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November 2008
Vol. 22, No. 10
Reflections
Ross Levatter is a physician living in Phoenix.
Good and hard — A new variant of the Obama campaign slogan that came out during the Democratic Convention is “The Change America Needs.” I myself am not convinced that Obama is the change America needs. Sadly, and with apologies to the writers of “The Dark Knight,” I suspect he is the change America deserves. — Ross Levatter
Andrew Ferguson is a contributing editor of Liberty. At present he is working on a biography of science-fiction writer R.A. Lafferty.
Voter’s remorse — When I attained my 18th birthday, it was a wonderful time to be a Republican. The operative word was gridlock: Bill Clinton was president, Congress was up in arms against him, and between the two the federal government could barely agree on anything. Hell, they couldn’t even keep the lights on.
So stupidly I assumed that, given control of government, the Republicans would continue deflating our capital bloat; I believed (foolish child!) that candidate Bush would maintain the isolationist policies educed on the campaign trail: no more Serbias, no more Sudans, just four to eight years to mop up Great Society detritus while our juggernaut economy jagged on. I went from casting a vote against Al Gore (which I would gladly do again . . . and again . . . and again) to casting a vote for Walker Bush. And I have rued it ever since.
A decade on, it seems to be a great time to be a Democrat. Theirs is the sole antiwar candidate; theirs the opposition to a man who will surely go down as one of the worst presidents in our nation’s history. (I wait, and not exactly on the edge of my seat, for the day when Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson take their well-deserved places above him.) I can understand the excitement of pulling the lever that will dump the Republicans out of power. But so many people I’ve spoken with seem to be making my mistake, of confusing a vote against McCain with a vote for Obama, and I suspect many of them will come to regret it.
Obama would have to work hard to lose this election: anti-Bush sentiment has seen the GOP suffer heavy losses in congressional races, and McCain is in dead heats even in states that have been GOP locks since Reagan. His election will likely be accompanied by a consolidation of Democrat gains on the Hill: he should have the numbers, even if not filibuster-proof, to push through any bill he wants.
Thus his acolytes are expectant. They believe in him. They look to him to end the war in Iraq, and dish out the goodies. But Obama’s chest-thumping over Afghanistan and, of greater concern, Pakistan, indicates that he will reallocate rather than reduce military expenditure. (Confirmation comes in the form of the punchably-faced Joe Biden, who spent much of his Denver convention speech agitating for a new Cold War.) It will be interesting then to see which campaign promises he chooses to break, and how deeply he disappoints. Bear in mind that when Democrats really hit the heights, they tend to get involved in major wars.
But maybe it’ll be 1993 all over again, and Obama will be forced to spend most of his time dealing with a newly recalcitrant Republican minority. Maybe his supporters’ regrets will be limited to complaints about not getting enough largesse. Maybe glorious gridlock will return. No matter what, like his Democrat predecessors listed above, President Obama’s name will never, ever appear on any list of “worst presidents.” Let us hope it doesn’t deserve to. — Andrew Ferguson
Baloo is a nom de plume of Rex F. May.
Mustang Sarah — I just wrote to L. Neil Smith, author of speculative fiction, and accused him of writing the backstory and bio in secret, and then hiring an excellent actress to portray Sarah Palin. I’m still not sure that didn’t happen. Of course, she might also be from an old unpublished manuscript of Heinlein’s. At any rate, we have here a unique opportunity to help get an ideal American type into the vice-presidential office. Before this happened, I would have bet it would be impossible for John McCain to do anything at all that could persuade me to vote for him. I was wrong.
Is McCain the Yeltsin of America? Yeltsin did two great things — he got up on that tank, and years later he named Putin his successor to clean up the mess he’d made in his own years in office. McCain survived a captivity that would have destroyed most of us, and years later he named Palin.
It may be the one of the few genuine acts of genius in American political history, and ol’ McCain did it.
Not only is the opportunity to get her in office, and maybe to elect her president in a few years, a wonderful thing, but the icing on the cake is to experience the reaction of the Left. It’s hard to oppose her without opposing the very fabric of the American soul, and that’s what they’re doing. She’s not a typical American type, as many have said — she’s the ideal American type. Annie Oakley and June Cleaver. Dana Scully, Nancy Drew, Molly Brown . . . the list goes on.
I’m off to get a bumper sticker. — Rex May
Gary Jason is an adjunct professor of philosophy and the author of Critical Thinking: Developing an Effective World View and Introduction to Logic.
Why feed the bear? — Russia has used the billions the West has poured into its coffers to rebuild its military and stoke its revanchist plans to get its empire back. If this wasn’t obvious from Putin’s words over the last few years, as well as his ruthless suppression of dissent and freedom of the press in his country (including targeted assassinations of journalists critical of his regime), it is now crystal clear with his invasion and dismemberment of Georgia.
Putin, the crafty chessplayer, played the game deftly. He flooded money, arms, and citizens into the two rebellious regions of Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) after France and Germany blocked Georgia’s (and Ukraine’s) admission to NATO. When the Georgians — in a tactical blunder Putin was waiting for — tried to reestablish control of over those regions internationally recognized as their territory, the Russians moved in rapidly and in force. The result is that Russia now has de facto annexed those regions, and its tanks are close to the capital. All the while Europe and the U.S. have looked on passively.
Besides wanting Georgia back in their empire, the Russians have a larger objective: to control the energy supply of Europe. Georgia just happens to have a major oil pipeline (the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, owned by BP), through which a million barrels a day flows. This pipeline is a vital source of oil for Europe, and Russia intended the message to be sent that the pipeline is now under its control. In case the Europeans — obtuse to be sure — didn’t quite get the message, the Russians underlined it by hitting the pipeline with 50 missiles.
Putin’s plan is to achieve, by controlling Europe’s energy supplies, what Stalin couldn’t achieve with his armies: hegemony over the continent.
Absent some stern response from Europe and the United States, we can expect Ukraine to be hit next. Ukraine has a large number of ethnically Russian citizens loyal to Russia, and is a democracy — something which authoritarian regimes like Russia despise. More to the point, Ukraine has the Crimea — a strategically important peninsula where a large Russian fleet is harbored. This fleet is supposed to be leaving by 2017, though that is unlikely now that the Bear has gotten away with attacking Georgia. I doubt it will be even a year before Putin attacks Ukraine.
We should consider some peaceful but meaningful measures here. Certainly we should end the joint operations with the Russians on the space station and boycott the 2012 Olympics scheduled in Russia. But more importantly, we should end all connections with Russia vis a vis our nuclear power industry. Earlier this year, for example, Bush submitted to Congress the “123 Agreement,” which would allow the transfer of nuclear materials and technology to Russia, allowing Russia to reprocess spent fuel from our reactors. The deal was already suspect because of Russia’s enabling of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It should now be off the table permanently. The last thing we need is to have the Bear’s claws on our nuclear power in the way they are on Europe’s oil and natural gas supply.
Most importantly, we need to quit feeding authoritarian regimes like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran the billions for energy that we currently do. We need to build nukes, drill domestically, allow importation of ethanol from places where it is produced more cheaply than here, and continue to develop alternative sources of energy. — Gary Jason
Tim Slagle is a standup comedian living in Chicago. His website is timslagle.com.
Hire purpose — Chicago Mayor Daley recently asked city employees to take unpaid furloughs as a way to meet the budget shortfall without layoffs. I don’t really understand this. Most municipal government positions are necessary things; if the garbage man doesn’t show, eventually someone else has to pick up the trash. So how is it possible that so many employees can take off so much time and the city can still function?
In the private sector, those employees would be considered unnecessary, and have to find more productive places in the economy to apply their talents. But in a city that counts on the assistance of municipal employees around election time to maintain the power structure, layoffs are unheard of.
It is a big part of why the government can never outperform the private sector. In the private sector, people are hired when there is a task that needs to be done. In a government, people are just hired. — Tim Slagle
Fred Smith is president and founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a contributing editor of Liberty.
Natural enemies — With environmentalists increasingly upset about bottled water, energy independence, resource waste, landfill adequacy, and so forth, one might hope to harness their energy to a useful cause. Why shouldn’t they take on the TSA? Think of the billions of bottles of cosmetics, hairspray, fast drinks, and even (gasp!) water that have been confiscated at airports throughout America. (Full disclosure: I lost a bottle of Laphroaig scotch myself.) Sure, they argue that it makes us safer. But what about the safety of our planet, now menaced by dumpsites loaded with confiscated fluids?
Could we divert the Greenies’ political clout into repealing the Homeland Security Act? — Fred Smith
Randal O’Toole is a contributing editor of Liberty and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Economy: stupid — Barack Obama is going to win in a walk. I make this prediction with mixed feelings. Obama will boost our standing in the world’s eyes. He will inspire a young generation of blacks and other minorities to believe that they can succeed in America. But his economic policies will prove disastrous. — Randal O’Toole
David Boaz is the author of Libertarianism: A Primer and The Politics of Freedom.
The liberty club — In our study “The Libertarian Vote,” David Kirby and I estimated that about 15% of American voters hold libertarian views — not libertarian in the ideological sense held by many readers of Liberty, but views that are neither liberal nor conservative and that tilt in a broadly libertarian direction, skeptical of government involvement in both economic and personal matters. One of the questions we got in response was, ”Then why don’t libertarians have more influence?”
You can argue that libertarian voters do have a lot of influence. In the past generation or so, the United States has ended conscription and Jim Crow laws, slashed marginal tax rates, ended the tight regulation of the transportation and telecommunications industries, and revolutionized the roles of women, blacks, and gays.
Nevertheless, there have been plenty of policy changes in the other direction, the Libertarian Party remains infinitesimal, and libertarian voters are frustrated in every election by a choice between big-spending Democrats and religious-right, military-interventionist (and, ahem, big-spending) Republicans. So if 15% of voters would like something different, why can’t we organize them into an effective faction?
Here’s one hypothesis: One reason why libertarians underperform politically is that they are politically split, not just between radicals and incrementalists, as can happen in any political movement, but also among various political movements — while being too small to influence any of them very much.
It seems to me that libertarians come in several political groupings:
(1) Those who care primarily about free markets and thus support conservative Republicans. Given the candidates on offer, that means helping to move the GOP to the right on social issues (and war and civil liberties) as well as on economic issues. This group would include the Club for Growth, Republican “Leave Us Alone” activist Grover Norquist, many donors to free-market thinktanks, and probably most libertarian-leaning politically active people.
(2) Those who want to make the GOP more socially tolerant and thus support moderate Republicans, which effectively means Republicans who aren’t very free-market. This would include Log Cabin Republicans, pro-choice Republicans, and lots of Wall Street and Silicon Valley businesspeople.
(3) Those who think the GOP is irredeemably bad on social issues and civil liberties and thus support Democrats. This would again include some Silicon Valley businessmen who are pro-entrepreneurship and fiscally conservative but just can’t support a party that is opposed to abortion rights and gay rights. A dramatic example is Tim Gill, the founder of Quark, who calls himself a libertarian but has contributed millions of dollars to Democrats because of Republican opposition to gay rights. There are also broadly libertarian people involved in the ACLU, the drug-reform movement, and other civil libertarian causes.
(4) Those who support the Libertarian Party. They don’t get many votes, but they include a large percentage of libertarian activists.
It would be a better world if libertarians of the Cato-Reason-Liberty stripe were the intellectual vanguard of a broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, or “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” party or faction. But that’s not the case. I don’t have a real solution for this problem. We could hope for a libertarianish politician to emerge who could appeal to all these groups. But that’s very difficult, given the existing divides both between the parties and within the Republican Party. And it may also be that libertarians just don’t have the drive for power that characterizes major political leaders. I wrote back in 2006 that “three libertarian-leaning governors — the brilliant lawyer William Weld, the eccentric entertainer Jesse Ventura, and the true citizen-politician Gary Johnson” — all walked away from politics sooner than most politicians do.
Since then, of course, Ron Paul has emerged as the most successful libertarian politician around. He did have some crossover appeal, attracting young antiwar people as well as free-marketers and constitutionalists. But his support seemed more intense than widespread, and his seeming hostility to trade and immigration would limit his appeal to the broader libertarian constituency.
One possibility might be to create a nonpartisan libertarian advocacy group. Right now there are lots of libertarian (or at least free-market) thinktanks. But there’s no libertarian equivalent of MoveOn.org, the Family Research Council, or other such mass-membership organizations. In the February 2001 issue of Liberty, Randal O’Toole suggested converting the Libertarian Party into the Liberty Club, which like the Sierra Club could organize, inform, educate, agitate, and lobby on a wide range of issues without requiring its members to support particular candidates or parties. Maybe he had a point. — David Boaz
Jim Walsh is an assistant editor of Liberty.
The cure the same as the disease — I hate the fact that the media is calling the FannieMae/FreddieMac bailout a failure of free-market economics. Only a myopic bureaucrat would call Fannie and Freddie “free-market” anything. They were statist, pseudo-capitalist, and destined to fail precisely because they tried to regulate the mortgage markets. — Jim Walsh
Leland B. Yeager is Ludwig von Mises Distinguished Professor of Economics at Auburn University.
Going negative — Nowadays pundits urge candidates to stop negative advertising — casting aspersions on each others’ characters — and instead concentrate on “the issues.” This is a ridiculous expectation.
Realistically, candidates try to outdo one another with attractive promises. They pay little attention to the costs of keeping them, as in the costs represented by other public and personal goods that would necessarily be sacrificed, and in the long-run fiscal consequences. Promises are not analysis. Nowadays they cover the price of gasoline, personal and national economic conditions, taxes, disengagement from Iraq, supposed or genuine issues of energy and global warming, emotional distractions such as abortion and gay marriage, and unspecified “change.” Discussion of some issues necessarily crowds out discussion of others.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” But the current stage of any business cycle does not depend on what party controls the White House or Congress. Over the long run, true enough, the accretion of policies, adopted piecemeal and haphazardly, does improve or worsen prospects for prosperity and economic growth; but no single cohort of politicians deserves special credit or blame.
Candidates especially avoid talking substance on such tough issues as the long-run impossibility of servicing the avowed national debt and also keeping Social Security and Medicare commitments, without crushing tax increases. The likeliest eventual outcome is partial repudiation disguised by inflation. This fiscal recklessness traces to the short time horizons and personal irresponsibility of politicians, all of which Public Choice theory can explain and none of which politicians will examine.
A political campaign just is not a format for serious discussion of deep issues. Candidates do not have the time and money required, and probably not the factual and analytical understanding. The average voter would not pay attention anyway. A lesson lies in the failed 1948 reelection campaign of Sen. Joseph Ball, who reputedly went around Minnesota delivering gloomy lectures on political economy. The best to be hoped for is that ongoing research and discussion among academics and thoughtful journalists might eventually inform broad philosophies such as classical liberalism, left-liberalism, and conservatism. Voters might eventually come to make choices based on candidates’ broad economic and political philosophies.
Meanwhile, negative campaigning, even attacks on opponents’ personal characters, remains legitimate. Character matters more than conjectured stances on specific and often unexpected issues. To character and to human-interest vignettes, voters will pay attention, relatively. Clues to a candidate’s character appear in his or her personal as well as public behavior, truthfulness or prevarication, consistency or chameleonism, and current and past associates. Sound negative advertising must be honest, of course — neither misrepresenting the opponent’s behavior and statements nor citing them out of context. Dishonest advertising, quickly identified, is a black mark on the character of a candidate who uses it or tolerates its use by campaign assistants. — Leland B. Yeager
Eric D. Dixon is the editor for the Show-Me Institute, Missouri’s free-market thinktank.
Two cheers for Heller — The recent landmark Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller is cause for most libertarians to celebrate. Although the case sets a
relatively limited precedent, and D.C. officials are reticent about letting the decision actually take practical effect, the ruling itself sent a clear judicial message that the 2nd Amendment entails an individual right to possess firearms. I’ve particularly enjoyed watching the case progress, not the least because it heavily involved a couple of people I met more than a decade ago during my internship with the Cato Institute in Washington.
Some people, however, make it their mission to highlight the cloud that comes with every silver lining. Regarding Heller, I’ve seen the argument crop up a few places online that, far from being a (small) victory for freedom, the ruling is one more nail in the coffin of federalism. This has long been a contentious issue among libertarians of various stripes — whether or not the 14th amendment and the subsequent “incorporation doctrine” has, on net, advanced freedom.
I’ve always found it easy to sympathize with both sides of this argument. On one hand, when a city or state violates somebody’s fundamental rights, it’s gratifying to be able to appeal to a higher authority. On the other hand, there’s no reason we should trust a powerful central government to protect freedom from violation by lesser jurisdictions, more than we might expect it to violate those freedoms itself. And as a central authority becomes stronger, subordinate units are less likely to act as effective checks on abuses.
A reflection is hardly enough space to settle this issue definitively — and I don’t claim any special ability to sort out the complicated legal theory and counterfactuals involved. Those of you who save your back issues of Liberty would be well served in pulling out the issues from 1999 and 2000 that contain a back-and-forth set of essays about the 14th Amendment by Cato’s Gene Healy and Roger Pilon. Regardless of which side you take, Richard Nixon’s compliment to P.J. O’Rourke applies just as well to both these guys: “Whether you agree with him or not . . . he writes a helluva piece.”
As much as I love to imagine how history could have played out differently, given a slightly changed set of circumstances, the fact remains that the 14th amendment is now in effect — and it won’t be repealed any time soon. The federal government is actually exercising an overarching level of oversight. That being the case, I’ll celebrate individual instances in which genuine violations of liberty by state governments are scaled back by federal court decisions. If a few more people in D.C. get to protect themselves with firearms because of Heller, it’s a victory — no matter how much we might have preferred a long counterfactual string of alternative precedents.
Considered in the wider history of constitutional jurisprudence, this ruling reminds me of a single-panel “Bizarro” cartoon, by Dan Piraro, that I first encountered about 20 years ago in a collection of the strip. In it, we see a guy hiking away from the scene of his smoking, broken-down car. He suddenly finds, at the side of the road, a pair of roller skates that fit him. The caption: “Suddenly it was all very clear. Life would be a series of great disappointments followed by minor windfalls.”
So it goes. If the Anti-Federalists had prevailed 221 years ago (defending, ironically, the concept that we today call federalism), thereby avoiding the increasingly expansive readings of the Constitution we’ve seen ever since, people living within the United States may well have managed to secure more overall freedom than we actually have today. But they didn’t, and we’re long removed from that particular counterfactual. So, in my book, District of Columbia v. Heller definitely counts as a windfall. — Eric D. Dixon
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