November 2007: How Fares Our Freedom?

We all have some friends and acquaintances who seem congenitally to be optimists and others who were born pessimists.

Among libertarians – for whom extremism is never a vice – the division is especially sharp, and pessimists outnumber optimists by a wide margin. I know plenty of libertarians who believe we are at the gates of hell, carried there in a charred handbasket by people whose names change over time (sometimes “Clinton,” sometimes “Bush”) but who always walk in the same direction. Are they right?

Once a quarter my staff and I produce performance reports for our supporters and allies, and each report includes a brief overview of the articles that appeared in our publications.

Looking at the 300 or so articles published in the third quarter of this year, I would say our freedom fared pretty well in the areas of taxes, school reform, and environmental protection; we lost ground in the information technology and telecom fields; and we had offsetting wins and losses in health care.

What follows are some of the victories and defeats we reported during the past three months.

Health Care

Plus: Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), the principal free-market alternative to socialized medicine, are expanding rapidly, with some 40 percent of companies expected to offer their employees an HSA option in 2008.

Plus: Republican candidates for president have announced health care platforms that reflect much of the consensus among free-market experts.

Plus: States such as Texas are passing legislation that will require health care providers to give consumers statewide greater access to price information for medical services and billing procedures. Such information is necessary for markets in health care to really work.

Plus: President Bush vetoed a proposed expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal government entitlement program that subsidizes health insurance for nonpoor families.

Minus: The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to use drugs not yet approved by FDA.

Minus: All Democratic candidates for President are calling for variations on nationalized health care.

Minus: Medicare adopted rules barring doctors from referring patients to specialty hospitals in which they have a financial stake and restricting reimbursement for anemia drugs. Both are signs of advancing socialist-style regulation and rationing of care.

Budget and Tax

Plus: Growth in federal domestic discretionary spending finally slowed in 2006 and appears to be lower still in 2007, with a resulting decline in the annual national deficit.

Plus: Bush vetoed of a $0.61 a pack increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes.

Plus: Congress passed and Bush signed legislation to extend the moratorium on Internet taxes by seven years.

Plus: Five states – Hawaii, Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Texas – passed legislation this year mandating the creation of searchable Web sites offering comprehensive information on government expenditures.

Minus: State and local government spending is growing faster than federal spending, and many states face unsustainable public pension deficits.

Minus: Michigan and Wisconsin ended their budget stalemates by adopting massing tax increases.

Minus: John Berthoud, president of the National Taxpayers Union, died unexpectedly at his home. He was a key player in successful coalition and grassroots efforts to oppose rising taxes at the federal and state levels.

Infotech and Telecom

Plus: Many cities, facing up to the problems with municipal Wi-Fi and broadband projects, have begun changing or abandoning their plans.

Plus: Video franchise reform laws continue to get adopted and implemented at the state level, removing what many feared would be a major barrier to the rollout of new broadband services by telcos.

Plus: A threat by Congressional Democrats to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, which would substitute “balance” for the free exchange of ideas in the broadcast media, was defeated.

Minus: Network neutrality continues to dominate the public policy debate. If adopted in the form some of its advocates support, industry investment would be discouraged and consumer service quality would be compromised.

Minus: FCC intervened in the wireless marketplace by attaching conditions on the auctioning of a block of spectrum, a test of imposing network neutrality on wireless providers.

Minus: Six states have joined Google in calling for an extension of the terms of the 2002 settlement of antitrust charges against Microsoft.

Minus: The cause of protectionism was reinforced in September by a European court ruling alleging anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft.

Minus: Opposition mounts to Google’s attempt to buy DoubleClick based on the same discredited concerns about market share and network dependency that are being used to attack Microsoft.

School Reform

Plus: A Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that all charter schools statewide must get the same per-pupil funding as other public schools.

Plus: Louisiana achievement tests show charter schools outperform other public schools statewide.

Plus: More than 5,000 Georgia families applied for special-needs scholarships.

Plus: Pennsylvania approved a scholarship tax credit increase of $16 million for 2008.

Minus: Arizona courts ruled in August that charter schools must allow the state to dictate their curricula and the order in which they teach history courses, defeating the purpose of having a charter and autonomy.

Minus: Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and federal legislators started a push to make sure DC Opportunity Scholarships are not renewed in 2008.

Minus: Proposals to reform No Child Left Behind read like a wish list for the National Education Association and other interest groups.

Minus: The battle over possible repeal of Utah’s pathbreaking statewide voucher program was fully engaged. A public vote in November will decide the program’s fate.

Environmental Protection

Plus: California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) announced he is collecting signatures to put a pro-nuclear power resolution on the ballot in California.

Plus: Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus addressed the United Nations, delivering a hard-hitting speech explaining why the threat of global warming is too small to justify the policies being proposed by the U.N. and global warming alarmists.

Plus: Several scientific discoveries cut away at the foundation of global warming alarmism, including new evidence of a “natural thermostat” at the Earth’s equator that vents excess heat, evidence that soot and other non-greenhouse gas aerosols have a cooling rather than warming effect on temperatures, and evidence that the official U.S. surface temperature stations are improperly maintained and prone to produce false warming signals.

Plus: NASA quietly adjusted downward its temperature data for the U.S. According to the corrected numbers, only three of the 10 warmest years on record occurred during the past 10 years, and 1934, not 2006, was the warmest year in U.S. history.

Plus: A federal judge dismissed a global warming lawsuit by the state of California against six automakers, which had sought hundreds of millions of dollars for damaging the state with greenhouse gases.

Minus: Congress is poised to support an energy bill that would mandate a huge increase in ethanol use, a provision that would cost consumers billions of dollars, cause environmental damage, and do nothing to improve air quality or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Minus: Proposed amendments to the Clean Water Act would create an unprecedented expansion of federal power.

Minus: Congress is likely to approve mandatory restrictions on automotive fuel economy that would limit consumer choice, result in thousands of unnecessary traffic deaths each year, and do little if nothing to achieve the stated goal of weaning the U.S. off Middle Eastern oil.

Minus: Al Gore and his supporters persuaded five Norwegian socialists to give Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee did not explain how scaring little kids about theoretical threats in the distant future fosters world peace.

Eternal Vigilance

The optimists and pessimists, of course, won’t be satisfied with this mixed report card. They will still want to know “are we winning or are we losing?”

To which I can only reply: The battle is being hard-fought, victories are possible, and no end is in sight.

Joseph L. Bast (jbast@heartland.org) is president of The Heartland Institute.