David Boaz

At TIME I write about the rise of libertarianism, Rand Paul, and my forthcoming book (Tuesday!) The Libertarian Mind:

Tens of millions of Americans are fiscally conservative, socially tolerant, and skeptical of American military intervention….

Whether or not Rand Paul wins the presidency, one result of his campaign will be to help those tens of millions of libertarian-leaning Americans to discover that their political attitudes have a name, which will make for a stronger and more influential political faction.

In my book The Libertarian Mind I argue that the simple, timeless principles of the American Revolution—individual liberty, limited government, and free markets—are even more important in this world of instant communication, global markets, and unprecedented access to information than Jefferson or Madison could have imagined. Libertarianism is the framework for a future of freedom, growth, and progress, and it may be on the verge of a political breakout.

Read the whole thing. Buy the book.

Rand Paul’s leadership in the Senate — on the budget, regulation, privacy, criminal justice, and foreign policy — and his likely presidential campaign are generating new attention for libertarian ideas.

The growth of the libertarian movement is a product of two factors: the spread of libertarian ideas and sentiments, and the expansion of government during the Bush and Obama administrations, particularly the civil liberties abuses after 9/11 and the bailouts and out-of-control spending after the financial crisis. As one journalist noted in 2009, “The Obama administration brought with it ambitions of a resurgence of FDR and LBJ’s active-state liberalism. And with it, Obama has revived the enduring American challenge to the state.”

That libertarian revival manifested itself in several ways. Sales of books like Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom soared. “Tea party” rallies against taxes, debt, bailouts, and Obamacare drew a million or more people to hundreds of protests. “Crony capitalism” became a target for people across the political spectrum. Marijuana legalization and marriage equality made rapid progress. More people than ever told Gallup in 2013 that the federal government has too much power.

“Libertarianism is the framework for a future of freedom, growth, and progress, and it may be on the verge of a political breakout.”

In studies that David Kirby and I have published at the Cato Institute on “the libertarian vote,” we have found that only 2 to 4 percent of Americans say that they’re libertarian when asked. But 15 to 20 percent — 30 to 40 million Americans — hold libertarian views on a range of questions. The latest Gallup Governance Survey finds 24 percent of respondents falling into the libertarian quadrant, matching the number of conservatives and liberals and up from 17 percent in 2004 and 23 percent in 2008. And when asked in a Zogby poll if they would define themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian,” fully 44 percent of respondents — 100 million Americans — accept the label. Those voters are not locked into either party, and politicians trying to attract the elusive “swing vote” should take a look at those who lean libertarian.

In two presidential campaigns, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) attracted hundreds of thousands of followers to his combination of antiwar, anti-spending, and sound-money (“End the Fed”) ideas, and showed them that these views were “libertarian.” Two national student organizations Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty now take libertarian ideas to thousands of college campuses in the United States and well beyond.

Now his son, Rand Paul (R-KY), is generating headlines about the GOP’s libertarian wing and questions about libertarian ideas.

In the past week alone Paul has joined Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to introduce legislation designed to limit the use of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, introduced along with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) a bill to encourage companies to “repatriate” overseas cash, proposed to audit the Federal Reserve, and found himself in the crosshairs when he questioned the need for compulsory vaccination laws.

Libertarianism, a belief in what Adam Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” is the core philosophy of America. The first colonists fled aristocratic Europe to find religious liberty, individualism, and economic opportunity. They declared their belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American history has been a struggle between liberty and power, between those who wanted to defend and extend the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution and those who wanted to make the United States more like the countries our ancestors left, with powerful and paternalistic government. Throughout our history, libertarian sentiments have been rekindled when the federal government has grown beyond what Americans will tolerate—such as the past few years.

Today, libertarians support policies based on these same principles — lower taxes, less regulation, protection of civil liberties, personal freedom, and a foreign policy based on a strong national defense and avoidance of foreign wars. In recent years libertarians have led the way in supporting marijuana legalization, gay marriage, gun rights, school choice, and restrictions on NSA surveillance of Americans, and in opposing policies ranging from Obamacare and Wall Street bailouts to the Iraq war.

Whether or not Rand Paul wins the presidency, one result of his campaign will be to help those tens of millions of libertarian-leaning Americans to discover that their political attitudes have a name, which will make for a stronger and more influential political faction.

In my book The Libertarian Mind I argue that the simple, timeless principles of the American Revolution—individual liberty, limited government, and free markets—are even more important in this world of instant communication, global markets, and unprecedented access to information than Jefferson or Madison could have imagined. Libertarianism is the framework for a future of freedom, growth, and progress, and it may be on the verge of a political breakout.

I’ve been talking a lot about the parasite economy this week – like in my forthcoming book The Libertarian Mind and on STOSSEL this Friday night – and two stories in the Washington Post today illustrate the problem.

John Wagner reports that campaign contributions are now flowing to surprise Maryland gubernatorial winner Larry Hogan. Why would campaign contributions come in after the campaign is over?

“A lot of people speculatively invested in the Brown campaign and now realize they made the wrong choice,” said Jennifer Bevan-Dangel, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, a group that closely monitors campaign contributions. “Donors give because it gets them in the door, regardless of who’s in power.”

The reports show that Hogan raised nearly $1.4 million in the two months after the election — roughly the amount that Martin O’Malley (D) raised after he was elected governor in 2006.

When a state government hands out some $40 billion a year, lots of people want to get friendly with the people who will influence how that money is spent. Through regulations, the government influences billions more, and lobbyists don’t want to be left out of those discussions either.

Money flowed to Hogan from utilities, banks and health-care companies that are regulated by the state and from associations that represent businesses in Annapolis. Groups representing chiropractors, nurse practitioners, nursing homes and psychologists have all given since the election….

Other donors include more than a dozen of the highest-paid lobbyists in Annapolis. 

Also in today’s Post, Mike DeBonis reports that council candidates backed by newly elected D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser are raking in cash for their upcoming special elections. People want a friend in city hall, too.

Why indeed do “chiropractors, nurse practitioners, nursing homes and psychologists” need lobbies, much less give campaign contributions? Because they want a piece of vast government expenditures on health care, they want regulatory protection from competition, or they want something else that government can deliver. 

I make no criticism here of Governor Hogan or Mayor Bowser. I have no reason to think that either of them has done anything inappropriate for a campaign contributor. This is a systemic problem.

It’s just part of the parasite economy, where you use the law to get something you couldn’t get voluntarily in the marketplace.

Interest in the bestselling novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand continues to grow, 33 years after her death and 70 years after she first hit the bestseller lists with The Fountainhead. Rand was born February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In the dark year of 1943, in the depths of World War II and the Holocaust, when the United States was allied with one totalitarian power to defeat another, three remarkable women published books that could be said to have given birth to the modern libertarian movement. Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had written Little House on the Prairie and other stories of American rugged individualism, published a passionate historical essay called The Discovery of Freedom. Isabel Paterson, a novelist and literary critic, produced The God of the Machine, which defended individualism as the source of progress in the world.

The other great book of 1943 was The Fountainhead, a powerful novel about architecture and integrity by Ayn Rand. The book’s individualist theme did not fit the spirit of the age, and reviewers savaged it. But it found its intended readers. Its sales started slowly, then built and built. It was still on the New York Times bestseller list two full years later. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the 1940s, millions eventually, some of them because of the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and many of them were inspired enough to seek more information about Ayn Rand’s ideas. Rand went on to write an even more successful novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957, and to found an association of people who shared her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. Although her political philosophy was libertarian, not all libertarians shared her views on metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Others were put off by the starkness of her presentation and by her cult following.

“College students, professors, businessmen, Paul Ryan, the rock group Rush, and Hollywood stars have all proclaimed themselves fans of Ayn Rand.”

Like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Rand demonstrates the importance of immigration not just to America but to American libertarianism. Mises had fled his native Austria right before the Nazis confiscated his library, Rand fled the Communists who came to power in her native Russia. When a heckler asked her at a public speech, “Why should we care what a foreigner thinks?”, she replied with her usual fire, “I chose to be an American. What did you ever do, except for having been born?”

George Gilder called Atlas Shrugged “the most important novel of ideas since War and Peace.” Writing in the Washington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: “Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed.”

Rand’s books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalism’s greatest defenders seemed to emphasize its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just aren’t good enough for socialism. It was Ayn Rand who said that socialism is not good enough for human beings.

Her books garnered millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of vivid, can’t-put-it-down novels. The people who read Ayn Rand and got the point didn’t just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty.

Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of irrationality and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of “do your own thing” and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the “Me Decade” but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship.

Throughout those decades her books continued to sell — 30 million copies over the years, and they still move off the shelves. The financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts gave Atlas Shrugged a huge push. A Facebook group titled “Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life” was formed. More than 50 years after publication, the book had its best sales year ever. And sales have remained high — more than a million copies of Rand’s books were sold in 2012.

College students, professors, businessmen, Paul Ryan, the rock group Rush, and Hollywood stars have all proclaimed themselves fans of Ayn Rand. Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged appear on Barnes and Noble’s list of the top 50 classic bestsellers. In a survey of Book of the Month Club readers for the Library of Congress, Atlas Shrugged actually came in second to the Bible as “the most influential book for Americans today.”

Recently Rand has been the subject of major books, such as Anne Heller’s biography and Jennifer Burns’s study of her ideas, both in 2009, and profiles in USA Today, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and C-SPAN’s “American Writers” series. We’ve seen a Showtime movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, starring Helen Mirren; a documentary, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1997; and a three-part film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. She even appeared on a first-class stamp as part of the Postal Service’s Literary Arts series. A quotation from Rand greets visitors to the American pavilion at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center.

It’s hard to think of a writer more popular — and more controversial — than Ayn Rand. Despite the enormous commercial success of her books, and the major influence she’s had on American culture, reviewers and other intellectuals have generally been hostile. They’ve dismissed her support for individualism and capitalism, ridiculed her “purple prose,” and mocked her black-and-white morality. None of which seems to have dissuaded her millions of readers.

Although she did not like to acknowledge debts to other thinkers, Rand’s work rests squarely within the libertarian tradition, with roots going back to Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Paine, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, and Mises. She infused her novels with the ideas of individualism, liberty, and limited government in ways that often changed the lives of her readers. The cultural values she championed — reason, science, individualism, achievement, and happiness — are spreading across the world.

Ayn Rand, the Russian refugee who became America’s bestselling novelist of ideas, was born 110 years ago today in St. Petersburg. I reflect on her life and impact at Townhall.com:

George Gilder called Atlas Shrugged “the most important novel of ideas since War and Peace.” Writing in the Washington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: “Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed.”

Rand’s books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalism’s greatest defenders seemed to emphasize its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just aren’t good enough for socialism. It was Ayn Rand who said that socialism is not good enough for human beings….

The financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts gave Atlas Shrugged a huge push. A Facebook group titled “Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life” was formed. More than 50 years after publication, the book had its best sales year ever. And sales have remained high – more than a million copies of Rand’s books were sold in 2012.

Whole thing here.

Find my exchange on Objectivism and libertarianism here. Watch two biographers of Ayn Rand talk about her at a Cato forum here. Scholars debate Rand’s moral and political thought at Cato Unbound.

President Obama is proposing to blow through the limits on the federal budget established in the 2011 Budget Control Act, known as sequestration. After years of soaring federal spending, that law actually led to modest spending decreases in 2012 and 2013. But now Obama wants to raise federal spending by $75 billion next year, in addition to the “automatic” rise of about $220 billion in entitlement spending, which his budget does nothing to slow.

Once again journalists are warning of “congressional dysfunction,” recalling the years without a budget, the debt ceiling fights, 11th-hour deals, and lame-duck showdowns that have characterized the past few years of budget politics.

“Republicans and Democrats alike should be able to find wasteful, extravagant, and unnecessary programs to cut back or eliminate.”

Back in the summer of our discontent, 2011, when the airwaves were full of warnings about default, I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that gets the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt sailing past $18 trillion and 100 percent of GDP.

We’ve become so used to these unfathomable levels of deficits and debt — and to the once-rare concept of trillions of dollars — that we forget how new all this debt is. In 1981, after 190 years of federal spending, the national debt was “only” $1 trillion. Now, just 34 years later, it’s more than $18 trillion. Traditionally, the national debt as a percentage of GDP rose during major wars and the Great Depression. But there’s been no major war or depression in the past 34 years; we’ve just run up $17 trillion more in spending than the country was willing to pay for. That’s why our debt as a percentage of GDP is now higher than at any point except World War II. Here’s a graphic representation of the real dysfunction in Washington:

(Hat tip to the Washington Post for the original graphic and to Jonathan Babington for updating it.)

Those are the kind of numbers that caused the tea party movement and the Republican victories of 2010. And many tea partiers continue to remind their representatives that they were sent to Washington to fix this problem.

And where did all this debt come from? As the tea partiers – and all members of Congress — know, it came from the rapid increase in federal spending over the past decade.

Annual federal spending rose by a trillion dollars when Republicans controlled the government from 2001 to 2007. It rose another trillion during the Bush-Obama response to the financial crisis. So spending every year is now twice what it was when George W. Bush entered the White House 14 years ago, and the national debt is more than three times as high.

Republicans and Democrats alike should be able to find wasteful, extravagant, and unnecessary programs to cut back or eliminate. And yet many voters know that both parties have been responsible for the increased spending. Most Republicans, including many of today’s House leaders, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, the Iraq war, the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, and the TARP bailout during the Bush years.

That’s why fiscal conservatives have become very skeptical of promises to cut spending some day — not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next ten years. As the White Queen said to Alice, “Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years—but never cuts today.

Federal spending has doubled in the Bush-Obama years. From entitlements to corporate welfare to radically higher military spending to unused NASA towers, surely every member of Congress can find some spending to cut. Fiscally responsible members of both parties should hold firm on the budget caps agreed to in 2011, and then look for opportunities to cut spending. As this incredibly slow recovery staggers on, the economy doesn’t need another $75 billion of deficit spending.

The dysfunction in our governance is not a potential showdown on Capitol Hill, it’s spending, deficits, and debt.