David Boaz

We sometimes talk about 1943 as the year that the libertarian movement really started, with the publication of three passionate books by Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, and Isabel Paterson. In his review of a new biography of Arthur Koestler, Paul Berman makes 1940 sound like a crucial year for books of liberal anti-communism (that is, of course, anti-communism by modern liberals, not classical liberals, who were always opposed to socialism). Perhaps it took 20 years for liberals and anarchists to realize what was happening in Russia and organize their thoughts about it. Libertarians got there a bit sooner, from Mises’s theoretical critique in Socialism in 1922 to Rand’s firsthand experiences that led to the publication of We the Living in 1936. 

Koestler’s book Darkness at Noon was completed in 1940, then smuggled out of Vichy France and published the next year. Also in 1940:

A talented little group of intellectuals in the 1930s was keen on Promethean myths, and the center of that impulse was the United States, where the talented group pictured the Communist movement in the light of Prometheus and his struggles. Edmund Wilson devoted his masterwork To the Finland Station to the Promethean theme—it, too, came out in 1940, by the way…. 

By the time Wilson completed his own manuscript, he knew very well that, in Russia, Marxism had pretty much failed. And he attributed this failure largely to a philosophical error on Marx’s part, back in the nineteenth century. Marx had thoughtlessly incorporated into his own doctrine a whiff of mysticism, drawn from Hegel. The mystical whiff had transformed Marx’s movement from a sober, progressive-minded, social-science action campaign into a movement of religious inebriates. A religious frenzy had produced a hubris. Under Lenin and the Bolsheviks, hubris led to despotism. And to crime—to the deliberate setting aside of moral considerations. To the dehumanization of humanism.

Such was Wilson’s argument in To the Finland Station. Here was the Promethean myth, twisted into tragedy: a story of rebellion and counter-rebellion. Freedom and its betrayal. Fire and self-immolation. Wilson’s philosophical mentors were Max Eastman and Sidney Hook, and in that same year each of those redoubtable thinkers came out with his own variation on the same interpretation—Eastman in an essay in Reader’s Digest (which later appeared in his book Reflections on the Failure of Socialism) and Hook in a volume called Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy. In the United States in 1940, tragic Prometheanism was more than an argument. It was a school of thought.

And somehow Koestler, composing his novel under European circumstances inconceivably more difficult than anything his American colleagues would ever experience, arrived at roughly the same interpretation.

Read more…

From ArtsAndScience, the magazine of Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts and Science:

Assistant Professor of Chemistry John McLean has been awarded a $2.7 million Grant Opportunity grant from the National Institutes of Health as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

John Stossel’s weekly show has a new time: 9 p.m. and midnight every Thursday on the Fox Business Network, plus Fridays at 10 p.m., Saturdays at 9 p.m. and 12 midnight, and Sundays at 10 p.m. (Don’t get Fox Business? Tell your cable company you want Stossel!)

On this week’s show Stossel will interview 76-year-old Otis McDonald about his lawsuit seeking the right to protect himself with a gun, which is now before the Supreme Court. He’ll also talk to John Lott about the new edition of his book More Guns, Less Crime.

While you’re waiting for Thursday night, check out Stossel’s show on Milton Friedman, which featured interviews with Johan Norberg, Tom Palmer, and me. Or indeed his classic ABC special on politics and limited government, where I got even more air time!

Jason Sorens, political scientist and founder of the Free State Project, has a series of posts at Pileus trying to estimate  the size of the “liberty constituency” in each state. Using statistical techniques well beyond my high-school algebra, he first calculated the support for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in each state if conditions were equal. It may not be terribly surprising that by those calculations Ron Paul’s best states — and therefore, putatively, the states with the largest “liberty constituency” — were New Hampshire, Idaho, South Dakota, and Washington. In fifth place, presumably reflecting those dreaded “Beltway libertarians,” was the District of Columbia.

In part 2 Sorens used principal component analysis (PCA) to see whether a libertarian constituency exists as a concept and is distinct from mere liberalism-conservatism. Using eight variables drawn from election results and opinion surveys, he combines four of them to estimate “size of libertarian constituency,” and four others to estimate “size of liberal constituency,” the inverse of which would be the size of the state’s conservative constituency. That gives him this chart:

Sorens points out, “Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Alaska are the most conservative states, while Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Connecticut, and New York are the most liberal states. The states with the most libertarians are Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Idaho, with Nevada, Indiana, Georgia, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Utah, California, and Colorado following.” The most liberal states don’t seem to have many libertarians. Of the conservative states, Idaho and Alaska have a lot of libertarians, Oklahoma and Nebraska not so much. (I suspect that a more mainstream libertarian-leaning candidate, a small-government, free-trade, skeptical-of-foreign-intervention candidate like Nebraska’s own Chuck Hagel, might have more appeal to the sober burghers of the Cornhusker State than the more provocative candidacies of Ron Paul and the Libertarian Party.)

Read more…

Americans don’t curtsy to foreign monarchs.

Serena, who earned her third title by beating her sister in last year’s final, has tweaked her tournament preparation in anticipation of a visit Thursday to Wimbledon by Queen Elizabeth II.

“I’ve been working on my curtsy,” Serena said. “It’s a little extreme, so I’m going to have to tone it down. I was practicing it this morning.”

This is a republic. We do not recognize distinctions among individuals based on class or birth. We are not subjects of the queen of the England, the queen of the Netherlands, the emperor of Japan, or the king of Saudi Arabia. Therefore we don’t bow or curtsy to foreign heads of state.

Cato fellows Nat Hentoff and Penn Jillette have just been profiled in major publications — Hentoff in the New York Times and Penn in Vanity Fair. Warning: the Hentoff profile is mostly about jazz, and the Penn interview contains lots of four-letter words, obscene imagery, and harsh language about religion. So if you have a low tolerance for jazz or for obscenity and blasphemy, be forewarned. But it’s no surprise that both of them talk a lot about the importance of free speech.

Despite the claims of immigration opponents such as Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, the rate of violent crime at the border and across Arizona has been dropping in the past few years, the New York Times reports — a fact you could have read here at Cato@Liberty back on April 27 and May 25.

The state of Maryland wants more people to have affordable housing — at least if they’ve already got it. Concerned that the owners of mobile home parks might sell the land for other uses, “affordable housing advocates” succesfully lobbied Maryland legislators this year for

legislation that, they say, discourages owners of mobile-home parks from selling their properties. If the landowner does sell, it provides the homeowner with some protection.

Under the law, which was passed earlier this year, a mobile-home park owner who wants to sell and change land use must give written notification to the residents and provide displaced homeowners with a relocation plan and relocation assistance that equals 10 months’ worth of rent. The legislation applies to mobile parks with more than 38 sites.

Now the first thing to be said about this is that it is theft. That’s become so common in legislatures that we’ve become accustomed to it. But we shouldn’t lose sight of what happened here: Some people spent their own money to buy land. They rented that land to people with mobile homes, who knew that they were not buying the land, they were just renting a place to park their mobile homes. (The word “mobile” might be a tipoff that they’re made to move.) And then the government took away the owner’s right to change the use of his land. The owner could still sell it, of course, as long as he gives written notification of his plans, provides the renters with a “relocation plan,” and pays them 10 months’ rent to leave his land. That’s a huge burden; the government has simply appropriated much of the value of the owner’s land.

But there’s an obvious long-term consequence here, too, one that the Washington Post didn’t get to in its 1000-word story. What’s going to occur to a landowner as she reads this story? She’s going to think, if I allow anyone to park a mobile home on my property, I’ll be permanently harnessed to that tenant, like a medieval serf. So maybe I’d better not rent any space to a mobile home owner. But then she’s going to think a bit further: What about other kinds of affordable housing? If I build inexpensive apartments or bungalows, and rent them to people who need affordable housing, will the state of Maryland decide that I shouldn’t be allowed to change the use of the land or sell it? After all, wealthy Montgomery County, Maryland — which doesn’t have many mobile homes — does have a 20-page handbook of rules and restrictions for any owner who might want to convert an apartment building to condominiums, including the county’s right to buy the land and a guarantee of lifetime tenancies for low-income elderly tenants. William Tucker pointed out in a 1997 Cato paper how rent control laws usually had to be followed by condo conversion restrictions, as building owners tried to find some way to make a profit on their buildings. And then of course the whole series of attempts to “protect” affordable housing leads to housing shortages and sky-high rents.

If you want people to supply affordable housing, it’s probably a good idea not to pile taxes, restrictions, and threats of confiscation on the backs of those who do.

Thursday night at 8 and midnight, John Stossel debates the war on drugs with Sean Hannity. Check it out on the Fox Business Network.

John’s other guests will include Jeffrey Miron of Harvard and Cato and Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal.

And for more Stossel, don’t miss last week’s classic episode on Milton Friedman and Free to Choose with Tom Palmer, Johan Norberg . . . and me.

Submissions for the Bastiat Prize for Journalism and the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalist close at the end of June. Journalists, bloggers, and writers of op-eds are encouraged to submit their work here. The International Policy Network awards prizes of up to $10,000 to  “writers anywhere in the world whose published articles eloquently and wittily explain, promote and defend the principles and institutions of the free society.”

Note that these prizes are not (just) for students. Last year’s winners included law professor John Hasnas, for an oped published in the Wall Street Journal; Robert Guest, Washington Correspondent of the Economist; Robert Robb, editorial columnist of the Arizona Republic; British politician and blogger Daniel Hannan; and Shikha Dalmia, online columnist for Forbes and Reason.