And nearly half of that $9.00 dollars will be state and city taxes.
It seems more and more state legislatures think they can pay for their spending whims by taxing tobacco.
But New York won’t take in nearly the new revenue it anticipates from its tobacco tax hike. That’s because more New Yorkers will buy cigarettes on the black market, where criminals and even terrorists—known as “buttleggers”—reap huge profits and ignore the taxes.
There’s a lesson here: Americans will pay taxes when they’re fair.
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IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara is featured today in the American Spectator with a new op/ed entitled, “Free Market Universal Care.”
In the piece, Ferrara discusses a new bipartisan Senate bill that he says is “a complete government takeover of health insurance,” that would raise Federal taxes and spending by $10 trillion over the first ten years.
An excerpt:
“Universal health care can be guaranteed to all while making government smaller rather than bigger. This arose out of the best thinking from conservative health care policy analysts as far back as the enormous debate and victory over the Hillary health care plan in 1993-1994. The public does demand a social safety net that does not let anyone suffer without essential health care. Read More...
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A traditional excuse for heavy government regulation and price controls on property and casualty insurance is the need for government to protect consumers against rapacious private insurance companies. If private insurers are left to their own devices, the advocates of price-controls argue, they would gouge consumers and restrict the availability of insurance coverage.
Well, a natural experiment just occurred to test that hypothesis in Massachusetts, formerly one of the heaviest regulators of insurance in the nation. Until this year, Massachusetts directly dictated the rates automobile insurers could charge.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute recently published a report card scoring each of the states on how their regulation of the insurance industry affects consumers (before the reform took effect in Massachusetts). Read More...
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Well, it’s June, which marks the beginning of the hurricane season and (this year) the end of the Democratic primaries. And you know what that means!
The presidential candidates are looking for some way to win votes in the battleground state of Florida; and Florida is looking for a bailout—or at least the promise of a bailout when the next big hurricane hits.
Florida-backed legislation, which has passed the U.S. House of Representatives but not the Senate, seeks to have the federal government become the national “reinsurer” in cases of catastrophic property losses, such as, oh, a major hurricane.
In essence, the federal government would pick up the tab in case of a huge disaster.
Florida is backing the legislation for two reasons. Read More...
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Peter Ferrara will appear this morning on the 'Lynn Woolley Show' to discuss the Senate cap and trade bill.
To catch the interview live at 10:15 am CT, visit the Lynn Woolley Show online at http://www.belogical.com/. Read More...
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In the 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission began a struggle to reconcile old communications laws governing telephones, broadcasting, and cable television with the new technological and business realities. The old regime was based on monopoly; and it was believed that regulation was needed to protect consumers, extend networks into new areas, and keep prices low. But technological developments made competition possible, and competition would make most of the old regulations unnecessary.
In 1996, when Congress overhauled telecommunications law, the FCC gained the authority to "forbear" from regulation. The hope was that the FCC could deregulate without Congress having to revisit the matter.
How is regulatory forbearance working?
In 1996, long-time observers could have provided a laundry list of regulations ripe for forbearance over the next few years. Read More...
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IPI Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara will appear this morning on “The Right Balance” with host Greg Allen to discuss ‘the strategy of the smart surrender,’ the AMT, and more.
Catch the discussion this morning at 10:50 ET by listening live online here: http://www.therightbalance.org/ Read More...
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Has Ethanol Led to a Boom or a Bust?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says it depends on whether you’re an environmentalist or one of the poor.
What if you bet everything on ethanol’s ability to save the environment and ended up breaking the bank— the food bank, that is.
The environmentalists have pushed for years to decrease burning fossil fuels like gasoline by substituting corn-based ethanol.
They won, and the rest of us lost—especially the poor.
The problem is that it takes about 1,700 gallons of water to make one gallon of ethanol. And corn-based ethanol produces nearly twice the greenhouse gases as gasoline.
And the ethanol boom has led to a corn boom. The increased demand for corn has driven up the price, making it unaffordable for millions of poor people, leading to riots around the world.
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The leftist IP skeptic agitators have discovered the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and they are coming unglued.
ACTA is an attempt to put together a treaty to ensure closer cooperation between governments in fighting piracy and counterfeiting, which is an increasingly important issue to countries, especially countries with developed economies, since they are more dependent on the creative industries, and thus incur significant economic damages from counterfeits and piracy.
Additionally, counterfeit medicines have become a serious health concern, especially in developing countries but also in developed countries.
As I said, the leftist IP skeptic community (commune?) is coming unglued. Read More...
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Massive government spending and entitlement programs create opportunities for fraud. Nevertheless, never underestimate the ability of politicians to claim against all evidence that their new entitlement will be the exception.
A perfect example is Barack Obama’s claim that once president, his sweeping health care reform proposal will save billions of dollars, in part by getting rid of “waste, fraud and abuse.”
If only it were so.
Just last week Attorney General Michael Mukasey praised federal and state law enforcement efforts in trying to stem the wave of Medicare fraud, especially in medical devices.
It’s a really BIG wave.
Since a Medicare anti-fraud strike force began targeting South Florida, 200 people have been arrested responsible for an estimated $638 million in false claims.
Read More...
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Barry at Music Row Law considers a recent think tank report recommending a five point plan for the music industry.
In a nutshell, he points out key flaws with the proposal. It isn't helpful to call for the music industry to follow the path of Google and give away content for free—Whether one thinks of Google's content as its software or as the web sites one finds through Google, either way, Google is “not giving away their own content” and they don't pay to produce it (a basic point I blogged on at IPcentral some years back and which it would be rather embarassing for anyone to miss).
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IPI Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy, Peter Ferrara, will appear today on “The Marc Bernier Show” to discuss a theme emerging from many conservatives—“the strategy of the smart surrender.”
Peter featured this discussion recently in an op/ed published in the American Spectator.
Click here to listen live online at 4:35 pm ET. Read More...
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In 2006, the World Health Organization launched its International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT). The reason and importance behind this effort was clearly and succinctly captured in an IMPACT-produced brochure that reads, “Counterfeit Drugs Kill.”
How curious and disappointing then it is to see some influential nations oppose the IMPACT effort, and, in fact, question entirely the need for WHO and leading nations to step up efforts to combat the deluge of dangerous, illicit medicines.
At the recent World Health Assembly in Geneva, a group of developing countries that included India, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Thailand thundered loudly against the WHO’s IMPACT initiative because it may stand in the way of the parallel trade of generic manufacturers. Read More...
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Peter Ferrara’s featured in National Review Online today with a new op/ed: “Baby, Baby It’s a Cold World.”
Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was recently referenced by senior climate-science authority Fred Singer as saying: “Global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn't gotten warmer since 1998. . . . . And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We're actually in a period . . . of global cooling.”
This is what the temperature data shows. Indeed, even global-warming advocates are now saying there won’t be any actual global warming for the next ten years or so. You can interpret that to mean the budding cooling trend will continue.
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Author: Erin Humiston || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA