David Boaz

Somehow I was reminded of this cartoon today.

Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer is profiled in the Washington Examiner’s Sunday “Credo” column. He talks about the meaning of freedom and about people who have risked their lives to protect the rights of others, and offers some interesting thoughts when asked about “moral relativism”:

You say that for many people, the idea of right and wrong has been degraded in our culture. Why? When did that happen?

The growth of moral relativism is an interesting thing to chart. Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago argued that it was an unintended consequence of a positive development, which was the integration of different races and religions. As that happened, it became the easiest way to tell schoolchildren not to fight by saying, “Everyone and everything is as good as everything else.” It is an easier route to say that there are no moral truths, but the outcome is not more mutual respect. It undermines the foundation of mutual respect.

Moral relativism was a lazy shortcut for a pluralistic society. A better approach is to say you should respect others because they’re human beings, and because they have rights.

Find the whole article here or see it in newspaper-page format on page 34 of the digital edition.

And buy Tom Palmer’s Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice here.

Charles Krauthammer writes about “liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate” and the conceit that “Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.” He has plenty of contemporary examples, but he also recalls one from a few years ago:

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

Nozick, of course, was a libertarian, not a conservative, as the more insightful obituary by the philosopher Alan Ryan in the British Independent notes: the book’s “criticism of social conservatism is at least as devastating as its criticism of the redistributive welfare state.” But Krauthammer is right to note the casual assumption by the New York Times that conservatism desperately needed “philosophical justification.”

Sunday’s Washington Post contains a related article by political scientist Gerard Alexander: “Why are liberals so condescending?”

At the Economist‘s online debate, Elaine Kamarck and I have posted rebuttals to the opening statements. I say, among other things:

One question here is how do you measure a politician’s failure. Is it, for instance, a failure to get his policies enacted, or his success in enacting bad policies? Surveys of historians always give high marks to presidents who expanded government or fought wars. Washington’s most-quoted political scientist, Norman Ornstein, recently defended the productivity of the current Congress; his article illustrated that to the Washington establishment the very definition of a productive Congress is the spending of more taxpayers’ money, the creation of new agencies and bureaucracies, and the concentration of more power in the hands of federal regulators. Citizens might prefer a government that kept us out of war, let the economy grow, and left us alone…

Some analysts note that Ronald Reagan had low ratings at this point in his term, and a bad midterm election, but came back strong. As it turns out, tax cuts, spending restraint, deregulation and sound money tend to create strong economic recoveries. Threats of tax hikes, unprecedented levels of deficits, a wave of new regulations and fears about Fed monetisation may not.

Has Mr Obama failed, a year into his term? Of course not. But that’s the direction he’s headed.

The vote is now 53 percent against the proposition that Obama is failing. If you agree with the proposition “This house believes that Barack Obama is failing,” I encourage you to cast your vote.

Does the government know what it’s doing, can it know what it’s doing, in financial regulation? In the latest issue of Cato Policy Report, Jeffrey Friedman doubts it:

You are familiar by now with the role of the Federal Reserve in stimulating the housing boom; the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in encouraging low equity mortgages; and the role of the Community Reinvestment Act in mandating loans to “subprime” borrowers, meaning those who were poor credit risks. So you may think that the government caused the financial crisis. But you don’t know the half of it. And neither does the government….

Omniscience cannot be expected of human beings. One really would have had to be a god to master the millions of pages in the Federal Register — not to mention the pages of the Register’s state, local, and now international counterparts — so one could pick out the specific group of regulations, issued in different fields over the course of decades, that would end up conspiring to create the greatest banking crisis since the Great Depression. This storm may have been perfect, therefore, but it may not prove to be rare. New regulations are bound to interact unexpectedly with old ones if the regulators, being human, are ignorant of the old ones and of their effects….

This premise would be questionable enough even if we started with a blank legal slate. But we don’t. And there is no conceivable way that we, the people — or our agents in government — can know how to solve the problems of modern societies when our efforts have, in fact, been preceded by generations of previous efforts that have littered the ground with a tangle of rules so thick that we can’t possibly know what they all say, let alone how they might interact to create another perfect storm.

Read the whole thing — about moral hazard, banking regulations, and the “perfect storm of ignorance” that happened and will happen again — here in PDF. Less attractive HTML version here. Jeffrey Friedman is editor of Critical Review and of Causes of the Financial Crisis, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

As I hope you know by now, John Stossel is on the Fox Business Network every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Don’t miss it. But if you do, there are rebroadcasts at 10 p.m. Friday, 7 p.m. Saturday, and 11 p.m. Sunday.

But some people complain that their local cable station doesn’t carry the Fox Business Network. Well, contact them and tell them you want Stossel! (I’ll wait while you do that.) And now, since the cable company won’t add the network instantly, you should also know that clips and full shows are also available at Hulu.com. Just go to http://www.hulu.com/stossel for lots of recent shows — on health care, global warming, Ayn Rand, Whole Foods, and more.

Steve Poizner, the California insurance commissioner who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, created a stir this week by charging opponent Meg Whitman’s campaign with attempting to coerce him out of the race. He said he had reported her campaign to state and federal law enforcement authorities.

What did Whitman actually do? Well, Poizner said that Whitman consultant Mike Murphy had contacted a Poizner staffer by phone and email to urge him to withdraw from the race. The email, released by Poizner, said: “I hate the idea of each of us spending $20 million beating on the other in the primary, only to have a badly damaged nominee. And we can spend $40 million tearing up Steve if we must; bad for him, bad for us, and a crazy waste to tear up a guy with great future statewide potential.” In the email, Murphy went on to suggest that if Poizner dropped out of the race before the June 8 vote, Whitman and her team would immediately get behind him for a 2012 challenge to Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Poizner says that’s not only “strong-arm tactics” but possibly an illegal inducement to get him to withdraw. But isn’t this really just politics as usual? Don’t candidates as a matter of course say “support me this time, and I’ll support you next time” or “run for a different office and I’ll endorse you”? Presidential candidates, or their campaign managers, are often said to have promised the vice presidency to more than one rival to clear the field.

The point about spending $40 million of Republican money tearing up fellow Republicans is a pretty common complaint about party primaries. In fact, National Review correspondent John J. Miller raised just that concern about the Rick Perry-Kay Bailey Hutchison showdown in Texas.

Even during the Rod Blagojevich flap over “selling” a Senate seat, the always-provocative Jack Shafer and Jim Harper both asked, Isn’t this what politicians do? They make deals — including deals like “I’ll support your campaign if you’ll make my buddy (or me) a Cabinet secretary.” No doubt the promises are often worthless, but they still get made. Blagojevich and Murphy have reminded pols all over the country that such deals are better made in person, not via email or telephone.

Politics ain’t beanbag, Mr. Poizner. Accept the deal or reject it. But “let’s clear the field and spend our money fighting the other party” is pretty standard politics. And a darn sight better than another standard political practice, using the taxpayers’ money to bribe the voters to support you.

“Wealthy Face Higher Taxes.” That’s the headline that greeted two million American businesspeople Tuesday when they opened their Wall Street Journals. Inside, another banner head: “Big Firms Would Face Deeper Tax Bite.” Turn to the New York Times: “A Red-Ink Decade/Obama Budget Sees Years of Deficits.” The Financial Times: “Obama to target overseas tax breaks.” Investor’s Business Daily: “Higher Taxes for All in Obama Budget, $1.6 Tril 2010 Deficit.” And the Washington Post (not that many productive people get that on their doorstep): “Obama budget would spend billions more.”

And President Obama wonders why banks aren’t lending, employers aren’t hiring, and investors are holding back? As the Economic Policy Institute illustrates, this is the slowest recovery of any postwar recession.

Let’s hope the Obama administration soon learns that higher taxes, more regulation, a larger share of GDP shifted to government, fears of Fed monetization of soaring debt — not to mention newspaper reports of Obama budgeteers “flipp[ing] through the tax code, looking for ideas” — can only discourage employers, investors, and entrepreneurs. Robert Higgs has cited the role of “regime uncertainty” in prolonging the Great Depression, as investors worried about what FDR might do next. Will Wilkinson points to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s saying “businesses want certainty. They need certainty so they can make long-term plans today.” Unfortunately, Will says, “Creating completely irresponsible, economically chilling regime uncertainty would appear to be the basic modus operandi of the Obama administration.”

Taxes, regulation, and uncertainty — and Obama asks why businesses aren’t lending, investing, and hiring.

At the Economist website, I’m debating the question, “This house believes that Barack Obama is failing.” I’m taking the affirmative. Readers are allowed to vote, and the Economist‘s typically left-leaning readers are voting for Obama by about the same margin that Americans are rejecting his health care plan. So feel free to mosey on over there, read both sides of the argument, and cast your vote. My bottom line:

When your policies aren’t working, the voters have noticed and your transformative ideological agenda is moving broad public opinion in the other direction, it’s safe to say you’re failing.

Rebuttals and closing statements will follow in a few days. But don’t delay! Visit today!

Johan Norberg’s Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis has been named one of the best books of 2009 by the Spectator, Britain’s most important political affairs magazine. Excerpt:

Ever since the crash, I have been waiting for Johan Norberg to write about it — and finally, this year, he has obliged. I have three copies of his first book, In Defence of Globalisation, with varying degrees of annotation. I have already started to deface Financial Fiasco, his book showing how governments created this mess. The American government pumped up the housing bubble — and then there was a collective delusion that the market was rational. As Norberg says, the market is no more than a collection of humans who fall prey to hubris. And their hubris was imagining that computer models had eliminated risk: that the boom would not be followed by a bust.

It previously got an excellent review in the Financial Times. It’s enough to make you think that the elite British press are smarter than the elite American press.