Telling the truth to one’s superiors is hard. Especially when the stakes are high. Christina Romer comes to mind. Brilliant economist. She’s done excellent work on the role of monetary policy during the Great Depression.

A partisan Democrat, she was summoned to Washington soon after President Obama’s election to advise him. All of a sudden she endorsed the Bush-Obama views on stimulus. This is a 180 degree turn from her previous views. Romer’s own academic research shows that fiscal stimulus’ effects are too small to do measurable good.

Romer the economist believes that most business cycles have monetary causes. Not fiscal. Monetary. Romer the economist had been very consistent in expressing that view. But that view changed as soon as she arrived in Washington and became Romer the economist transformed into Romer the political advisor. Suspicious.

This is not a new phenomenon. Politicians from both parties have been using economists for as long as economists have let themselves be so used. Politicians love the air of legitimacy that pointy-headed academics can give to their proposals. And economists love the sudden rush of attention and name recognition — and the professional prestige that will long outlast the current administration. They are happy to sell out. Or is it buying in?

That thought was sparked by reading about F.A. Hayek mourning the death of some of his colleagues’ integrity back during the Reagan years:

“You can either be an economist or a policy advisor.

I have seen in some of my closest friends… how a few years in government corrupted them intellectually and made them unable to think straight.”

-Cato Policy Report, Vol. 5, No. 2, February 1983.

One of the first things I noticed after moving to Washington was the sheer number of bad drivers. Lane markers are treated as mere suggestions. Use of turn signals is strictly optional. It doesn’t help that outside of the downtown area, the roads are a confusing jumble. That spells disaster in a city with a large transient population unfamiliar with the city’s nooks and crannies.

But that’s all anecdotal evidence. The hard data confirm that DC drivers are a sorry lot:

Washington had the most accident- prone drivers of any U.S. city for the third straight year, according to Allstate Corp., the biggest publicly traded U.S. auto insurer.

Washington’s drivers get in a collision every 5.1 years, meaning that they have a 96 percent higher chance of being in an accident than the average American driver…

The national average for the period between collisions has been about 10 years for the six years the company has conducted the study.

Read more here.

Invading Iraq was one of the Bush administration’s worst mistakes. It is a waste of blood and treasure to send troops to a country that never attacked us and poses no security threat. I’ve been looking forward to the day when President Obama would announce that misguided war’s end.

Today is that day. He has declared an official end to combat operations. But the announcement rings hollow.  There are still 50,000 troops in Iraq. They are still being fired upon. They are still firing back. Their lives are still at risk every day. That sounds an awful lot like “combat operations.”

Iraq will be a free country some day. But that requires massive institutional reform. That kind of sea-level change will take a generation or more. And it has to come from within. It cannot be imposed from without by a foreign army.

Armies can fight wars. They cannot build nations. Freedom is not a top-down construction. It is a bottom-up process. It is well past time to withdraw all troops from Iraq and put a real end to combat operations.

America does have a role in Iraq’s future. Engaging in trade and commerce with Iraqis will help build the economy there, while benefiting consumers in both countries. Tourism and cultural exchange can build up good will for a nation currently viewed by many Iraqis as an occupier.

Most importantly, intellectual exchange can give Iraq’s future leaders an understanding of liberalism that they can make their own and adapt to Iraq’s unique circumstances.

It’s a long and messy road. But nobody can take the first step until combat operations actually end. We are still 50,000 troops away from that noble goal.

Through June, the government spent about $620 billion of stimulus money. The Obama administration claims that the spending has saved or created 2.3 to 2.8 million jobs.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume those job creation numbers are true. In fact, let’s pick the rosiest number — 2.8 million jobs.

At a price of $620 billion, that comes out to $221,428.57 per job. Startlingly inefficient.

Now consider that that $620 billion had to come from somewhere else. Some of that money came from taxes. That leaves less money left over for consumers and businesses to spend. Some of the stimulus money was borrowed. That leaves less capital for private companies borrow.

The private sector tends to spend less than the government to create a job. Since stimulus spending is spending more money to create fewer jobs than the private sector, it is actually causing net harm to the job market.

In place of the spending stimulus, I humbly offer a deregulatory stimulus. CEI VP Wayne Crews and I offer some specific proposals here.

A man collected 12 years of salary and benefits from his government job in Norfolk, Virginia. Nothing unusual about that… except that he “had not reported to work in years.”

Yes, this is an outrage. But maybe the world would be a better place if more government employees took that approach to their jobs.

how does a 15 year old hores’ teeth look

I’m going to assume that our friendly Googler meant “horse,” not “whore.” The search probably led him or her to this post about horse teeth regulations.

Albany’s legislators are in quite the fiscal mess right now. Short of cutting spending, they’re trying everything they can to plug their $8.5 billion budget deficit. The Wall Street Journal explains how this affects bagels:

“In New York, the sale of whole bagels isn’t subject to sales tax. But the tax does apply to “sliced or prepared bagels (with cream cheese or other toppings),” according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance. And if the bagel is eaten in the store, even if it’s never been touched by a knife, it’s also taxed.”

So there you have it. Bruegger’s, a New York bagel chain, put signs in its stores telling customers that “We apologize for this change and share in your frustration on this additional tax.”

Bruegger’s shouldn’t be apologizing to its customers. The state legislature should be apologizing to theirs. If they had been able to keep state spending in check, there would be no need for the tax.

(Via Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward)

For most people, the TSA is merely an annoyance. We grudgingly play our part in security theater so we can get where we’re going. But for Kathy Parker, the TSA is something far more serious (via Steve Horwitz):

“Everything in my purse was out, including my wallet and my checkbook. I had two prescriptions in there. One was diet pills. This was embarrassing. A TSA officer said, ‘Hey, I’ve always been curious about these. Do they work?’

“I was just so taken aback, I said, ‘Yeah.’ “

What happened next, she says, was more than embarrassing. It was infuriating.

That same screener started emptying her wallet. “He was taking out the receipts and looking at them,” she said.

“I understand that TSA is tasked with strengthening national security but [it] surely does not need to know what I purchased at Kohl’s or Wal-Mart,” she wrote in her complaint, which she sent me last week.

She says she asked what he was looking for and he replied, “Razor blades.” She wondered, “Wouldn’t that have shown up on the metal detector?”

In a side pocket she had tucked a deposit slip and seven checks made out to her and her husband, worth about $8,000.

Her thought: “Oh, my God, this is none of his business.”

Two Philadelphia police officers joined at least four TSA officers who had gathered around her. After conferring with the TSA screeners, one of the Philadelphia officers told her he was there because her checks were numbered sequentially, which she says they were not.

“It’s an indication you’ve embezzled these checks,” she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn’t before that moment, she says.

She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. “That’s my money,” she remembers saying. The officer’s reply? “It’s not your money.”

Read the whole thing. If the Fourth Amendment had any force anymore, the TSA would have been abolished years ago. It is well past time for President Obama and Congress to consider that step. It would certainly do wonders for them in the polls.

In the world of regulation, no good deed goes unpunished. In the UK, an ex-soldier named Derek Evans decided to mow the lawn at the cemetery where his mother is buried. At first, he had intended to tidy up only her grave. But out of kindness, he ended up mowing the entire cemetery.

Regulators quickly put a stop to Mr. Evans’ good deeds. British blog Big Brother Watch reports:

The jobsworths at the Council have told him that as he was without public liability insurance he was banned from carrying on – despite the fact, as Mr Evans points out in stark terms, “the only people I was mowing near are six feet under.”

… There’s just no common sense to decisions like this: they’re so stupid you have to be an “expert” to reach them.

(Via Iain Murray)

Despite my pessimism (realism?) about politics, ever since reading Julian Simon, I have been an optimist when it comes to progress and the human condition. Since the industrial revolution, each generation has lived longer and better than the last. By that measure, the last decade was the best in human history.

This despite the last decade being an unmitigated political disaster, at least in America. President Bush grew government faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Between new health care entitlements, massive energy and farm bills, two wars, and more than 30,000 new regulations, the Bush administration was no friend of limited government.

President Obama has so far been no better. If anything, his policies are George W. Bush’s on steroids.

Fortunately, the institutional foundations of the market economy are stronger than any bumbling politician. Wherever there is peace, stability, tolerably low corruption, and secure property rights, people will make their lives better over time, despite meddlesome regulators getting in the way. The pattern is global.

Via Ronald Bailey, a brilliant article in Foreign Policy reinforces that point. Things really are getting better. The last decade was the best in human history. Read the whole thing. If you’re despairing over the state of the world, the data are a wonderful cure for pessimism. Here’s a taste:

Consider that in 1990, roughly half the global population lived on less than $1 a day; by 2007, the proportion had shrunk to 28 percent — and it will be lower still by the close of 2010. That’s because, though the financial crisis briefly stalled progress on income growth, it was just a hiccup in the decade’s relentless GDP climb.