A common objection to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which struck down limits on political speech by corporations, is that corporations do not deserve First Amendment protection because they are not people. Cato Institute fellow Ilya Shapiro explains why that argument is so much nonsense:

[W]ould the “no rights for corporations” crowd be okay with the police storming their employers’ offices and carting off their (employer-owned) computers for no particular reason? — or to chill criticism of some government policy. 

Or how about Fifth Amendment rights? Can the mayor of New York exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there?

So corporations have to have some constitutional rights or nobody would form them in the first place.  The reason they have these rights isn’t because they’re “legal” persons, however — though much of the doctrine builds on that technical point — but instead because corporations are merely one of the ways in which rights-bearing individuals associate to better engage in a whole host of constitutionally protected activity.

Although Barack Obama promised lobbyists would not serve in his White House, and issued executive orders restricting former lobbyists, more than 40 ex-lobbyists now populate top jobs in the Obama administration, including three Cabinet secretaries, the Director of Central Intelligence, and many senior White House officials.

At the Washington Examiner, see Tim Carney’s working list of ex-lobbyists in the Obama administration.

• How do we let financial firms fail without threatening the rest of the economy? Nicole Gelinas, author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington, will take up that topic at a breakfast forum at the National Press Club on Thursday, February 11. The event, hosted by the Manhattan Institute and the journal National Affairs, runs from 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.

• The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is coming up this month. This event just keeps getting bigger and better. In addition to hearing the usual top-flight speakers, you’ll be able to partake in several workshops on student activism and Internet activism. So put it down on your calendar for February 18 – 20. What other event lets you both learn about state nullification and meet a World Series of Poker champion?

• Like think tanks?  Like Twitter lists? Check out our list of think tanks on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/InsiderOnline/think-tanks. You can also find a variety of other conservative institutions and outlets on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/InsiderOnline/lists. If we’ve missed anybody, let us know.

• The Red Chapel may resemble a sequel to Borat, but its subject is much more serious. Danish Filmmaker Mads Brügger got his cameras inside North Korea by fabricating a pro-socialist, comedy troupe, The Red Chapel. As one can imagine, the faux show is bizarre enough, but the North Koreans insist on stripping the show of every non-Korean element and end up making the it even worse. The movie, however, fared quite well at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the World Cinema grand jury prize this past weekend.

• The Free Market Foundation of South Africa has been doing great work exposing the failures of interventionist economics in South Africa. And they’ve now been recognized for that work: The Atlas Foundation has awarded the think tank its 2010 Freda Utley prize.

U.S. gross domestic product grew 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter, which sounds pretty good. But wait: Kevin Hassett points out that more than half of that increase in output (3.4 percentage points) went to increasing inventories. That can’t continue:

Since 1970, there have been nine quarters, like the last one, when GDP grew by at least 3 percent and inventories accounted for at least half of that growth. The history of those quarters is hardly a favorable sign of what is in store.

Inventory spikes make for blowout quarters. In the nine quarters with such spikes, the average growth rate was 6.6 percent and the average inventory contribution was 4.4 percent, even higher than what was observed for last quarter.

Spikes also produce hangovers. The average growth rate in the quarter after a spike was 0.9 percent, a whopping 5.7 percent lower. In the second quarter following a spike, the average growth rate is just 1.6 percent.

Penn State University has cleared Michael Mann on three out of four counts of professional misconduct. Last fall, a cache of e-mails came to light showing that Mann and climatologists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit had discussed concealing, destroying, and manipulating global warming data. Those who haven’t yet sampled the relevant e-mails can find a good selection in a lengthy review by the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank. Mann comes across as a thin-skinned, intellectual bully. Of course, being a thin-skinned, intellectual bully is not in and of itself a violation of professional standards. But, as the Commonwealth Foundation points out, Penn State has an interest in seeing the controversy go away and research grants for its meteorology department continue to flow. Penn State is also funded by taxpayers. So, says the Commonwealth Foundation, “the Pennsylvania General Assembly should commission an external and independent investigation into Mann’s potential scientific misconduct.”

The committee reviewing Mann’s work could not reach a determination on a fourth allegation. It recommended that another committee, composed of faculty peers from diverse fields, be formed to investigate whether Mann “engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” Stay tuned.

When the stimulus was debated last year, many folks pointed out that the extra $87 billion for Medicaid in the package could not reasonably be described as merely a temporary stop-gap for state budgets. What would states do when the funding expired? Kick people off of the Medicaid rolls? No, they would come back to Washington for further bailouts, and Congress would oblige.

The budget proposal released this week by the White House confirms these predictions: The Wall Street Journal reports that the budget includes a six-month, $25 billion extension of the Medicaid boost that states received in last year’s stimulus bill. Not surprisingly, the states used that extra Medicaid money to expand coverage. The Journal quotes Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire: “We think some of those people who are now coming on Medicaid are a segment of the population who have never been on Medicaid.” The Journal further notes: “In fiscal 2009, states estimate Medicaid enrollment grew by an average of 5.4%, the highest rate in six years, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That rate is expected to increase to 6.6% in fiscal 2010.”

This isn’t the first time that politicians have sold a permanent expansion of government as merely temporary. For a good discussion of incrementalism, lying, and other strategies used by politicians to expand government, see Charlotte Twight’s book Dependent on D.C.

The White House’s 2011 federal budget includes $3.99 billion for Community Development Block Grant programs, and one of the groups likely to get a chunk of that funding is ACORN—the group that was caught on video giving advice on how to start a brothel to two undercover filmmakers.

Hey, didn’t Congress vote to defund ACORN over that? Yes, but the group’s lawyers are trying to convince the courts that Congress acted unconstitutionally when it did so. They say the defunding amounts to an unconstitutional bill of attainder. A bill of attainder is an act of Congress that punishes a group without benefit of a trial. Federal judge Nina Gershon seems inclined to accept ACORN’s argument. She issued a temporary injunction preventing the funding cutoff from taking effect. Matthew Vaddum has more on that at the American Spectator. According to Heritage Foundation legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky, ACORN’s lawyers are wrong: The Constitution’s bar against bills of attainder means only that Congress cannot put someone in jail or otherwise deprive them of their constitutional rights without a trial. Nobody has a constitutional right to taxpayer largess.

What more does one need to say about school choice other than that it is good for students? According to the authors of a new paper published by Environmental Science & Technology, school choice policies can contribute to global warming by increasing the distances that children must travel to their schools. These effects, say the authors of “Vehicle Emissions during Children’s School Commuting: Impacts of Education Policy,” should also be considered in evaluating whether school choice policies are worthwhile.

Don Boudreaux writes to the authors:

[W]hy limit your study to proposals for K-12 educational choice? Too many young men and women who attend college surely commute too far – some actually leave their homes to move across the country! – thus poisoning everyone’s lungs in their selfish quest to attend the colleges of their own choosing. Further research by you will likely discover that it’s best to prohibit Americans from attending colleges far from home.

And why stop with education? Perhaps another future study can be on the environmental impact of supermarket choice. After all, with people free to drive wherever they wish to buy groceries, it’s almost certainly the case that too many of us drive hither and yon unnecessarily, wasting our time and fouling the air. I’ll bet that your research will show that restricting each American to shopping only at that supermarket nearest to his or her home will reduce vehicular emissions and, hence, help the environment.

Boudreaux adds: “Indeed, the possibilities suggested by your research are infinite.” Many environmentalists, of course, are already aware of the many possibilities for limiting personal behavior that fighting global warming affords them. They’ve already endorsed restricting meat consumption, rationing air travel, limiting the number of babies people can have, forcing people to eat only locally grown food, outlawing inefficient appliances, telling people what kind of vehicles they may drive, preventing the poor from driving entirely, telling people where and in what kind of house they must live, banning drive-thru restaurants, outlawing incandescent light-bulbs, banning beach bon fires, banning patio heaters, and outlawing bottled water. And in general, they want to make trade and immigration policy subordinate to environmental prerogatives.

All this reminds us of lines from the “One Ring” poem from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them / One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” Global warming policy is environmentalists’ “one ring”—it is the issue that subsumes nearly every other issue, and promises the scare mongers the power to dictate nearly every aspect of everyone’s life.

“[M]edian growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” That finding comes from a new paper by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff:

The sharp run-up in public sector debt will likely prove one of the most enduring legacies of the 2007-2009 financial crises in the United States and elsewhere. We examine the experience of forty four countries spanning up to two centuries of data on central government debt, inflation and growth. Our main finding is that across both advanced countries and emerging markets, high debt/GDP levels (90 percent and above) are associated with notably lower growth outcomes. … Seldom do countries simply “grow” their way out of deep debt burdens.

Why are there thresholds in debt, and why 90 percent? This is an important question that merits further research, but we would speculate that the phenomenon is closely linked to logic underlying our earlier analysis of “debt intolerance.” … A general result of our “debt intolerance” analysis … highlights that as debt levels rise towards historical limits, risk premia begin to rise sharply, facing highly indebted governments with difficult tradeoffs. Even countries that are committed to fully repaying their debts are forced to dramatically tighten fiscal policy in order to appear credible to investors and thereby reduce risk premia. [Internal citations omitted.]

The White House’s 2011 budget proposal, released this week, projects that U.S. debt held by the public will rise from 63.6 percent this year to 77 percent in 2020. How close to the Reinhart/Rogoff threshold do we want to get?

The rise in debt, in case anyone wasn’t sure, is being driven by increases in spending not by a lack of taxing. Heritage fellow Brian Reidl reports that the White House’s proposed budget will “permanently expand the federal government by nearly 3 percent of gross domestic product … over 2007 pre-recession levels,” and “[r]aise taxes on all Americans by more than $2 trillion over the next decade.”

President Obama’s proposed budget freeze would reduce federal spending by about $15 billion next year. But not spending the rest of the stimulus could save $327 billion immediately. Here’s what that would look like if the federal budget were water:

• Next Thursday, a panel at The Heritage Foundation will discuss the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which overturned on First Amendment grounds limits on political speech by corporations.

• The Pennsylvania Independent is another great effort by a state-based think tank to step in where traditional news outlets have failed to meet the need for objective reporting on public affairs. This journalism project, launched by the Commonwealth Foundation, is “dedicated to promoting open, transparent, and accountable state government by reporting on the activities of agencies, bureaucracies, and politicians in Pennsylvania.  Our mission is to promote greater civic engagement and encourage discussion about public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide importance.”

• The Enviropreneur Institute is an opportunity for 17 conservation leaders to learn how business and economic principles can be applied to environmental problems. Fellows in the two-week program will get to interact and learn from some of the leading thinkers and doers in free-market environmentalism. The program, offered by the Political Economy Research Center, runs June 27 – July 9 in Bozeman, Montana. The application deadline is March 7.  

• Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent is the top conservative novel on National Review’s list of ten best. See the other nine listed at The Corner.

• Who are the go to think tanks? A new report of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania answers that question. And speaking of go-to think tanks, we should note that InsiderOnline’s extensive database of public policy research features the best work of many of these organizations. And for an online directory of conservative public policy organizations, see PolicyExperts.org.

Here’s one way to get the kids interested in economics:

Two countries stood out in providing immediate assistance following the earthquake in Haiti, reports Claudia Rosett in Forbes:  

One was Israel. Thanks to a mix of democratic enterprise and decades of suffering terrorist attacks, the Israelis have become experts in swiftly responding to destruction. While most of the rest of the world struggled to get organized, the Israelis had landed a modern field hospital and staff in Haiti and were busy saving lives.

But the mother of all standout, standup countries has been, as usual, the U.S. As of Jan. 21, the United Nations' ReliefWeb database showed contributions from the U.S. government (a.k.a. U.S. taxpayers) worth $90 million, or 44% of the grand total pledged.

And that’s just assistance from the government, which, as we noted last week, is typically but a fraction of the private charitable response from Americans following natural disasters. Other Western democracies, in particular France and Sweden, have made notable contributions to the United Nations effort in Haiti. On the other hand, reports Rosett, the oil-rich Islamic countries of the Middle East are in a collective tie with Botswanna for amount of aid to Haiti. These are many of the same countries that routinely use the United Nations as a platform to condemn the United States and Israel.

The evidence shows that stimulus spending is not good for long-run economic growth; but that doesn’t mean there is no political benefit for the Obama administration in pursuing another one. Dan Mitchell explains in the latest Center for Freedom & Prosperity video:

Fifty-two percent of union members now work for the government, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s the first time public-sector union members have outnumbered union members in the private sector.

In 2009, private-sector unions lost 834,000 members while public-sector unions actually gained 64,000 members. The trend, however, precedes the recession. In 1973, only 17.3 percent of union workers were government employees. Since that time, the world economy has seen a sustained rise in competition. Trade barriers have generally fallen; deregulation has been pursued by many countries, especially in transportation, energy, and telecommunications; and new technologies such as the Internet have lowered barriers to entry. As Heritage fellow James Sherk explains, unions find it difficult to extract benefits from companies that must compete:

Unionized companies do poorly in the marketplace and lose jobs relative to their nonunion competitors. Toyota and Honda have gained jobs as General Motors and Chrysler have lost them. Thousands of repetitions of this dynamic caused private-sector union membership to fall from 20.1 percent to 7.6 percent between 1980 and 2008. In 2009, private-sector union membership fell further to 7.2 percent. Competition undermines unions. Government employees, however, face no competition as the government never goes out of business.

While signs of more competition in the economy should always be welcomed, taxpayers should also note what this development means for the labor movement. Where the labor movement once focused on trying to extract a higher share of profits from businesses, it has now become a powerful force lobbying for higher taxes and more government. And when government labor unions negotiate for higher benefits, they are negotiating with politicians who may depend on getting the labor vote come election time. Are those politicians really representing taxpayers?

(For further discussion of how competition undermines union power, see “Unions and Protectionism,” by Dan Griswold in the Winter 2010 issue of Cato Journal.)

When the time comes to reassess the constitutionality of considering race in higher-education admissions, we will need social scientists to clearly demonstrate the educational benefits of diverse student bodies, and to better understand the links between role models in one generation and aspirations and achievements of succeeding generations.

Those words come from a chapter written by Sandra Day O’Connor and Stewart Schwab, in the recently published The Next 25 Years: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa.

Hmmm. In an affirmative action case seven years ago, Justice O’Connor wrote an opinion for the Supreme Court that treated as a settled question the educational benefits of diversity in higher education. That case was Grutter v. Bollinger, and the Court’s ruling allowed the University of Michigan to continue using racial preferences in deciding which applicants to accept to its law school.

George Leef notes the apparent second thoughts by O’Connor in a recent essay for the John William Pope Center. He further notes that the one study relied upon by the Court in Grutter has since been revealed as flagrantly superficial. Leef’s advice for future review by the justices:

[T]hey should not bother with “research” that amounts to, as Carl Cohen says, “reporting students’ answers to shamefully loaded questions like: ‘Do you feel that diversity enhances or detracts from how you and others think about problems and solutions in classes.’” Infinitely better would be to examine actual evidence to see if, for example, there is anything to the “role model” hypothesis Justice O’Connor mentions.

My own guess is that there isn’t: Students who have grown up in a highly diverse, interconnected, media-saturated society and are bright enough to get into selective colleges are not apt to be affected in their studies by the racial composition of the faculty. I might be wrong, though. The Court could look for evidence on this, not mere supposition.

Taxpayers have spent more than $100 billion on Head Start since 1965, but according to the government itself, the program has virtually no lasting benefit for the low-income children it serves.  

The Health and Human Services Administration recently released an assessment that compared children in Head Start with those not in the program. The study tracked the progress of 3- and 4-year-old children up through first grade, finding little lasting impact. In their conclusion, the study authors write:

In sum, this report finds that providing access to Head Start has benefits for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the cognitive, health, and parenting domains, and for 3-year-olds in the social-emotional domain. However, the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole. For 3-year-olds, there are few sustained benefits, although access to the program may lead to improved parent-child relationships through 1st grade, a potentially important finding for children’s longer term development.

The report looked at 112 different measures of cognitive, socio-emotional, health, and parenting outcomes. Only two of those measures showed a beneficial outcome for 4-year-olds in the program. For 3-year-olds, five of the measures showed a beneficial outcome and one of the measures indicated a negative outcome.

There is, however, a federal education initiative that that has been shown to have a lasting beneficial impact. Children in their third year of participation in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program read at a higher level than their public-school counterparts, “equivalent to 3.1 months of additional learning,” according to the most recent assessment by the Department of Education. And those scholarships cost less than $7,000 per student. Unfortunately, Congress decided to discontinue the D.C. school choice program last year. President Obama said he wanted to do what works in education, but so far he is going along with Congress pursuing exactly the opposite policy.

Additional comment on the HHS study: “Head Start Impact Evanescent – HHS Study,” by Andrew Coulson, Cato-at-Liberty, January 13, 2010; “Head Start and America’s Race to the Top in Education,” by Grover J. Whitehurst, The Gov Monitor, January 24, 2010; and “Head Start Earns an F: No Lasting Impact for Children by First Grade,” by David B. Muhlhausen and Dan Lips, The Heritage Foundation, January 21, 2010.

Australia has 13 of the 24 most expensive housing markets and four of the top five surveyed by the 6th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. The survey identifies land-use policies aiming for higher population densities—i.e., “smart growth”—as a primary culprit for making housing unaffordable in Australia and many other markets.  

Survey authors Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavlelitch ranked 272 markets in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The markets were ranked according to the ratio of median house price to median annual income (median multiple). Among the high-priced Australian markets were Sydney, where the average house costs 9.1 times the average annual income; and Melbourne, where the average house costs 8.0 times the average annual income. Cox and Pavlelitch point to Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta as two examples of cities that have kept housing affordable through flexible land use policies that are responsive to consumer demand:

In 1981, Sydney and Dallas-Fort Worth were approximately the same [in] population. Dallas-Fort Worth has grown much faster and is now nearly 50 percent larger than Sydney. In 1981, Melbourne was larger than Atlanta. Atlanta has also grown faster and is approximately 50 percent larger than Melbourne and more than a quarter larger than Sydney … .

Obviously, the demand for housing was greater in the much faster growing markets of Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta than in Sydney and Melbourne. Yet, unlike Sydney and Melbourne, house prices did not rise relative to incomes in Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, because the planning systems permitted new housing to be built on cheap land on the urban fringe. In 1981, the Median Multiple in Dallas-Fort Worth was 3.5. By 2008, it had dropped to 2.7. Atlanta had a Median Multiple of 2.6 in 1981 and it remained 2.6 in 2008. These and other liberally regulated metropolitan areas experienced the housing boom, but not the housing bubble.

By comparison, housing affordability deteriorated in Melbourne, from a Median Multiple of 2.9 in 1981 to 8.0 in 2009. Sydney, with its earlier excessive regulation, had a Median Multiple of 4.9 in 1981, but worsened to 9.1 by 2009 … .

Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta have grown more than the five major urban areas of Australia combined since 1981, both in urban footprint and in population (more than double the Australian rate). Sufficient new infrastructure was provided and taxes remained low by national standards in Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta. Moreover, the ability of fast-growing markets to provide transport infrastructure is illustrated by the fact that Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta have average work trip travel times less than Sydney, despite having larger populations and covering more land area than Sydney. [Internal citations omitted.]

The chart below from the survey also illustrates the tendency of more tightly regulated markets to have higher house prices:

Private, voluntary giving in response to humanitarian crises typically exceeds official government assistance, according to figures reported by Heidi Metcalf Little at the Hudson Institute. She notes that American corporations gave $90 million in assistance following the earthquake in China, while official assistance from the U.S. government totaled $3.1 million. Following the Myanmar cyclone, Americans gave $30.1 million privately compared to official U.S. assistance of $24 million. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, American citizens gave $2 billion for humanitarian assistance compared to $350 million from the U.S. government.

These facts are not recited to suggest that there is a problem with the level of U.S. government assistance, but merely to point out that there is plenty of generosity to be found in individual Americans. See Little’s blog post for a roundup of good charities helping Haiti (read to the bottom of the post).

The government may not restrict political speech simply because it emanates from a corporation, said the Supreme Court Thursday in its opinion in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case concerned efforts by the group Citizens United to distribute Hillary, the group’s unflattering film about then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in 2008. The Court’s ruling strikes down the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that makes it illegal for a corporation to engage in electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and within 60 days of a general election.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the opinion of the Court, rejected the idea that the government could restrict corporations from engaging in electioneering communications while carving out an exception for media corporations: “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.” Kennedy noted various problems with allowing such disparate treatment, including that

… the exemption would allow a conglomerate that owns both a media business and an unrelated business to influence or control the media in order to advance its overall business interest. At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue. This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment.

Supporters of limits on corporate speech argue that the Court is putting the rights of corporations ahead of the rights of citizens. Justice Antonin Scalia addressed this question well in footnote 7 of his concurring opinion:

The dissent says that “‘speech’” refers to oral communications of human beings, and since corporations are not human beings they cannot speak. … This is sophistry. The authorized spokesman of a corporation is a human being, who speaks on behalf of the human beings who have formed that association—just as the spokesman of an unincorporated association speaks on behalf of its members. The power to publish thoughts, no less than the power to speak thoughts, belongs only to human beings, but the dissent sees no problem with a corporation’s enjoying the freedom of the press.