The Heritage Insider: Brexit is an opportunit for more free trade not less, the state patriotism in America, more privization please, a greener grid is a less secure grid, the rules change when abortion is before the court

July 2, 2016

What’s with the apocalypse talk on the Brexit result? Newsflash: the EU isn’t the only game in town. There are plans to make the nation’s electric grid greener and smarter. But, without security advances, greener and smarter also means more vulnerable. A new poll finds that Americans still love their country, even when they criticize it. With federal debt piling up, now would be a good time to rediscover a policy that has been popular and successful around the world for decades: privatization. In order to get the “right” pro-choice outcome in its recent abortion case, the Supreme Court had to change the rules a bit. Plus, over 40 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.

Brexit should be a boon not a hindrance to free trade. Richard Epstein explains: “It is odd, as Paul Gregory writes, that professional economists think that Brexit is likely to lead to a systematic catastrophe, as if its only consequence is the loss of unfettered British access to the sclerotic European markets, whose systematic slow growth stems from the foolish assumption that uniform restrictions on labor and capital markets are better than no restrictions at all. […] Britain is a small maritime nation with few natural resources that has to make its way by trade to the far corners of the globe. The difficulty with the EU is that Great Britain had to take the bitter with the sweet. To gain access to the stagnant EU, it had to accept the power of the EU to block the trade deals that Britain could make with Canada, India, and the United States—at least so long as President Obama refuses to back off his foolish threat to put Great Britain at the back of the queue. Indeed, if all went well, Britain could enter into a free trade agreement with the EU.” [Hoover Institution]

There is a tradeoff between making the nation’s electricity grid smarter and greener and making it secure. Policymakers, Mark Mills explains, have not yet assessed that tradeoff properly: “The key issue is not today’s security but tomorrow’s. Here the risks are growing rapidly. The push for ‘greener’ and ‘smarter’ grids requires far greater grid-Internet connectivity to ensure the continuous delivery of electricity. These greener, smarter grids will involve a vast expansion of the Internet of Things that greatly increases the cyberattack surface available to malicious hackers and hostile nation-state entities. […] Comparatively trivial sums are directed at ensuring that grids are more secure, compared with the vast funding to promote, subsidize, and deploy green energy on grids. [Manhattan Institute]

The state of patriotism in America: A new poll by Karlyn Bowman, Eleanor O’Neil, and Heather Sims finds: “Fifty-six percent of Americans said they were very proud to be American citizens, locating our country more than midway down in this highest response category. American patriotism is not blind patriotism. Polls show that Americans find a lot to criticize in their society. In June 2016, only 29 percent told Gallup they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time. Sixty-nine percent were dissatisfied. But they still love their country, and they are not reluctant to say so.” [American Enterprise Institute]

More privatization, please. Privatizing government enterprises has been one of the most popular and successful reforms around the world, writes Chris Edwards: “As of 2005, the 10 largest share offerings in world history were privatizations. By 2010, about half of the global stock market capitalization outside of the United States was from companies that had been privatized in recent years.” Yet, he notes, in the United States there has been no action on privatization since the Clinton administration. Opportunities for reform include U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Air Traffic Control system. [Cato Institute]

The rules are different for abortion cases. In striking down Texas’s regulations on abortion providers, the Supreme Court in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt virtually abandoned the principle of res judicata, which holds that plaintiffs don’t get to relitigate issues merely because they don’t like the result. Howard Slugh explains how that happened: “Soon after losing their first case, the plaintiffs brought a second lawsuit. This time, they did not include a statewide challenge to the admissions requirement. In his dissent, Justice Alito notes that including such a subsequent challenge would have been so frivolous as to open the plaintiffs’ attorneys to sanctions. However, the district-court judge unilaterally added the impermissible claim to the lawsuit. […] Normally, the Supreme Court would have reversed the lower court, and it would not even constitute a close call. Unfortunately, anyone who expects the normal rules of law to apply in abortion cases will face constant disappointment. In order to justify departing from the normal rules, Justice Breyer relied, at least in part, on an unprecedented argument. He claimed that where ‘important human values’ are at stake, the normal rules of res judicata are weakened. Apparently, abortion is the first “important human value” to ever come before the Court.” [National Review]

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