Think tanks wrap-up

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the first of two wrap-ups for November 8.

The Cato Institute

WASHINGTON -- Social Security and the 2002 Election

by Michael Tanner

"This election is a referendum on Social Security." So spoke House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt last month. If so, given the election results it appears that the American people have made their opinion perfectly clear. They support proposals to allow younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes.

While much pre-election commentary was devoted to a few Republicans who attempted to blur their position on Social Security in those races where candidates took clear positions in support of individual accounts, it was a winning issue. For example, Hans Reimer of the anti-private account Campaign for America's Future called the North and South Carolina races "bellwethers" that would hinge on the issue of Social Security reform.

Neither Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina nor Lindsay Graham in South Carolina made any attempt to hide their support for individual accounts. Indeed, when accused of supporting "a risky scheme," both counterattacked, pointing out that their Democratic opponents had no proposals of their own to fix the program's looming financial crisis. Dole campaigned showing a blank piece of paper as the "Bowles Social Security Plan."

Given a clear choice, voters chose both Graham and Dole by large margins.

In the night's biggest upset, Georgia Representative Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Senator Max Cleland. Although the race turned largely on national security issues, Cleland had attacked Chambliss for wanting to turn "the Social Security benefits of people on Main Street over to Wall Street to play Russian roulette with."

Chambliss, in contrast, signed a pledge, circulated by SocialSecurityChoice.org, promising to support individual accounts if he was elected. In Minnesota, Norm Coleman was another upset winner who signed the SocialSecurityChoice pledge.

Several other prominent supporters of individual accounts won important Senate races as well, including John Corwyn in Texas, Jim Talent in Missouri, and John Sununu in New Hampshire. Sununu was another top target for anti-account activists who poured money into an effort to defeat him. Ads accused him of wanting to "privatize" Social Security to benefit his "wealthy Wall Street backers." But Sununu won.

Support for individual accounts was a winner in House races too. Few congressmen have been as outspoken in their support for individual accounts as Pat Toomey, R-Penn., despite the fact that his Democrat-leaning district has high concentrations of both senior citizens and union workers.

Opponents of individual accounts poured money and manpower into the district trying to defeat Toomey. Yet Toomey won by a larger margin this year than he had in 2000.

Representatives Clay Shaw, R-Fla., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-WVa., also won by larger margins than in 2000, in campaigns where Social Security was a major issue. Shaw not only sponsored legislation to create individual accounts, he chairs the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. His opponent Carol Roberts focused nearly all of her campaign on the issue. In 2000, Shaw won reelection by only a few hundred votes. This year, he took nearly 60 percent of the vote.

Likewise, Capito's race was once seen by Democrats as a national model for how to use Social Security as a campaign issue. They used the race to test their Social Security attack ads, drawing nationwide attention. But, in the end, Capito too took nearly 60 percent of the vote.

Social Security failed as a Democratic issue in other races as well. Former Rep. Jill Long Thompson may have been the first candidate in the country to air an ad attacking her opponent, Chris Chocola, for supporting "privatization." Chocola won, however, picking up an open seat previously held by Democrats.

In Minnesota, John Kline refused to compromise on his support for individual accounts and knocked off incumbent Representative Bill Luther. And, in New Mexico, Steve Pearce, another strong supporter of individual accounts, won a newly created seat in a competitive district.

On the other hand, Republicans who decided to run away from Social Security reform didn't fare so well. Pennsylvania Representative George Gekas abandoned earlier support for individual accounts, even signing a pledge sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future to oppose them. He lost. In New Jersey, Doug Forrester supported individual accounts in the primary and won. He changed his mind in the general election and lost.

The late House Speaker Tip O'Niell is reputed to have called Social Security the "third rail" of American politics -- touch it and your career dies. But the third rail has now lost its juice. Across the country, candidates who had the courage to touch the issue not only survived, they won.

We've had our referendum and the American people have spoken. Now it's time for the politicians to act.

(Michael Tanner is director of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Choice.)

The Reason Foundation

LOS ANGELES -- Snuffing out freedom: Ballot initiatives as instruments of tyranny

by Jacob Sullum

By a margin of more than two to one, Floridians voted on Tuesday to ban smoking in almost all indoor workplaces. The only exceptions are tobacco shops, hotel rooms, "stand-alone bars" (i.e., bars that are not located in restaurants), and private residences (provided they are not being used "to provide child care, adult care, or health care").

This is one of the strictest smoking bans in the country, although it does not go quite as far as California's, which covers bars as well as restaurants--the approach favored by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In the New York Times, the eponymous Manhattan restaurateur Elaine Kaufman made the case for a less coercive solution: "We'd put a sign out front, letting people know we're a smoking establishment. And here's a grown-up idea: let people make their own decision about whether to enter. As far as the employees go, it would be up to them, too. Since not all restaurants will choose to be smoking establishments, the work force will have other options."

But Floridians do not care for options; like spoiled children, they want things their way all the time. They believe they have a right to demand "a smoke-free environment" everywhere they go, even on other people's property.

In principle, this is no different from insisting on "a meat-free environment" in a steakhouse or "a music-free environment" in a noisy bar. Instead of expressing their preferences as consumers and employees in the marketplace, which would lead to a diversity of choices, smoke banners insist on total hegemony, imposing their one best way on everyone.

In a state where about 22 percent of adults smoke, only 30 percent of the electorate voted against the smoking ban. Let's assume smokers did not go to the polls in disproportionate numbers to oppose the initiative, and let's forget about the nonsmokers in the hospitality industry who had an economic interest in defeating it. The results still suggest that fewer than one in 10 Floridians is prepared to defend property rights as a matter of principle.

That disheartening reality illustrates one of the perils of ballot initiatives, which are often portrayed as a way to avoid gridlocked legislatures and deliver what the people really want. Sometimes what the people really want is to lord it over a recalcitrant minority that is exercising its rights in a way that irks them. In such cases, the difficulty of getting laws passed in a legislature pressured by "special interests" acts as a check on the tyranny of the majority.

Yet sometimes voters are more tolerant than politicians. Although polls consistently find that most Americans think patients who can benefit from marijuana should be able to use it without fear of arrest, politicians are afraid to endorse the idea. That instinct may be politically prudent, assuming that voters who support medical access do not feel as strongly about the issue as voters who rebel at the idea that marijuana could be good for anything.

Pot-phobic voters may be more likely to hold a candidate's position on medical marijuana against him. But when medical marijuana is presented on its own, as it has been in eight states and the District of Columbia, it wins handily.

That does not mean voters support access to marijuana for recreational purposes. In Arizona and Nevada, where voters had already approved medical use of cannabis, they voted against broader decriminalization initiatives on Tuesday's ballot. More than 60 percent of voters opposed the Nevada initiative, which would have allowed licensed sales and possession of up to three ounces by adults.

Apparently Nevadans were not reassured by the measure's prohibition of marijuana consumption outside the home. Perhaps the initiative's backers would have had more luck if they had presented it as a smoking ban.

(Jacob Sullum, is a senior editor at Reason magazine.)

LOS ANGELES -- The Lesser Evil?

by Ronald Bailey

It's a truism of American politics that the Democrats want to take all your money but will let you live the way you want, while the Republicans will let you keep your money, but want to tell you how to live.

Another political truism is that elections are fought between the Evil Party and the Stupid Party. When the Evil Party is in power, they pass Evil laws. When the Stupid Party is in power, they pass Stupid laws. But sometimes both parties agree and then we get laws that are both Evil and Stupid. We in Washington call that bi-partisanship.

The Republican victory was a surprise to most political prognosticators. But what now? First the good news -- the Republicans have promised to go after the trial lawyers.

Richard Epstein, the brilliant libertarian legal scholar at the University of Chicago, once said that every lawyer over 500,000 in the United States costs the American economy $20 million as a dead-weight loss every year. The American Trial Lawyer's Association is the second biggest contributor the Democratic Party, so we can probably count on self-interested Republicans to try to pass proposals to rein in idiotic lawsuits like those against fast food companies and gun manufacturers.

Further good news is that the Republicans will not repeal the recent tax cuts and may actually increase them. Also, the Republicans may begin to reduce the unnecessary regulatory burdens imposed by certain agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

And who knows, perhaps if they get really brave, they may actually begin to address the looming crisis in Social Security and allow Americans to invest in private accounts for their retirements. And they may enact legislation that further empowers parents to choose their children's schools. After all, the National Education Association is the biggest single contributor to the Democratic Party. Further good news is that the Democratic Party's penchant for trying to foster race and class war failed.

Now the bad news. Republicans will endorse the continuing erosion of our civil liberties that is occurring as the result of the stupid Drug War and the War on Terrorism. With regard to the War on Terror, the United States clearly needs to defend itself , but the Republicans will also likely support various foreign adventures from which it will be hard to extract ourselves. In addition, the Republican Congress will likely approve the creation of a redundant, intrusive and expensive Department of Homeland Security. They will also kowtow to right wing bioluddites who want to criminalize certain medical biotech research.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.

The Institute for Public Accuracy

(The IPA is a nationwide consortium of policy researchers that seeks to broaden public discourse by gaining media access for experts whose perspectives are often overshadowed by major think tanks and other influential institutions.)

WASHINGTON -- Veterans Day

-- David Cline, national president of Veterans for Peace and a longtime coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Cline is a disabled combat veteran.

"Bush is using the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to wage endless war abroad and reduce freedom here at home. The veterans are one of the groups who have some sense of the reality of war. We've been used by our government to enforce unjust policies. We're also used to justify future military attacks; the government doesn't care about us much

until they need us to wave the flags for a new generation of recruits. War is a tool for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld now. They want to control the oil. Moreover, they are chicken hawks; they used their privilege so they didn't put themselves on the line, even though they have been for war."

-- S. Brian Willson, a former officer in Vietnam who is active in Veterans For Peace,

is producing a documentary about U.S. intervention in Korea.

"Many veterans intimately know the savagery of wars and their fraudulent, political pretexts. Our nation's pathological addiction to insatiable consumption and its corresponding dependency upon war to protect disproportionate global privilege is leading to species suicide unless we experience an evolutionary shift integrating ecological mindfulness. People are capable of replacing oligarchy with participatory democracy. This is a pivotal evolutionary moment, begging people to choose nonviolence and conscious living as an alternative to mindless, impending extinction. We need genuine global justice, not more veterans or war memorials."

-- Ellen Barfield was stationed in South Korea just after the 1979 coup there.

"My focus this 'Veterans' -- more properly Armistice -- Day is the strong connection between U.S. training and/or supplying troops in other countries, and later terroristic acts against their own people or against the United States. A prime example of this is the U.S. Army School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at

Ft. Benning, Georgia."

-- Marc Liggin spent five years in the Army and got out as a conscientious objector

with the help of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors organization. He now volunteers for the GI Rights Hotline.

"In my day job I supervise a 911 medical and fire emergency dispatch center. I can honestly tell you that working the GI Rights Hotline is a bit more stressful than working 911 ... Callers often pour out their life story. I hear about the grief and pain they've caused themselves and their family by joining the military. Many want to kill themselves just to get out. Parents and spouses call, pleading for the freedom of their loved ones. The calls and e-mails are endless."