Day: December 17, 2008

Robert Reich on Legality of Auto Bailout

I think the planned bailout of the automobile industry is an awful idea. Robert Reich thinks it is a good idea. But Reich is at least principled enough to worry that the way the Bush administration plans to handle the bailout — after Congress already rejected attempts to craft such a bailout — borders on being illegal,

But I’ve got to tell you, I’m deeply troubled by what I hear is the administration’s likely decision to give them a bridge loan, when just last week Congress said they can’t have it.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in democracy. And under our Constitution, Congress is in charge of appropriating taxpayer money. If Congress explicitly decides not to appropriate it for a certain purpose, where does the White House get the right to do so anyway? By pulling the money out of another bag? That other bag, by the way, called the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP for short, was enacted to rescue Wall Street, not the automobile industry.

. . .

If it’s a slush fund, everything’s arbitrary. I mean, why autos and not, say, state and local governments? They’re running short about $100 billion this year and as a result are slashing public services, including the nation’s schools. Even as it is, TARP is shrouded in secrecy. The Treasury has burned through about $335 billion so far, and no one knows exactly how or by what criteria. Why, for example, did it set tough conditions on some banks while giving Citigroup the sweetest deal imaginable?

Unfortunately the incoming administration seems to be just as clueless as the outgoing one when it comes to economic and financial policy.

Reason on Arkansas’ Ridiculous Interior Designer Licensing

Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote an excellent article for Reason back in November on Arkansas’ idiotic licensing scheme for, of all things, interior designers.

In 22 states, including Arkansas, it is illegal to call yourself an interior designer without going through an arduous and expensive certification process. In Nevada, it’s illegal to do interior design without a license. That’s right, advising someone about drapes could land you in the hoosegow.

Like many states, Arkansas has an Interior Design Board. The sole purpose of this board is to register interior designers. The IJ paper notes that “consumer complaints about interior designers to state regulatory boards are extremely rare. Since 1998 an average of one designer out of every 289 has received a complaint for any reason. Nearly all of those complaints, 94.7 percent, concern whether designers are properly licensed—not the quality of their service.”

The Institute for Justice paper Mangu-Ward is referring to is Dick Carpenter’s Designing Cartels which has a thorough look at such regulations across the nation.

Mangu-Ward’s article is mostly about Arkansas state legislator Dick Greenberg (R) who is attempting to kill regulation of interior decorators there by eliminating funding for the Interior Design Board which is responsible to be registering interior designers. Of course he faces an uphill battle — we can’t just have people running around making interior design recommendations without registering for government permission first!

Atheism, Religion and Atrocities

Robert at MakingMyWay has one of the best responses I’ve read to the accusation that atheism was primarily responsible for much of the state-sponsored mass murder of the 20th century, specifically in Marxist/Communist regimes (thought it should be pointed out that Imperial Japan was hardly a hotbed of secularism and yet managed to murder hundreds of thousands of people).

To some extent, though, I think the question Robert attempts to answer — “Was atheism the cause of 20th century atrocities?” — is precisely the wrong question in much the same way that “Was religion responsible for the Inquisition?” borders on being nonsensical.

For example, some defenders of theism try to blame the Nazi’s on atheism which is just as absurd as laying blame for the Third Reich entirely at the feet of Martin Luther’s anti-semitic rantings. None of the atrocities by secular or religious authorities can be summed up in such sloganeering.

Moreover, it is certainly not outside the realm of possibilty that some future totalitarian regime basing repression wholeheartedly and explictly on some version or other of atheism could arise.

Robert lays out three commonalities that 20th century repressive regimes shared: a) belief in a dogmatic truth; b) hostility to liberty and independent thought; and c) unquestioned obedience from the top (the cult of personality that was such a feature of 20th century despotism). He argues that those commonalities are decisive rather than the nominal religious or secular nature of a regime.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that secularists themselves have frequently failed to look at regimes in this way. In fact, a survey of 20th century secularists finds a surprising number of them in the first half of the 20th century who were more than happy to judge such regimes based precisely on the alleged “true motivation” of the regime. So there were plenty of apologists for the USSR in the United States and Western Europe who did hold up the USSR’s allegedly progressive goals against the reactionary aims of the Fascists in order to explain their support for the former and their condemnation of the latter.