David Boaz

Ross Perot, the billionaire entrepreneur who in 1992 became the most successful independent or third-party presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, has died at 89.

Many people say that Perot, running on an anti-deficit platform, cost President George H. W. Bush reelection. I don't think so. The most impressive political prediction I ever made was around June 1992, when I saw a poll that showed Bill Clinton running third behind Perot and Bush (it was probably the Gallup Poll shown here, with Perot 39, Bush 31, and Clinton 25). I told colleagues then, "This poll shows that Clinton will win, because third-party candidates always fade and the most important number in this poll is that only 31 percent of voters want to reelect the president." Clinton would have won a majority if voters hadn't had a third option.

Perot has some obvious similarities with President Trump -- a businessman with no political experience, who opposed free trade and the recent Gulf War, promised to go to Washington to “take out the trash and clean out the barn," had a predilection for conspiracy theories, and was enough of a celebrity to announce his candidacy on Larry King's popular CNN show. However, his big issue was the $4 trillion national debt -- those were the good old days! -- and the deficits being run up by both parties. And instead of insulting tweets and ranting speeches, Perot's stock in trade was 30-minute television ads full of charts and graphs, backed up by a 50-page economic plan promising cuts in domestic spending and tax hikes on high incomes and gasoline.

Perot was reported to have spent $65 million of his own money on his campaign (the Democratic and Republican candidates got $55 million each in taxpayer money in exchange for pledges by the candidates to limit direct campaign contributions, but they still managed to raise about $60 million each in "soft money"). In one sense, Perot's campaign was a perverse result of federal campaign finance regulations. The Federal Election Campaign Act severely restricted how much money one could contribute to a campaign -- unless you were the candidate. You could spend as much of your own money on your own campaign as you wanted. So the only way that Perot could spend $65 million (he tossed around suggestions of spending $100 million) was to run for president himself. But maybe the country would have been better off if he had been able to donate that money to, say, the well-respected Sen. Warren Rudman of Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act fame. Similarly, maybe it would have made more sense for Steve Forbes to donate $38 million to supply-side evangelist Rep. Jack Kemp in 1996 rather than to run himself. 

Ross Perot did have one positive impact on American politics. He made spending, deficits, and debt a real political issue, and that surely played a role -- along with the booming economy -- in bringing down deficits during the Clinton administration.

Perot also demonstrated that it's extremely difficult to run an even modestly successful presidential campaign outside the two major parties unless you are both a billionaire and a celebrity.

Ross Perot, the billionaire entrepreneur who in 1992 became the most successful independent or third-party presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, has died at 89.

Many people say that Perot, running on an anti-deficit platform, cost President George H. W. Bush reelection. I don’t think so. The most impressive political prediction I ever made was around June 1992, when I saw a poll that showed Bill Clinton running third behind Perot and Bush (it was probably the Gallup Poll shown here, with Perot 39, Bush 31, and Clinton 25). I told colleagues then, “This poll shows that Clinton will win, because third-party candidates always fade and the most important number in this poll is that only 31 percent of voters want to reelect the president.” Clinton would have won a majority if voters hadn’t had a third option.

Perot has some obvious similarities with President Trump – a businessman with no political experience, who opposed free trade and the recent Gulf War, promised to go to Washington to “take out the trash and clean out the barn,” had a predilection for conspiracy theories, and was enough of a celebrity to announce his candidacy on Larry King’s popular CNN show. However, his big issue was the $4 trillion national debt – those were the good old days! – and the deficits being run up by both parties. And instead of insulting tweets and ranting speeches, Perot’s stock in trade was 30-minute television ads full of charts and graphs, backed up by a 50-page economic plan promising cuts in domestic spending and tax hikes on high incomes and gasoline.

Perot was reported to have spent $65 million of his own money on his campaign (the Democratic and Republican candidates got $55 million each in taxpayer money in exchange for pledges by the candidates to limit direct campaign contributions, but they still managed to raise about $60 million each in “soft money”). In one sense, Perot’s campaign was a perverse result of federal campaign finance regulations. The Federal Election Campaign Act severely restricted how much money one could contribute to a campaign – unless you were the candidate. You could spend as much of your own money on your own campaign as you wanted. So the only way that Perot could spend $65 million (he tossed around suggestions of spending $100 million) was to run for president himself. But maybe the country would have been better off if he had been able to donate that money to, say, the well-respected Sen. Warren Rudman of Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act fame. Similarly, maybe it would have made more sense for Steve Forbes to donate $38 million to supply-side evangelist Rep. Jack Kemp in 1996 rather than to run himself. 

Ross Perot did have one positive impact on American politics. He made spending, deficits, and debt a real political issue, and that surely played a role – along with the booming economy – in bringing down deficits during the Clinton administration.

Perot also demonstrated that it’s extremely difficult to run an even modestly successful presidential campaign outside the two major parties unless you are both a billionaire and a celebrity.

It is advised to speak no ill of the dead. So I don't. I just add a bit of context to the headlines calling Lee Iacocca "the man who saved Chrysler." With a hat tip to David Henderson, who dug up Cato Policy Analysis no. 4, from 1980, which David wrote. The title was “A Step Toward Feudalism: The Chrysler Bailout,” and here's some of what he wrote:

Since the summer of 1979, Chrysler executives have sought a federal subsidy to save their company from possible bankruptcy, and they appear to be near their goal. (Because the subsidy Congress passed December 21, 1979, will be given only if Chrysler receives private financing and reduces employees’ wages, whether the company will get the subsidy is uncertain at this writing.) They have talked throughout their negotiations with the government as if a bankruptcy would necessarily cause them to shut down, but if Chrysler went bankrupt it would agree with its creditors on a future repayment scheme and could survive and even thrive. The company’s survival would depend on whether projected revenues exceeded or fell short of projected costs. However, Chrysler executives have talked as if the company would necessarily fail, and therefore I will take them at their word and assume that it will indeed go out of business if the government does not subsidize it.

Should the U.S. government let Chrysler fail? Let’s reword the question: Should the government force taxpayers to subsidize a company whose products do not meet the market test? The answer becomes clear: No. Why should taxpayers have to pay to keep a firm in business? As consumers and producers, they have shown that they do not want to keep it going. Consumers are not willing to pay enough for Chrysler’s products to cover the company’s costs; producers — including suppliers to Chrysler and Chrysler employees — are not willing to sell their goods and services at a cost below Chrysler’s projected revenues. Consumers and producers have spoken, and that should be the end of it.

Chrysler executives reply that if the company fails their workers will be unemployed and their suppliers will lose business and lay people off. But surely this unemployment of resources cannot last long: if this were a likely prospect, Chrysler would not be in its present bind. Precisely because the resources have higher-valued alternate uses, Chrysler cannot afford to pay them out of projected revenues. Other potential users of the resources are willing to pay more than Chrysler can. The cost of a resource is its value in the highest-valued alternate use, and therefore to say that Chrysler’s costs exceed its revenues is to say that Chrysler resources are worth more elsewhere.

Henderson pondered the political economy implications of the bailout:

If Chrysler receives the subsidy, its executives will soon learn that the man who pays the piper calls the tune. They will find that some of their business decisions require the approval of a federal official. Then, if they do not object (and how can they?), they will find more decisions subject to government approval. There will even be a push to have the federal government receive shares in Chrysler in return for the subsidy. John Kenneth Galbraith has started this offensive already. He asks in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (August 13, 1979) “. . . if as taxpayers we are to invest one billion dollars in Chrysler, could we not be accorded an appropriate equity or ownership position? This is thought a reasonable claim by people who are putting up capital.”

And that’s not all. The executives will find themselves on much weaker ground fighting off increases in government power that hurt them. They cannot use moral arguments (no one would take them seriously) or arguments of any other kind against big government. John Kenneth Galbraith makes this point in the same letter: “Could we not,” he says, “ask that all corporations and corporate executives that approve or acquiesce by their silence in this expansive new public activity, refrain most scrupulously from any more of this criticism of big government.” If Chrysler receives the subsidy, one more barrier to the growth of government will have crumbled.  

Read the whole thing.

Special bonus: In 1979 I worked for a group of free-market business leaders, the Council for a Competitive Economy. The New York Times reported on our campaign against the Chrysler bailout.

It is advised to speak no ill of the dead. So I don't. I just add a bit of context to the headlines calling Lee Iacocca "the man who saved Chrysler." With a hat tip to David Henderson, who dug up Cato Policy Analysis no. 4, from 1980, which David wrote. The title was “A Step Toward Feudalism: The Chrysler Bailout,” and here's some of what he wrote:

Since the summer of 1979, Chrysler executives have sought a federal subsidy to save their company from possible bankruptcy, and they appear to be near their goal. (Because the subsidy Congress passed December 21, 1979, will be given only if Chrysler receives private financing and reduces employees’ wages, whether the company will get the subsidy is uncertain at this writing.) They have talked throughout their negotiations with the government as if a bankruptcy would necessarily cause them to shut down, but if Chrysler went bankrupt it would agree with its creditors on a future repayment scheme and could survive and even thrive. The company’s survival would depend on whether projected revenues exceeded or fell short of projected costs. However, Chrysler executives have talked as if the company would necessarily fail, and therefore I will take them at their word and assume that it will indeed go out of business if the government does not subsidize it.

Should the U.S. government let Chrysler fail? Let’s reword the question: Should the government force taxpayers to subsidize a company whose products do not meet the market test? The answer becomes clear: No. Why should taxpayers have to pay to keep a firm in business? As consumers and producers, they have shown that they do not want to keep it going. Consumers are not willing to pay enough for Chrysler’s products to cover the company’s costs; producers — including suppliers to Chrysler and Chrysler employees — are not willing to sell their goods and services at a cost below Chrysler’s projected revenues. Consumers and producers have spoken, and that should be the end of it.

Chrysler executives reply that if the company fails their workers will be unemployed and their suppliers will lose business and lay people off. But surely this unemployment of resources cannot last long: if this were a likely prospect, Chrysler would not be in its present bind. Precisely because the resources have higher-valued alternate uses, Chrysler cannot afford to pay them out of projected revenues. Other potential users of the resources are willing to pay more than Chrysler can. The cost of a resource is its value in the highest-valued alternate use, and therefore to say that Chrysler’s costs exceed its revenues is to say that Chrysler resources are worth more elsewhere.

Henderson pondered the political economy implications of the bailout:

If Chrysler receives the subsidy, its executives will soon learn that the man who pays the piper calls the tune. They will find that some of their business decisions require the approval of a federal official. Then, if they do not object (and how can they?), they will find more decisions subject to government approval. There will even be a push to have the federal government receive shares in Chrysler in return for the subsidy. John Kenneth Galbraith has started this offensive already. He asks in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (August 13, 1979) “. . . if as taxpayers we are to invest one billion dollars in Chrysler, could we not be accorded an appropriate equity or ownership position? This is thought a reasonable claim by people who are putting up capital.”

And that’s not all. The executives will find themselves on much weaker ground fighting off increases in government power that hurt them. They cannot use moral arguments (no one would take them seriously) or arguments of any other kind against big government. John Kenneth Galbraith makes this point in the same letter: “Could we not,” he says, “ask that all corporations and corporate executives that approve or acquiesce by their silence in this expansive new public activity, refrain most scrupulously from any more of this criticism of big government.” If Chrysler receives the subsidy, one more barrier to the growth of government will have crumbled.  

Read the whole thing.

Special bonus: In 1979 I worked for a group of free-market business leaders, the Council for a Competitive Economy. The New York Times reported on our campaign against the Chrysler bailout.

The headlines say that Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, have been awarded the 2026 Winter Olympics. Ten years from now Italians may look back on today as a disaster. 

More and more cities are realizing that Olympic games are glamorous but not economically sound. I made that point four years ago when Boston withdrew its bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics:

The [Boston] critics knew something that the Olympic enthusiasts tried to forget: Megaprojects like the Olympics are enormously expensive, always over budget, and disruptive. They leave cities with unused stadiums and other waste.

E.M. Swift, who covered the Olympics for Sports Illustrated for more than 30 years, wrote on the Cognoscenti blog a few years ago that Olympic budgets “always soar.”

“Montreal is the poster child for cost overruns, running a whopping 796 percent over budget in 1976, accumulating a deficit that took 30 years to repay. In 1996 the Atlanta Games came in 147 percent over budget. Sydney was 90 percent over its projected budget in 2000. And the 
Athens Games cost $12.8 billion, 60 percent over what the government projected.”

Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, the world’s leading expert on megaprojects, and his co-author Allison Stewart found that Olympic Games differ from other such large projects in two ways: They always exceed their budgets, and the cost overruns are significantly larger than other megaprojects. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost overrun for an Olympics is 179 percent.

After the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, sports columnist Nancy Armour wrote in USA Today, “The legacy of the Rio Olympics is a farce.” She continued:

The closing ceremony was six months ago Tuesday, and already several of the venues are abandoned and falling apart. The Olympic Park is a ghost town, the lights have been turned off at the Maracana and the athlete village sits empty…. the billions that were wasted, the venues that so quickly became white elephants, the crippling bills for a city and country already struggling to make ends meet…

Columnist Anne Applebaum predicted in 2014 that future Olympics would likely be held only in “authoritarian countries where the voters’ views will not be taken into account” — such as the two bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her prediction seemed to be borne out a year later when the people of Boston revolted against the city's establishment -- business leaders, construction companies, university presidents, the mayor, etc. -- and forced the city to withdraw its bid for the 2024 summer games. Since then, however, Applebaum's faith in democracy seems to have been too high, as upcoming games will be held in Tokyo, Paris, Milan, and Los Angeles (along with China).

In Cato Policy Report, Flyvbjerg examined “the ‘iron law of megaprojects’: over budget, over time, over and over again.” The Olympics are glamorous, and nobody does glamour better than Milan, but they're not the road to prosperity. 

The headlines say that Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, have been awarded the 2026 Winter Olympics. Ten years from now Italians may look back on today as a disaster. 

More and more cities are realizing that Olympic games are glamorous but not economically sound. I made that point four years ago when Boston withdrew its bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics:

The [Boston] critics knew something that the Olympic enthusiasts tried to forget: Megaprojects like the Olympics are enormously expensive, always over budget, and disruptive. They leave cities with unused stadiums and other waste.

E.M. Swift, who covered the Olympics for Sports Illustrated for more than 30 years, wrote on the Cognoscenti blog a few years ago that Olympic budgets “always soar.”

“Montreal is the poster child for cost overruns, running a whopping 796 percent over budget in 1976, accumulating a deficit that took 30 years to repay. In 1996 the Atlanta Games came in 147 percent over budget. Sydney was 90 percent over its projected budget in 2000. And the 
Athens Games cost $12.8 billion, 60 percent over what the government projected.”

Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, the world’s leading expert on megaprojects, and his co-author Allison Stewart found that Olympic Games differ from other such large projects in two ways: They always exceed their budgets, and the cost overruns are significantly larger than other megaprojects. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost overrun for an Olympics is 179 percent.

After the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, sports columnist Nancy Armour wrote in USA Today, “The legacy of the Rio Olympics is a farce.” She continued:

The closing ceremony was six months ago Tuesday, and already several of the venues are abandoned and falling apart. The Olympic Park is a ghost town, the lights have been turned off at the Maracana and the athlete village sits empty…. the billions that were wasted, the venues that so quickly became white elephants, the crippling bills for a city and country already struggling to make ends meet…

Columnist Anne Applebaum predicted in 2014 that future Olympics would likely be held only in “authoritarian countries where the voters’ views will not be taken into account” — such as the two bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her prediction seemed to be borne out a year later when the people of Boston revolted against the city's establishment -- business leaders, construction companies, university presidents, the mayor, etc. -- and forced the city to withdraw its bid for the 2024 summer games. Since then, however, Applebaum's faith in democracy seems to have been too high, as upcoming games will be held in Tokyo, Paris, Milan, and Los Angeles (along with China).

In Cato Policy Report, Flyvbjerg examined “the ‘iron law of megaprojects’: over budget, over time, over and over again.” The Olympics are glamorous, and nobody does glamour better than Milan, but they're not the road to prosperity. 

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) is the most libertarian member of Congress. His view of his role in Congress is deeply rooted in his commitment to the Constitution. Amash told the New York Times in 2011, “I follow a set of principles, I follow the Constitution. And that’s what I base my votes on. Limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty.”

Amash has a remarkable knack for drawing opponents who are ignorant or dismissive of the Constitution. His 2014 primary opponent, Brian Ellis, strikingly dismissed Amash’s principled, constitutional stand: “He’s got his explanations for why he’s voted, but I don’t really care. I’m a businessman, I look at the bottom line. If something is unconstitutional, we have a court system that looks at that.” 

Most members of Congress vote for unconstitutional bills. Few of them make it an explicit campaign promise.

And now, just today, one of his pro-Trump challengers in next year's primary, Tom Norton, "passed out press releases calling on the House to expel Amash for allegedly failing to represent constituents in a district that backed Trump."

Needless to say, Congress does not and would not expel a member for such a reason. Not that it matters, in 2016 Amash carried his district by 22 points while Trump had a 9-point margin.

Meanwhile, here's an article on Amash's differences with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on what libertarians should think about the behavior described in the Mueller Report.