Who will regulate the regulators?

From the Washington Post.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), for instance, served as chairman of a subcommittee responsible for overseeing technology-oriented efforts to improve homeland security, intelligence, information sharing and risk assessment in 2008. At the time, she disclosed more than $1 million in holdings in companies involved in intelligence and homeland security contracting, including Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who chaired a subcommittee that oversees water quality, owned a stake valued at more than $1 million in Linn Energy, a company that has been cited by federal authorities for alleged water pollution. It is unclear whether specific issues concerning Linn ever came before the subcommittee.

Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), whose subcommittee keeps watch on clean air and nuclear safety, reported up to $65,000 in holdings in Duke Energy, which uses nuclear plants to generate electricity. Duke is 46th on the list of top 100 “corporate air polluters in the United States,” according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts. Duke spokesman Tom Williams said that the company provides power for 11 million people in five states and that some air pollution “kind of goes with what we do.”

The membership of some committees had disproportionately large holdings in companies or industries they oversee, The Post analysis shows.

On the House Agriculture Committee, which holds sway over farm policies and subsidies, members had farming and agribusiness investments worth five times on average the amount held by other colleagues in the House. Many of the committee members’ holdings were in family farms. Nothing prevents those members from also receiving farm subsidies, and in the past, some have.

Likewise, House Energy and Commerce Committee members, who routinely hold hearings about telecommunications and computer issues, had heavier than average investments in companies such as Oracle, Nokia, AT&T and Verizon.

House Homeland Security Committee members also had more communications and electronics holdings as a group than the House as a whole, and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee members as a group owned almost six times more holdings in transportation firms.

In the Senate, the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee had on average almost twice the value of holdings in finance, insurance and real estate as that chamber as a whole. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee members had almost three times the value of agribusiness holdings as their colleagues on other committees.

The thing that is sad about this is that it isn’t shocking. We want good regulators, so they are subject to congressional oversight. But who oversees Congress? I guess the answer is “the voters” but that’s doesn’t seem to be working. Right now, conflicts of interest abound and all we get is pledges that “My investments don’t interfere with my oversight work. I am an ethical person.” Does anyone really believe that? Do you trust congressment more or less than CEOs? Because the rules for CEOs are much, much stricter. Why? Because without them, fewer investors would invest in the company – they’re not suckers.

This is why I will favor markets over government more often than not – and especially in things like Education* and Health Care. There are natural checks on abuses by CEOs: investors stop investing; consumers stop buying their products. It is virtually impossible to unseat a member of congress for questionable ethical behavior, and as long as that is true it will continue and will get worse.

*In a recent podcast with Diane Ravitch, one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, noted that once the bill passed, educational testing companies with close ties to congressmen (both D and R) somehow got massive contracts to do all of the testing. Surprised? Me neither. I’m also now less surprised that NCLB didn’t work. It sounds to me like the primary people it helped were businesses who knew the right people in Congress.

When people choose poorly

Who wrote this? (scroll all the way to the bottom)

if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

And what would you do about it? The story goes on to discuss conditions in an African village where this is true. But this is by no means isolated to Africa – we know that many poorer people in the United States make poor choices with their money.

This is, I think, a pretty good example of where people differ. My tendency is toward non-intervention, because I place a high value on person freedom of choice, including the decision to choose poorly. And this is why it is so hard to help the poor. Because honestly, it would best if we could just hand them cash in the form of a negative income tax.

For those who don’t know, a negative income tax would work like this: we set a threshold, say, $30,000 per year and pass a law that says that everyone gets that amount. If your income is below that amount, you get a check from the government (it could be every other week like a paycheck, similar to withholding taxes now) to top up your income to that level. Once you pass that level, you begin paying taxes.

This does a lot of wonderful things. First, it allows people to get a job, even a low paying one. Much research has shown that a lot of our happiness is tied to employment; there is a dignity and identity to be found in the fact that you go to work each day. Also, we know that if often takes a job to get a job: many social networks form around employment relationships. Those who are unemployed automatically lose their best means of finding a job – their coworkers. This way, there is a much smoother transition from potentially minimum-wage jobs to better jobs when all the while you have enough to provide for your family.

Second, it levels the playing field in many ways for the poor – their money is green as well. They can choose the products they like, perhaps even find their child a tutor after school. They no longer face the silly restriction on what they can buy with food stamps at the grocery store* and in general can live what should be a relatively middle class life. Here, as well, there is dignity – the power and freedom to choose for yourself. Because most programs for the poor come with a lot of strings attached.

But that’s exactly the point. What would go with this is the removal of all the controls around these programs – we couldn’t use government money to alter behavior. They may buy alcohol or even drugs. They may buy a brand new full size car or truck. And most people don’t like that.

So, the government implements all sorts of programs which attempt to save the poor from themselves; helping them while trying to coerce their behavior. This requires some convoluted rules, lots of oversight and lots of inconvenience for the poor. This causes lots of means testing which make the climb out of poverty quite steep when you compute the marginal tax rates.

To be sure, there are other problems here. First, no congressman will ever vote for this because it is too broad-based and could only be funded by the removal of many individual programs. Also, if/when recipients choose poorly, they will clamor for a higher bar to be set because they “don’t have enough to live on” after they’ve gotten their new iPads and 3G cell phones to buy diapers for their baby.

But it gets at a deeper issue: How much should the government use it’s power to coerce it’s citizens to behave “well”? My answer is “as little as possible” and that may be many of your answer as well. But the nuts and bolts of where one of us says “no” and another says “yes” is a recurring dividing line in American politics.

*A Wisconsin senator (maybe Vermont?) got the WIC program to mandate the purchase of something like 2 gallons of milk to use the program. Not only is this silly for a single mom with one child (who may not yet be able to drink milk) but it is highly problematic for those in cities who have to take groceries home on the bus. But that senator got his/her milk subsidy! And helped the poor, too! I can find a citation for this if you’d like, but don’t feel like look it up right now.

It was Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times. We know where he stands:

If we’re going to make more progress…we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths — and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution.

Jonathan Chaplin on Loving Faithful Institutions

From The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School. The whole piece is long, but well worth reading.

One illustration of this task, I’ve been suggesting, is to develop faith-guided models of normative business corporations (rather than just lambasting the shortcomings of existing ones). This won’t come easy. It will require a combination of extensive practical experience of the business world at many levels and extensive knowledge of the traditions of Christian-inspired social and economic reflection. Without the resources of business entrepreneurs, theologians, philosophers, or ethicists can fulminate against “oppressive global capitalism” until the cows come home (if you’ll now forgive a lapse into pre-industrial language), but Christian business practitioners will not give them the time of day. 

Yet without the resources of the traditions of Christian social thought, the result will be similar to what I have all too often encountered from business students at (even) Christian colleges. From their accounts, it becomes clear that their business professors often have neither the training nor the inclination to take any real critical distance from the reigning secular, utilitarian, liberal economic paradigms in their field. And the result of that deficiency is that generations of young Christian businesspeople will be sent out into the world of work thinking that the currently dominant structure of the business corporation is already normative from a Christian point of view. Some of these young businesspeople may turn out to be generous benefactors to Christian causes, but few will be transformers of the corporate sector in the direction of an economy of hope, justice, and solidarity.

The Milgram experiments, redux

From the BBC.

A disturbing French TV documentary has tried to demonstrate how well-meaning people can be manipulated into becoming torturers or even executioners. The hugely controversial Game of Death was broadcast in prime-time on a major terrestrial channel, France 2, on Wednesday.

It showed 80 people taking part in what they thought was a game show pilot. As it was only a trial, they were told they wouldn’t win anything, but they were given a nominal 40 euro fee. Before the show, they signed contracts agreeing to inflict electric shocks on other contestants.

One by one, they were put in a studio resembling the sets of popular game shows. They were then asked to zap a man they believed was another contestant whenever he failed to answer a question correctly – with increasingly powerful shocks of up to 460 volts.

Egged on by a glamorous presenter, cries of “punishment” from a studio audience and dramatic music, the overwhelming majority of the participants obeyed orders to continue delivering the shocks – despite the man’s screams of agony and pleas for them to stop.

Eventually he fell silent, presumably because he had died or lost consciousness. The contestants didn’t know that the man, strapped in a chair inside a cubicle so they couldn’t see him, was really an actor. There were no shocks and it was all an experiment to see how far they would go.

Only 16 of the 80 participants stopped before the ultimate, potentially lethal shock.

The Question

In a comment (#13) on Jesus Creed about Uganda’s effort to harshly criminalize homosexuality, David Opderbeck asks what I think is the question facing Christians in the 21st century:

The question we face today is a relatively new one in the history of the Church: how do our particular moral principles, which we believe to be universally true, play into the civil law of a pluralistic participatory democracy, in which not all of the participants accept our moral principles?

We have tended to buy into the Enlightenment’s claim of universal principles accessible to all by reason, and have forgotten that Christian ethics really only make sense for Christians. Christianity is still a faith depending on revelation. We can’t just look at the world around us and intuit the gospel. That doesn’t mean we can’t cooperate with all people of goodwill toward the common good, but we can’t expect the radical expectations of Christianity to be self-evident.

Leonard Pitts Jr. on the death penalty, abortion, and John Allen Muhammad

Read the whole thing here.

When I argue against the death penalty, I tend to lean on a few salient points: It is far costlier than life imprisonment; it is biased by class, race and gender; it is irreversible in the event of error. I use those arguments because there is ample statistical evidence to back them up and because they are irrefutable.

But I have one other problem with the death penalty: It’s wrong. It debases us. The power of life and death is too awesome to be left in human hands. And here, I know, the abortion opponent wonders how I can square that with support for abortion rights. The answer is simple: I can’t.

Like, I suspect, most pro-choice people, my support for abortion rights hinges upon a visceral rejection of the idea that government can compel a woman to bear a child that she, for whatever reason — rape, incest, deformity, poverty — chooses not to. I suspect I am also like most pro-choice people in being squishy and irresolute about the fact that a human life hangs in the balance of that decision. I suspect we find it easier to think of it as a potential human, not a real one — an oops without a name.

None of this, by the way, is tendered as apology or even justification. Rather, it is simply to observe that where the awesome power of life and death are concerned, most of us are guilty of inconsistency.

The classic liberal position, after all, opposes capital punishment and supports abortion rights, the latter often rationalized along the lines of the fractured logic above. The classic conservative position, meanwhile, opposes abortion rights and supports the death penalty, glossing over with equally fractured logic the fact that innocents will be (indeed, have been) executed.

With the exception of the Catholic Church, then, and a few other outposts of religiosity, none of us is consistent on these issues of life and death, all of us ignoring truths that indict our deep convictions, striking bargains with conscience in the name of a good night’s sleep.

Into that irresolution falls the execution of John Allen Muhammad.

And what am I to say? I hate the death penalty, but this guy’s rampage touched my life, frightened my children, so I’m OK with it? What kind of sense does that make?