Day: February 20, 2001

Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia) made news recently by introducing House Resolution 19 which would overturn the longstanding ban against assassination. President Gerald Ford instituted the ban when he signed Executive Order 11905 prohibiting the Central Intelligence Agency from carrying out an assassination. The order was necessary, Ford said, because of revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency had been behind a number of assassinations throughout the world and had plotted to assassinate a number of world leaders. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan expanded the ban to prohibit anyone working with the U.S. government from being involved in assassinations.

Barr claims the policy unfairly limits the options of the president and can result in rather perverse outcomes. “The president of the United States, whichever president it is, Republican or Democrat,” Barr told Fox News, “ought always to have available to him the whole range of options” including assassination.

One of the arguments in favor of allowing assassinations is the widely held belief that the United States already finds ways to get around the Executive Order that end up killing innocent people. The 1986 night time raid on Libya, for example, seems like a pretty cut and dried assassination attempt that hit multiple targets only in order to technically comply with the edit against assassinations. The raid didn’t harm its intended target, Libyan dictator Moammar Khadaffi, but it did kill his young step daughter.

The problem with Barr’s proposed reform is that it is headed in the direction. Rather than giving the President more options and more ability to act unilaterally, the Republican and allegedly conservative Congress should be acting to shore up the War Powers Act and rightfully return the power to make war back to the Congress.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is explicit about the role of Congress in making war. “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” Yet this remains one of the most ignored parts of the Constitution, with the President assuming war powers today in a way that many of the Founding Fathers would have considered bordering on tyranny (especially given their general fear of standing armies in the first place).

Instead of giving the President even additional powers that are not provided for in the Constitution, lets move to restore a strict constructionist view of the war powers of the executive and legislature and put the war power back in the hands of Congress.

Source:

Congress sets sights on assassination bill. Jon Dupre, Fox News, February 14, 2001.

The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration’s is proposing cutting funding to the U.S. Export-Import Bank by up to 25 percent. The Export-Import Bank represents corporate welfare at its worst. The bank provides government-backed loans to some of the largest corporations in the country to finance overseas sales.

Chris Ullman, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget told the Post that, “As we try to slow the rate of growth of spending, and put money towards the president’s priorities such as education, spending on things such as corporate subsidies needs to be diminished.”

Okay this is a good start, but why stop at merely diminishing the subsidies? It’d be better just to eliminate the Export-Import Bank completely. How can the United States honestly say that it supports free trade when it provides such massive subsidies to some of the richest corporations on the planet?

Opponents of even a 25 percent cut resort to that explanation popular with children worldwide — everybody else is doing it. Since nations such as China, India and Japan provide lavish subsidies to domestic firms, supporters of the Export-Import Bank argue that the United States has to subsidy its firms in order for them to be competitive in those foreign markets.

That makes no sense at all from an economic point of view. The only thing corporations receiving these loans are being competitive at is using the levers of power to transfer wealth and income from other people into their own coffers. If a corporation needs government aid to survive in a market, by definition it is not competitive.

That didn’t stop ten business groups, including some that normally can’t talk enough about the beauty of free trade such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, from sending a letter to the Office of Budget and Management complaining that the proposed cuts would “set the Bank back nearly 10 years.”

We can only hope.

Source:

White House wants to curb ex-im lending. Paul Blustein, The Washington Post, February 14, 2001.

My four-year-old is enthralled by Barbie. We’ve got Barbie clothes, cars, horses, and everything else you can imagine all over our house. For awhile we resisted buying her a Barbie, but after Emma had some problems with toilet training we made a deal with her — if she could conquer the toilet, we’d let her pick out a Barbie.

That provided all the motivation she needed and in a few weeks we were headed off to the toy store. Anyway, to make a long story short she quickly picked out a black ballerina Barbie. She explained that she wanted that Barbie because it looked like her favorite woman from the day care she goes attends.

The only reason it was notable was because we assumed that a child would most likely pick dolls that closely resemble themselves. According to Clint Talbott, Dave Thielen’s 8-year old daughter had the same hypothesis and decided to subject it to a little testing for an upcoming science fair.

She took white and black Barbies and showed them to adults and children with different dresses and asked people to pick which one they preferred. Among her sample of 30 adults, the adults showed a preference for a lavender dress outfit but no preference based on race. Among the children, however, her hypothesis was confirmed — only six of the 30 children preferred the black Barbie.

Personally that sounds like a pretty clever 8 year-old but her school, Mensa Elementary School in Boulder, Colorado, apparently thought she was a bit too smart for her own good. Her science fair exhibit reporting her results barely lasted an hour before teachers removed it on the grounds that it might upset somebody. The director of elementary education told Thielen that the project was inappropriate because, “A science fair is not the way we choose to discuss race relations.”

Talbott writes,

No kidding. A science fair is not the way we discuss anything. It’s not a discussion. The girl was not propounding a point of view. She conducted a scientific experiment. She reported the results. She displayed initiative, curiosity and discipline. Just as she was supposed to do.

The weird thing, of course, is that we are constantly informed by various institutions that there is not enough dialogue and discussion of racial issues while at the same time those very same institutions are often very uncomfortable with open discussions about race. I don’t know how we’re ever going to resolve racial problems when people can’t even report on issues related to race without risking censure.

The BBC recently reported on a presentation given by Jay Olshansky, professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. According to Olshansky,

The human body was not designed for long-term use. It was designed for short-term use and in effect what we’re doing is pushing these bodies beyond the end of the warranty period for living machines.

Olshansky notes that while Life Expectancy around the world are still increasing, the rate at which they are increasing is beginning to slow down. Specifically, Olshansky claimed that without significant advances from the biomedical sciences, life expectancy would not reach 100 in the United States until sometime in the 26th century.

When considering such pessimistic predictions, there is one important thing to keep in mind. Olshansky is simply the latest in a long line of public health officials who have said that it would take many centuries to reach certain levels of life expectancy; most of those experts were disproved within their lifetime.

In fact the amazing that about Olshansky’s figures is that he worries about how long it will take to reach a life expectancy of 100. The debate used to revolve around whether or not even developed nations would ever be able to reach life expectancies of 85. Considering that some sub-groups of the American population have achieved life expectancies in excess of 97, very few people today doubt that the 85 year mark will be reached.

The unstated problem underlying Olshansky’s number is that a life expectancy of 100 for a country like the United States would be achievable if people valued long life above anything else, but Americans tend to consider living a good, if moderately shortened life, to be preferable to living a less adventuresome and indulgent — though likely longer — life span. This is especially the case since living to be past 80 still subjects individuals to relatively high risks of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, that diminish the value of living those extra years. Even given that, however, the United States leads the world in the number of people who are older than 80 years of age.

Olshansky and others underestimate the rate of discovery that biomedical sciences are about to unleash. Researchers have made astounding leaps in knowledge about diseases such as Alzheimer’s since the mid-1980s, and the pace of understanding is clearly accelerating very quickly (a good example of this is the incredibly quick response to AIDS. AIDS activists like to complain that the government and corporations are dragging their feet, but the incredible speed with which AIDS was identified and treatments created is unprecedented in the history of medical science. It took researchers almost 50 years just to decide how polio as transmitted).

It would be very surprising if the life expectancy of the developed nations didn’t reach 100 before the end of this century, and the developing world should begin to catch up too assuming they can work out the interminable problems with war and political illiberalism.

A bigger problem will be how a potential rise in life expectancy could throw off current projections of a stabilization of world population around 2050 AD or so.

Source:

Life expectancy of 100 ‘unrealistic’. Jonathan Amos, BBC, February 19, 2001.