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421. The Roots of the IRS Scandal

Author:
Steve Simpson
Publication Date:
10-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
The revelation in May of this year that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was systematically targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny under the laws governing nonprofit organizations shocked the nation and triggered one of the Obama administration's biggest scandals to date. According to a Treasury inspector general's report, in May of 2010, agents in the IRS's Cincinnati office began singling out applications for nonprofit status from groups with terms such as "Tea Party" or "patriot" in their names. The agents conducted lengthy investigations of the groups to determine whether they intended to spend too much of their money on political activities that are prohibited to most nonprofits.1 The IRS required some groups to answer long lists of questions about their intentions, it demanded donor lists from others, and it even examined Facebook and Internet posts.2 Some groups simply gave up and withdrew their applications. Others spent two years waiting for a decision that never came.3 When Congress investigated the scandal, Lois Lerner, the former head of the office that oversees nonprofit organizations, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify. Later, hearings revealed that Douglas Shulman, the former head of the IRS, was cleared to visit the White House at least 157 times during his tenure and that IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was one of two Obama appointees at the IRS, helped develop the agency's guidelines for investigating the Tea Party groups.4 As a result, critics of the IRS have good reason to think that the scandal reaches the highest levels of our government. The public's outrage over this scandal is, of course, entirely appropriate. If the government can enforce laws based on nothing more than one's political views, then both freedom of speech and the rule of law are dead. But the outrage over the IRS's focus on conservative groups obscures a far more important question: Why was the IRS investigating the political activities of any group? The answer to that question is more troubling than the possibility of rogue IRS agents, biased law enforcement, or even abuses of power at the highest levels. As bad as all of those things are, the bigger threat to freedom is a legal regime that requires scrutiny of Americans' political activities and a political and intellectual culture that applauds such scrutiny and openly calls for more of it. This is the situation in America today. Our tax and campaign finance laws impose a host of regulations on Americans based on how much time, effort, and money they spend on political speech, and many opinion leaders agitate for even more laws and investigations every day. Against this backdrop, the IRS scandal should not surprise us. Our politicians and intellectuals demanded regulation of some of the loudest voices in our political debates, and the IRS delivered. Unfortunately, far too many critics of the IRS have accepted the premise that our laws should distinguish between groups that spend money on political activities and groups that do not. Expressing this view, Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein has argued that the real scandal was that the IRS did not treat all nonprofits as harshly as it treated the Tea Party groups.5 Using the same reasoning, congressional Democrats have attempted to blunt the scandal by claiming that the IRS also investigated some groups on the left.6 It appears that these claims are untrue, but the message is clear: As long as the government is scrutinizing everyone's speech equally, then there is no scandal. But this is the opposite lesson to learn from the IRS scandal. For anyone who cares about freedom of speech, the real scandal is that the government regulates Americans' campaign spending at all. So long as laws remain on the books that do so, scandals such as this one-and far worse-are inevitable. But to understand why that is so requires a deeper understanding of the premises on which the laws are based and how the laws operate in practice. . . .
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
America and Washington

422. Dr. Josh Umbehr on the Concierge Medicine Revolution

Author:
Ari Armstrong
Publication Date:
10-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
Americans are rightly concerned about the rising costs of health care and the monstrosity known as ObamaCare. As patients are looking for better ways to manage their health care, doctors are seeking innovative ways to offer their services. One type of medical practice growing in the marketplace is “concierge medicine,” in which patients pay a doctor or group of doctors a set fee (usually paid annually or monthly) in exchange for a defined package of care.
Political Geography:
America

423. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire

Author:
Alexander V. Marriott (reviewer)
Publication Date:
10-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
“If America should grow into a separate empire,” British Prime Minister Frederick Lord North warned in late 1778, “it must of course cause . . . a revolution in the political system of the world” (p. 15). In his latest book, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire, Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy examines the lives of the ten British political leaders, generals, and admirals most responsible for attempting to prevent that revolution from succeeding. O'Shaughnessy sympathetically discerns how and why they failed—and why America succeeded. O'Shaughnessy, professor of history at the University of Virginia, also examines the revolution from an outsider's perspective in his masterful An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (2000).1 Whereas his previous work sought to answer the question of why the other British colonies in the Americas—Canada and the sugar islands in the Caribbean—did not join with the American revolutionaries, The Men Who Lost America sets forth to save the British leadership from the historical ignominy of being remembered as “incompetent and mediocre” or “hidebound” (p. 5) and “novices” (p. 8). With a much more intimate biographical knowledge of these principal actors—including George III; generals Cornwallis and Clinton; Lord North; and the secretary of state for America, Lord George Germain—O'Shaughnessy seeks to reconstruct the perspective of the British war effort, which is, he contends, “essential for making the war intelligible” (p. 9). Among the strengths of the book, O'Shaughnessy artfully weaves the entire breadth and sweep of the wars of the American Revolution through nine biographical chapters (with one chapter devoted to the brothers General Sir William Howe and Admiral Lord Richard Howe). O'Shaughnessy also destroys certain deeply entrenched myths about the American Revolution and inculcates greater appreciation for the victory gained by the revolutionaries over a collection of determined, intelligent—and in many cases quite sympathetic—adversaries. The main recurring theme of the book, apparent in the experience of every figure examined, is the fundamental misunderstanding among British policy makers of the nature of the revolution and the depth of support for it among the colonists. “It was indeed an axiom of British policy,” writes O'Shaughnessy, “that the majority of Americans were loyal, and that the revolution was nothing more than a coup achieved by 'the intrigues of a few bold and criminal leaders'” (p. 98). Many modern American admirers of the American Revolution also unwittingly hold on to this view, often encapsulated in the convenient notion that the Americans were divided roughly into thirds: revolutionaries, loyalists, and the indifferent. As the British learned only very slowly, too slowly to alter their strategy, the loyalists were not anything close to a majority or even a consistent minority large enough to count on. . . .
Political Geography:
America

424. The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy

Author:
Michael Dahlen (reviewer)
Publication Date:
10-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
From 2006 to 2007, Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, was one of few people warning that the U.S. economy was fundamentally unsound and that real estate was grossly overpriced. In his first book, Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse (2007), he predicted that the economy, the housing market, and the stock market would fall apart. He also voiced these predictions on several cable news shows, yet few people heeded his warnings. Some hosts and other guests even mocked and ridiculed him. But Schiff was right. In his recent book, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy-How to Save Yourself and Your Country, Schiff says that the worst is yet to come and that the 2008-2009 economic crisis was merely a "tremor before the earthquake." Schiff argues that the main culprit of our economic instability is America's central bank: the Federal Reserve. Through its control of the money supply and the effect this has on interest rates, the Fed artificially inflates the prices of various asset classes, creating so-called "bubbles," and when those prices inevitably collapse, the Fed then inflates the prices of other asset classes. "Throughout the 1990s," Schiff observes, "we had the stock bubble and the dot-com bubble. The Fed replaced that with the housing bubble and the credit bubble. Now, the Fed and the administration are replacing those bubbles with the government bubble" (p. 20). By "government bubble," Schiff is referring to the U.S. dollar and Treasury bonds. When asset prices collapse and recessions ensue, Schiff notes, the Fed-via bailouts and low interest rates-props up insolvent banks and other companies (while also helping to finance government debt). It has taken these actions allegedly to minimize the short-term pain of recessions, but in doing so, the Fed has prevented the economy from correcting itself, making it increasingly unsound. "If you keep replacing one bubble with another, you eventually run out of suds. The government bubble is the final bubble" (p. 23). If the Fed keeps interest rates artificially low and if the government keeps running massive budget deficits, the day will come, Schiff argues, "when the rest of the world stops trusting America's currency and our credit. Then we'll get the real crash" (p. 1). In his introduction to the book, Schiff explains that he is taking a different approach here than he took in his previous books: "[T]his time I have decided that rather than simply predicting doom, I would lay out a comprehensive set of solutions. That's why I wrote this book" (p. 2). After diagnosing our economic problems, Schiff explains how we can fix them. . . .
Topic:
Economics and Government
Political Geography:
America

425. Damien Cahill, Lindy Edwards, and Frank Stilwell (eds.), Neoliberalism: Beyond the Free Market(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Author:
Emmanuel Kipole
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Central European University Political Science Journal
Institution:
Central European University
Abstract:
Apparently capitalism and neo-liberalism have elevated the market to a position of omnipotence as a spontaneously occurring best resources' distributor. However, neo-liberalism as a philosophy that informs capitalism has always sparked divergent opinions as to its core spirit and practice. Neo-liberalism has always been netted into different perspectives. Although the consensual bottom-line of neo-liberalism philosophy is the free market, there is no consensus on its interpretation, contextualization and practices. As a whole, there is optimism in neo-liberalism the same as there is skepticism.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, America, and Europe

426. Responding to Change: The New World of Oil and Gas

Author:
Bill White(Chair) and Leonard Coburn(Rapporteur)
Publication Date:
09-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
Improved technology has led to enhanced oil and gas productivity at lower cost and significant production increases in the United States and Canada, dramatically changing energy perspectives. The shift from energy scarcity toward abundance is requiring new energy policies. The potential for the United States to become a net exporter of oil and gas changes American views of energy dependency. Shifts in global energy demand growth from developed to less developed countries, and especially to the Asia-Pacific region, require understanding of changing global energy trade. American energy will flow to markets where scarcity is the largest. Canada and the United States are reaping the benefits of this new world of oil and gas. Mexico will lag behind unless it addresses its chronic problems. Without reform, Mexico could become a net importer of all its hydrocarbons, a fundamental change from its current status. Responding to these changes will require knowledge, foresight, and strategies that are bold and comprehensive.
Topic:
Economics, Energy Policy, Environment, Oil, and Natural Resources
Political Geography:
United States, America, Canada, and Mexico

427. Reducing Livability: How Sustainability Planning Threatens the American Dream

Author:
Randal O'Toole
Publication Date:
10-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
In response to state laws and federal incentives, cities and metropolitan areas across the country are engaged in “sustainability planning” aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In many if not most cases, this planning seeks to reshape urban areas to reduce the amount of driving people do. In general, this means increasing urban population densities and in particular replacing low-density neighborhoods in transit corridors with dense, mixed-use developments.
Topic:
Climate Change, Development, Energy Policy, Infrastructure, and Governance
Political Geography:
America

428. Protection and Realization of Indigenous Peoples' Land Rights at the National and International Level

Author:
Katja Göcke
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Institution:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:
Today, it is generally recognized that the relationship to land forms the basis of an indigenous people's identity, and that indigenous peoples' cultures cannot be preserved without a certain degree of control over land and natural resources. In the course of colonization, however, indigenous peoples lost ownership and control over most of their ancestral lands, and from the end of the 19th century onwards the existence of inherent indigenous land rights, i.e. rights not derived from the colonial powers but rooted solely in the use and ownership of the land by indigenous peoples since time immemorial, had been completely denied. This began to change in the 1960s. Due to increased pressure by national courts and international institutions, state governments started to recognize the continued existence of inherent indigenous land rights and to develop different policies to protect them. This paper looks at how indigenous peoples' land rights are nowadays recognized and protected in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and whether the different national approaches are in accordance with international legal standards. It will be shown that none of the States subject to this study acts completely in accordance with its obligations under international law, but that nevertheless all States have some strong points regarding the realization and protection of indigenous land rights and can learn from each other's experiences.
Topic:
International Law
Political Geography:
United States, America, Canada, and Australia

429. A Step Further on Traditional Peoples Human Rights: Unveiling the Key-Factor for the Protection of Communal Property

Author:
Giovana F. Teodoro and Ana Paula N.L. Garcia
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Institution:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective in relation to the protection of property rights of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Through an analysis based on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System, it is possible to identify the core elements that justify the special protection concerning traditional territories, leading to a rationality that revolves around the unique bond that traditional peoples establish with their land. By studying the recent evolution of the debate within the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the article intends to shift the focus from formal and constricted ethnic classifications to the underlying cultural identity aspects of the relationship between a certain people and its own land. This change of perspective allows the consolidation of a singular idea of property rights towards traditional territories. Aimed not only at indigenous peoples, but also to any community that shows a distinguished and deep cultural tie to its land, this particular property right notion leads to a more comprehensive and consistent protection of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples' fundamental rights.
Topic:
International Law
Political Geography:
United States and America

430. Indigenous Peoples' Rights and the Extractive Industry: Jurisprudence From the Inter-American System of Human Rights

Author:
Efrén C. Olivares Alanis
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Institution:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:
The right of indigenous peoples over their lands, territories, and natural resources has been developed in recent years by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. When this right is in apparent or real conflict with the rights or interests of the extractive industry over these lands or natural resources, resolving the conflict presents complex legal and practical problems. The Inter-American Court has established standards that must be met in order to restrict indigenous peoples' rights over their lands and natural resources, as well as the requirement to conduct transparent consultations in good faith and, when applicable, obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of the affected indigenous peoples before a project can be approved in their territories. This article explores these standards and requirements, and analyzes their application by the Inter-American Court and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Topic:
International Law
Political Geography:
America