David Boaz

In a Washington Post obituary for billionaire John Kluge, Terence McArdle explains how he made his fortune by creating Metromedia, the nation’s largest chain of independent television stations:

Metromedia stations relied on a mix of local programs, old movies and syndicated reruns that often ran counter to what the big three network affiliates had in the same time slot.

Kluge’s key insight was:

Mr. Kluge believed that if the networks had an 80 percent share in a major market, 20 percent of the market wanted to watch something else.

And that’s a key difference between the market and government, one that’s so obvious we may fail to notice it. Kluge figured he could make money by offering a product that only 20 percent of consumers wanted. Many television networks these days make money by attracting 1 percent or less of the market. But in the political world, it’s usually one-size-fits-all. Politicians decide, and then that’s what we all get — phonics in the schools or not, prayer or not, instead of a market of schools from which parents could choose. Health insurance with 99 mandated coverages whether you want them or not.

I made a similar point in Libertarianism: A Primer (p. 189), on politics as a package deal:

Sesame Street recently gave us an example of what that means.  In an election special, the Muppets and their human friends have $3 to spend, and they learn about voting by deciding whether to buy crayons or juice.

“Rosita:  You count the people who want crayons.  Then you count the people who want juice.  If more people want juice, it’s juice for everyone.  If more people want crayons, it’s crayons.

“Telly:  Sounds crazy but it might just work!”

But why not let each child buy what he wants?  Who needs democracy for such decisions?  There may be some public goods, but surely juice and crayons don’t count.  In the real world, one candidate offers higher taxes, legalized abortion, and getting out of the War in Vietnam, another promises a balanced budget, school prayer, and escalation of the war.  What if you want a balanced budget and withdrawal from Vietnam?  In the marketplace you get lots of choices; politics forces you to choose among only a few.

Many issues of the late, great libertarian magazine Libertarian Review are now available online. The magazine was published from 1972 to 1981, first as a newsletter of book reviews and then as a glossy monthly magazine edited by Roy A. Childs, Jr. It made quite a splash during those years, and Childs became one of the most visible and controversial libertarian intellectuals. After the magazine folded, as so many intellectual magazines do, he spent almost a decade as editorial director and chief book reviewer for Laissez Faire Books. He had read everything, and he knew everyone in the libertarian movement. He got lots of prominent people — including Murray Rothbard, John Hospers, Thomas Szasz, Roger Lea MacBride, and Charles Koch — to write for the magazine. And he discovered and nurtured plenty of younger writers.

Libertarian Review featured

• news coverage and analysis of inflation, the energy crisis, economic reform in China, the 1979 Libertarian Party convention and the subsequent Clark for President campaign, the Proposition 13 tax-slashing victory, the rise of the religious right, the emergence of Solidarity, Jerry Brown, Three Mile Island, and the return of draft registration.
• classic essays like Jeff Riggenbach on “The Politics of Aquarius” and “In Praise of Decadence,” Joan Kennedy Taylor on Betty Friedan, Rothbard on “Carter’s Energy Fascism.”
• interviews with F. A. Hayek, Howard Jarvis, Paul Gann, Henry Hazlitt, John Holt, and Robert Nozick.
• and especially Roy Childs: on William Simon’s A Time for Truth, on Irving Kristol, on the rise of Reagan, on drugs and crime, on the hot spots of Iran, Afghanistan, and El Salvador.

As Tom G. Palmer put it in a letter published in The New Republic of August 3, 1992, just after Roy died, “Roy Childs was one of the finer members of a generation of radical thinkers who worked successfully to revive the tradition of classical liberalism — or libertarianism — after its long dormancy, and who dared to launch a frontal challenge to the twentieth-century welfare state. An autodidact who knew more about the subjects on which he wrote than most so-called ‘experts’, his writings exercised a powerful influence on a generation of young classical liberal thinkers.”

Check it out.

“Now on Democrats’ agenda: Budget cuts,” proclaims a front-page headline in Saturday’s Washington Post. The online headline reads, “Democrats add fiscal austerity as a campaign issue.”

Good news, huh? Let’s check it out:

The candidate was outraged — just outraged — at the country’s sorry fiscal state.

“We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet,” he fumed to a roomful of voters. “In my view, we have nothing to show for it.”

And that was a Democrat, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who voted “yes” on the stimulus, the health-care overhaul, increased education funding and other costly bills Congress approved under his party’s control.

Meanwhile,

Paul Hodes, the Democratic Senate candidate in New Hampshire, recently proposed $3 billion in spending cuts that would slice airport, railroad and housing funds. Elected to the House four years ago as an anti-war progressive, Hodes lamented that “for too long, both parties have willfully spent with no regard for our nation’s debt.”

So Senator Bennet is outraged at the national debt — for which we have “nothing to show” — but he has voted, apparently, for every one of the spending bills in his time in the Senate that have created today’s $13 trillion debt. The National Taxpayers Union says his overall voting record on spending bills rates an F.

And Representative Hodes is calling for a $3 billion spending cut. Sounds big, eh? Front-page news indeed. But of course, it’s less than 0.1 percent of the 2011 federal budget — and that’s assuming that all these cuts would come out of this year’s budget. Hodes’s press release doesn’t make that clear; they might be cuts over 5 years or so. And his very next press release said he was fighting for federal funds for local New Hampshire services.

Both Republicans and Democrats want voters to think that they’re getting tough on spending, deficits, and debts. But their statements are at wide variance with their actual records and actions. We didn’t pile up $13 trillion in debt while no one was looking; members of Congress, of both parties, voted for these bills. Voters need to watch what they do, not what they say.

My colleague Chris Edwards, quoted by reporter Shailagh Murray, is a little more polite:

“The problem from a fiscal conservative voter’s point of view is that every member or wannabe member claims to be a fiscal conservative these days, so it’s more difficult than usual to separate the wheat from the chaff,” said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank.

“Three top Republican House members have written a book that repeatedly criticizes former GOP leaders as well as President Obama,” reports the Washington Post. “In ‘Young Guns,’ scheduled for release Sept. 14, Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) cast the Republican congressional leaders who preceded them as a group that “betrayed its principles” and was plagued by ‘failures from high-profile ethics lapses to the inability to rein in spending or even slow the growth of government.'”

Good point! And one we’ve made several times at Cato.

But how credible are the messengers? Once you ruin a brand, it can take a long time to restore it. And part of the solution is owning up to your own errors, not just pointing the fingers.

In this case, I’m sorry to discover that Reps. Cantor and Ryan both voted for the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, expanding federal control over education. They both voted for the costly Iraq war in 2002. They both voted for the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act in 2003, which was projected to add more than $700 billion to Medicare costs over the following decade. They both voted for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which included the $700 billion TARP bailout. (Rep. McCarthy, who joined the House in 2007, voted against TARP.)

To be fair, all three of the authors get A’s and B’s in the annual ratings of Congress by the National Taxpayers Union, which means they have better records on spending than most of their colleagues. But I’ll be curious to see if the book admits that any of the near-trillion-dollar votes discussed above were mistakes — not just by the departed Bush, Hastert, and DeLay but by many Republican members of Congress.

I once went to another Washington think tank to hear an advertised lecture by David Friedman, “author and professor of law and economics at Santa Clara University.” The great libertarian author of The Machinery of Freedom, speaking at a liberal-establishment Washington think tank? Cool. So I showed up early, took a seat by the wall, and was crushingly disappointed to discover that the speaker was in fact some other David Friedman, who was decidedly no libertarian, and I was pinned in and couldn’t leave. They told me later that an intern got the wrong bio off the web. Always blame the intern.

So anyway, I just wanted Cato-at-Liberty readers to notice that our new paper “Reforming Indigent Defense: How Free Market Principles Can Help to Fix a Broken System,” which Tim Lynch wrote about here, is in fact co-written by “the real David Friedman,” the son of Milton Friedman, the professor of law and economics with a Ph.D. in physics, the author of the early libertarian classic The Machinery of Freedom as well as such other books as Hidden Order, Law’s Order, and Future Imperfect — yes, that David Friedman.

So even if you didn’t think you were interested in the topic of voucherizing legal aid for indigent defendants, just consider that David Friedman is always interesting.

The Washington Post, December 21, 2005:

The four Republican rebels — Larry E. Craig (Idaho), Chuck Hagel (Neb.), John E. Sununu (N.H.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — have joined all but two Senate Democrats in arguing that more civil liberties safeguards need to be added to the proposed renewal of the Patriot Act.

Let’s hope that some of the prospective new senators who consider themselves constitutionalists will raise their voices on issues like this.

A front-page New York Times headline reads:

Struggling Cities Shut Firehouses in Budget Crisis

Because certainly American cities spend their money on nothing that is less important than fire protection.

More on the Washington Monument Syndrome here.

“Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said Tuesday that he will hold a hearing this fall to examine whether regulators are being tough enough in curbing pay practices at Wall Street firms that can lead to excessively risky practices,” writes Zachary Goldfarb in the Washington Post.

Hmmm. “Pay practices that can lead to excessively risky practices.” Since Barney Frank entered Congress, federal spending has risen from $590 billion in 1980 to $3.7 trillion this year. (U.S. Budget, Historical Tables, Table 1.1) The annual deficit has risen from $74 billion to $1.5 trillion.  Gross federal debt rose from $909 billion to $13.8 trillion — and to over $15 trillion next year. (Table 7.1) And all this without a major war or depression during those 30 years.

Maybe we should adjust pay practices for members of Congress to give them an incentive to avoid risky, unaffordable, out-of-control borrowing and spending.

E. J. Dionne writes in the Washington Post today that many Republicans think the George W. Bush administration was “too ready to run up the deficit.” But, he says,

That the deficit increased primarily because of two tax cuts and two wars was not part of most conservatives’ calculation because acknowledging this was ideologically inconvenient.

That’s one explanation. Of course, spending did rise by more than a trillion dollars during Bush’s eight years, and it wasn’t all military spending.

And as Michael Tanner writes today, “The Deficit Is a Symptom, Spending Is the Disease.”

Traditionally, federal spending has run around 21 percent of GDP. But George W. Bush and (even more dramatically) Barack Obama have now driven federal spending to more than 25 percent of GDP. And as the old joke goes, that’s the good news. As the full force of entitlement programs kicks in, the federal government will consume more than 40 percent of GDP by the middle of the century.

The real objection of libertarians and many conservatives to Bush is the massive increase in federal spending. As Tanner says, the deficit is just the symptom of an out-of-control, overspending federal government.

John Judis writes in the New Republic that Obama hasn’t been as successful at selling his economic program as Reagan was:

On the eve of the [1982] election, with the unemployment rate at a postwar high, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 60 percent of likely voters thought Reagan’s economic program would eventually help the country. That’s a sign of a successful political operation.