I’ve written about the Muslim Brotherhood before at RedState and while researching that post, one thing became abundantly clear: it is a scary organization with a complicated history. Bill Whittle narrates this excellent video from Encounter Books to help us understand the threat the Brotherhood poses. Watch and learn. Follow @ben_howe
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The Grand Jihad
Earlier this week, abortion and pro-life advocates observed the 39th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which, along with its companion case, Doe v. Bolton , recognized abortion to be a constitutionally protected right while giving states some leeway in restricting its availability. Roe dominates America’s abortion debate. If you had asked any of the scores of thousands of pro-lifers who poured into Washington, D.C., on Monday for the annual March for Life to name their most urgent priority, most would have said overturning Roe . Abortion advocates, meanwhile, talk about Roe as if it were the only thing standing between women and a new era of back alley abortions. As NARAL Pro-Choice America states on its website, “We believe that women should have the option to choose abortion. Today they can, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.” But Roe may matter less than many people realize — or perhaps matter for different reasons that commonly thought. Many people mistakenly believe that legal abortion hinges on Roe — that without Roe abortion would be illegal everywhere in America. But that’s not true. If Roe goes, abortion law would revert to the states to decide. Others mistakenly believe that the number of abortions would drop precipitously if Roe goes. That likely would not happen. Consider how abortion is treated in two states: South Dakota and California. Relatively few abortions take place in South Dakota because South Dakotans are generally pro-life and elect pro-life lawmakers who have passed a number of restrictions on abortion. They include parental notification laws, bans on public funding of abortion and a requirement that women seeking abortion be given pro-life counseling. In 2011, South Dakota passed the nation’s longest abortion waiting period law, three days. That means women seeking surgical abortions in that state must wait three days between their initial visit to an abortion facility and the abortion. This is an important restriction because there are only two abortion facilities in South Dakota, and less than a quarter of South Dakota women live in counties with an abortion facility, according to the Guttmacher Institute. So for many women, obtaining an abortion means making two lengthy trips to the abortion center. Given the legal environment in South Dakota, it’s not surprising that only six percent of South Dakota women who became pregnant in 2008 aborted — three times lower than the national abortion rate of 19%. That’s just 850 abortions in 2008, representing less than 0.1% of abortions nationally. But the number of abortions performed in South Dakota likely wouldn’t change much if Roe were overturned. In 2006, South Dakota passed a “trigger law” that would automatically ban most abortions if Roe is overturned. But, given that twice in the past few years South Dakota voters have voted down ballot measures to ban abortion outright, the trigger law would likely be repealed if Roe goes. This means that post- Roe South Dakota would probably look much like it does today. Abortion would be restricted and relatively few women would obtain them. But a blanket abortion ban would be unlikely. The same could happen in the twenty or so other states that have trigger laws or pre- Roe abortion bans that remain on the books. Many of these laws would be repealed or altered after Roe ‘s demise to reflect voters’ opposition to total bans and legislators’ unwillingness to defy public opinion. Gerald Rosenberg, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies the effect of Roe on abortion rates, said recently, “My guess is that no more than a dozen states could sustain a total abortion ban, and these are principally states where virtually no legal abortions are performed today.” Now consider California, where there are no major restrictions to abortion and only 1% of women live in counties without an abortion facility. Abortion is available virtually on demand in California, and, in 2008, nearly one quarter of the 900,000 California women who got pregnant aborted. That’s 214,109 abortions, or nearly one-fifth of all abortions nationally. But California’s high abortion rate probably wouldn’t change much were Roe overturned. California is one of seven states that have passed laws that, according to Guttmacher, “prohibit any interference with a woman exercising her right to obtain an abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the life and health of the woman.” In other words, these seven states — which together account for one quarter of abortions nationally — have passed laws that codify Roe . The Center for Reproductive Rights estimates that 23 states would protect abortion fully if Roe fell. According to the Guttmacher statistics, these states accounted for 713,120 abortions in 2008, or 59% of abortions nationally. The upshot is that Roe means relatively little in terms of the number of abortions because the vast majority of abortions take place in states that would almost certainly keep the practice legal if Roe fell, and relatively few abortions take place in states that would ban the procedure. But that doesn’t mean Roe isn’t important. I asked experts on both sides of the debate whether Roe still matters. Not surprisingly, they all responded emphatically that it does. Susan Cohen, director of Government Affairs with the Guttmacher Institute, told me that because many states might “jump to criminalize abortion” if Roe were overturned, Roe “has never been more relevant or critical in maintaining basic protections and rights for American women.” Denise Burke of Americans United for Life, a pro-life legal organization that creates model pro-life legislation for states, told me that Roe ‘s reversal is important because, among other things, Roe is “the paradigmatic case of judicial usurpation of the legislative role.” She says that striking it down would take away the federal courts’ power to decide abortion policy and block laws passed by the people’s elected representatives. Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, wrote in an email that even a relatively small drop in abortions after Roe would be “well worth doing” because “each human life spared is on inestimable value.” But George thinks pro-lifers shouldn’t be satisfied with merely working to overturn Roe. He believes they should also work for federal protection of unborn human life. He believes abortion is not purely a state issue and that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution expressly empowers Congress to enforce through legislation the guarantees of due process and equal protection to unborn human beings as persons. George also mentioned the “enormous symbolic significance” of Roe and the corresponding symbolic significance that its reversal would have. Michael New, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan–Dearborn who studies abortion trends, conceded that Roe ‘s reversal wouldn’t significantly change the legal status of abortion in many states. But because “the law is a powerful teacher,” he thinks overturning Roe ” would be an important first step for the pro-life movement.… For the first time in nearly 40 years it would result in a meaningful national debate about what sort of legal protection unborn children deserve.” Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, agreed. ” Roe is still relevant,” she said. Tobias referred to Roe’s reversal as “a teaching tool,” because as long as Roe remains, nine unelected justices are setting abortion policy for the entire country. Roe ‘s demise, in Tobias’s formulation, would be “a beginning not an end.” If that’s true, it’s a beginning pro-lifers have been waiting 39 years to commence.
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Does Roe Still Matter?
During Monday’s Republican debate ( transcript ) in Myrtle Beach, SC, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich offered a bold vision for allowing Americans to voluntarily contribute the “employee portion” of their Social Security payroll taxes into personal investment accounts, while the “employer portion” would continue to be paid into the Social Security Trust Fund — a fund that only Al “Lockbox” Gore and Congressman Xavier Becerra (D-CA) think actually holds anything like real money. Gingrich made accurate and important points that such a change would hugely benefit the country: Now, what does it do? It gets the government out of telling you when to retire. It gets the government out of picking winners and losers. You save — it makes every American an investor when they first go to work. They all have a buildup of an estate, which you do not get in the current system. And the estimate by Martin Feldstein at Harvard, who was Reagan’s chief counsel and economic advisors, was you actually reduce wealth inequality in America by 50 percent over the next generation because everybody becomes a saver and an investor and you have a universal investing nation. Former Senator Rick Santorum responded: [T]here’s nobody for the last 15 years that’s been more in favor of personal savings accounts than I have for Social Security. But we were doing that when we had a surplus in Social Security. We are now running a deficit in Social Security. We are now running a huge deficit in this country. Under Congressman Gingrich’s proposals, if he’s right, that 95 percent of younger workers taken, there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in increased debt, hundreds of billions of more debt being put on the books, which we can’t simply — we’re going to be borrowing money from China to fund these accounts, which is wrong. I’m for those accounts, but first we have to get our fiscal house in order, balance this budget and then create the opportunity that Newt wants. But the idea of doing that now, is fiscal insanity. Santorum is epitomizing what Frederic Bastiat would have called “a bad economist.” In his seminal 1848 essay on the difference between the bad economist, who considers only “that which is seen,” and the good economist who “takes into account… those effects that must be foreseen,” Bastiat presaged Monday’s battle between Santorum, who didn’t offer a vision past tomorrow, and Gingrich, who reminded us that whatever his other faults he remains the deepest thinker on the podium: Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil. It’s true: The United States has a huge budget deficit and debt. Some of that is already due to Social Security because its payout requirements now exceed its income from payroll taxes. It’s about to get much worse. According to USA Today , based on the 2011 Social Security and Medicare Trustees Annual Report: Social Security’s long-term shortfall grows about $1.2 trillion annually — a sign of an imbalance between the number of young workers and older beneficiaries, according to the Social Security trustees’ annual reports. The $21.4 trillion unfunded liability represents the difference between all taxes that will be paid and all benefits received over the lifetimes of everyone in the system now — workers and beneficiaries alike. This is the measure corporations and insurance companies use to assess financial adequacy of their retirement programs. The number differs from the $6.5 trillion, 75-year shortfall that Congress uses to assess Social Security’s health. Congress’s 75-year figure is smaller because it counts taxes collected from future workers — those toiling from 2050 to 2085, for example — but doesn’t count the benefits they will get in the 76th year and beyond. In addition, Congress reduces its estimate of Social Security’s shortfall by counting the $2.6 trillion in IOUs the government has issued to the program’s trust fund. However, the government’s audited books, issued by the Treasury Department , don’t count that money as having any value to the federal government because it is a debt the government has issued to itself — like paying off a car loan with a credit card. In other words, if you believe Newt Gingrich’s math — and Santorum didn’t challenge it — that his plan of allowing voluntary personal accounts would make Social Security solvent in the long run, then Santorum is worried about a relatively paltry (by President Obama’s spending standards) couple hundred billion dollars of additional annual deficit for some number of years in order to save as much as $20 trillion over the long term. And like all bad economists (including Keynesians and Democrats), Santorum ignored the massively pro-growth aspects of Gingrich’s proposal: The multi-trillion dollar increase in privately saved wealth will provide a major adrenalin boost to the American (and world) economy, causing increased employment and GDP growth, translating into higher tax revenues that will offset at least part of the increased deficit that a “static” model would predict. Santorum makes another major mistake, subject to the same criticism some have made of Republican attacks on Romney’s Bain Capital: he’s using an argument that we would expect from, and that should be left to, Democrats. Democrats are deeply antithetical to anything that would increase the number of Americans who have a financial interest in understanding government regulation, intervention, spending, and taxation. They are, as economist Don Luskin puts it, part of the real political conspiracy, namely the coordinated effort by the left to keep you poor and stupid . Do you think the nation would have tolerated Dodd-Frank if another 10 or 20 or 50 million people of voting age suddenly realized that federal regulation actually impacted them rather than just “the one percent”? How about cap-and-trade, or the out-of-control NLRB, FCC, or EPA? How about Obamacare? No, a nation of investors is a nation without a Democratic majority and don’t think Nancy Pelosi and friends don’t know it. If Rick Santorum were as much a free-market capitalist as he claims to be, he would, rather than making Obama’s arguments for him, be championing Newt’s personal Social Security account plan while pressing the Speaker a little harder on details of how to deal with the short-term budget impact of increasing long-term economic liberty and national fiscal solvency. It is a trade manifestly worth making, bad economists notwithstanding.
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Rick Santorum, Bad Economist
Perhaps the coolest part of my job is getting embargoed copies of best sellers and getting to read them well in advance of release. Around Christmas this year, I received a small package in the mail and out came Ameritopia with a great big sticker on the front. “Pre-Publication Copy. EMBARGOED until January 16, 2012.” Well, the problem was that it was Christmas time and I had no time to sit down and read a book. I put it on my desk and there it sat. As luck would have it, I fell under the weather and started traveling all about the same time. In and out of airports, in and out of the doctor’s office, in and out of bed — I had a little down time and I picked it up and started reading. Let me first say that the cool thing about reading a Mark Levin book or an Ann Coulter book is that if you are in a crowded place you occasionally notice people who notice what you are reading getting up and moving away from you and others moving closer — the books alone are crowd control items and have also served to get me off jury duty. As for the contents of the book? Fantastic. And I don’t just say that because Mark is a friend. Regular listeners of my radio show know I constantly refer back to to Men in Black when legal issues arise on the show. Mark has a unique ability to take complex subjects and boil them down to their essentials, which he then conveys in an accessible, easy to understand manner. This time is no different. Mark’s subject is left wing utopia versus what America is actually. It’s a breakdown of the typical view of what a utopia is and is not and what America is. Mark succinctly explains how the evolution of the concept of a utopia has built the intellectual framework for statism, how it does not work, and how the American founders broke with that intellectual framework with new ideas from the enlightenment to pursue a nation where the state did not control man’s destiny into a utopian fantasy, but rather, as Lincoln said, let each man make himself. Over time, of course, we know how the story goes. The checks and balances broke down, the constitution “evolved” under liberal jurisprudence, and the state has grown not just in budgetary size, but creeping more and more into our lives and personal decision making processes. Part 2 of Mark’s book should be read by every high school student. It is a great breakdown of the ideas that influenced our founders and how they applied them. From Locke to Montesquieu, Mark takes what could be difficult concepts and makes them so even a public school grad can understand them. I really, really enjoyed the book and fully suspect you will too . Yet again, Mark Levin has another best seller. In all honesty, I have told Rush Limbaugh several times it is time for him to write another book. But, and no offense Rush if you read this, Mark has filled the void ably and, unlike a lot of talk radio hosts in America, fills that void with intellectual fire power, not pablum and crap.
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Ameritopia
Peering ahead at the worst possible outcomes of Obamacare five years from now, imagine that individuals were being fined by the Department of Health and Human Services for failing to buy health insurance — even though insurance companies have withdrawn from the market and aren’t offering it anymore! Would that be fair? Well, it’s exactly what’s happening right now as the Environmental Protection Agency penalizes oil companies for failing to buy non-existent cellulosic ethanol. Ah, ethanol. What market atrocity hasn’t yet been committed in pursuit of the idea that we should power our cars from farmland rather than taking the fossilized stuff out of the ground? In case you haven’t noticed, the 30-year-old program for subsidizing ethanol production through tax credits has expired. Congress let it to happen over the Christmas holidays while hassling over how to fund the federal government for fiscal 2012. Republicans (minus a few farm state members) have long condemned the program while Democrats, who usually hail it as a triumph of the Carter Administration, finally decided it wasn’t worth defending anymore. This means the tax credit for ethanol — which started at 3 cents per gallon and eventually rose to 54 cents — is now off the books. Also gone is the 46-cents-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol to protect the domestic industry. Does that mean we’re back to reality? Unfortunately, no. Still in place are the mandates adopted when the Bush Administration set phantasmagorical goals for ethanol production, particularly cellulosic ethanol, which brings us to our original subject. The ethanol that we’ve been putting in our gas tanks for the last 20 years is made from corn seeds. The sugars and starches in the grain break down under heat and can be easily fermented into alcohol. We’ve been doing it since Neanderthal days (the Cave Men had a version of beer), so it’s not too complicated. The problem is that the seeds make up only 15 percent of the corn plant. The rest is cellulose, the much tougher molecules that give the plant its structure and do not break down so easily. It can be accomplished with chemical enzymes or by evaporating everything and then combining it back to liquid ethanol, but both methods are far too expensive and energy intensive. So the preferred techniques are biological. There are bacteria in the guts of cows and termites that break down cellulose but they are highly adapted and have trouble living outside their native environment. Only in 2010 did someone genetically engineer a strain of yeast that can do the same thing. But that is getting way ahead of the story. Drawing on only 15 percent of the plant, we are now processing an incredible 40 percent of the 12 billion bushels grown on 400,000 farms into fuel ethanol. The entire world crop is only 25 billion bushels, which means that one out of five bushels worldwide is going into American automobiles. This has crimped the world food supply and set off riots in places as diverse as Mexico and Southeast Asia. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization regularly condemns ethanol as a “crime against humanity” but no one in this country pays much attention. Always on the horizon of this effort, however, has been the vision that we will one day be able to process the remaining 85 percent of the plant — the cellulose — into a usable fuel as well. Then we wouldn’t have to be taking food out of people’s mouths. Unfortunately, while it’s been accomplished here and there in the laboratory, no one has ever been able to scale the process up to a commercial level. Nor is there any assurance that anyone ever will. People have been trying to domesticate morel mushrooms for centuries without any success. Somewhere around 2005, however, the environmental movement and its tagalongs in the Bush Administration came upon the perfect solution — government mandates! “America is addicted to oil,” President George Bush, Jr., pronounced in his 2006 State of the Union address, even mentioning the magic word “switchgrass,” which serves as a shibboleth among renewable energy enthusiasts. Switchgrass is a fast-growing weed that sprouts anywhere and could provide enough feedstock to replace significant portions of our domestic oil — if anybody ever figures out how to ferment it. Charging straight ahead, however, Congress adopted the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandated the consumption of 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2010, 250 million by 2011, and 500 million in 2022 at a time when no one had ever mastered the technology. To make sure it happened, the bill added a $2 billion Department of Energy program to fund manufacturing plants. The Department of Agriculture kicked in another $1.6 billion. You say you want technological progress? Put things in the hands of the government. The first company to take advantage was Range Fuels, a Colorado company that broke ground in November 2007 in Soberton, Georgia, promising to generate 100 million gallons of ethanol a year out of pine-logging wastes. Before it even built the plant, Range Fuels won the 2008 North American Fuels Technology Innovation Award for Green Excellence. Full operation was promised by 2009. By 2010, Range had received a $50 million grant from the Department of Energy with another $26 million promised when it produced its first gallon. The State of Georgia contributed another $6 million and the Department of Agriculture added an $80 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Biorefinery Assistance Program. Still, Range had not produced a single gallon of ethanol. In January 2011 Range finally opened the factory to produce one 200-gallon run of methanol — which can’t be used in cars — and then closed down, saying the plant didn’t work. That single run allowed it to collect the last $26 million, so that Range was able to reimburse its investors while leaving taxpayers holding the bag. It was a bigger scandal than Solyndra, although no one noticed at the time. By this time the EPA had scaled the 100-million gallon mandate down 6.6 million, yet even that wasn’t available. Cello Energy, an Alabama company with similar ambitious, also gave up on the process after receiving government money. There was no cellulosic ethanol to be had anywhere. Still, the mandates remained in place and so the EPA decided to enforce them anyway. It required several major oil companies to buy $6.8 million worth of “credits” for future cellulosic ethanol on the presumption that one day they will be able to cash them in. At this point, the higher the EPA raises the mandates, the more they can collect from the oil companies. Is anyone in the government or environmental community repentant or even discouraged by any of this? Hardly. Cathy Milbourn, of the EPA, said the quotas were still “reasonably attainable” and that by maintaining them “we avoid a situation where real cellulosic biofuel production exceeds the mandated volume.” Try to figure that one out. Retired Vice Admiral Dennis V. McGinn, who serves with the American Council on Renewable Energy, added: “I am absolutely convinced from a national security perspective and an economic perspective that the renewable fuel standard, writ large, is the right thing to do.” So that’s what it’s like when the government decides to run the renewable fuel industry. Just imagine what it’s going to be like when it’s running health care.
