Even Libertarians Have Fantasies

I’ve shared two personal fantasies on this site, but I must be a policy wonk because they involved a vision of a  politician telling a voter to grow up and an imagined interaction between the Governor of Texas and the United Nations.

Not exactly steamy stuff, I realize.

And even when I posted a video about libertarian porn, it involved zero nudity.

So I think I’m being very bold in sharing this libertarian fantasy.

=======================================================

This morning my friend lucked out and was able to buy several cases of ammo.

“Libertarians are hot”

On the way home he stopped at the gas station where a drop-dead gorgeous blonde was filling up her car at the next pump.

She looked at the ammo in the back of my pickup truck and said in a very sexy voice, “I’m a big believer in barter. Would you be interested in trading sex for ammo?”

He thought a few seconds and asked, “What kinda ammo ya got?”

======================================================

Too bad this has never happened to me.

Unfortunately, libertarians usually are the target of jokes, though I admit some of them are very amusing.

For instance, a video portraying Somalia as a libertarian paradise.

Then we have two cartoons, one on libertarian ice fishing and the other showing libertarian lifeguards.

And this image showing 24 types of libertarians.

Last but not least, this montage of how the world views libertarians.

Read Full Post »

A Libertarian Quandary: Should Drugs Be Legalized if It Means Bigger Government?

Here’s a new edition of my “you be the judge” series.

These are posts designed to explore some of the more challenging aspects of a pro-libertarian philosophy.

Today’s example comes from Colorado, which had displayed a libertarian streak on issues ranging from school choice to drug legalization.

But the latter issue is the source of today’s quandary. Should marijuana be legal if it means more tax revenue that will be used by the political elite to expand the burden of government spending?

Here are the details from the Denver CBS station.

A draft bill floating around the Capitol late this week suggests that a new ballot question on pot taxes should repeal recreational pot in the state constitution if voters don’t approve 15 percent excise taxes on retail pot and a new 15 percent marijuana sales tax. Those would be in addition to regular state and local sales taxes. …Marijuana activists immediately blasted the proposal as a backhanded effort to repeal the pot vote, in which 55 percent of Coloradans chose to flout federal drug law and declare pot legal in small amounts for adults over 21.

If my math is correct, the politicians want a 30 percent special tax on marijuana, which is on top of the regular taxes that would be imposed.

That would be fine with me – if the proposal specified that the additional tax revenue was offset by a tax cut of equal size.

But as I explained in my “starve-the-beast” post, higher taxes usually finance bigger government.

Indeed, some politicians openly admit that they want the new revenue to expand the budget.

Sen. Larry Crowder, R-Alamosa, said the whole purpose of legalizing recreational marijuana was to raise money for education and other programs. “So if there’s no money, we shouldn’t have marijuana,” Crowder said. …In Washington state, the only other place where voters last year approved recreational pot, the ballot measure set taxes at 75 percent, settling the question. Both states are still waiting to find out whether the federal government plans to sue to block retail sales of the drug, set to begin next year.

Though I didn’t realize that the state of Washington imposes a 75 percent tax on marijuana. How…um…French!

More Money for Government? The Ultimate Buzz Kill

So what’s the bottom line? If I lived in Colorado, would I vote to keep pot legal even if it meant more money from the buffoons in the state capital?

Since drug legalization is about 990 out of 1000 in my list of priorities, I’m tempted to say no.

On the other hand, it would be nice to reduce the onerous burden of the War on Drugs, which has been used an excuse to expand the size and scope of government.

What do you think?

P.S. If you want more examples of “you be the judge,” previous editions are listed below.

• Is fleeing to Cuba a justifiable way to keep your children away from government control?
• Is it appropriate to put politicians on trial for economic malfeasance?
• Is it excessive vigilante justice to set your daughter’s rapist on fire?
• Should prisoners with AIDS be segregated from other convicts?
• Which tax collection tactic is more brutal and unjust?
• When a wheelchair-bound guy uses a baseball bat to punish his granddaughter’s molester, what’s the right response?
• Should politicians set pay levels at government-owned firms?
• Is sharia law sometimes appropriate?
• Is the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general population?
• What do you do about self-destructive behavior in a government-run healthcare system?
• Should there be laws against incest among consenting adults?
• Should motorists be allowed to warn other drivers about speed traps?
• Is jury nullification the right approach for victimless crimes?
• Was this angry father wrong to take matters into his own hands?
• Should drunk-rafting be a crime?
• Should rich people pay higher speeding fines?

Read Full Post »

You Be the Judge: Were Mr. and Mrs. Hakken Right to Take their Children and Flee to Cuba?

The previous edition of “you be the judge” asked whether restrictions on aggressive panhandling are justified.

I thought that was a bit of a quandary, but I’m more conflicted by today’s question about the bizarre episodes of the Hakken family.

As explained in this CNN story, they have kidnapped their own children and fled to Cuba. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

The Hakkens have been on the lam after they allegedly snatched the two boys from their grandmother’s home in Florida. The couple lost custody of their children last year. There is an international manhunt for this family, and here they are, blending in among the other boats.

So why would parents have to kidnap their own kids and flee to what most people would consider a socialists hellhole?

…the police department in Slidell, Louisiana, issued its own statement offering background on the Hakkens and why the boys were taken from the parents last year. In June of 2012, Slidell police responded to a disturbance report at a hotel where Josh and Sharyn Hakken were staying with their sons, the police statement said. “When police arrived, both Mr. and Mrs. Hakken were acting in a bizarre manner that alarmed officers. They were talking about ‘completing their ultimate journey’ and were traveling across the country to ‘take a journey to the Armageddon’,” the Slidell police statement said, adding, “Let it be noted that both of their children were present in the hotel room at the time.” Because of the parents’ behavior and “the fact that narcotics and weapons were located inside of the hotel room,” the children were taken by child welfare officers, and Joshua Hakken was arrested on drug charges, the statement said.

Which brings us to recent events.

At some point over the past few months, the children were sent to live with their grandmother, Patricia Hauser, the mother of Sharyn Hakken. Sheriff’s investigators say Josh Hakken entered Hauser’s home at 6:30 a.m. last Wednesday. She told police that he tied her up and fled with the children… Those investigators told CNN they believe Hakken joined up with his wife, who was waiting in their pickup truck, and the family drove to a parking garage. A short time later, investigators said, Hakken is believed to have taken a sailboat out of a private slip in nearby Madeira Beach.

And, as you already know, they wound up in Cuba.

I first saw this story in the Miami Airport, and it referred to the Hakkens as being anti-government. Naturally, I immediately took their side.

Unfit parents?

But as I’ve learned more details, I’m conflicted. There’s nothing wrong with the parents having firearms, though one hopes they took steps to make sure the young kids didn’t have access to the guns.

On the other hand, I think there is something wrong with drug use, particularly in front of the children. Nonetheless, that’s not a sufficient reason in my mind for the government to seize someone’s kids unless there’s some evidence of genuine endangerment.

I am weirded out, though, with regards to their alleged language about taking an “ultimate journey” to “the Armageddon.” Are they suicidal nutcases? Are they mentally unstable? Those would be reasons for intervention.

Assuming, of course, that we can trust that the cops and other government officials provided an accurate rendition of events.

But assuming that’s the case, do you think the state had the right to take the kids from the Hakkens?

And if you want more challenging examples of “you be the judge,” peruse this list.

• Is it appropriate to put politicians on trial for economic malfeasance?
• Is it excessive vigilante justice to set your daughter’s rapist on fire?
• Should prisoners with AIDS be segregated from other convicts?
• Which tax collection tactic is more brutal and unjust?
• When a wheelchair-bound guy uses a baseball bat to punish his granddaughter’s molester, what’s the right response?
• Should politicians set pay levels at government-owned firms?
• Is sharia law sometimes appropriate?
• Is the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general population?
• What do you do about self-destructive behavior in a government-run healthcare system?
• Should there be laws against incest among consenting adults?
• Should motorists be allowed to warn other drivers about speed traps?
• Is jury nullification the right approach for victimless crimes?
• Was this angry father wrong to take matters into his own hands?
• Should drunk-rafting be a crime?
• Should rich people pay higher speeding fines?

Read Full Post »

Did George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney Suffer from “Libertarian Economics”?

Even though I’m a staunch libertarian, I’m not under any illusion that everyone is open to our ideas. Particularly since, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we get falsely stereotyped as being heartless, hedonistic, anti-social, and naively isolationist.

That’s why I’m willing to accept incremental reforms. Compared to my libertarian dream world, for instance, the entitlement reforms in the Ryan budget are very modest. But they may be the most we can achieve in the short run, so I don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

But I do make the bad the enemy of the good. Politicians who expand the size and scope of government get on my wrong side, regardless of whether they are Republicans or Democrats.

Which explains why I haven’t approved of any Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan.

With this in mind, you can imagine my shock when I read Robert Patterson’s recent column that blames recent GOP presidential woes on…you guessed it, “far-right libertarians.”

…in the political big leagues, …the GOP strikes out with the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections… That familiar lineup shares one big liability: libertarian economics, which has been undermining the Republican brand… That message represents the heart and soul of a party that started sleeping with far-right libertarians in 1990. …In the libertarian universe, “economic freedom” trumps everything: civilization, nation, statecraft, patriotism, industry, culture and family. This “economic freedom,” however, diverges greatly from the liberty that transformed the United States into an industrial, financial and military colossus.

What the [expletive deleted]!

Let’s go down the list of  recent GOP presidential candidates and assess whether they were captured by “far-right libertarians” and their dangerous philosophy of “economic freedom.”

• George H.W. Bush – He increased spending, raised tax rates, and imposed costly new regulations. If that’s libertarian, I’d hate to see how Patterson defines statism.
• 

  Do you see any libertarians? Me neither.

  Robert Dole – All you need to know is that he described his three proudest accomplishments as the creation of the food stamp program, the imposition of the costly Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Social Security bailout. I don’t see anything on that list that’s remotely libertarian.

• George W. Bush – I’ve written several times about Bush’s depressing record of statism. Yes, we got some lower tax rates, but that policy was easily offset by new spending, new intervention, new regulation, and bailouts. No wonder economic freedom declined significantly during his tenure. Not exactly a libertarian track record.
• 

  No libertarians here, either

  John McCain – His track record on spending is somewhat admirable, but he was far from libertarian on key issues such as tax rates, global warming, bailouts, and healthcare.

• Mitt Romney – He was sympathetic to a VAT. He criticized personal retirement accounts. He supported corrupt ethanol subsidies. And he said nice things about the TARP bailout. And I don’t need to remind anybody about Obamacare’s evil twin. Is that a libertarian agenda?

I also disagree with several of the policies that Patterson advocates, such as protectionism and industrial subsidies.

But that’s not the purpose of this post. Libertarians already face an uphill battle. The last thing we need is to be linked to a bunch of big-government Republicans when we share almost nothing in common on economic policy.

Read Full Post »

Was William Shakespeare the First Libertarian?

I’ve never been a big Shakespeare fan, but that may need to change. It seems the Bard of Avon may be the world’s first libertarian.

Some of you are probably shaking your heads and saying that this is wrong, that Thomas Jefferson or Adam Smith are more deserving of this honor.

The first freedom fighter?

Others would argue we should go back even earlier in time and give that title to John Locke.

But based on some new research reported in Tax-news.com, Shakespeare preceded them all.

Uncertainty over the likely future success of his plays led William Shakespeare to do “all he could to avoid taxes,” new research by scholars at Aberystwyth University has claimed. The collaborative paper: “Reading with the Grain: Sustainability and the Literary Imagination,”…alleges that, in his “other” life as a major landowner, Shakespeare avoided paying his taxes, illegally hoarded food and sidelined in money lending. …According to Dr Jayne Archer, lead author and a lecturer in Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth: “There was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright – a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximize profits at others’ expense and exploit the vulnerable – while also writing plays.”

In that short excerpt, we find three strong indications of Shakespeare’s libertarianism.

1. What does it mean that Shakespeare did everything he could to avoid taxes? His actions obviously would have upset the United Kingdom’s current bloodsucking political elite, which views tax maximization as a religious sacrament, but it shows that Shakespeare believed in the right of private property. Check one box for libertarianism.

2. What does it mean that the Bard “illegally hoarded food”? Well, such a law probably existed because government was interfering with the free market with something like price controls. Or there was a misguided hostility by the government against “speculation,” similar to what you would find from the deadbeats in today’s Occupy movement. In either event, Shakespeare was standing up for the principle of freedom of contract. Check another box for libertarianism.

3. Last but not least, what does it mean that Shakespeare “sidelined in money lending”? Nations used to have statist “usury laws” that interfered with the ability to charge interest when lending money. Shakespeare apparently didn’t think “usury” was a bad thing, so he was standing up for the liberty of consenting adults to engage in voluntary exchange. Check another box for libertarianism.

To be sure, it appears that Shakespeare was more of an operational libertarian rather than a philosophical libertarian.

And now that I’m giving it more thought, perhaps that doesn’t qualify him for the honor of being the world’s first libertarian.

After all, does the former Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, deserve to be called a libertarian for evading taxes? Does the new Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, somehow become a libertarian simply because he utilized the Cayman Islands?

Or what about lawmakers such as John Kerry, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and others on the left who have utilized tax havens to boost their own personal finances? I very much doubt that any of them deserve to be called libertarian (though the burden of government shrank under Bill Clinton, so maybe we can consider him an unintentional libertarian).

But maybe with a bit of literary license, we can make Shakespeare a full-fledged libertarian.

“O  liberty, liberty! Wherefore art thou liberty?”

“Double, double, statism and trouble;
Taxes burn, and regulations bubble!”

Hmmm… perhaps instead of my budding second career as a movie star, I should become a playwright instead?

Read Full Post »

You Be the Judge: Should the Law Discourage People from Becoming Vagrants?

It’s both difficult and easy to be a libertarian.

It’s difficult because the corrupt Washington establishment of politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and interest groups almost always is allied against us.

But it’s easy since you have strong moral principles that put liberty over statism, so at least you don’t need a lot of time to figure out whether class-warfare tax policy is desirable, whether the federal government is too big, or whether government should be throwing people in jail for victimless crimes.

But not every issue is black and white.

About two years ago, I made fun of the bureaucrats in Montgomery County, MD, for proposing a plan to require that bums and panhandlers get government permits.

Afterwards, someone from that community told me that the goal wasn’t more bureaucracy, but rather to give local authorities a legal excuse to take action against vagrants who supposedly harass other people.

I don’t know if that was an accurate assessment, but it does raise an interesting question of whether the government should have any laws to limit panhandling and discourage people from becoming bums.

The local government in Houston seems to use this approach. As reported by the Daily Mail, you’re not supposed to feed vagrants, and it’s also against the law for bums to rummage through garbage.

A homeless man has been given a ticket for rummaging through a trash can in the downtown area of one of America’s biggest cities. …The summons he was issued cites his violation as: ‘disturbing the contents of a garbage can in downtown central business district.’ …the city’s laws which ban the feeding of homeless people… In most other cities homeless people are able to rely on the kindness of strangers for food and those who have fallen on hard times are free to dive through the garbage at will, but in Houston even that source of food is banned.

By the way, this issue isn’t limited to government actions. Some business owners in normally liberal California have become so irritated by aggressive mooching that they have distributed stickers saying “Please don’t feed our bums.”

So what’s the right policy? Is there an unlimited right for people to be bums and aggressively pester others for money? Does that include a right to sleep on the sidewalk, even if that undermines local businesses?

I confess that my gut instinct is to oppose such laws. On the other hand, I don’t like being harassed by able-bodied men who don’t want to get jobs. And I would be very irritated if I owned a small business and was losing money because bums were driving away customers and causing property values to decline.

If you like these “you be the judge” quandaries, here are other examples of difficult-to-decide issues.

• Is it appropriate to put politicians on trial for economic malfeasance?
• Is it excessive vigilante justice to set your daughter’s rapist on fire?
• Should prisoners with AIDS be segregated from other convicts?
• Which tax collection tactic is more brutal and unjust?
• When a wheelchair-bound guy uses a baseball bat to punish his granddaughter’s molester, what’s the right response?
• Should politicians set pay levels at government-owned firms?
• Is sharia law sometimes appropriate?
• Is the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general population?
• What do you do about self-destructive behavior in a government-run healthcare system?
• Should there be laws against incest among consenting adults?
• Should motorists be allowed to warn other drivers about speed traps?
• Is jury nullification the right approach for victimless crimes?
• Was this angry father wrong to take matters into his own hands?
• Should drunk-rafting be a crime?
• Should rich people pay higher speeding fines?

I tend to be guided by the sentiments in this amusing poster, but many of these questions defy easy answers.

P.S. If you want a good chuckle, check out this entrepreneurial bum.

Read Full Post »

Question of the Week: Why Aren’t Libertarians More Persuasive?

A month ago, I answered a question about reconciling the absence of libertarian societies with the supposed superiority of libertarian principles.

I gave an uncharacteristically optimistic response, arguing that the world in many ways has become more free thanks to libertarian policies (or, to be more accurate, a decline in statism).

This led to several follow-up questions, mostly premised on the notion that I must be smoking crack to think government has become less of a burden. My defense would be that the world is more free than it was 40 years ago, but probably less free than it was 10 years ago, so it depends on your benchmark. And I definitely agree that the world is trending toward less freedom (with these charts being a very sobering example).

But the question that caught my eye, and makes for a good follow-up, comes from a reader in Missouri: “Why aren’t libertarians more persuasive?”

To elaborate, the question assumes that libertarianism is the right approach and that the evidence supports libertarian policies, so another way of phrasing the question is: “What is wrong with libertarians that they can’t sell libertarian ideas?”

The easy and simple answer is to say the problem is that the people are too susceptible to being bribed by politicians. As illustrated by the chart, more and more Americans are getting hooked on the heroin of government dependency.

And as more Americans adopt the moocher mindset found in Vermont, libertarians have a hard time developing a winning message.

But I think the reader is really asking whether the problem with libertarianism is…well, libertarians.

This is a fair question. Having given hundreds of speeches and engaged in thousands of conversation, I can say that many people make the following assumptions about libertarians.

1. On economic policy, libertarians don’t care about the poor. Since I work on fiscal issues, this is the one I deal with all the time. I try to explain – ad nauseam – that we want smaller government and more economic freedom because faster growth is the only effective way to lower poverty and help the poor. But a lot of people think we’re defending the status quo.

2. On social policy, libertarians are libertines, embracing and endorsing hedonism. This is probably the most common stereotype, and there definitely are libertarians who are motivated by a desire to get rid of laws that impinge on their freedom to do things like smoke pot. But the libertarian position is not that pot is good, but rather that prohibition is bad.

3. On foreign policy, libertarians are oblivious to external threats such as al Qaeda. I’ve had several people, for instance, complain about Ron Paul opposing the killing of Osama bin Laden, and they assume that means libertarians are somehow the modern-day equivalent of Soviet appeasers. Yet our message is that we favor national defense, but that we think we’ll have far less need to defend ourselves if we stop intervening in ways that have nothing to do with national security.

4. And in general, libertarians are ultra-individualists who reject concepts such as community, family, and nation. While it’s true that libertarians are motivated by individual freedom, opposition to government coercion does not imply that people can’t be good neighbors or good parents. Indeed, we would argue that a free society promotes private virtue. And there’s nothing inconsistent with patriotism and libertarianism, as illustrated by this t-shirt.

Looking at what I’ve written, I realize I haven’t answered the question. All I’ve done is identified some stereotypes and explained why they’re not accurate.

So I’ll simply conclude by making a rather unremarkable observation that overcoming these perceptions is a big challenge for libertarians – assuming that we want to make greater inroads with the masses.

P.S. I got nagged by several readers for not posting a “Question of the Week” last weekend. What can I say, I’m old and forgetful. But you can always peruse previous versions if you’re somehow suffering.

But I’ll try to compensate for my oversight with some humor. Since this post is about the supposed shortcoming of libertarians, here’s some self-mocking humor. We’ll start with a video portraying Somalia as a libertarian paradise, followed by cartoons on libertarian ice fishing and libertarian lifeguards, then an info-graphic showing 24 types of libertarians, and close with a poster showing how the world sees libertarians.

Read Full Post »

Karl Rove and the Rest of the GOP Establishment Should Think Twice Before Trying to Undermine the Tea Party

Even though it changed the terms of the political debate, thus giving them a majority in the 2010 elections, many in the Republican establishment deeply resent the Tea Party. They don’t like being monitored by taxpayer-friendly groups that will expose them when they side with special interests (as they have in recent months on Export-Import Bank subsides and housing handouts).

And they really hate the idea of being held accountable at the polls when they side with the corrupt big-spenders in Washington. Just ask Senator Bennett and Congressman Inglis.

Pork…or principles?

Now the Washington establishment is fighting back. Karl Rove, best known for helping to steer the Bush Administration in favor of statist policies that led to the disastrous elections of 2006 and 2008, even has created a PAC to oppose the Tea Party.

But this seems like a very childish and self-destructive approach. According to some scholarly research, the Tea Party has made a big difference, both in terms of generating more votes for the GOP and in terms of pressuring Republicans to side more with taxpayers rather than the inside-the-beltway interest groups.

Here are some intriguing details from the new academic study.

We use data from a large number of sources to measure the influence of the Tax Day protests on the Tea Party. …We show that these political protests and the movements they built affected policymaking and voting behavior as well. Incumbent representatives vote more conservatively following large protests in their district… Larger protests increase turnout in the 2010 elections, primarily favoring Republican candidates. We find evidence of sizable effects. In particular, our baseline estimate shows that every Tea Party protester corresponds to a 14 vote increase in the number of Republican votes. Our most conservative estimate lowers that number to 7. The Tea Party protests therefore seem to cause a shift to the right in terms of policymaking, both directly and through the selection of politicians in elections.

Seems like a GOP political consultant should be very pleased with this research (assuming, of course, that they’re motivated by Republican and conservative victories rather than their own influence and contracts).

Want some more evidence that the Tea Party has made a difference? Well, check out these excerpts from a story in The Atlantic complaining about the lack of action in the Senate and ask yourself whether the addition of Senators like Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, and Pat Toomey might be one of the reasons why Obama’s agenda has been stalemated.

Here’s an impressive fact about life in today’s Washington: The last time a major new piece of policy legislation passed the U.S. Senate was July 15, 2010. That’s when the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill came through the Senate. And it was 951 days ago. If you’re wondering whether President Obama’s ambitious second-term agenda has a chance to make it through Congress, this little fact might be worth keeping in mind. …the Senate…hasn’t done anything the president could add to his list of policy accomplishments. For that — the kind of thing a president might talk about in his campaign speeches — it’s been more than two and a half years.

It’s now been more than 951 days, and let’s be thankful with every passing second. A “do-nothing” Congress is a very good thing if the only other option is to pass monstrosities such as Obamacare and Keynesian spending schemes.

Keep in mind, by the way, that there are now more Tea Party-oriented Senators such as Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, and Jeff Flake.

To conclude, I’m not under any illusion that the Tea Party automatically means better politicians and/or better election results. But every advocate of tax reform and smaller government should be very happy that there are people in the country who are pressuring politicians to adhere to libertarian-ish principles rather than playing the corrupt Washington game.

Read Full Post »

Question of the Week: If Libertarian Principles Are so Superior, then Why Aren’t there any Libertarian Societies?

While I generally have a happy-go-lucky attitude toward life, I’m pessimistic about public policy.

So when I got an email asking me how I would reconcile the supposed superiority of libertarian principles with the absence of libertarian societies, I initially was tempted to assert that our principles are sound and then give reasons why I nonetheless expect freedom to continuously diminish.

• The eroding-social-capital answer: Statism is inevitable because governments lure people into dependency with handouts.
• The tyranny-of-the-majority answer: Statism is inevitable because people thinks it’s okay for 51 percent of the people to rape and pillage 49 percent of the people.
• The public-choice answer: Statism is inevitable because interest groups will manipulate the political process to obtain unearned wealth.
• The crony-capitalism answer: Statism is inevitable because big business can’t resist getting into bed with big government and corrupting the process of free enterprise.

There are probably other reasons, but I think you get the idea. No wonder I’ve been speculating about where people should move when America descends into Greek-style economic chaos.

But I want to be uncharacteristically optimistic and explain why libertarian principles are still very relevant and that the outlook is better than we think.

• First, we have some polling data showing that the American people are quite hostile (at least in theory) to big government.
• Second, global economic liberty has increased in recent decades according to Economic Freedom of the World, notwithstanding recent slippage in the United States and Western Europe.
• Third, non-economic liberties are much stronger today than in past years, as explained by my colleague David Boaz.
• Fourth, whether we’re looking at North Korea vs South Korea, Chile vs. Venezuela, or the U.S. vs. Europe, the world is a laboratory and the evidence gets stronger with each passing year that markets are better than statism.

So while I don’t expect that there will ever be a libertarian Nirvana, I also don’t think it’s time to throw in the towel and meekly accept the yoke of statism.

Read Full Post »

Is It Okay to Steal if You’re from the Government?

In early January, I shared a “libertarian purity test” based on 64 questions.

I was a bit disappointed that I only scored a 94 out of a possible 160, but my excuse is that it was really a test of anarcho-capitalism. And as I explained when sharing this amusing video, I’m only in favor of getting rid of 90 percent of government.

But maybe the simplest test of libertarianism (and also the simplest test of whether you’re a decent human being) is to see whether you’re upset by the following story.

It combines the lunacy of the drug war with the evil of asset forfeiture.

Here are some of the truly disgusting details from the OC Weekly. First we learn about the victims of this government abuse.

…he and his wife purchased the Anaheim building, which has suites for up to 12 offices, in 2003 and that her dental practice was located there. …Over the years, they’ve rented to a variety of tenants, from insurance companies to an immigration service.

This unfortunate couple rented space to a group that seemed to comply with federal and state legal requirements.

…on June 11, 2011, he began renting to a club called ReLeaf Health & Wellness. …Because of the Ogden memo, because medical marijuana was legal under state law, and because his tenants held business permits from the city, he figured he wasn’t doing anything illegal. “I am a law-abiding citizen,” he says. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

But the city of Anaheim and the jackboots at the Drug Enforcement Administration targeted the tenant, and then decided to try and steal the property of the landlord!

…On Dec. 2, 2011, an undercover officer posing as a patient with a legitimate doctor’s recommendation for cannabis—something required of all entrants to the collective—”purchased 4.2 net grams of marijuana for $37.” The investigation ended there, but the single sale…was enough evidence for the DEA to argue that the otherwise-harmless computer engineer and dentist should lose their retirement-investment property. …The lawyer for the engineer and dentist who may be in the process of losing their nest egg is Matthew Pappas. …”The only evidence in this case is a $37 purchase of medical marijuana and an anonymous comment on a website that anybody could have written,” Pappas says. “For this, they want to take a $1.5 million building.”

You may be thinking that you missed something, that certainly the federal government wouldn’t steal an entire building simply because a tenant may have broken a silly drug law. Especially when it’s very ambiguous whether a crime actually took place.

But you didn’t miss a thing. This is pure, unadulterated, evil government.

And if you’re not already feeling some libertarian blood flowing through your veins, here are some additional examples of government thuggery.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A family in legal trouble because it rescued a baby deer.
• A women jailed overnight because she let her kids play outside.
• Cops legally stole $17,000 from a man who committed no crime.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

Yes, this is why we’re paying taxes. And Obama just got one tax increase and now he’s asking for another tax increase!

Read Full Post »

Can You Name America’s Most Effective Think Tank?

What’s the best think tank in the United States?

I’m obviously not impartial since I work at the Cato Institute, but here are a few relevant pieces of information.

• When Obama first took office and faced very little opposition, the Cato Institute took the lead against the faux stimulus, rallying hundreds of economists (including Nobel laureates) in opposition to the White House’s primitive Keynesianism.
• The legal argument for restoring the Constitution’s restraints on federal power has been driven by the intellectual work of Cato Institute scholars and adjunct scholars.
• In the battle against Obamacare (as well as the battle against its evil twin, Romneycare), the Cato Institute has been the most dogged, most principled, and most effective fountainhead of ideas and strategies.

But you don’t have to believe me.

The Center for Global Development has just released new research showing that the Cato Institute is America’s most productive and effective think tank.

The CGD’s calculations on based on hard data, looking at how much organizations spend and comparing that to their success with social media, web traffic, links, media exposure, and scholarly citations.

As you can see, the Cato Institute has a comfortable lead over other think tanks.

Much of the credit for Cato’s success belongs to Ed Crane, who founded the organization more than 30 years ago and presided over its growth until his retirement last year.

Under Ed’s leadership, Cato became a major factor in public policy debates. Some say this is because he had a good senior team and hired good people. All that is true (at least I hope since he hired me), but I think another key factor in Cato’s success is that there’s never even the slightest suggestion that what we say and do is influenced by politics.

People can disagree with Cato because they object to limited government and individual liberty, but they always know it’s the place to go for honest and principled analysis.

And that makes me a very lucky guy. Every day, thanks to Cato, I get to fight against wasteful, bloated, and corrupt government.

P.S. While we’re proud of our top performance in the CGD ranking, Cato came in second place in the 32-team DC think tank softball league, losing in the championship game of the tournament, so we know there’s room for improvement.

Read Full Post »

Question of the Week: “Take the Quiz and Tell Us How Libertarian You Are?”

For five consecutive weekends, I responded to your “questions of the week.”

That involved queries about my views on when the monetary system will begin to unravel, whether I hated Republicans, what I thought about Senator Jim DeMint moving over to the Heritage Foundation, the degree to which the media is biased, and if my opinions have changed on any issues.

But last weekend, I got too wrapped up in other topics and neglected to answer any of the questions I received. So I’ll try to compensate by answering one question today and another tomorrow.

Today’s query actually is a request, not a question: “Take the Quiz and Tell Us How Libertarian You Are?”

At first I thought this was going to be a request to take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, put together by the Advocates for Self Government.

And that would have been an easy test since it involves only 10 questions. I’ve done if before and I’m a pure libertarian.

But the reader instead sent me the much more detailed test put together by Professor Bryan Caplan of George Mason University.

This means answering 64 questions, though it doesn’t actually take that long to complete.

The good news is that I got a 94, which sounds close to perfect.

The bad news is that the maximum score is 160, so I obviously fell far short of libertarian purity.

But even a 94 makes me a very unusual person. According to Professor Caplan’s grading system, I’ve “entered the heady realm of hard-core libertarianism.

If you want to know why I got what appears to be a modest grade, it’s because the test basically measures whether you’re an anarcho-capitalist. And as I confessed back in 2011, when sharing this funny video poking fun at libertarianism, I’ve never been able to rationalize how to get rid of all government.

From an ideological perspective, I’d like to think that we could privatize courts, police, and national defense. But I just don’t see how the market would fill those roles.

So, yes, I’m a squish. But whenever anarcho-capitalists give me a hard time, I tell them that we should work together to get rid of 90 percent of government. Then we can squabble about what to do with the remaining 10 percent.

P.S. Since I shared the funny anti-libertarian video, I may as well share these other examples of humor targeting me and my fellow travelers.

• Two cartoons, one on libertarian ice fishing and the other showing libertarian lifeguards.
• A montage showing 24 types of libertarians.
• Six different perceptions of libertarians.

And since sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, here’s some libertarian-produced humor mocking statists.

Read Full Post »

You Be the Judge: Should Troublemakers Be Segregated from the General Population?

Let’s take a break from depressing posts about Obama’s fixation on class-warfare tax policy and the failure of Washington to enact genuine entitlement reform.

It’s time for another edition of “You Be the Judge.” I periodically come across stories that cause me internal conflict. Often my heart gives one answer and my head disagrees. Or I’m genuinely unsure of the right approach.

Previous editions of the game include:

• Is it appropriate to put politicians on trial for economic malfeasance?
• Is it excessive vigilante justice to set your daughter’s rapist on fire?
• Should prisoners with AIDS be segregated from other convicts?
• Which tax collection tactic is more brutal and unjust?
• When a wheelchair-bound guy uses a baseball bat to punish his granddaughter’s molester, what’s the right response?
• Should politicians set pay levels at government-owned firms?
• Is sharia law sometimes appropriate?
• What do you do about self-destructive behavior in a government-run healthcare system?
• Should there be laws against incest among consenting adults?
• Should motorists be allowed to warn other drivers about speed traps?
• Is jury nullification the right approach for victimless crimes?
• Was this angry father wrong to take matters into his own hands?
• Should drunk-rafting be a crime?

Lots of fun stories, as you can see.

Our latest example is about the Dutch are dealing with the “scum” of society. Here’s some of the story from the UK-based Telegraph.

A potential name for the new Dutch community?

Hollands’s capital already has a special hit squad of municipal officials to identify the worst offenders for a compulsory six month course in how to behave. Social housing problem families or tenants who do not show an improvement or refuse to go to the special units face eviction and homelessness. Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam’s Labour mayor, has tabled the £810,000 plan to tackle 13,000 complaints of anti-social behaviour every year. He complained that long-term harassment often leads to law abiding tenants, rather than their nuisance neighbours, being driven out. “This is the world turned upside down,” the mayor said at the weekend. …The new punishment housing camps have been dubbed “scum villages” because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers. “Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum,” he suggested last year. “Put all the trash together.” …The tough approach taken by Mr van der Laan appears to jar with Amsterdam’s famous tolerance for prostitution and soft drugs but reflects hardening attitudes to routine anti-social behaviour that falls short of criminality. There are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police.

Part of me thinks this is a good approach. Not the part about expensive social workers, to be sure, but I’m sympathetic to the notion that there are “bad apples” that cause trouble and can ruin neighborhoods.

Why not put them all together and let them stew in their own juices?

On the other hand, this soft version of prison seems inappropriate if people haven’t been convicted of a crime. Surely the government could trump up some sort of charge, and even do it in a semi-legitimate fashion. These sound like the sort of people who could be nailed for all sorts of things, such as disorderly conduct, assault and battery, urinating in public, and so on.

But swinging back in the other direction, it sounds as if the “scum” are inhabitants of public housing. And while I think public housing shouldn’t exist, I have no problem with the government enforcing standards of behavior as a condition of living in one of these Moochervilles. So all that’s really happening is that the riff-raff of society is being shifted from one form of government-provided housing to another.

What do you think?

P.S. The Netherlands is a typical European welfare state in many ways, but it has a good school choice system and a very competitive corporate tax system (as shown in the second video in this post). But those few good policies won’t be enough since the nation’s long-run fiscal outlook is as bad as Greece and worse than Spain and Italy. And if the burden of government spending gets too high, it swamps any good policies in other areas.

Read Full Post »

Question of the Week: “Dan, Why Do You Hate Republicans?”

I get several emails per week asking my view on various topics and many of the questions raise very interesting issues.

So I’ve decided to start a new feature. Every weekend, I will endeavor to answer one question.

My first chore is to explain why I hate Republicans, and as you can see here and here, there’s certainly ample reason to think I hold GOPers in low esteem.  The actual question, though, is:

You seem to be more critical of Republicans than Democrats and you went out of your way to attack Romney. Doesn’t that play into the hands of Obama?

The answer is yes and no. I don’t mean to sound like a politician, but I view my job as providing nonpartisan analysis on public policy issues. That means I criticize the statist schemes of the folks in Washington, regardless of whether the politicians have a “D” or an “R” at the end of their names.

To be fair, I’m probably a bit harder on Republicans, but only because they’re the ones who often pretend that they are on my side.

And sometimes they are on my side. My two favorite presidents are Reagan and Coolidge, and I have great admiration for those few politicians – such as Ron Paul – who almost always do the right thing.

But I also have discovered that bad Republicans usually do more damage than Democrats. Nixon was one of the most statist presidents of my lifetime, and Bush 41 and Bush 43 were almost as bad.

And even the politicians I’m willing to praise, including Ron Paul, sometimes do the wrong thing. And as much as I praise Reagan, he had some huge mistakes, such as the catastrophic health insurance program.

My simple rule of thumb is I will support a politicians who, in my estimation, will be a net plus for liberty. So notwithstanding my reputation for being a libertarian ideologue, I have a very practical approach to politics.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s rather disappointing that so few Republicans satisfy that simple test.

But now let’s return to the question. Doesn’t that view play into the hands of Obama? As I said, yes and no

“Hey, you libertarians should vote for me”

I want to maximize liberty (or minimize statism) in the long run. So if I have a choice between a big-government Republican and big-government Democrat, I sometimes think we’re better off if the Democrat prevails.

Jimmy Carter, for instance, probably wasn’t that much worse than Gerald Ford. And he paved the way for Reagan.

And Bill Clinton, in retrospect, was a much better choice than Bush 41. And he paved the way for the GOP landslide in 1994.

So the question before us today is whether Barack Obama is paving the way for a good Republican…or whether he’s a Lyndon Johnson paving the way for a Richard Nixon.

Read Full Post »

Is There a Libertarian Argument for another Four Years of Barack Obama?!?

From a rational perspective, the logical choice is not voting. After all, the odds of your vote making a difference are infinitesimally small.

But that’s if you view voting as an “investment” choice – i.e., you taking time and effort to do X in hopes of getting Y in return.

The other view is that voting is a “consumption” choice – i.e., something we do for enjoyment, like eating a hamburger or going to a movie. You recognize your vote almost surely won’t matter, but you do it because it gives you pleasure to vote for someone (or, in my case, it gives you pleasure to vote against someone).

Now let’s consider libertarians, conservatives, and other advocates of small government. Regardless of whether they’re investment voters or consumption voters, what should they do this election?

You could take an online test and see which candidate matches your views.

Mike Godwin of Reason, however, says you should vote for Barack Obama. Though he starts out by suggesting that most of us should vote for the Libertarian candidate.

…if you’re a Libertarian who’s not in a swing state – you live in California, maybe, or Texas – there’s no compelling reason for you to cast your vote for anyone other than Gary Johnson.

But then he argues that voters in battleground states should prefer Obama over Romney.

…you should give some thought to voting for Obama as the lesser of the two big-government, Harvard-educated evils. …Romney seems perfectly capable of adopting a liberal government program when it suits him. While Romney officially opposes Obamacare, it’s scarcely different from the health-care reform Romney presided over in Massachusetts.

I suspect most supporters of limited government won’t disagree with his assertion that Romney is squishy, but then Godwin goes off the reservation.

…there actually is a libertarian argument for Obamacare. …a truly universal system is the best option for maximizing health-care efficiencies. And if we can preserve some aspects of competition among insurers (which Obamacare, mimicking the health-care plan proposed by the GOP to counter Bill Clinton’s efforts at health-care reform, attempts to do), that’s all to the good. But there’s an even stronger libertarian argument for Obamacare. Namely, it frees more Americans to take better jobs without worrying about losing the health care plan they had in their old jobs. Worker mobility is one of the things that reliably fuels free enterprise, and workers will be more mobile under Obamacare than they would be under Romney’s semi-dismantled version of it.

I obviously disagree, but Godwin isn’t being crazy. Indeed, he’s basically echoing the pro-mandate position that was advanced by my former colleagues at the Heritage Foundation.

This is a reasonable position if you start from the premise that there’s no way of unwinding most of the existing government policies that have prevented markets from operating in the healthcare sector. That’s not my view, so I’m merely saying Godwin has a legitimate point, not that he’s right.

Getting back to his pro-Obama argument, he closes with discussion of social issues.

…let me underscore three points where Obama is surely closer to libertarians than Romney is. One of these is abortion rights, self-evidently. …Another is immigration. …A third quasi-libertarian position is Obama’s late-arriving but still-welcome stance on gay marriage.

I don’t find these arguments compelling. Libertarians are not monolithically pro-life or pro-choice. But to the extent there’s unanimity, they agree that Roe v. Wade was a nonsensical decision and that the issue should be decided by state legislatures. Which sort of makes them allies with Republicans, even if they don’t necessarily agree with how states should handle the issue.

I’m also more skeptical of immigration amnesty than the average libertarian, largely because I agree with Milton Friedman about the risks of combining open borders with a welfare state.

And I also think marriage should be a private institution with no role for government, though if you read the details of the article, it appears that Godwin has the same perspective.

“Me, the choice of libertarians?!?”

To summarize, I don’t find Godwin’s arguments convincing. If he really wanted to convince conservatives, libertarians, and other supporters of small government that Obama was the right choice, he should have argued that Romney would be another big-government statist like Bush. That’s a very compelling argument, as you can see from this list of Romney transgressions.

He even could have made the argument that keeping Obama for an additional four years would be the best way of laying the groundwork for a Reagan-style victory in 2016 with a presumably small-government advocate like Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, or Paul Ryan at the top of the ticket. That would have caught my attention since my first political decision was to favor Carter over Ford in 1976 in hopes of paving the way for Reagan in 1980.

By the way, I’m not saying it’s right or wrong to vote for Romney, Obama, or Johnson. My job is to focus on policy, not politics. But it is the silly season of politics, so I can’t resist making some observations.

Read Full Post »

Research Suggests that Conservatives Are More Likely to Be Knuckle-Dragging Neanderthals, sort of…

I’ve written before about the underlying differences between conservatives, libertarians, and statists, and I’ve even suggested that libertarians and social conservatives should be natural allies on many issues.

“Redistribute this, punk”

“I want higher taxes”

Little did I realize, though, that biceps may be a determinant of political philosophy. To be sure, some on the left have long said that conservatives are primitive and reactionary brutes, sort of modern-day neanderthals.

Well, it turns out that there’s some scientific evidence for this idea, at least among males. But before leftists get too excited about this new research, they should be forewarned that it also implies that folks on the left are more likely to be sunken-chested, spindly-armed weaklings.

In the grand scheme of things, I’d rather be Arnold Schwarzenegger than Woody Allen. But I’ll just assume that libertarians are a perfect fusion of strength and sensitivity.

Anyhow, enough of my speculation. For those who want to know what the research really says, here are some excerpts from an article in The Economist.

Dr Petersen and Dr Sznycer were investigating the idea that a person’s political opinions might be aligned with his physical characteristics. The opinion in question was whether resources should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. The physical characteristic was strength. …For men, …opinion did depend on strength. The two researchers came to this conclusion after looking at 486 Americans, 223 Argentinians and 793 Danes. They collected data on their volunteers’ strength by measuring the circumference of the flexed biceps of an individual’s dominant arm. (Previous work has shown that this is an accurate proxy for strength.) They then measured people’s status with questionnaires about their economic situation. And they determined a person’s support for redistribution by asking the degree to which he or she agreed with statements like: “The wealthy should give more money to those who are worse off”; and “It is not fair that people have to pay taxes to fund welfare programmes.” They also asked about participants’ political ideologies. Dr Petersen and Dr Sznycer found that, regardless of country of origin or apparent ideology, strong men argued for their self interest: the poor for redistribution, the rich against it. No surprises there. Weaklings, however, were far less inclined to make the case that self-interest suggested they would.

On a semi-serious note, the research doesn’t say that strong men are against redistribution. It simply says they openly favor whatever happens to be in their self-interest. So a strong but poor male would favor a big welfare state, while a rich and strong male will prefer liberty.

For weaklings and women, from what I can tell, there is no correlation between strength (or lack thereof) and political philosophy.

P.S. Since we started this post by referencing a serious analysis of the difference among conservatives, libertarians, and liberals, let’s close with a humorous look at the difference between conservatives, liberals, and Texans. In the same vein, here’s a joke about the difference between Californians and folks from other states.

Read Full Post »

Should Governments Be Allowed to Steal Your Property?

I’ve already written about the despicable practice of “civil forfeiture,” which allows governments to confiscate the property of innocent people who have not been convicted of any crime.

And I’ve cited great columns on the issue from George Will and John Stossel., as well a sobering report on the topic from the Wall Street Journal.

Now the Institute for Justice has a video that should outrage any decent person.

It’s examples of government thuggery like this that make me a libertarian. You should be one as well.

If you need more convincing, check out these horror stories of statist abuse.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A women jailed overnight because she let her kids play outside.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

But let’s end on a happy note, with a few jokes about cops, one sympathetic, one mocking, and one political.

Read Full Post »

According to an Online Survey, Gary Johnson Is the Presidential Candidate Closest to My Views

About one year ago, I took an online quiz put together by the folks at Reason and discovered that Ron Paul was closest to my views.

Not that I was terribly surprised, though I confess that I don’t remember if Gary Johnson was part of the quiz. And, if so, whether there were any differences between him and Ron Paul.

Speaking of Gary Johnson, I just took a quiz at the ISideWith website and it tells me that Gary Johnson shares 97 percent of my views.

That’s not a big shock, but I was surprised that the poll says I’m more Republican than Libertarian.

Methinks the people who put together the poll must be high on crystal meth. Yes, I’m probably a bit more conservative than the average libertarian on issues like terrorism and immigration, but I’m a far, far stronger advocate of limited government than the average GOPer.

But I gather the poll probably matches your views with the rhetoric of various candidates and parties, not their actual records.

And the gap between Republican rhetoric and Republican performance probably explains why just about every prominent libertarian is ignoring the GOP and voting for Gary Johnson, according to this survey by Reason. Unless, of course, they think voting is a waste of time.

P.S. In the for-what-it’s-worth department, the ISideWith people report that Gary Johnson’s views attract majority or plurality support from voters in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada.

P.P.S. Mitt Romney’s views don’t have majority support in any state.

P.P.P.S. Since the United States is supposed to be a constitutional republic rather than a majoritarian democracy, I don’t like any group of voters having the power to muck up my life.

Read Full Post »

The Eternally Confused Mind of a Statist

I’ve shared some rather amusing jabs at libertarians.

• A video portraying Somalia as a libertarian paradise.
• Cartoons on libertarian ice fishing and libertarian lifeguards.
• A mosaic showing 24 types of libertarians.
• A poster showing how the world sees libertarians.

So it’s only fair that I give libertarians a chance to punch back. Here’s a very clever poster put together by the Libertarian Party.

Sort of reminds me of this cartoon mocking American hippies.

Or perhaps we can find a good real-world example in Greece, where the supposedly anti-government riots are actually protests by overpaid bureaucrats demanding more government.

Read Full Post »

Economic Conservatives and Traditional Conservatives Are – or Should Be – Natural Allies in the Fight against a Bloated Federal Government

It’s not uncommon for there to be debate and discussion about the degree to which libertarians and social conservatives are allies and enemies.

I think they’re mostly allies, in part because there is wide and deep agreement on the principle of individual responsibility. They may focus on different ill effects, but both camps understand that big government is a threat to a virtuous and productive citizenry.

That being said, I also realize that a libertarian who thinks drug legalization is the most important issue in the world is probably not going to feel much kinship with a social conservative who focuses on spiritual treatment of drug addiction (even though I would argue they should share policy views).

I’m contemplating this topic because of a recent New York Times column by David Brooks. He is concerned that traditional conservatives (which I think would overlap with, but not be identical to, social conservatives) have lost influence in the conservative movement and Republican Party. Let’s start with this excerpt.

…the conservative movement…was a fusion of two different mentalities. On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. …there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government. …they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

So far, so good. As a self-described libertarian, I like these concepts. Indeed, I support liberty in part because I think it will both enable and encourage people to experience good lives in the kind of ecosystem David describes.

But then he has a sentence that rubs me the wrong way.

Ronald Reagan embodied both sides of this fusion, and George W. Bush tried to recreate it with his compassionate conservatism.

Let me first stipulate that it’s unfair to equate “compassionate conservatism” with “big government conservatism.” That may have been the end result, but the goal – as was explained to me on several occasions – was to reform the way government did things, not to make it bigger.

But even if we accept that goal, I think Reagan and Bush represented different strains of conservatism. Reagan wanted to shrink the federal government because he viewed Washington as a threat to David’s “harmonious ecosystem.” In other words, Reagan-style conservatism is (was?) based on the notion that Washington could only make things worse, not better.

The Bush people, by contrast, had a more optimistic view of the federal government’s capabilities.

Indeed, Brooks is explicitly willing to make government bigger in hopes of achieving certain goals.

There are few people on the conservative side who’d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels. The results have been unfortunate. Since they no longer speak in the language of social order, Republicans have very little to offer the less educated half of this country. …The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.

Here’s where I think he lets hope triumph over experience. What makes him think that the federal government is capable of successfully creating and operating “mobility programs”? It’s been operating dozens of such programs and they’ve all failed.

Or why does he think the federal government can reduce out-of-wedlock births when the evidence suggests that the welfare state has played a non-trivial role in enabling such misguided behavior?

Brooks also makes a ridiculous claim about what’s happened to domestic discretionary outlays. Here’s the data, adjusted for inflation, from the Historical Tables of the Budget.

Granted, David is talking about the plans in the Republican budget, not what’s actually happened. But the most the GOP wants to achieve is to put domestic discretionary spending back at 2008 levels. That’s not exactly an “absurdly low level,” particularly compared to existing post-stimulus outlays.

The more relevant question is why he thinks federal spending is associated with good results. There’s certainly no positive evidence from Obama’s stimulus. We also know the War on Poverty backfired. And entitlements are a ticking time bomb in the absence of reform.

By the way, this doesn’t negate what Brooks says about the GOP’s inability to articulate a message that resonates with (as he calls them) the “less educated half of this country.”

All I’m arguing is that results should matter. If we care about making life better for these people and we want the “harmonious ecosystem” David mentions, then we should be making government smaller rather than larger.

Read Full Post »

Another Disgusting Display of Government Thuggery

When I first read this story about a woman getting arrested because her kids were playing outdoors, I figured it would be a perfect addition for my ongoing series that tries to determine whether the United States or the United Kingdom has the most incompetent, stupid, and/or venal government officials making the most brainless and/or thuggish decisions.

And when you read these excerpts from a newspaper in Houston, you’ll agree that venal and thuggish are very appropriate words.

A stay-at-home mom from La Porte has filed a lawsuit against the city’s police department, an unknown officer and one of her neighbors. Tammy Cooper said she was wrongly accused of endangering her children and was even forced to spend the night in jail, all because she let her kids play outside. …her children, ages 9 and 6, were riding their motorized scooters in the cul-de-sac where they live while she watched from a lawn chair in her front yard just a few feet away. ..a La Porte police car pulled up in front of her home. …He proceeded to tell me he had received a call from one of my neighbors that my kids were riding their scooters unsupervised. Cooper said she was handcuffed, put in the back of a police car and forced to spend the night in jail. …The charges against her were eventually dropped but she still describes the ordeal as humiliating and said her children were even questioned by police and terrified. …”I hope that what I went through doesn’t go unpunished – that there are consequences for a bad decision,” Cooper said.

But as I thought about the story, I got more and more angry. Heck, it’s the kind of story that should get everybody upset. So maybe it belongs in the this-should-turn-everyone-into-a-libertarian category. Sort of like these horrifying examples.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

Though I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding why any ethical person wouldn’t be a libertarian anyhow.

But I’m digressing. Returning to our topic, I very much hope that Mrs. Cooper wins her lawsuit. It’s not against the law for kids to play outside. Even if she was inside watching a soap opera, that shouldn’t matter.

If cops have nothing better to do in La Porte, then perhaps it’s time to downsize the police department. And a good place to start is by firing the thug that arrested a woman for no reason.

Read Full Post »

Our Government’s Shameful Priorities: Heavier Punishment for Bank Account Reporting Miscue than for Child Porn

If you can read the following and not get upset, you are not a good person. Please move to France (where higher taxes are “patriotic”) and don’t come back.

I’m engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but you’ll hopefully understand after reading this excerpt from a very disturbing report posted on Zero Hedge.

Jacques Wajsfelner of Weston, Massachusetts is a criminal mastermind. Big time. Like Lex Luthor. But rest easy, ladies and gentlemen, for this nefarious villain is about to face some serious jail time thanks to the courageous work of US government agents. You see, Mr. Wajsfelner was finally caught and convicted of a most heinous crime: failing to disclose his foreign bank account to the US government. Note– he was not convicted of tax evasion. He was not convicted of failing to file or pay taxes. His crime was not filing the annual Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR). Because of his failure to disclose his foreign bank account, Wajsfelner is now looking at FIVE YEARS behind bars in a Day-Glo orange jumpsuit. Oh, one more thing– Wajsfelner is 83 years old. He was born in Germany during the global depression and rise of Adolf Hitler. The Wajsfelner family soon fled the Nazi regime and made its way to the United States.

Please note that Mr. Wajsfelner didn’t get convicted of not paying tax. He got convicted for the utterly trivial and victimless “crime” of not reporting a foreign bank account.

So the government is sending a completely harmless old man to jail for something that shouldn’t be illegal (and if we had a flat tax, there would be no double taxation of saving and investment, so it wouldn’t matter for tax purposes if your bank account was in Georgetown, Kentucky, or Georgetown, Cayman Islands).

Now let’s compare the treatment of Mr. Wajsfelner with the way some real criminals are treated.

Then there’s Eric Higgins of Port Huron, Michigan, who was recently busted for major possession of child pornography and engaging in sexually explicit conversations with juveniles online. He was given 20 months. Oh… and Mr. Higgins was a US Customs & Border Patrol agent. …Or Ricardo Cordero, another US Customs & Border Patrol officer who was given 27-months for personally smuggling 30 Mexican nationals into the United States, and assisting another smuggler to bring 15 Mexican nationals across the border. This genius even had the smuggler testify as a character witness at his divorce proceeding! Or Jon Corzine, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and member of the political elite, who presided over one of the largest plunders in the financial system ever seen during the recent MF Global collapse. He walks the streets freely to this day.

The article closes with a very accurate – but understated – assessment of the federal government.

It seems pretty clear where the US government stands: the victimless crime of failing to report a foreign bank account is far more egregious than, say, possession of child pornography, engaging with minors in online sex chat, bribery, extortion, fraud, and abuse of official power.

This horrifying example of government abuse is a good example of why I’m a libertarian. Yes, I get upset about bloated and counterproductive government spending. And I also get irked by our punitive and destructive class-warfare tax system.

But what gets me most upset is unfair tyranny against powerless people. If your stomach can stand it, here are some more examples.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.

Every one of the government officials involved in these episodes should be fired. And they should consider themselves lucky that tar and feathers are no longer a method of dealing with despicable bureaucrats.

P.S. The Zero Hedge website is also the source of the extremely funny and clever ethnic analysis of Europe.

P.P.S. While I utterly despise bureaucrats who engage in thuggish behavior, I’m not a big fan of bureaucrats in general.

P.P.P.S. The government’s grotesque treatment of Mr. Wajsfelner is part of the overall attack on tax competition. Heaven forbid people have the freedom to benefit from better tax policy in other jurisdictions!

Read Full Post »

How Libertarian Are You? A Test Involving Tractors, Pot, and Police Cars

I’ve written posts revealing horror stories of government abuse and argued that people should become libertarian.

I’ve commented on research ostensibly showing that conservatives and libertarians don’t necessarily share moral premises.

And I’ve even speculated on whether libertarianism and patriotism are somehow inconsistent (this Penn & Teller video gives the right answer).

But I’ve never done a poll to gauge libertarian sentiment, so let’s do an experiment. Here’s an excerpt from a BBC report.

A farmer in the US state of Vermont who was facing a minor drugs charge is now in more serious trouble after driving a tractor over seven police cars. Roger Pion crushed the county sheriff’s cruisers on Thursday before making his getaway on the farm vehicle. The 34-year-old was stopped by police in Newport city, northern Vermont, not far from the crime scene. Sheriff’s deputies were unaware of the destruction in their department car park until a resident called 911. Orleans County Sheriff Kirk Martin said they were initially unable to give chase as their cars had been wrecked.

Now share your anonymous reaction.

If you’re so disposed, feel free to augment your vote in the comments section.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I’m torn between the third and fourth options.

When I think about it logically and dispassionately, I know I should pick the third choice. But my rebellious inner child wants to cheer for somebody who fights back, so I’m tempted to take the last option. That same inner child, by the way, was quite amused that the cops couldn’t even give chase because their cars were totaled.

Maybe this makes me a libertarian chicken hawk. I cheer for people who fight back even though I wouldn’t do the same thing.

Sort of like my attitude toward tax evasion. I applaud people who take that risk (assuming they live in nations with unjust governments), but am too cowed by the IRS to do it myself.

But I’m not a complete coward. I almost got thrown in a Mexican jail for opposing the tax-hungry bureaucrats at the OECD. That has to count for something.

Read Full Post »

Is This a Case of Government Overreach or an Example of Proper Law Enforcement?

Normally this blog focuses on big issues such as the economic damage of government spending and the self-defeating foolishness of high tax rates.

Today, though, it’s time for another edition of “You Be the Judge.”

In this game, we look at stories and issues that require us to balance common sense, the principles of a free society, and justice.

Previous editions of this game include: Putting politicians on trial, vigilante justice, brutal tax collection tactics, child molestation, pay levels at government-owned firms, sharia law, healthcare, incest, speed traps, jury nullification, and vigilante justice (again).

Our latest example comes from Alaska, where someone with very questionable judgement was busted for floating down a river while consuming vast quantities of alcohol. Here’s some of the story from the Fairbanks Daily News.

A Juneau man faces a rare DUI charge for allegedly having a 0.313 breath-alcohol content as he floated through Fairbanks on an inflatable raft Sunday night. Alaska’s driving under the influence law applies to people operating motor vehicles, water craft and airplanes. …when Alaska State Troopers received a report of a “heavily intoxicated” man floating down the Chena River near the Parks Highway bridge at 6:40 p.m. Sunday, a wildlife trooper boat responded and arrested 32-year-old William Modene. …At 0.313, Modene’s breath-alcohol content was almost four times the legal limit for operating a vehicle, 0.08. …Under Alaska’s DUI law, operating a water craft means to “navigate a vessel used or capable of being used as a means of transportation on water for recreational or commercial purposes on all waters, fresh or salt, inland or coastal, inside the territorial limits or under the jurisdiction of the state.”

So here’s the issue we have to decide: Mr. Modene doesn’t sound like a model citizen, and he may be swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool, but the question on the table is whether the government should have arrested him for DUI?

From a legal perspective, is it accurate to say that he was “operating” a water craft or “navigating” a vessel?

I’m not an expert on such matters, but it seems to me that he was doing nothing more than floating down a river. There’s nothing in the story, for instance, to indicate he had a motor on his raft.

From what we know, Mr. Modene posed zero danger to other people. He was merely a drunk, minding his own business as he floated along.

My gut instinct is that this case should be tossed. The government would be in a much stronger position if it had charged him with “being drunk in public” or something like that. But even in that case, floating down a river may not meet the test of being “in public.”

There’s a separate issue, of course, about whether the government can and should intervene if someone is engaging in self-destructive behavior. If there’s a report that someone has just taken a bottle of sleeping pills, most of us presumably would agree that it would be okay for the government to break down his door and tote him to a hospital to have his stomach pumped.

But the self-destructive behavior has to pose an immediate danger. We’d hopefully all reject, for instance, the notion of some Bloomberg-esque ban on unhealthy food because people sometimes shorten their lives by overeating.

Since I probably average one beer a month, I’m not competent to make sweeping statements about alcohol, but it’s my understanding that a blood alcohol level of .4 is when people begin to die. Since Mr. Modene was already above .3, perhaps there’s some argument for police intervention.

But set that aside. Pretend you’re on the jury and you have to vote on whether Modene is guilty of DUI. What’s your verdict? And if you also want to weigh in on whether the government had a right to interfere with his raft trip, don’t be bashful.

For me, that second question is more challenging. That’s why I like sticking with simple questions of right vs. wrong, such as whether I side with Switzerland or France on the issue of whether fiscal sovereignty and financial privacy should be undermined to help high-tax nations impose their bad tax laws on an extraterritorial basis.

Read Full Post »

Read This Horrifying George Will Column and You Will – if You Have any Decency – Become a Libertarian

I periodically provide mind-blowing examples of individuals who have their lives turned upside down by evil bureaucrats.

You may think “evil” is too strong a word, but it sticks in my mind after perusing these examples of abusive actions by the federal government.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.

Now we have a George Will column that will get you very angry. At least if you’re a good person.

Will starts by describing the federal bureaucracy’s attack on an innocent woman for a non-crime.

…our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville’s Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black’s scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled. Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale-watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ask if the whistling constituted “harassment” of a marine mammal, which is an “environmental crime.” NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment — but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a “material false statement” to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act, intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.

But it gets worse, because the federal jack-boots then raided her office (I don’t even know what “jack-boots” are, but they signify government thuggery, and that’s definitely a good description of what happened).

…after this bizarre charge — that she lied about the interaction with the humpback that produced no charges — more than a dozen federal agents, led by one from NOAA, raided her home. They removed her scientific photos, business files and computers.

This unfortunate woman has also been charged with another non-crime.

She has also been charged with the crime of feeding killer whales when she and two aides were in a dinghy observing them feeding on strips of blubber torn from their prey — a gray whale. To facilitate photographing the killers’ feeding habits, she cut a hole in one of the floating slabs of blubber and, through the hole, attached a rope to stabilize the slab while a camera on a pole recorded the whales’ underwater eating. So she is charged with “feeding” killer whales that were already feeding on a gray whale they had killed. She could more plausibly be accused of interfering with the feeding.

As an aside, Will notes that the NOAA bureaucrats have little regard for the Constitution.

Six years ago, NOAA agents, who evidently consider the First Amendment a dispensable nuisance, told Black’s scientific colleagues not to talk to her and to inform them if they were contacted by her or her lawyers. Since then she has not spoken with one of her best friends.

Most important, he concludes with the key point about how all of us are threatened by Leviathan.

In 1980, federal statutes specified 3,000 criminal offenses; by 2007, 4,450. They continue to multiply. Often, as in Black’s case, they are untethered from the common-law tradition ofmens rea, which holds that a crime must involve a criminal intent — a guilty mind. Legions of government lawyers inundate targets like Black with discovery demands, producing financial burdens that compel the innocent to surrender in order to survive. The protracted and pointless tormenting of Black illustrates the thesis of Harvey Silverglate’s invaluable 2009 book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.” Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, chillingly demonstrates how the mad proliferation of federal criminal laws — which often are too vague to give fair notice of what behavior is proscribed or prescribed — means that “our normal daily activities expose us to potential prosecution at the whim of a government official.” Such laws, which enable government zealots to accuse almost anyone of committing three felonies in a day, do not just enable government misconduct, they incite prosecutors to intimidate decent people who never had culpable intentions. And to inflict punishments without crimes. …The more Americans learn about their government’s abuse of criminal law for capricious bullying, the more likely they are to recoil in a libertarian direction and put Leviathan on a short leash.

Utterly disgusting. As Glenn Reynolds periodically suggests, “tar, feathers” would be an appropriate way of dealing with these hyenas.

By the way, government thuggery is not limited to the crowd in Washington.

• If you have a soul, you will be outraged by this example of a local government abusing poor people.
• If you have decency, you will be disgusted by this example of a state government persecuting someone who didn’t commit a crime.
• If you believe in basic rights, you will be horrified by this example of a foreign government seeking to outlaw political dissent and free speech.

P.S. For the second time, I feel compelled to apologize to Hyenas. They’re part of the natural ecosystem. Thuggish bureaucrats, by contrast, are a malignant and artificial force.

Read Full Post »

Socialism for Kids, the Obama Version

I have several amusing posts about the left’s fixation on redistributionism, including this Halloween classic, this Elizabeth Warren takedown, this mockery of the Occupy Wall Street nitwits, and this caricature of Obama’s class warfare.

In this grand tradition, here’s a funny poster sent to me by a reader.

This is an appropriate point for the disclaimer that Obama is not a socialist, which technically requires government ownership of the means of production. As I’ve explained before, it’s much more accurate to say he’s a statist, a corporatist, or a redistributionist.

And since we’re looking at definitions and this post features young children, I’m reminded of the great description of libertarianism put forth by my Cato colleague David Boaz.

You could say that you learn the essence of libertarianism — which is also the essence of civilization –  in kindergarten: don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, keep your promises.

That definition isn’t amusing, like what’s portrayed in this satirical video or shown in this mocking poster featuring the 24 types of libertarians, but it has the advantage of being simple and accurate.

Read Full Post »

Amen to Pat Robertson on Marijuana Legalization

Even though I’m a dull and straight-laced guy, that doesn’t mean I want the government to pester, harass, and persecute people for engaging in victimless crimes that I find distasteful.

Especially when interventionism and prohibition doesn’t work. To be blunt, the War on Drugs has been a costly failure (much like the War on Poverty).

Fortunately, it appears that more and more people are coming to the same conclusion – and many of them aren’t libertarians. For instance, I recently cited Mona Charen’s wise comments about the issue.

Even more remarkable are the statements from one of America’s leading evangelicals, Pat Robertson.

Here’s the key sections from an Associated Press report.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs has failed. The outspoken evangelical Christian and host of “The 700 Club” on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network he founded said the war on drugs is costing taxpayers billions of dollars. He said people should not be sent to prison for marijuana possession. The 81-year-old first became a self-proclaimed “hero of the hippie culture” in 2010 when he called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions. “I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of a controlled substance,” Robertson said on his show March 1. “The whole thing is crazy. We’ve said, ‘Well, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime.’ That’s baloney.” …Robertson said he “absolutely” supports ballot measures in Colorado and Washington state that would allow people older than 21 to possess a small amount of marijuana and allow for commercial pot sales. Both measures, if passed by voters, would place the states at odds with federal law, which bans marijuana use of all kinds. While he supports the measures, Robertson said he would not campaign for them and was “not encouraging people to use narcotics in any way, shape or form.” “I’m not a crusader,” he said. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”

Wow, not only for legalization, but “absolutely” supports ballot initiatives in Colorado and Washington. Kudos to Rev. Robertson for recognizing the human cost of the Drug War. As the old saying goes, not everything immoral should be illegal.

Here’s five minutes from Gov. Gary Johnson on the issue.

Very well stated. Legalization is common-sense conservatism. Too bad Gary Johnson didn’t get more attention early in the GOP race.

The Drug War doesn’t work, and it is the ultimate example of Mitchell’s Law since it has spawned bad policies such as asset forfeiture and anti-money laundering rules.

Time to “just say no” to big government.

Read Full Post »

How to Reconcile Liberty, Morality, Conservatism, and Libertarianism with Carney’s Fusionist Theorem

As a libertarian who became interested in public policy because of Ronald Reagan, it won’t surprise you to know that I’m more of a “right libertarian” than “left libertarian.”

I fully agree with positions that motivate left libertarians, such as the war on drugs doing more harm than good, foreign entanglements such as NATO no longer serving America’s national security purpose, and the importance of preserving constitutional protections of civil liberties. But since I’m a fiscal policy economist, I normally consort with conservatives.

And my frequent interactions with conservatives sometimes lead me to wonder why we aren’t closer allies. Well, maybe we can be if both sides read what Tim Carney wrote for today’s Washington Examiner.

His column is about Rick Santorum’s inability to unite proponents of limited government, but that’s secondary to the insightful analysis on how conservatives and libertarians can be natural allies. Here are key passages.

For many of today’s liberals, if something is bad — like the traditional light bulb, a very high health-insurance deductible, a gas-guzzling car, or a lack of racial diversity — the government ought to outlaw it. Maybe they can’t comprehend the mind-set of many of today’s conservatives, who revere both individual liberty and traditional morality as the necessary conditions for human happiness and thus say that certain behaviors are immoral but shouldn’t be illegal. Not only are traditional morality and limited government totally compatible, today they are intimately linked, as the Left uses big government to subsidize abortion providers and force all employers to pay for their employees’ contraceptives. …the moral law should guide our personal actions, and individual liberty should guide our political decisions. …When liberals cry that conservatives are trying to legislate morality, that’s typically projection and misdirection from liberal attempts to legislate morality — they say we’re trying to outlaw buying contraception because we oppose their efforts to mandate buying contraception. …More often than not, in the United States these days, it’s the secular Left imposing its morality on the religious Right. Don’t want to photograph a gay wedding? You’re fined. Don’t want to sell the morning-after pill at your pharmacy? You’re driven out of your job. Don’t want to pay for your employees’ sterilization? You’re a criminal. Don’t want to subsidize Planned Parenthood with your tax dollars? Tough, pay up. An alliance between libertarians and conservatives is natural and right today. …The proper conservative response is to fight for the liberty of all Americans, including religious conservatives, to manage their own affairs according to what they believe is correct. Increasing the size of government, even in the name of a more moral society, simply gives the Left more weapons to turn on the Right in the culture war — Obamacare is the perfect example.

Maybe Tim’s column makes sense to me because I’m somewhat of a social conservative in my personal life. I’ve never smoked, never done drugs, don’t like gambling, rarely drink, don’t deal with prostitutes (other than the non-sexual ones serving in government), and have a traditional view on the importance of family. But I’ve never thought my boring personal preferences should be part of the law.

But as Tim explains, leftists believe in imposing their views on everyone else. And the last sentence in the excerpt shows why conservatives and libertarians should be united in opposition to statism. Big government gives the left the tools to advance an agenda that undermines both morality and liberty.

So with that in mind, I’m going to do something similar to Mitchell’s Law and Mitchell’s Golden Rule. But in this case, I’ll actually give credit to someone else. As shown in the picture, libertarians and conservatives should unite behind Carney’s Fusionist Theorem.

Read Full Post »

What’s the Difference between a Libertarian, a Supply-Sider, a Keynesian, and an IMF Bureaucrat?

I realize the title of this post sounds like the beginning of a joke, along the lines of “A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar…”, but this is a serious topic.

A big problem in fiscal debates is that people can’t even agree on what they mean by certain words. For instance, what’s the definition of austerity? Is it budget cuts, higher taxes, or both? Why are people saying the United Kingdom is practicing austerity, when the burden of government spending is going up?

Or how do we define responsible fiscal policy? Should politicians try to balance budgets, or should they shrink the burden of government? Is it reasonable for some people to call Obama a conservative because he wants higher taxes and claims the money would be used to reduce red ink?

I grapple with some of these questions in this appearance on Fox Business News.

But I’m not happy with my performance, largely because there needs to be a simple way of categorizing the various approaches to fiscal policy. So that’s what I’ve done in this Table. This is a first draft, so I welcome suggestions.

I’m serious about looking for input, For instance, I would like to come up with some way to describe Bushonomics without sullying the name of supply-side economics.

But perhaps I am just sensitive to that issue because supply-side economists tend to be serious and sober people who favor smaller government, but some of the politicians associated with supply-side economics – such as Jack Kemp – have been unapologetic big spenders.

I’m also unhappy with the division between IMFers and Keynesians, which is strange because it seems like half of my time is devoted to battling statists who argue for more government spending and the other half is consumed by fights against proponents of higher taxes.

What makes this so frustrating, though, is that Keynesians and IMFers are usually the same people, even though the philosophies are supposedly inconsistent.

I suspect that all they really want is bigger government, and they use any sign of weakness to argue for more spending, and then they quickly pivot and ask for higher taxes because of red ink. The biased analysis of the Congressional Budget Office is a good example.

The right approach, needless to say, is libertarianism. Small government and low tax rates are the pro-growth, pro-freedom recipe. That’s the one part of the Table that’s right on the mark.

Read Full Post »

Why Libertarianism Is the Best Philosophy, as Demonstrated by a Cartoon

Every so often, I write about what makes libertarianism special and different.

In the future, though, I think I’ll simply share this excellent cartoon.

By the way, I actually think the cartoon is a bit unfair to conservatives. Unless I’m missing something, the right-wing position on birth control is to resist subsidies and mandates. As I recently wrote, that’s the economically sound and libertarian point of view.

That being said, one of the most obvious distinctions between libertarians and conservatives is that the latter do sometimes favor laws restricting private behavior when there is no harm imposed on third parties. The misguided War on Drugs is a good example, as illustrated by this Gary Johnson speech, this video, and this AP story.

The libertarian message isn’t that drug use is good, but rather that prohibition is ineffective and that the net result of the drug war is bigger government and less freedom.

Read Full Post »