David Boaz

The New York Times has an editorial today titled “Big Tobacco Fights Back,” criticizing tobacco companies’ lawsuit against new advertising restrictions. Repeatedly, the Times attributes the lawsuit to “the [tobacco] industry.”

But as my former Cato colleague Jacob Grier notes, the biggest tobacco company (Philip Morris) is on the Times’s side in opposing the lawsuit. So wouldn’t it make more sense to title the editorial “Medium-Size Tobacco Fights Back”?

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Frank B. Atkinson says that this fall’s gubernatorial race in Virginia will depend on

the all-important independent voters — the disproportionately moderate, young, prosperous, suburban and libertarian-leaning people who typically decide Virginia contests.

Background on the libertarian vote here.

The Washington Examiner’s satire columnist, Scott Ott, imagines an unusually honest presidential address next week:

A draft copy of President Barack Obama’s planned September 8 address to America’s public school children, tells students that “If you want to grow up to be like me, you should beg your parents to put you in private school, right now.”

Although Obama attended public school in Indonesia early in life, he soon switched to a private Catholic school, and from fifth grade through graduation went to a private college-prep school in Hawaii. His own daughters now attend a private school in Washington D.C..

“Do you think you’re going to get into Harvard University with your one-size-fits-all public school diploma?” the president will reportedly say. “Come on! Don’t make me laugh. You’ll be lucky to survive through graduation. Seriously, you gotta get out of this mediocrity machine. Go ahead! Get up right now. Run for the door. What are you waiting for?”

While the White House would not confirm the content of the leaked speech draft, a spokesman acknowledged that “You don’t get to be as smart and cool as Barack Obama by sitting in P.S. 152, listening to some union lackey droning on, and then eating government surplus in the cafeteria.”

On Tuesday, the president will bypass parents, taking his message directly to kids in the classroom “in hopes that you’ll pester Mom until she gets a second job to pay private-school tuition so you can escape the swirling vortex of ignorance and despair that is our government-run school system.”

“The only thing standing between you and success,” the president will allegedly say, “is the mentality that the government will take care of you. Once you shake that, there’s no limit to your achievement. Pay any price. Bear any burden. Just get your fanny out of that fiberglass chair, go buy yourself an Oxford shirt, a pair of slacks and a clip-on tie, and go to a place that faces constant economic pressure to improve.”

Watch for a couple of Cato presentations on C-SPAN this weekend.

Saturday morning at 10 a.m. (EDT), senior fellow Dan Mitchell will be talking about tax policy on a panel from the recent Steamboat Institute meeting in Colorado.

Then, as soon as that panel is over, switch to Book TV on C-SPAN2 to see the Cato Book Forum on “The Age of Reagan,” featuring author Steven Hayward and Cato’s William Niskanen, who served for four years on Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. If you miss the 11:15 showing, you’ll have another chance at 3 p.m. Sunday.

And if you missed my “Freedom in Crisis” speech on C-SPAN last weekend, you can watch it at your leisure on C-SPAN.org or cato.org.

Glenn Greenwald, author of Cato’s much–discussed paper on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal, writes about cults of presidential personality. He notes that Jay Nordlinger of National Review and other conservatives — not to mention a few libertarians — have criticized the Obama administration’s plan to broadcast a presidential speech into American schools and push teachers to post Obama quotes in their classrooms and encourage students to talk about how President Obama inspires them.

Greenwald never actually defends the Obama plan. But he does argue that conservatives have short memories when they say that this is something unique. In particular, he reminds us of the notorious Monica Goodling’s questions to job candidates at the George W. Bush Department of Justice, such as “[W]hat is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” And also of White House political aide Sara Taylor, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I took an oath to the president, and I take that oath very seriously.” Committee chairman Patrick Leahy had to ask her, “Did you mean, perhaps, you took an oath to the Constitution?”

Greenwald has a good point. Both the red and blue teams have been far too quick to succumb to a cult of presidential personality. (And really, swooning over Reagan or Obama is sort of understandable. But George W. Bush? You have to wonder if they worked really hard at creating a Bush cult because there wasn’t really much there.)

But I do see one difference: The Obama administration is trying to push its president-worship onto 50 million captive schoolchildren (not to mention using the NEA to enlist the nation’s artists in promoting Obama and his agenda). Goodling was asking people looking for government jobs why they wanted to “serve George W. Bush.” Now, sure, they should want to serve the public interest — and she was asking these questions to people seeking career legal positions as well as to political appointees. Still, it seems a smaller bit of cultishness than going into every public school.

Gene Healy wrote about cultishness by both Bush and Obama supporters here.

I’ll be speaking for the Freedom and Free Societies Program at Cornell University next Thursday, September 10. Details here.

I’ll also be speaking at Vanderbilt and in Nashville on September 29. Details to come.

Last November’s rejection of the failed GOP didn’t mean voters were ready to embrace a massive increase in the size of the federal government, says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew Research Center:

Obama campaigned for strong government action on the economy and health care, and most of his voters agreed with this direction. But Obama’s efforts to expand the role of government have alienated many of those who did not vote for him but nonetheless gave him high marks when first he took office.

Pew Research’s political values survey this spring showed no surge in public demand for more government. Indeed, anti-government sentiment, which had been building for years, was heightened by the financial bailout and stimulus program.

NPR reported this morning that “Cash for Clunkers” style programs in Germany and France are “popular and successful.” Successful by what standard? I see that the Wall Street Journal has reported that in Europe “’cash for clunker’ programs have breathed fresh life into a battered auto industry.”

Yes, by that standard, no doubt subsidies for buying cars are successful in encouraging the sale of cars. Certainly subsidies to homebuying encouraged the buying of homes. A “Cash for Computers” program would “breathe fresh life” into computer sales. Make it “Cash for Compaq” or “Cash for Windows,” and you could direct purchasers to particular companies.

But to declare a policy successful, shouldn’t you mean that it makes the country better off? And that means that the subsidies produced more economic growth or more overall consumer satisfaction than a policy of nonintervention would have. That’s a much harder standard to meet. Subsidies by definition divert consumer choices from their natural outcome. Economists generally agree that subsidies create deadweight losses for society. And sometimes, by distorting consumer decisions and encouraging decisions that don’t make real economic sense — as in the long effort to channel consumer resources into housing — subsidies eventually prove unsustainable and unstable.

Indeed, it seems likely that another part of the Wall Street Journal was correct when it described “Cash for Clunkers” as “crackpot economics.”

Just a few minutes ago on the washingtonpost.com homepage, there was an example of one of my pet peeves about bias — possibly unconscious bias — in the way the major media cover issues. A homepage headline read “Price of Failure on Health Care,” and the Howard Kurtz article itself is titled “The Price of Failure.” Kurtz explores what would happen if “health care reform [goes] down in flames.”

So what does he mean by “Failure on Health Care”? He means President Obama not getting the sweeping new government programs that he seeks. But to many of us Post readers, that would actually be “Success on Health Care.” It would mean that American health care would not get worse under the burden of government regulations and restrictions.

The media tendency to refer to the defeat of a big-government scheme as “failure” reflects a possibly unconscious bias toward government action. As I’ve written before:

Does one ever hear “Congress failed today to reduce taxes”? “No Progress on Deregulation”? I don’t think so. Journalists unconsciously assume that Congress should Do the Right Thing. When it doesn’t, that’s “failure” or “no progress.” Journalists and headline writers should try to find neutral language to describe Congress’s actions.

(Kurtz’s article actually focuses on the political consequences to Obama of not passing his signature issue, and I have no quarrel with the article. But the headlines convey the sense that it would be a “failure” for Congress not to pass a government health-care plan.)

At his town meeting in New Hampshire, President Obama urged people not to listen to those who seek to “scare and mislead the American people.” Meanwhile, his new White House website “Reality Check” — your tax dollars at work, folks, on political propaganda — warns supporters that “the road ahead will surely reveal more aggressive efforts from defenders of the status quo to confuse and scare Americans with half-truths and outright lies.”

I immediately thought of former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s notorious declaration in December 2001: “to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.”

Presidents and their teams don’t like criticism. They have total access to the media — primetime, nationally televised speeches and press conferences, weekly radio addresses, websites, massive party and political organizations, journalists at their beck and call. Their every passing comment is news. Their speeches dominate the headlines. They set the agenda, whether it’s the Patriot Act or health care bills. And yet they can’t abide criticism.

And when the criticism is effective, they lash out. They denounce their opponents for seeking to “scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties” or “confuse and scare Americans with half-truths and outright lies.” (Quick: which one of those was 2001, and which was 2009?)

But the fact is that the Bush administration’s actions after 9/11 really did result in a loss of liberty, and the Obama administration’s plans for our health care really should scare Americans. And libertarians have been, and will continue to be, in the forefront of Americans resisting intrusions on liberty by administrations from both parties. They won’t be dissuaded by Nixonian claims that dissent and criticism are divisive and damaging to national unity.