This new highway is brought to you by Big Brother

In a somewhat intriguing article arguing for private funding of new road and infrastructure projects, AEI's R. Richard Geddes makes this following aside:

More toll-funded roads wouldn't necessarily mean more toll plazas clogging our highways. Advanced satellite tracking technologies allow "open road" tolling, in which motorists would be charged per mile of road used--just as consumers are charged per kilowatt hour for electricity, per gallon of water, or per minute of cell phone use--without the backup at the toll booth. Private investors have the resources to utilize this new technology.

It might be a bit late in the game to make this complaint-slash-observation, but I'm not really sure that I'd want some governmental-business partnership tracking every place I drive with a satellite. We're increasingly trackable thanks to our cell phones and standard in-car technologies at this point, so the horse may be out of the barn, but the idea still gives me the creeps.

 

Challenger

Tucked in a drawer somewhere around here, I have an autographed picture of Judith Resnik. During the early 1980s, while other kids were swooning to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," I was writing fan letters to astronauts. And one of the original astronauts -- John Young, who'd flown on Gemini and Apollo and the first space shuttle -- had been kind enough to respond with a stack of autographed pictures. His own, for one. Guion Bluford, the first African-American in space, for another. And Resnik, the second American woman in space. I treasured these photos, would pull them out and stare at them, but return them carefully to their package when I was done. I was never a baseball card collector, but I understood the impulse.

Resnik was the "other woman" aboard the shuttle Challenger, when it blew up 25 years ago today. Most people remember the teacher Christa McAuliffe, understandably; her presence on the doomed flight, as an amateur among risk-taking professionals, compounded the sense of tragedy. But I felt more connected to Resnik. Her autographed photo had created a connection between us, in my mind. And while I would've been upset by the explosion, the fact that I possessed something she'd once touched enhanced my own personal sense of devastation.

Weird thing, though, is that I never cried about it. Not until 10 years later, in 1996, when I caught a TV special commemorating the anniversary of Challenger's demise. It was only then -- as an adult, in my first full-time newspaper job -- that I broke down and sobbed. I was probably weeping for myself; the explosion was the beginning of the end of my intensely held childhood dream, after all. I am not an astronaut, and I will never slip the surly bonds. 

But Judy Resnik did. 

Can free markets save Afghanistan?

There's a suggestion of the sort in Sen. Marco Rubio's piece over at National Review:

And if their people are to establish businesses and attract long-term economic development investments that help wean them off the opium trade, Afghanistan must become a country where basic property and commercial laws are respected and enforced.

Now, Rubio is a bit of a Tea Party darling, but this is the first time I've heard hint of anybody trying to apply Tea Party philosophy to the war in Afghanistan. And I'd really like to see him expand on this theme. My initial reaction is that lots of Afghans are, in fact, responding to market forces by growing the opium that the West uses-slash-finds-so-problematic. Beyond that, though, I've not really heard that property right issues are a particular problem in a land where the central government is corrupt and ineffective. If there's a substantive critique to be made along these lines, I'd really be interested in seeing it. Admittedly, I suspect it's a throwaway line that doesn't actually mean anything.

Does gridlock defeat special interests, or serve them?

At the Cato Institute, Marcus Ethridge writes (PDF) a celebration of good old-fashioned government gridlock. By making government so inefficient, he says, you make it unlikely that special interests can dominate the decision-making process:

A large and growing body of evidence makes it clear that the public interest is most secure when governmental institutions are inefficient decisionmakers. An arrangement that brings diverse interests into a complex, sluggish decisionmaking process is generally unattractive to special interests. Gridlock also neutralizes some political benefits that producer groups and other well-heeled interests inherently enjoy. By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.

This seems overly optimistic to me. It assumes that "well-heeled interests" don't understand how to employ the levers of power in negative fashion as well as positive ones. The United States Senate tried for decades to pass civil rights legislation--like anti-lynching laws--only to be frustrated time and again by a band of Southerners who used the filibuster to great effect. In that case, there was broad-based recognition in American society that it was bad to kill black people, but the filibuster served the purpose of protecting Southern white guys. Who was the "special interest" in that case?

Ethridge never once uses the word "filibuster" in his piece, though, celebrating instead on the checks and balances provided in the Constitution--the filibuster isn't in there--and bemoaning the rise of the regulatory state. I'm not really sure how you honestly examine gridlock (and deride the "rent seeking" associated with unelected regulators making rules for the rest of us) without dealing with the ramifications of the filibuster. There's an argument to be made that the filibuster so constrains Congress that the legislative branch has ended up deferring to executive branch rulemakers to get stuff done instead of doing their jobs. The framers of the Constitution may have created a limited government, but they also wanted it to be energetic. The filibuster, as currently used, is a gridlocked step too far. And I see little evidence it serves anybody but small interest groups.

Commencing a Mark Steyn freakout in 3 ... 2 ...

Apparently jihadists aren't going out-baby us all into sharia law:

Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the world’s religious balance, experts said. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent.

Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics at Princeton and a consultant for Pew on global Islam, said that the report could challenge assertions by some scholars and far-right political parties about future demographic domination by Muslims.

“There’s this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, they’re going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, the United States,” she said. “But the figures don’t even come close. I’m looking at all this and wondering, where is all the hysteria coming from?”

In the United States, the Muslim population might someday be as high as 1.7 percent of the population. There's this wild-eyed segment of conservatives who believe that every single American Muslim is a secret radical bent on establishing a caliphate to make all of us grow beards, wear burkhas and stop watching HBO. Even if that was true -- uh, it's not -- the numbers simply don't bode well for that proposition.

Scott Rigell, the defense budget, and a Constitutional cop-out

Near the end of the New York Times' story about the desire of some Tea Party Republicans to cut the defense budget, I came across this striking passage:

Representative Scott Rigell, a Republican newcomer from Virginia who at first sparred with the Tea Party but then signed a pledge supporting many of its positions, said that he, too, was committed to a strong military and the spending it required. In an interview after the hearing, he said that “as a very first priority, it is our constitutional duty to stand an army.”

You hear a lot of this sort of thing from hawks who want to cut Medicare but continue pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a bloated defense budget, so it might be a good idea to understand how Rigell wrongly invokes the Constitution to avoid a hard discussion about the proper size of the defense budget.

First of all, the Constitution empowers Congress to raise an army and a navy, it's true, but it doesn't actually create a duty (that is, if I'm reading Rigell properly, a requirement) to do so. In fact, it limits army appropriations to just two years at a time. Why? So that the Congress can frequently discuss whether the size and footing of that army is appropriate to the needs of the nation.In Federalist 24, after all, Alexander Hamilton writes "that clause which forbids the appropriation of money for the support of an army for any longer period than two years a precaution ... will appear to be a great and real security against the keeping up of troops without evident necessity."

"Evident necessity."  Read, oh, Federalist 23 through 29, and the idea of "evident necessity" becomes clear: The Founders wanted the European powers to keep their mitts off the United States and its territories. (They also wanted a strong navy to protect American mercantile shipping.) Since Tea Partiers and Republicans continually raise the topic of the Founders' vision for America, it's worth emphasizing very strongly: The United States current defense posture -- one in which we have so many bases around the world that we've literally lost count -- is light years away from what the Founders articulated. They were fighting fears that the U.S. military would become so large that it could oppress the American people; they didn't even consider the idea of bestriding the entire globe.

Just for emphasis, though, let's rejoin Hamilton in Federalist 26. 

The legislature of the United States will be obliged, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. ... The provision for the support of a military force will always be a favorable topic for declamation. As often as the question comes forward, the public attention will be roused and attracted to the subject, by the party in opposition; and if the majority should be really disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.

Finally, in Federalist 28, Hamilton suggests that Americans don't need to worry about the military getting too big for its britches. "We should recollect that the extent of the military force must, at all events, be regulated by the resources of the country. " 

The debate over defense spending doesn't end with a listing of Congress' enumerated powers, in other words. The Founders wanted us to debate that spending, vigorously. They expected that the size of military would be kept in line with the actual need to defend the (ugh) homeland, and reined in if the military was getting too large. And they expected that the size and power of the military would be constrained by our national ability to spend money on that military. There are indications on all fronts that the American government in the 21st century is running afoul of all those ideas. Congrats to Tea Partiers who are sincere enough in their vision to go down this road. And watch out for Republicans who mutter the words "Constitutional duty" in order to short-circuit a very needed debate.

 

Well, as long as I'm wading into the abortion topic anyway...

Nicholas Kristoff:

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.”

Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision.

I get and won't try to dispute why the Catholic Church is anti-abortion. But this incident, like similar ones before it, does somewhat perplex me: If the ethic at stake is the preservation of life, why is the life of a child considered more valuable -- as it apparently is in this case -- than the life of the mother? Or, in more abstract terms, than the lives of four other children who would have been deprived of the care of their mother?

For comparison's sake, I note that the Catholic Church more or less originated and provided the intellectual energy behind the "just war doctrine." Broadly speaking, it lets church members justify a course of action that always results in the maiming and killing of many innocent people—precisely so that greater harm, or evil, won't result from inaction. 

I, for one, don't expect Catholic hospitals to start offering abortions right and left. Certainly, I'm not a Catholic. But Catholic hospitals provide much of the care available to people in rural and poor areas of the country, and it concerns me if they're being confined by policies that don't seem to place much value on the lives of actual living women.