David Boaz

Back in April there was a lot of debate about how many people actually attended the April 15 “tea parties” to oppose President Obama’s tax and spending programs. Pajamas Media, an enthusiastic backer of the protests, offered an estimate upwards of 400,000.

Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog, a more skeptical observer, diligently compiled what he considered “nonpartisan and credible” estimates — mostly from mainstream media or police sources — and came up with a detailed sum of about 311,000. Not bad for widely dispersed events, most with no big-name speakers or celebrities, not hyped by the major media (though certainly hyped by some of the conservative media).

But I’ve recently stumbled across reports of two tea parties that didn’t make Silver’s list. In a long profile of a councilwoman who supported Obama in Greenwood, South Carolina, the Washington Post reports on her encountering 200 people at a tea party in Greenwood. And the latest compilation of newspaper clippings from the Mackinac Center includes an April 16 article from the Midland (Michigan) Daily News about a tea party there that attracted 500 people. So who knows how many other farflung events didn’t get included in Silver’s comprehensive list?

Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth complained that the tea parties — and maybe even libertarians — weren’t clearly focused on the problem of spending. As I said in a comment there, I think that’s an unfair charge:

Here’s how one major news outlet reported them:

Nationwide ‘tea party’ protests blast spending – CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/15/tea.parties/ )
ABCNews.com said “Anti-Tax ‘Tea Parties’ Protest President Obama’s Tax and Spending Policies.” USA Today wrote, “What started out as a handful of people blogging about their anger over federal spending — the bailouts, the $787 billion stimulus package and Obama’s budget — has grown into scores of so-called tea parties across the country.”

It’s hard to put specific cuts, especially COLAs and the like, on protest signs; but I think it’s fair to say that the tea-party crowds were complaining about excessive spending and “generational theft.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) is very upset that the Obama administration has rejected the California state government’s request for a bailout. She tells the Washington Post:

This matters for the U.S., not just for California. I can’t speak for the president, but when you’ve got the 8th biggest economy in the world sitting as one of your 50 states, it’s hard to see how the country recovers if that state does not.

First, presumably Lofgren knows that the federal government is projecting a deficit of $1.8 trillion for the current fiscal year — so where is this emergency aid for California to come from?

But perhaps even more importantly, Lofgren seems to confuse the state of California with the State of California. That is, she confuses the people and the businesses of California with the state government. There’s no clear and direct relationship between the two. The state government is currently running a large deficit and is warning of a “fiscal meltdown.” Of course, as it continued to issue claims of fiscal meltdown and painful cuts over the past many years, California has continued to spend. The state has nearly tripled spending since 1990 (doubled in per capita terms).  It went on a spending binge during the dotcom boom and never adjusted to the lower revenues after the bust.  During the Schwarzenegger years the state has increased spending twice as fast as inflation and population growth. What were they thinking?

But a bailout for the government won’t necessarily help the recovery of the state’s economy. In fact, by increasing taxes and/or borrowing, it would likely weaken the national economy. And by encouraging continued irresponsible spending by the state government, it would just be an enabler of destructive policies that suck money out of the productive sector of California’s economy. We all want the California economy to recover. But that’s not the same thing as giving more money to the California government.

Why is a U.S. senator’s extramarital affair on the front page of The Washington Post this morning?

Don’t get me wrong, I like a juicy sex scandal as well as the next guy. And I’m amused at my friend and former colleague Radley Balko’s Facebook comment (or was it a tweet? who can keep up with the new media?) that “sadly, growing public acceptance for gay marriage has given yet another conservative politician no choice but to cheat on his wife.”   But this affair fit Bill Kristol’s definition of good Republican behavior:  “Republicans have old-fashioned extramarital affairs with other adults.” No prostitution, no underage interns, no public toilets.

So why is it front-page news?

Meanwhile, you know what’s not on the front page, today or any day so far? President Obama’s firing of the AmeriCorps inspector general, in apparent violation of a law that Senator Obama voted for, perhaps in retaliation for the IG’s investigation of Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson, an Obama supporter. It’s an interesting story. As a Wall Street Journal lead editorial explained:

In April 2008 the Corporation [for National and Community Service] asked Mr. Walpin to investigate reports of irregularities at St. HOPE, a California nonprofit run by former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson. St. HOPE had received an $850,000 AmeriCorps grant, which was supposed to go for three purposes: tutoring for Sacramento-area students; the redevelopment of several buildings; and theater and art programs.

Mr. Walpin’s investigators discovered that the money had been used instead to pad staff salaries, meddle politically in a school-board election, and have AmeriCorps members perform personal services for Mr. Johnson, including washing his car.

Other papers have been on the story, notably the Washington Examiner. But as even The Washington Post‘s ombudsman notes, not a word in the Post (until a small story on page A19 today, featuring the Obama administration’s spin on the issue). The Post is, however, ahead of The New York Times, which has apparently not run a word on the story, even online, though it did have room for the senatorial affair. 

And I have to wonder: If George W. Bush had fired an inspector general who had alleged fraud by a key Bush supporter, would the Post and the Times have covered the story?

I was rereading George Nash’s book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, and I found this ever-more-timely and surprisingly pithy quotation from Ludwig von Mises in his book Bureaucracy:

They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office.

(Meanwhile, thanks to the continuing progress made by the non-state sector of society, what a wonderful world in which both these brilliant books can be read either in hard copy or on line!)

As Dan Mitchell noted below, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched a “Campaign for Free Enterprise” to stop the “rapidly growing influence of government over private-sector activity.” Chamber president Thomas Donohue told the Wall Street Journal that an “avalanche of new rules, restrictions, mandates and taxes” could “seriously undermine the wealth- and job-creating capacity of the nation.”

Indeed. Given the scope and extent of the Obama administration’s assaults on private enterprise — national health insurance, energy central planning, pay czars, abrogation of contracts, skyrocketing spending, and so on — free enterprise can use all the help it can get. I welcome the Chamber to the fight.

But it would be nice if the Chamber had joined the fight for economic freedom a bit earlier, say back in February when many of us were trying to stop the administration’s massive “stimulus” spending bill. That bill’s official cost is $787 billion; with interest, it would be about $1.3 trillion; and if you assume that its temporary spending increases will be extended, it will cost taxpayers about $3.27 trillion over 10 years.

Back then, Donohue had a few criticisms of the bill, but

The bottom line is that at the end of the day, we’re going to support the legislation. Why? Because with the markets functioning so poorly, the government is the only game in town capable of jump-starting the economy.

Or they might even have started defending free enterprise last fall, instead of going all-out to push the TARP bailout through Congress.

Converts to the cause of limited government are always welcome. But we might not need a $100 million Campaign for Free Enterprise if American business had opposed big government when the votes were going down in Congress. Still, better late than never.

Who’s the top dog in American business these days? Washington, says the Washington Post:

That’s one of the main themes of this week’s Capital Connection conference put on by the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association. . . . This time, policy wonks and government insiders will also be there.

Reed E. Hundt, former Federal Communications Commission chairman, and Tommy G. Thompson, former Health and Human Services secretary, will be speaking, as will VentureBeat blog author Matt Marshall and GigaOm author Om Malik, two well-known technology bloggers. Washington hasn’t been a frequent stop for them in the past.

It’s just one more sign of the region’s growing clout in the business and technology world. This is where stimulus dollars are doled out, where the economic recovery is taking shape, and where regulations — many of which directly affect businesses — are being crafted and rewritten. Of course, lawyers and lobbyists are getting a great deal of business helping folks find ways to tap into stimulus money. . . .

Companies familiar with the Beltway culture are well-positioned to benefit from the government’s increased role in nearly every sector. . . .

The conference, which is open to the public for the first time, demonstrates the growing nexus between the business community and the government, said Julia Spicer, MAVA’s executive director.

“The spread between the two worlds has tightened a bit,” she said. “The economy is the real focal point” of the conference, “and the government has a definite role in that.”

USA Today investigates how members of Congress are “working behind the scenes to try to influence how the [stimulus]  money is spent.”

Congress and President Obama proudly noted that there were no earmarks in the $787 stimulus bill. But…

Ten of 27 departments and agencies receiving stimulus money have released records of contacts by lawmakers under Freedom of Information Act requests USA TODAY filed in April. Those records detailed 53 letters, phone calls and e-mails recommending projects from 60 members from February through the end of May. Thirteen of those lawmakers voted against the stimulus package.

Critics of the stimulus bill pointed out that government money is always politically directed. It’s little consolation to be proven right.

Thomas Paine, one of the fathers of American freedom, died almost unmourned 200 years ago today. Brendan O’Neill remembers him at BBC.com:

In January 1776 he published a short pamphlet that earned him the title The Father of the American Revolution.

Titled simply, Common Sense, the work has been described by the Pulitzer-winning historian Gordon S Wood as “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire [American] revolutionary period”. It put the case for democracy, against the monarchy, and for American independence from British rule.

Lefties like Harvey Kaye, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, like to say

He put the case for political democracy AND social democracy, arguing in The Rights of Man that young people and the elderly should be afforded financial security by their governments. These welfare ideals are under attack right now, in our era of recession.

He has a point, though I suspect that Paine would think that the American welfare state has exceeded the sort of minimal provision for the poor that he had in mind. As for me, I rather like the fact that he proposed to execute any legislator who so much as proposed a bill to issue paper money and make it legal tender. A bit too strong, I concede. But a healthy understanding of what fiat money can do to people who work hard and save their money.

Find some of Thomas Paine’s best writings in The Libertarian Reader.

Dana Milbank has the evidence:

For the past few years, liberal activists have gathered in Washington each spring for the Take Back America conference….

But now that Obama has actually taken back America, the activists at this year’s gathering feel a bit like the dog that finally caught up with the car. Organizers changed the name from Take Back America to America’s Future Now, but that didn’t prevent a sharp decline in participation. …

Hickey estimates attendance dropped from 2,500 last year to 1,500 this year, and even that may overstate things. At yesterday morning’s four concurrent “issue briefings,” 585 chairs were set out. Only 213 of them were occupied, including just 15 for the session on global warming.

The Washington Post writes about how President Obama became obsessed with grabbing our complex energy systems by the scruff of the neck and shaking them into something more appealing to Ivy League planners. I was struck by this vignette:

But even before the late-night session in July, Obama had begun to educate himself about energy and climate and to use those issues to define himself as a politician, say people who have advised him. He read a three-part New Yorker series on climate change, for instance, and mentioned it in three speeches.

It’s great that he read a three-part series in the New Yorker. But has the president ever actually read anything by a climate change skeptic? Actually, a better term would be “a climate change moderate.” Leading “skeptic” Patrick J. Michaels, for instance, of Cato and the University of Virginia, isn’t skeptical about the reality of global warming. His summary article in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers begins:

Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.

But he also notes that climate change is complex, and its policy implications are at best unclear. “Although there are many different legislative proposals for substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, there is no operational or tested suite of technologies that can accomplish the goals of such legislation.” The flawed computer models on which activists rely cannot reliably predict the future course of world temperatures. The apocalyptic visions that dominate the media are not based on sound science. The best guess is that over the next century there will be very slight warming, without serious implications for our environment our society. Michaels’s closing appeal to members of Congress would also apply to President Obama and his advisers:

Members of Congress need to ask difficult questions about global warming.

Does the most recent science and climate data argue for precipitous action? (No.) Is there a suite of technologies that can dramatically cut emissions by, say, 2050? (No.) Would such actions take away capital, in a futile attempt to stop warming, that would best be invested in the future? (Yes.) Finally, do we not have the responsibility to communicate this information to our citizens, despite disconnections between perceptions of climate change and climate reality? The answer is surely yes. If not the U.S. Congress, then whom? If not now, when? After we have committed to expensive policies that do not work in response to a misperception of global warming?

Please, President Obama — in addition to the lyrical magazine articles on the apocalyptic vision that you read, please read at least one article by a moderate and widely published climatologist before rushing into disastrously expensive policies.