It’s now, relatively speaking, a “victory” for civil liberties that Obama is reverting to the Bush detention policy, rather than adopting an even worse policy.

At my FreeU blog, I have posted a lengthy entry dealing with the misbegotten “reform” process at my university, where the Sexual Harassment Industry is cleverly engaging in a rewrite of “procedures” to hide the disgrace of this process. While my post deals with one university, it applies equally well to most other public universities. All of the problems I mention are found on other campuses.

My recommended revisions will likely go down in flames. Common sense is no longer so common.

Everyone knows the famous Miranda decision requiring the accused to be informed of their rights. This decision became one of the keystones of modern liberal due process. If the accused is not informed of their rights, a police state may run rough shod over those alleged to have committed crimes.

Forget Miranda and all that “innocent before guilty” nonsense. Welcome to the wonderful new world of “Sexual Harassment Procedures” . . . .

The irony is rich: our campus, like so many others, has witnessed criticism of George W. Bush, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay procedures on the grounds that due process is lacking and the government shields itself from scrutiny. Yet here we are with procedures that bear an eerie resemblance to the Bush-era action.

Judging from the previews, Michael Moore’s latest, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” ought better be titled as above. Someone, quick, give him a copy of Adam Smith’s A Wealth of Nations and explain to him that the best way to stop corporations from taking advantage of government largesse distributed at the expense of the politically impotent is to cut off Congress’s ability to confer such favors.

As the late Harry Browne put it, in the context of the apparently now long-forgotten Savings & Loan scandal, “If there are packs of wild dogs roaming the streets because someone has strewn raw meat around, you don’t blame the dogs.”

Proving, once again, that “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

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As a footnote to Moore’s previous movie, “Sicko,” in which he holds up the Cuban health-care system as the ultimate model, see Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s recent column in praise of Cuban neurologist Hilda Molina, founder of the International Center for Neurological Restoration:

Castro became a frequent visitor to her center—until in 1991 the health ministry informed Molina that she and her staff would have to devote their better efforts to treating foreigners able to pay in dollars at the expense of Cuban patients. When she protested, she was reminded that she had an elderly mother and a son …

Alvaro recently met with her in Buenos Aires, where she has finally been able to join her mother and son:

As I listened to Molina, I kept thinking that her story was not about the tragedy but about the perfect farce that is Cuba’s communism. What else can be said about a regime that reserves its medical institutions for capitalist dollars in the name of abolishing capitalism and that for 15 years, in the name of anti-imperialism, prevents a woman from crossing borders in order to join her son? Yes, one perfect farce.

Perhaps farce is Moore’s new genre?

Responding to an op-ed by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick calling his state’s plan a “Health-Reform Model,” the president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians, Dr. Angela Gardner, cites:

A study just published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine shows a 9% increase in emergency room visits since the commonwealth [of Massachusetts]’s universal health-care plan was signed into law in 2006.

Dr. Gardner continues:

While the American College of Emergency Physicians supports universal health-care coverage, please do not perpetuate the myth that universal care will decrease emergency department visits. The evidence clearly says otherwise.

Thus, the drumbeat claim that government health-care will be at least partially funded by “savings” from shifting people from expensive emergency room care to affordable preventative care can now be shelved as simply another piece of “all the misinformation that’s been spread over the past few months” President Obama criticized in his Sept. 9 speech to Congress.

The Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) has proposed a plan to regulate the pay of bank employees by allowing the Fed to reject compensation schemes it views would encourage excessively risky behavior. Regardless of whether one thinks bankers’ compensation should be regulated, the Fed should not be doing this.

The Fed’s major responsibility is controlling the size of the money supply, which determines interest rates and the amount of inflation in the economy.  It does so with almost no oversight, but fortunately, its control over the money supply attracts relatively little political attention, most likely because few Americans actually understand what the Fed does.

The effects of its control over the money supply are relatively neutral, in that the entire economy feels the same effects, so the Fed is, for the most part, not balancing diverse interests.  While some people may want lower interest rates and others want them higher, the longer-run goal of price level stability tends to pull diverse interests toward the same policy page.  The lack of oversight is not as big a problem when everyone shares common goals and when the Fed is viewed as a neutral administrator of monetary policy.

The Fed’s oversight of monetary policy is an important job: one we may take for granted when we have a prolonged period of relative price level stability, but we only need look back to the 1970s to see what happens when the Fed’s attention is divided between price level stability and other policy goals.  To add to this responsibility an inherently politicized power to regulate bankers’ compensation would tarnish the Fed’s appearance of neutrality and embroil it in political controversy.

To give this power to the Fed would politicize the Fed and would compromise its ability to administer monetary policy in a manner relatively detached from political pressures.  Even if one thinks bankers’ compensation should be regulated (I don’t but that’s irrelevant to my argument here), the Fed is not the right organization for this job.

Using data just released from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Cato’s Chris Edwards has built this chart vividly illustrating the upshot of America’s love affair with big government under Bush and continuing under Obama—average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector:

Meanwhile, the trend of government jobs increasing while those in the private sector shrink is only being accelerated by Obama’s stimulus package creating permanent additional government jobs:

ObamaCare may thus prove unnecessary, as more and more employment shifts into eligibility for the extraordinarily generous Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. As delineated on the plan’s site:

Federal employees, retirees and their survivors enjoy the widest selection of health plans in the country. You can choose from among Consumer-Driven and High Deductible plans that offer catastrophic risk protection with higher deductibles, health savings/reimbursable accounts and lower premiums, or Fee-for-Service (FFS) plans, and their Preferred Provider Organizations (PPO), or Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO)…

The plan also provides transportability among jobs and into retirement.

Due to government restrictions on health insurance markets, we mere taxpayers can only dream of having access to such competitive and cost-differentiated choices.

Remind me again: who’s working for whom?

“[Euthanasia] is what any State medical service has sooner or later got to face. If you are going to be kept alive in institutions run by and paid for by the State, you must accept the State’s right to economize when necessary …” The Ministry of Fear (New York: Penguin Books [1943] 2005, p. 165).

I’ve seen lots written in the past year on the Federal Reserve Bank’s (Fed’s) expansion of the monetary base, but almost nothing written about changes in the Fed’s policy to target its funds and support toward specific institutions.  Prior to Bernanke’s reign as Chairman, the Fed acted in a way that was neutral toward specific firms.  That has changed, as the Fed has targeted particular firms to benefit from its support, mimicking the industrial policy that Japan has practiced for decades.

Prior to Bernanke, the Fed made loans to banks that were members of the Federal Reserve system through the discount window.  Member banks that were financially sound but that had short-term liquidity problems could get loans.  Under Bernanke’s tenure, Fed lending was extended to firms that not only were not member banks, but that were not even commercial banks.  This is a major change in Fed policy.

Prior to Bernanke, the Fed controlled the size of the money supply and interest rates by engaging in open market operations, which is the buying and selling of Treasury securities.  The Fed bought government-issued debt, which affected interest rates, the money supply, and ultimately inflation, but in a manner that was neutral toward participants in the economy.  Under Bernanke the Fed has targeted securities issued by specific firms, some clearly in the private sector and some government enterprises.  It owns securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and securities issued by other firms too.

I’d like to tell you exactly whose securities the Fed has bought, but I don’t know and the Fed’s not telling.  Bloomberg news has sued the Fed under the Freedom of Information Act to try to find out, but the Fed says it doesn’t have to disclose the information, and it would be harmful to do so.

The clearest case of the Fed targeting and supporting a particular firm was its $80 billion bailout of AIG in 2008.

These actions represent a substantial change in the policy orientation of the Fed.  Rather than being a neutral overseer of the nation’s money supply the Fed is engaging in industrial policy, targeting some firms for support while letting others fend for themselves.  The biggest contrast if the bailout of AIG versus the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The precedent is a bad one.  Market forces should determine which firms thrive and which struggle, not government oversight or Fed policy.  Back in the 1980s Japanese industrial policy was widely praised by many in the U.S. because of Japan’s phenomenal growth rate.  After the Japanese economy stagnated in the early 1990s enthusiasm for industrial policy waned.  Now the Fed is engaging in the same type of policy.

The Fed has a huge responsibility — and huge power — because it controls the nation’s money supply.  We are better off with a Fed that focuses solely on that rather than one that expands its power into other areas, regardless of those other areas.  But industrial policy is counterproductive in any event, so it is especially troubling to see Fed policy headed this way.

To the great astonishment of all of us who believed the U.S. government incapable of making an intelligent foreign and defense policy decision, the Obama administration has decided to terminate the U.S. plan to place anti-missile missiles in Poland and related radars in the Czech Republic. The plan had mightily provoked the Russian government, which not unreasonably viewed the program as part of a U.S. plan to stage a successful first-strike on Russia while crippling the Russians’ missile counterattack. This decision hardly means, of course, that U.S. ambitions and plans for total earth-and-space military domination have been altered in the large. Yet, by removing an element that provoked the Russians unnecessarily, the recent announcement should help to calm the nervousness in Moscow.

Now, if only something can calm the nervousness and will to power in Washington, D.C., the world will be able to breathe easier. Although the end of the Cold War pushed the threat of nuclear war out of the public’s consciousness, this threat remains the most menacing one for all mankind, and efforts to diminish it now seem stuck in low gear.

As an instructor of online history courses, I have many students overseas (Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, Saudi Arabia). The Internet connects them to me (and to the rest of us). The stories I could relate are fascinating and make teaching online courses all the more rewarding. Moreover, as an instructor I know that I’m helping those who are “American, Interrupted”

Even more important, soldiers of all ranks have blogged their way into history, thus writing what we used to say of newspapers: “the first pages” of history.

Read the following from the above “American, Interrupted” blog:

“I look up at the now familiar Arabian night sky and gaze at the stars, my close friends over this past year. Those same stars will ever hang in the sky and endure – like our love. Under those same points of light we’ll lay not too long from now, and those stars will smile just for us, because they know how long we’ve wished upon them to be together again. I love you, I’m so thankful for you, and I can’t wait to spend forever with you.

Sometimes I wondered if we were not unintentionally promoting anarchy because of this war on terror. I mean, we were encouraging and supporting rebellious elements of the population in their struggle against Saddam Hussein – thinking their struggle was one to free themselves of his rule. Sometimes I wondered if the struggle was to free themselves of all rules so they could establish a Shia theocracy. That would explain why Americans were in the crosshairs of Shia rebels. Many of them comprised the poorest and worst educated parts of Iraq, but it was these very people who we were making the masters of Iraq in the period of a year. This belief in empowering the weak and oppressed is noble, but it has to be done carefully. Sometimes it seemed the transfer of power bordered on a form of Bolshevism.”

That corporal’s blog made it into a video and Sundance Festival. For those interested in military blogging, the best one-stop database is http://milblogging.com/ There is always pressure to restrict blogging but the degree of freedom is somewhat remarkable given our policies in past wars.

But on to the heart of my story: Through the Independent Institute’s email and blog, I found Rich Stowell (actually, he found me!). After much interesting correspondence, I asked permission for this Oakland, California scholar-soldier to disseminate his blog address. SPC Rich Stowell (Public Affairs Correspondent) has a lot to say about freedom, war, and the socialistic style of Army bureaucracy. A stickler for grammar, I am sure he will point out my split infinitives but he spends more time skewering inane army sayings. Read here. Or describing the Animal Farm image he has of the Army. Obviously, this is NOT my father’s military!

Thanks go to Rich for reading my book Race and Liberty in America, and for keeping us up on the world “over there.” Rich is due back in two months — godspeed.

Stowell introduces himself

“As a proud member of the United States military, I see the power that we wield around the world. Our power is not in our arms, though, it is in our ideas and way of life. Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and Sailors are ambassadors of the American Way of Life, based on the U.S. Constitution. Our service men and women ought to know it and live it. Furthermore, the best defense of our freedoms is provided by dedicated citizens who know exactly what they are sacrificing for.”

To read his blog, go to http://my-public-affairs.blogspot.com/