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But the city has paid a price for embracing more democracy. The Hong Kong government has become less efficient and more divided than in the colonial era. An anti-business, anti-development and anti-mainland China ideology permeates debates in the legislature, which has become fractious and dysfunctional. Its hard to make the case that more democratic freedom has been a net gain for the citys more than seven million residents.

Filibustering in the legislature has slowed down many development projects, making land and housing shortages more acute, and hindering efforts to catch up with the rapid advances of neighboring mainland Chinese cities. As summer recess neared, the legislatures finance committee had approved only about half of the budgeted projects for the 2017-18 fiscal year.

The dysfunction of Hong Kongs legislature may also be a reflection of frustrations with high-speed growth, which appears to be breeding more inequality. Perhaps it is part of a global hostility to the excesses of capitalism. Whatever the cause, we have good reason to pause and reflect deeply on what sort of political system best suits our future development.

Like or not, we are part of China, not only politically, but culturally and economically. When Moodys downgraded Chinas debt credit rating in May, ours was downgraded in tandem.

And Beijing has reiterated, since publication of its white paper on one country, two systems in 2014, that the standing committee of Chinas legislature has the power to interpret Hong Kongs local laws. Under Chinas centralized system, cities, provinces and regions have no inherent power of their own. All the powers enjoyed by Hong Kong are given by Beijing, and can be taken back.

Our best bet lies in nurturing a harmonious and supportive relationship with mainland China. Its encouraging that some moderate democrats appear to have shifted their strategy by suggesting a more open dialogue with the central leadership. Several moderate democrats reportedly plan to attend a dinner with Mr. Xi this week.

Beijing, however, would be wrong to ignore Hong Kongs democracy movement. The fringe is becoming more extreme, with increasing calls in recent years for outright independence, a move that a majority of Hong Kongers reject. Most young people are unhappy with the political situation, and the nations leaders could find themselves with a much bigger challenge down the line.

While Beijing might be content with the election of Carrie Lam, a seasoned and popular civil servant who will be inaugurated on Saturday as Hong Kongs next leader, the undercurrent for change could return with a vengeance in just a few years time.

Regina Ip, a member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, is the chairwoman of the New Peoples Party.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 30, 2017, in The International New York Times.

See the original post here:
Hong Kong's Democracy Dreams - New York Times

Wednesday, I discussed how Nancy MacLean at best wildly exaggerated the influence of John Calhouns thought on modern libertarianism (further elaboration from Phil Magness here) and how she asserted that a libertarian author who praised Brown v. Board of Education was actually praising southern resistance to Brown. Co-blogger Jonathan Adler enumerates other controversies about the books accuracy here.

Now, Im going to discuss some other errors and distortions in Democracy in Chains, all relating to my own academic home, George Mason University. Here I have the advantage of first-hand knowledge in some instances.

Lets start with Page 182, where MacLean identifies staunch conservative Edwin Meese, one-timer rector at George Mason, as chief among the cadre of the libertarian cause. On Page 198, in describing the makeup of George Mason Universitys Board of Visitors, she asserts that it now included such libertarian cadre members as Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. She also identifies two conservative politicians with some libertarian sympathies, Dick Armey and James Miller, as Visitors who were part of this libertarian cadre. Her identification of Kristol as a libertarian made me laugh out loud, especially because there are few conservative writers less popular in libertarian intellectual circles than Kristol. But the notion that Meese, Feulner, et al., are libertarian cadre members is almost equally absurd.

Its of course much easier to assert a successful radical libertarian takeover of a university if you misidentify mainstream Republican conservative Visitors as libertarian radicals in the Koch orbit, but its also historical fiction, written by an academic historian. How did these conservative Republicans get to be Visitors? Not because of the Koch-funded libertarian conspiracy, but because the Board of Visitors is appointed by the governor, and Republican governors chose to appoint staunch Republicans. Not surprisingly, future Democratic governors replaced these Republican appointees with Visitors with Democratic ties, ending the libertarian takeover. (Its also worth noting that outside its economics department and law school, George Mason was and remains a typical strongly left-leaning university.)

I also chuckled at MacLeans account of the Institute for Humane Studies move from Menlo Park, Calif., to George Mason (IHS is devoted to nurturing the careers of young libertarian academics), which she suggests was part of an attempt to make IHS a player in the political world. MacLean asks, Was it the high energy he saw coming out of [economist James] Buchanans team [at George Mason] that led Charles Koch to move the institution closest to his heart? Did his earlier decision to give up on the Libertarian Party as a hopeless cause make him more receptive to other routes forward? We dont know.

Well, actually, we do know. Or at least I know. IHS moved from California to Virginia against the strong preference of everyone involved because it had to. IHS awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships annually to promising students, and thanks to recent tax reform, all of this money would suddenly be taxable unless IHS was affiliated with a university. Not too many universities were interested in hosting a radical libertarian academic organization. George Mason was willing to. Now if I know that, why wasnt MacLean able to find that out, instead of speculating?

Then there is MacLeans false depiction of Henry Manne, who was appointed dean of George Masons law school in 1986. MacLean writes, Manne rejected the idea of open searches for the best talent, in favor of hiring kindred thinkers, all white men who felt unappreciated at other schools.

Manne, who promised to put George Mason Law School on the map by making it a law and economics powerhouse, did quickly hire a group of scholars whom he knew from law and economics circles. That, however, doesnt mean the law school eschewed open searches. I can think of several colleagues who were hired through the normal law school meat market. In fact, Manne hired me through that process.

The notion that he only hired white men, meanwhile, is patently false. Its rather surprising that MacLean overlooks Bruce Kobayashi, a Japanese American, given that he is explicitly mentioned in the source cited by MacLean in her footnote. In 1987, Manne hired Joseph Broadus, an African American. By the time I joined the faculty in 1995, the Manne hires on our small faculty included two African Americans, two Asian Americans and two women. At least one other woman had joined the faculty but was hired away by the Bush administration. I cant think of a good excuse for MacLean not checking into this before falsely claiming that Manne only hired white men.

MacLean continues, At George Mason, he could soon advertise to right-wing donors, the entire curriculum is permeated with a distinctive intellectual flavor, emphasized and developed by almost every professor.' MacLean is not, in fact, quoting from donor material, but froma pamphlet Manne wrote in 1993 called An Intellectual History of the George Mason University School of Law. This pamphlet was distributed to all participants at George Mason Law and Economics Center events; I know because I received one at such an event in 1995. Moreover, rather than revealing a secret plot to make George Mason into a bastion of right-wing thought, the distinctive intellectual flavor Manne refers to is economic reasoning and the use of quantitative methods. Read in context, this is obvious (see for yourself), and MacLean is being dishonest or incompetent in suggesting otherwise.

Indeed, she immediately gives as an example of this intellectual flavor that Mannes law school would stake out a position on the side of corporations against consumerism and environmentalism, two causes that had grown in popularity and influence since the 1970s. His faculty would advocate the superiority of unregulated corporate capitalism and assert, as Manne himself argued in print, that companies needed liberation from the distortions created by government intervention.'

MacLeans footnoted sources for claiming that the George Mason Law School would stake out particular political positions are as follows: John Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (1984), and M. Bruce Johnsen, ed., The Attack on Corporate America: The Corporate Issues Sourcebook (1978). I have the latter source in front of me. In it, Manne argues that the weight of the academic literature favors unregulated corporate capitalism. It says nothing about imposing that view on any law school faculty, then or in the future. I will update this post when I get ahold of the Saloma book, but one thing should be obvious; given that Manne wasnt offered the deanship at George Mason until well after the book was written, it wont support the claim that Manne was asserting that he would have George Mason Law School stake out a position on anything. And indeed, the law school has never, ever, attempted to force or encourage its faculty to take a particular position on any given issue or set of issues, and that includes during Mannes rather imperious reign as dean.

Almost all of the above is tangential to MacLeans overall thesis about the influence of James Buchanan on American politics, but it seems to be part of troubling pattern.

The rest is here:
Some dubious claims in Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains,' continued - Washington Post

A libertarian-leaning group is suing Seattle, saying its democracy vouchers program is unconstitutional.

Seattles first-in-the-nation voucher system for publicly financing political campaigns is facing a new legal challenge by two local property owners who say it forces them to support candidates they dont like.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian-leaning law firm, sued the city Wednesday in King County Superior Court over the democracy voucher program, which was passed by voters in 2015 and is being used for the first time in this years City Council and city attorney races.

Under the program, Seattles voters decided to tax themselves $3 million a year in exchange for four $25 vouchers that they can sign over to candidates. According to the city, it costs the average homeowner $11.50 per year.

Supporters say its a novel way to counter big money in politics, to engage people who wouldnt otherwise be involved in campaigns and to help lesser-known candidates communicate their views.

But the lawsuit, brought on behalf of architect Mark Elster and landlord Sarah Pynchon, claims using their tax dollars to provide vouchers to their fellow citizens, who can then use them to support candidates Elster and Pynchon oppose, violates their free-speech rights under the U.S. Constitution.

Our free-speech rights come with a right not to speak, Elster said. Theyre putting words in my mouth. Theyre putting political speech in my mouth. Theyre using my money for political campaigns I may or may not agree with.

Alan Durning, who helped write the voucher law, called that argument meritless.

There are dozens of programs around the U.S. that use small amounts of public funds to support campaigns, to give more of a voice to ordinary people and reduce the influence of big money, Durning said. Seattles program is no different and will certainly stand up to this court challenge.

The U.S. Supreme Court has generally upheld the public financing of campaigns, within the limits of the First Amendment, saying that public financing as a means of eliminating the improper influence of large private contributions furthers a significant governmental interest helping to eliminate corruption.

Under the complaints rationale, virtually any public financing of campaigns that relies on tax revenue would be impermissible.

The lawsuit does not seek an immediate court order that would block the use of the vouchers this year; Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Ethan Blevins said that was a strategic move to give the court time to weigh the case, rather than rush a decision.

Adav Noti, a lawyer with the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, which supported Seattles law, said he didnt know offhand of any other lawsuit that has challenged public campaign financing on grounds that it compels speech. He called the arguments weak, noting that people typically cant sue over how the government chooses to spend their taxes and drawing an analogy to the current White House press secretary.

Could somebody bring a lawsuit saying, I dont want to subsidize Sean Spicers salary because I dont like his speech? Noti asked.

So far two City Council candidates Teresa Mosqueda and Jon Grant in the Position 8 race and City Attorney Pete Holmes have qualified to accept the vouchers by collecting threshold numbers of small-dollar contributions. Grant has redeemed the most, nearly $130,000 worth.

That particularly irks Elster, who opposes Grants call for tenants to have more control over what they pay in rent. He spoke with reporters Wednesday at his 2,850-square-foot Seattle home, which is assessed at $865,000, according to county records. While he said he is upset about his taxes going up, his concern with the vouchers is philosophical, not financial.

Grant, he said, is entitled to his opinion. But hes not entitled to my money.

See original here:
Lawsuit challenges Seattle campaign 'democracy vouchers' - The Seattle Times

In 1912, John D. Rockefeller went to Congress with a simple request. He wanted permission to take the vast wealth hed accumulated, and pour it into a charitable foundation.

Many were outraged.

John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian minister and a cofounder of the NAACP and ACLU, told the Senate that from the standpoint of the leaders of democracy, this foundation, the very character, must be repugnant to the whole idea of a democratic society. Rockefellers effort failed. He ultimately chartered it in the state of New York instead.

A few years later, Missouri Senator Frank Walsh cited the Rockefeller Foundation as he declared that huge philanthropic trusts, known as foundations, appear to be a menace to the welfare of society.

These were hardly isolated concerns. Contemporaries, as the Stanford professor and scholar of philanthropy Rob Reich has written, worried about how private foundations undermine political equality, affect public policies, could exist in perpetuity, and [be] unaccountable except to a hand-picked assemblage of trustees.

They are, he argues, extraordinary exercises of power. Rather than responding to power with gratitude, Reich said, we should respond with skepticism and scrutiny.

Its an unfamiliar perspective. These days, wealthy philanthropists are more likely to be lauded, their names emblazoned on buildings, their pictures on magazine covers. And Reich delivered it in an unusual setting, speaking Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, to an audience that included more than a few philanthropists and foundation executives.

But hes not alone. Judge Richard Posner, the idiosyncratic jurist and leading legal theorist, has complained that a perpetual charitable foundation ... is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody. It competes neither in capital markets nor in product markets ... and, unlike a hereditary monarch whom such a foundation otherwise resembles, it is subject to no political controls either.

Its a genuine dilemma. At its worst, big philanthropy represents less an exercise of individual freedom, Reich said, than a tax-subsidized means of taking private profit and converting it into public power. And he argued that big foundations possess the leverage to bend policy in their favored direction in a coercive manner, pointing to the example of the Gates Foundations funding of educational reform.

Not all his listeners were convinced. Steven Seleznow, who had worked for the Gates Foundation to fund public-education reform and now leads the Arizona Community Foundation, argued that there is already abundant accountability built into the system. He pointed out that educational grants had to be negotiated with public officials, and then approved by an elected school board, mayor, city council, or governor. Reich, though, believes that this elides the disparities in power between a foundation offering funds, and the government entity requesting them.

If large foundations are a threat to democracy, then, is there a way to reform them short of abolishing them altogether? Reich said yes, arguing for turning the apparent vice of unaccountability into a virtue. Philanthropies operate over longer time horizons than either government or private business. At their best, Reich said, they can serve as an extra-governmental form of democratic experimentalism, piloting risky or unproven policies, testing them, then presenting them to the public for a stamp of democratic legitimacy.

Its only this sort of bold experimentation, Reich argued, that can ultimately justify the array of benefits and protections big philanthropy enjoys. Foundations are free, unlike commercial entities, to fund public goods because they need not compete with other firms or exclude people from consuming the goods they fund, he wrote in The Boston Review. And they are free, unlike politicians who face future elections, to fund minority, experimental, or controversial public goods that are not favored by majorities or at levels above the median voter.

In Aspen, Reich analogized this to academic tenuregranting freedom to work on unpopular subjects or long-term projects without the demand for immediate results. It would, he said, allow philanthropy to domesticate plutocrats to serve democratic institutions.

Of course, the vast majority of charitable foundations wont have the resources to pursue the approach that Reich claims is the only potential justification for their existence. Of the 80,000 private foundations in the United States, 98 percent possess less than $50 million. Rather than there being a ceiling on the size of foundations, there should be a floor, Reich said. He argues that donors, instead of endowing their own, small charitable foundations, which may not be able to pursue bold, risky, long-term experiments, should write checks directly to nonprofit institutions and other charitable causes.

What Reich envisions would require a radical reimagination of the philanthropic sector: vastly fewer foundations, making much bolder bets, over longer time horizons. It wouldnt be easy to achieve. But, Reich argues, it would have a crucial advantage: It would provide a model of philanthropy that would strengthen democracy, instead of undermining it.

See the rest here:
Is Big Philanthropy Compatible With Democracy? - The Atlantic

Duke University historian Nancy MacLean has published a new book, Democracy in Chains, that is getting a great deal of favorable attention from progressive media outlets and is selling quite well online. The theme of the book is that Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, a founder of public choice economics and a libertarian fellow-traveler, was the intellectual leader of a cabal ultimately supported by Charles Koch intent on replacing American democracy with an oligarchy based on constitutional protections for property rights.

When I first came across this book and interviews with its author, I was immediately skeptical. For one thing, Ive been traveling in libertarian intellectual circles for about three decades, and my strong impression is that Buchanan, while a giant in economics, is something of a marginal figure in the broader libertarian and free-market movements. Sure, public choice theory has provided important intellectual support for libertarian views of government, but Buchanan was hardly the only major figure to work on public choice (which is basically applying economic theory to the study of politics). Many other leading public choice economists were decidedly liberal in their political views; consider, for example, Kenneth Arrow, whose foundational work preceded Buchanans. Even among the more free-market-oriented early public choice scholars, there is my late colleague Gordon Tullock (co-author of the book that won Buchanan the Nobel Prize; Tullock was stiffed because he was not formally trained in economics), George Stigler, Sam Peltzman, among others. Tullocks famous article on what came to be called rent-seeking strikes me as more influential on mainstream libertarian thought than the entire corpus of Buchanans later work.

Buchanans work on constitutional political economy was of great interest to a subset of libertarian-leaning economists, but was sufficiently obscure and idiosyncratic to have had relatively little influence on the broader movement. Ive met many libertarians who were brought to libertarianism by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Charles Murray, Julian Simon, Randy Barnett and others; Ive yet to meet anyone who has cited Buchanan as their gateway to libertarianism. Brian Dohertys Radicals for Capitalism, the best extant history of the libertarian movement, gives Buchanan approximately the attention Id think he deserves, several very brief cameos, all relating to Buchanans foundational work in public choice.

The other reason I was immediately skeptical of MacLeans take on Buchanan was because her portrayal of Buchanan did not mesh with my personal experience. I only met Buchanan once, at an Institute for Humane Studies gathering for young libertarian academics around 20 years ago. The devil himself (Charles Koch) was there. Buchanan gave the keynote address. What did this arch defender of inequality and wealth talk about? He gave a lengthy defense of high inheritance taxes, necessary, in his view, to prevent the emergence of a permanent oligarchy. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Democracy in Chains fails to note Buchanans strong support of inheritance taxes. [Update: He in fact publicly supported a 100% inheritance tax.]

My confidence in the book did not increase when I saw that MacLean tied the rise of the early libertarian movement to hostility to Brown v. Board of Education, and libertarian ideology in general and public choice theory to the work of John Calhoun, which did not jibe with my own research and experience.

When the book arrived, I eagerly looked for her sources supporting the notion that modern libertarianism owes a massive debt to Calhoun, a theme on which she spends her entire prologue; later in the book, she claims that the libertarian cause traces its lineage to Calhoun. It turns out that she cites two articles noting similarities between Calhouns theories of political economy and modern public choice theory, and also cites to two pages of Murray Rothbards 1970 book, Power and Market. To put the two pages from Rothbard in perspective, I have in front of me a volume with the entire run of the New Individualist Review, a pioneering libertarian academic journal published at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. The index has multiple citations to Mill, Friedman, Hayek, Hobbes, Montesquieu, von Humboldt, Smith, Rand and other classical liberal and libertarian luminaries. Calhoun, meanwhile, does not appear in the index. Not once.

Meanwhile, in Chapter 3, MacLean claims that contemporary libertarians eschewing overt racial appeals, but not at all concerned with the impact on black citizens, framed the Souths fight as resistance to federal coercion in a noble quest to preserve states right and economic liberty. Nothing energized this backwater movement like Brown. MacLean identifies only two such libertarians, Frank Chodorov and and Robert LeFevre. I cant check her citation to LeFevre, because its from private correspondence that I dont have access to. But her citation to Chodorov fails to support her assertion.

The article she cites by Chodorov can be found here. In it, Chodorovpraises Brown: The ultimate validation of the Court decision,which undoubtedly ranks among the most important in American history, lies in the fact that it is in line with what is deepest and strongest and most generous in our historical tradition. Chodorov goes on to point out that merely prohibiting segregated schools wont lead to integration because of residential segregation, and concludes that hostility to integration may lead some southern states to open up publicly-funded education to competitive private schools, which would mean what began as an attempt to evade an unavoidable change in an obsolete system of racial segregation might turn into an interesting educational experiment. Chodorov does note that among opponents to Brown there is a very genuine feeling that education is a matter reserved for the states, but again this is in the context of him praisingBrown.There is nothing in this piece remotely celebrating southern resistance to federal coercion in a noble quest to preserve states right and economic liberty. And there are more subtle errors as well. MacLean portrays Chodorov as being excited that Brown presented the opportunity to do away with the public school system, when in fact he specifically envisioned a larger network of private schools, denominational and non-denominational, side by side with the general public school system.

More to come.

[I wrote this post before I saw co-blogger Jonathan Adlers post detailing various other controversies over Democracy in Chains." I recommend that post, which anticipated a future post I planned.]

Read more:
Some dubious claims in Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains' - Washington Post