Given that I’ve mostly been critical of the western intervention in Libya, I’ll hand the microphone over to the enthusiastic Juan Cole for his take on the uprising in Tripoli that led to the end of Muammar Gaddafi and his regime.

Beyond that, let’s wish the best of luck to the people of Libya. Part of the problem with this intervention has always been that the fall of a dictator seems to me just as likely to lead to a bloody civil war or a new dictatorship as the emergence of a humane and stable regime. The effort to build a better future really only starts today.

As Stan Collender says, the odds seem overwhelming that the supercommittee will fail to reach agreement on anything useful. In my opinion, that would be an okay outcome. But under the circumstances, I think it would make sense for committee members to consider just accepting the fact that the parties are too far away to enact meaningful long-term deficit reduction and just see if they can’t get something done.

Revenue neutral tax reform, for example, is well known to be a difficult political lift. And yet this isn’t a subject where the difficulty is that the parties are too far apart. And since a revenue neutral reform would boost growth, it would in fact reduce the deficit. Probably if committee members try to do this, they’ll fail. Big reforms usually fail. But you could imagine a drive for tax reform succeeding, in a way that I just can’t see any way forward on big picture long-term budget questions.

The Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River is in a weird location that makes it freakishly long. Why’s it there instead of a bit further south? Well, as David Kestenbaum explains were it further south the toll revenue would go to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey so Governor Thomas Dewey wanted to put it north where the revenue could fund the New York State Thruway.

It’s a great story, though I’m kind of confused to see so many libertarians so excited about it. The basic notion seems to be that if you see “the government” doing “something” and the outcome is perverse, that proves that when “the government” does “things” it gets bad results so the government shouldn’t do anything. But pay attention to the story! This looks to me essentially like a story of the slightly perverse consequences of what amounts to privatization of infrastructure provision. The New York State Thruway Authority dealt with the Hudson River bridge issue in a manner designed to maximize profits rather than a benevolent social planner putting the bridge in the socially optimal more southerly location.

The other way to look at this is to ignore the Port Authority / Thruway Authority competition issue and see it as a federalism story. If the bridge were further south, like around where the Cross County Expressway goes, then the western side of the bridge would be in New Jersey. But the geography of the area is such that the overwhelming preponderance of the social benefit of a river crossing lies in New York State. Consequently, to get the project done New York State would either need to agree to structure it so as to offer cross-subsidy to New Jersey (which is what the Port Authority option would have done) or else needs to do it as an entirely New York project even if that meant a longer bridge further north. The fact that metropolitan areas in the northeastern United States are often divided among more than one state tends to complicate regional planning in an unfortunate way. But what does the Cato Institute propose to do about this? I wish we could go back in time and redraw the lines like this but it’s obviously a non-starter.

Michael Clemens:

What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those countries but cannot. How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists’ jaws hit their desks. The gains to eliminating migration barriers amount to large fractions of world GDP—one or two orders of magnitude larger than the gains from dropping all remaining restrictions on international flows of goods and capital. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.

Obviously, full open borders is not a feasible short-term goal. But why shouldn’t we look forward to a freer, more egalitarian world of tomorrow in which people are allowed to live where they want? Imagine if there was a law saying a person’s not allowed to move from Ohio to DC after college to look for work. We can do better than the current status quo. Largely freeing goods and capital to move around the world while imprisoning human beings according to the happenstance of their birth is an odd equilibrium to have chosen.

In some ways, I think Clemens even sells himself short. Legal barriers to labor mobility among rich countries seem to me to also be a big deal.

An excellent point from Sara Mosle:

Yet Brill wants us to believe that unions are the primary — even sole — cause of failing public schools. But hard evidence for this is scarce. Many of the nation’s worst-performing schools (according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress) are concentrated in Southern and Western right-to-work states, where public sector unions are weakest and collective bargaining enjoys little or no protection.

I think the dialogue on this tends to get turned upside down. There are a lot of reforms that K-12 education needs in the United States. Since strong teacher’s unions do in fact exist, they often take a prominent role in avoiding these reforms. But that’s a question of union leaders not liking reformers and reform proposals. Some people turn this around through a process of resentment and decide that breaking the unions should be the goal of reform. Not only is there little evidence to back this up, it doesn’t make any sense as a matter of logic. You can’t have an education system without having providers of education services. And the fact that the interests of service providers and the interests of the public are sometimes at odds has nothing in particular to do with labor unions. Unions act as a kind of red cape for some people in some contexts, just like for-profit colleges do for other people in other contexts, and federal contractors do for other people in yet other contexts.

But there actually isn’t any systematic way around this fact. If every school was a charter school, then the charter school operators would be lobbying for as much funding and as little accountability as possible.