Lighting Many Candles: Saving The Children

The flood of  “undocumented”  children coming into the U.S. from Central America poses an unsolvable problem for the governments of the U.S. and many of its states.   Legislation enacted during the George W. Bush administration prevents sending them back without individualized hearings, and unless Congress appropriates the money requested by President Obama there will not be enough hearings officers to handle things without huge delays.

In the meantime,  what happens to these kids?

Of course we cannot assume that Congress will do anything—doing nothing is what it does best!-- and in some respects that is not a bad thing.  The horrible economic and security conditions prompting parents to send young children off across Mexico to enter the U.S. without official permission make sending them home pretty close to wholesale child abuse.  

In an ideal world,  this kind of thing could not happen.  In an ideal world individuals and whole families would be just as free to move anywhere in the world as U.S. citizens are free to move to any of our fifty states.  In  ideal conditions people would consider themselves and all other people to be citizens of the world and would acquire citizenship in particular countries just by moving there,  exactly like Americans become citizens of Oregon or Michigan by moving there. 

We do not live in an ideal world,  and  recent headlines from Ukraine,  Syria,  Iraq, and  Nigeria  suggest we will not live in an ideal world any time soon.  Even so,  even without help from Congress, there are steps we can take as individuals and organizations to help these poor children.  Even an imperfect world offers many opportunities to help people,  to make a significant difference,  to light a large number of candles rather than cursing the darkness.

Half a century ago my parents,  who were comfortable but not particularly flush,  decided to sponsor a child in Hong Kong through one of the several organizations that handle this kind of thing.  Their monthly payments helped support my new foster sister Kit (whom I have never met, but corresponded with when my folks died) until she came of age.  Several decades ago my wife and I did the same thing, supporting a young boy—Angel--down in Ecuador until he became an adult.  My big regret with Angel was that I had forgotten so much of my Spanish that I was never able to communicate very well with him, and we have not kept in touch. 

Perhaps one or more of the child support organizations could undertake to connect American families and organizations such as congregations and civic groups with these children when and if they are returned to their parents.  Financial support would not solve all of the problems which caused the children to flee,  particularly the dangers of  just living in countries where crime runs wild and governments are corrupt,  but such support could at least make their lives less intolerable.

Critics might object  that to put children who had entered the U.S. illegally at the front of the line for economic support when they return home would encourage even more people to send their kids on this highly dangerous journey:  “moral hazard,” as it is called.  Well,  that’s what we get for living in an imperfect world!  In an imperfect world doing good sometimes has bad side effects. 

But that is not necessarily a reason for doing nothing, and in this case there is an obvious way to avoid the bad side effects:  get enough people to support children in these countries so that all the needy children can be supported,  not just those who came up to the U.S.

HOTELS, STADIUMS, CORPORATIONS AND CRONY CAPITALISM

Discussions about proposed hotels in Portland and Corvallis again draw our attention to the danger that unprincipled discrimination favoring selected businesses will undermine respect for government. 

The problem is not just with hotel developers scheming to get their fingers in the public cookie jar.  Several years ago Boeing got more than a dozen states into a tax-break bidding war before deciding where to locate a new plant.  More recently Governor Kitzhaber called a special session so the legislature could authorize him to lock in the state's current tax policy for Nike so it would build a new plant in Oregon.  

Then there is the scandalous use of public money and tax breaks in many parts of the U.S. to build stadiums for professional athletic teams. 

As Governor Kitzhaber pointed out,  the expansion that Nike had conditioned on a tax guarantee would increase Oregon’s tax collections and employment opportunities, and no doubt it did.  But legitimate taxes, like legitimate laws of all kinds, must apply the same rules to one and all.

The rule of law says that we cannot just reduce the tax rate for Boeing but must apply the reduction to all who pay the same type of tax.   We should not make tax guarantees to Nike that do not apply to all corporations in Oregon.  

As soon as we deviate from this principle, the door is opened to all kinds of corruption, influence-peddling, and favoritism. As soon as we deviate from this principle, we all lose the protection that is provided by the rule of law.

By way of analogy, imagine that Oregon were to offer to tax Microsoft's Bill Gates at only 2 percent if he would move from Washington to Oregon. This would be a substantial discount from the 9 percent income tax paid by other Oregonians, but would increase state tax revenues if Gates moved in, since 2 percent of something (a rather large something!)  comes to more than 9 percent of nothing.

Although it would make sense for Oregon to offer such a discount to Gates, everyone would recognize that doing this would be an outrage, a manifest violation of equal protection under the law.
Why then do we tolerate discriminatory taxation when rich corporations rather than individuals are the beneficiaries?

As a Corvallis resident I have studied the details of the proposed hotel here more than I have studied the convention center hotel in Portland.  Essentially the developers in Corvallis want property taxes and room taxes paid by the proposed hotel to count twice:  once, as the taxes they, like all other hotels in town, must pay,  and then again, to pay off city bonds that would contribute $4 million to their construction costs.   And the proposed deal is structured, according to the developers’ own estimates,   to save the hotel $39,445 per year in property taxes in 2016-2020 rising to a saving of $142,146 per year in 2046-2060. 

We cannot blame hotel developers,  athletic team owners,  and corporations for asking for tax breaks or financial support.  Often they offer up complicated economic arguments trying to convince people that their proposals are no-brainers.  But our public officials should not swallow these arguments uncritically.  Even on the rare occasions when such proposals might have actual merit they should reject them out of hand as a violation of the basic principle of good government:  genuine laws must apply the same rules to everyone. 

Eliminate VA Bottlenecks: Put Veterans on Medicare

Veterans Administration medical facilities recently have been under intense criticism for concealing how long patients must wait to see doctors and receive treatment.  A number of veterans may have died while waiting to see a VA doctor. 

Veterans Affairs Secretary  Eric Shinseki recently testified about the situation before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs committee.  He was not warmly received.  Several senators suggested that he ought to resign or be fired.

Unfortunately the problems with VA medical care will provide ammunition to politicians who oppose replacing Obamacare with a simple single-payer system, “Medicare for all.”  

Although the Affordable Care Act made no changes to veterans’ medical benefits,  critics of Obamacare have already seized the opportunity to charge that “government-run health care doesn’t work---just ask a veteran.”   

Of course the problems with veterans’ benefits do not prove that “government health care” doesn’t work.  Medicare,  for example, is a government program and it works quite well, with none of the problems afflicting Veterans’ Administration facilities, or,  for that matter,  Obamacare. 

A key difference between Medicare, on the one hand,  and veterans’ benefits and Obamacare on the other hand,  is that Medicare patients can go to virtually any doctor or hospital in the country, most of which are not operated by the federal government.   The VA has only limited facilities,  not always conveniently located,  and insurance policies sold under Obamacare often severely restrict the doctors and hospitals people can go to. 

Firing Secretary Shinseki would not solve the problems with VA medical facilities, which go much deeper than current complaints might suggest.  A major reform is needed here, and the simplest approach would be to privatize or close all VA facilities and put veterans on Medicare without regard to their age.  Like all other Medicare patients,  veterans could then choose freely among doctors and hospitals and not have to wait for appointments any longer than anybody else.  Money saved by closing VA facilities could be moved to the Medicare Trust Fund;  perhaps part of the savings could be used to provide supplemental insurance to veterans if that is needed to duplicate the coverage they had under the VA. 

The United States is unique in the industrialized world in having completely separate medical insurance systems for veterans,  retired people,  employed people,  the unemployed,  and for native Americans.  Other countries have single-payer systems covering everybody, systems which have worked quite well and which hold administrative costs down to a bare minimum.

Let’s treat the current criticisms of VA medical facilities not just as a problem,  but as an opportunity.   Moving all veterans into Medicare would eliminate one of these separate systems and would be a step in the right direction towards eliminating all of them and providing Medicare for all.

Hotel parking garage: heads they win, tails we lose

 Corvallis taxpayers may be asked to contribute $4.2 million of the $23 million cost of a waterfront hotel and parking structure.    Taxpayers should give this proposal their undivided suspicion.

Although details of the proposed deal are sketchy, those that have come to light do not suggest that Corvallis would be getting a good deal.  If Tom Jensen’s thoughtful letter to the editor has its numbers right,   for $4.2 million Corvallis could build its own downtown parking garage that would accommodate 400 cars day and night.  Under the proposed deal with the hotel developers around 100 parking spots in their garage would be available to the public in the daytime, and perhaps 60 spots at night.  Anyone who has tried to park downtown in the evening knows that 60 spaces would be a drop in the bucket, especially if the same money could have produced 400 spaces. 

The proposed bonds to finance this garage would be paid off at the rate of $325,000 per year,  while the hotel would only be paying $70,000 a year for getting to use as many of the parking spots as needed for its guests.  So where would the additional $255,000 a year come from?  Supposedly, it would come from room tax collections and property taxes paid by the hotel.  But if the hotel is built,  those taxes will be collected by the city even if it has not financed the garage, and these revenues would be available for other city purposes if it doesn’t have to pay off bonds with it.   So it is not reasonable to say that the proposed deal would be self-financing.

Of course the developers have threatened that the hotel would not “pencil out” if the city doesn’t kick in the $4.2 million.  In other words,  it would not be built and the city would not be collecting any room or property taxes from it.  This is an interesting bargaining argument, but the city need not and should not buy it.  As a general principle,  projects like this that cannot attract enough private capital to be built without public “participation” probably are not economically viable and should not be built.  I strongly recommend that the city call the developers’ bluff here,  and see what happens.

One cannot blame the developers for proposing this deal,  since it allows them to keep all of the profits from operating the hotel while shifting a great deal of the risks of loss to Corvallis taxpayers.  And while we should hesitate to impugn the motives of our officials,  the proposed deal does smell rather like crony capitalism at its worst.  

Since the whole proposal has only recently come to light, at the very least the Corvallis City Council should postpone a decision until more public scrutiny and discussion can take place.  If I were on the Council,  though,  my inclination would be to shoot the idea down at the earliest opportunity.   

Student writing assignments for the internet age

Half a century ago my freshman writing teacher at Willamette University was Paul G. Trueblood,  a leading expert on Lord Byron.  I did not appreciate him at the time.  I thought he wasted immense amounts of class time,  telling stories about conducting class out on the lawn when someone turned on the underground sprinkler system and the like.  But when I look back at my development as a writer I realize that his class may have been the most important one I took at Willamette.

Trueblood had us all write major term papers which had to be based entirely on an Everyman’s Library edition of Abraham Lincoln’s Speeches and Letters.  Although the book had an index of sorts,  each of us had to make our own index of passages relevant to the topic on which we were writing.  I still have the book and the index I made. 

The assignment forced us to organize a large but manageable body of information into categories conducive to writing a coherent analysis.  And since we were all working with the same collection of documents,  Professor Trueblood could verify that we had done the work ourselves.

Thanks to this assignment, books accumulated during my 36 years of teaching at Adrian College and 14 years since retiring have indexes that I scrawled inside the covers on topics I was researching. 

Only one other experience contributed as much to my development as a writer.  In 1970-71  I spent a sabbatical year as a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School.  The Liberal Arts Fellows in Law program was designed for college teachers whose classes involved law but who did not want to become lawyers.  There were five of us---two political scientists,  one philosopher, one business professor, and one historian---and we sat in on selected classes,  met as a group, and had plenty of time for independent reading and research. 

I happened to read a book which I considered to be an extremely well-done presentation of a perverse thesis.  After taking 60 pages of notes and comments,  I volunteered to review it for the American Political Science Review.  The editor accepted my offer and told me to limit my review to 1,000 words. 

My first draft, after  I had polished it, turned out to be nearly 2,000 words!  (I had to count them by hand since we did not have computer editors and word counters in 1971.)  My review was tightly reasoned and there wasn’t anything in it that I thought could be left out.  But I went through it with a tally sheet striking out unnecessary words here and there,  replacing five words with two when possible, eliminating sentences that didn’t pull their own weight, occasionally finding whole paragraphs that were not critical to my discussion. 

Finally,  my tally sheet indicated that it  was down to 1,012 words.  Figuring the APSR editor would not count the words by hand,  I sent it in.  My wife,  a more experienced writer, thought it was the best thing I had ever written.  The APSR, whose editors were famous for giving all manuscripts the works,  didn’t change one comma.

My experiences at Willamette and Harvard contributed to my ability to organize and write a highly unorthodox college textbook,  Thinking About Politics:  American Government in Associational Perspective,  published by D. Van Nostrand in 1981.  They also helped me try to improve the writing of my political science and pre-law students, which I considered a very important part of my work. 

By the time I took early retirement in 2000 the Internet and World Wide Web had come along,  complicating the teaching of writing because it made plagiarism so easy.  Students could copy essays on virtually every subject and then just mess with them enough to avoid getting caught if their professor checked using search engines.  Lazier students didn’t bother to do even this, and of course we made them wish they had.  I presume that today’s students know how to cover their tracks better.

More recent developments on the Internet offer new opportunities for college and high school teachers to give students the kind of experience I had at Willamette while minimizing the danger that students will turn in someone else’s writing.  Many newspapers now allow on-line comments about articles, editorials, and op-ed columns, and some of them weed out the most off-the-wall comments.   Some articles in the New York Times,  for example,  get several hundred comments even after editorial scrutiny. 

The comments for a particular article could function as the equivalent of the book of Lincoln’s speeches and letters that were the basis for the term papers Professor Trueblood had us write.  Students could be assigned to read the same published article and then examine all the comments,  sort them into categories,  and write individual analyses and evaluations of the patterns they find in the comments. 

Teachers who really want to pile it on could grade the papers turned in,  then return the papers with instructions to cut the number of words in half without eliminating any of the key points or supporting arguments made in the original paper.  This second assignment,  graded separately,  could replicate my highly educational experience writing the book review for the American Political Science Review.  And it would drive the students mad! 

But maybe 50 years later the students would realize they had really learned something important in the process.   

   

Crimea: Just one more worm in a big can

The so-called principle of the self-determination of peoples or nations has been a sacred cow ever since the administration of Woodrow Wilson.  But governments never respect this principle in dealing with their own subjects. The principle is invoked only to support the breakup of other political systems, as when Russia recently took Crimea away from Ukraine. 

This is not a trivial problem, since boundary disputes are rampant. Should Quebec be a part of Canada? Should Northern Ireland be a part of the United Kingdom, or of the Irish Republic? (Or independent? Or subdivided?!)  Should Kashmir be a part of India? What about Hong Kong? The Canal Zone? Kuwait? Israel? Puerto Rico?   

If a right to self-determination existed, it would be necessary to decide which individuals belong to a particular "people" or nation. One possible way would be for each individual to decide for himself. But today's international law considers the right to exclude undesired individuals to be an inherent right of every nation, no matter how much those individuals would like to become citizens.  So decisions on inclusion and exclusion of individuals (as well as where boundaries between countries should be drawn) have to be made collectively.

Most people believe that collective political decisions should be made democratically. But it is impossible to know whether a majority favors some decision until the membership of the group which will vote has been defined. A majority decides, but a majority of whom?  A majority in Crimea may be a tiny minority in Ukraine.  What principle tells us which population should vote to decide the future of Crimea?
A similar problem can be found in American labor law: determining which workers will be included in a "bargaining unit." The National Labor Relations Act,  written by people strongly committed to democracy,  requires decisions about designating a sole bargaining agent to be made by voting. But the law does not provide that the membership of the unit of workers to be represented will be determined by an election since a vote cannot determine who is to vote. 

American law authorizes the NLRB to listen to arguments about which workers should be included in or excluded from the bargaining unit and determine where the boundaries of the unit will be. This gets the job done.  Then voting can proceed.  A world government could provide the same service when boundaries between different countries are disputed, just as the U.S. Supreme Court resolves border disputes between the various states.

Given today’s lack of a world government the importance of borders combined with a lack of principled ways to resolve disputes about them is a recipe for major trouble.  Borders will continue to change,  as they always have.  (See any historical atlas if you do not believe me!)  But these changes will continue to be made by brute force, or by negotiations backed up by force, as they always have been.   

Who governs the Falkland Islands?  Great Britain.  Why?  Because it won the war with Argentina back in 1982.  Who will govern what is now the eastern part of Ukraine?   Stay tuned for further developments!  It may not be pretty. 

Time to end public sector collective bargaining

Without taking sides with the teachers or with the school board,   we need to think about the legal framework within which the current situation in Portland has developed.    Decades of experience suggest that public sector collective bargaining is a bad idea and that legislation authorizing it should be repealed.

The National Labor Relations Act authorized collective bargaining only with private employers.  The legislation  presumed an inequality of bargaining power between individual workers and big corporations; by joining forces behind a sole bargaining agent, workers would get better treatment.  Franklin D. Roosevelt,  the father of American labor law,  had opposed extending the NLRA to cover government employees.  He thought that a strike against a democratic government would be an abomination. 

Unlike private sector workers,  non-unionized government employees already enjoyed substantial protection against high-handed treatment thanks to civil service laws.  And, like all citizens,  they voted, making up a substantial bloc that elected official preferred not to offend.

Decades later,  though,  collective bargaining for state employees and then federal workers was authorized.   After several more decades,  situations brought about by public sector unionization do not make a pretty picture.

Unions negotiating with private employers have no interest in getting such a good deal that it bankrupts an employer or drives it to outsource production to China.  Public sector unions have had less reason to restrain their demands. 

The new laws allowed unions to pressure officials  to accept contracts government could not afford over the long run.  Rather than raising wages,  officials agreed to generous pensions for future retirees but failed to fund them.  Recent  bankruptcies of cities starting with Vallejo,  California (where I graduated from high school in 1957) and culminating with the spectacular bankruptcy of Detroit are largely due to unwise contracts with employee unions .

Strikes by government workers often have a more dramatic impact on daily life than strikes against private employers.  Strikes by subway workers or bus drivers can tie up a whole city.  Strikes by police or fire fighters can produce disasters.  As Portland residents are well-aware,  a strike by teachers can cause horrible problems for working parents.  This, of course, is why officials have so often knuckled under to union demands in the past, and will probably continue to do in the future unless we change the legal order they must work within.

Occasionally officials have dug in their heels.  When public school teachers in the Crestwood School District in Michigan struck in 1975,  the school board responded to the strike by firing all the teachers and replacing them.  This was upheld by the courts,  but caused lingering hard feelings between different segments of the community.  In the following decade President Reagan fired striking PATCO members when the air controllers declared an illegal strike.   

But we cannot count on elected officials to act more courageously than most of their predecessors.  Their basic interest inclines them to accept contracts postponing the unpleasantness so that someone else has to deal with it.

Public sector bargaining was a well-intended experiment that has produced bad results. 

Although it will be controversial,  we  should repeal all legislation allowing public employees to unionize and strike.  In the past Oregon has led the nation in progressive legislation promoting the welfare of the general public;  we now have an opportunity to continue in this grand tradition.