David Boaz

At the Al Smith Dinner, Barack Obama said, “I feel right at home here because it’s often been said that I share the politics of Alfred E. Smith and the ears of Alfred E. Newman.” That’s the best news I’ve heard all year. Because Al Smith was not only America’s most visible opponent of our first version of Prohibition, he was a leading critic of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Indeed, he was a founder of the American Liberty League, the leading organization in opposition to the New Deal.

As David Pietrusza wrote in Reason, the Liberty League grew out of the earlier organization Americans Against the Prohibition Amendment. And, he said,

In summing up the League’s philosophy, liberal author George Wolfskill (The Revolt of the Conservatives) outlined a remarkably coherent libertarian position. They believed, he said, that the New Deal was a threat to the Constitution and represented a danger of tyranny via centralization; that it was based on coercion, deceit, and false economic principles: that recovery was in fact retarded by government intervention; that government agricultural controls were “a cure worse than the disease”; that the New Deal combined aspects of socialist and fascist economic systems; that private enterprise was being damaged; that deficit financing and high spending threatened the nation with inflation; and that the banking community was now under the political control of the federal government.

So if Barack Obama indeed shares the ideas of Al Smith, maybe as president he’ll take on our current version of Prohibition, and get the government out of the banking community, and start to undo the unconstitutional excesses of the federal government that have merely accelerated from FDR to Bush and Cheney. We can only hope.

Some years ago I wrote an article titled “The Gun behind the Law.” (Not online, but it appears in The Politics of Freedom.) It began with a photograph of 50 or so helmeted policemen storming the doors of a large and institutional building. As it turned out, the photograph depicted a bank nationalization in Peru during the first and disastrously leftist presidency of Alan Garcia. I noted that the Peruvians were helping us understand the real import of the term “bank nationalization”: “What really occurred there is that some people forced other people to give up their property at the point of a gun….As the bankers of Peru have learned, every law is en­forced at the point of a gun.”

And I noted that things are very different here: “When we Americans hear the words ‘bank nationalization,’ we are apt to imagine a piece of paper being signed by a bank president and a deputy assistant treasury secretary.”

Well, I was a little off. It was actually nine bank presidents and the secretary himself. But the general scene was right:

The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States trooped into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department at 3 p.m. Monday. To their astonishment, they were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left.

“They weren’t allowed to negotiate. Mr. Paulson requested that each of them sign. It was for their own good and the good of the country, he said, according to a person in the room.”

At least one banker objected. “But by 6:30, all nine chief executives had signed — setting in motion the largest government intervention in the American banking system since the Depression.”

And all without any need for armed police takeovers of the banks. Nice and peaceful like. And no doubt some of the bankers were just delighted to get billions of dollars from the taxpayers. For those who didn’t want to be working for the government, the points I made in that long-ago article are still valid:

The gun is evident in the picture [from Peru], but it is no less real when an American is forced to give up his property by a law or regulation. Such commonly used terms as “national economic policy,” “social regulation,” “revenue enhancement,” “profamily legislation,” and “minimum-wage law” all obscure the simple fact that some people are forcing others to do as they’re told.

But Peru is not the United States, it will be said; our government would never send riot troops to take over a bank. That is largely because it wouldn’t have to—Americans don’t resist the demands of government. What would happen if they did?…

If more Americans decided to ignore absurd, special-interest, and counterproductive laws, it would soon be apparent that physical force lies behind the Federal Register. Does anyone believe that Americans would pay a large percentage of their income to the federal government if not for the ultimate threat of imprisonment and violence?

As the bankers of Peru have learned, every law is enforced at the point of a gun—a fact we should carefully consider when we are tempted to conclude that some perceived problem should be solved by enacting a law.

Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post has a column titled “Gods That Failed.” He’s referring to a famous book:

In 1949, a number of famous writers, among them Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender and Ignazio Silone, wrote essays explaining why they were no longer communists. The essays were collected in a volume entitled “The God That Failed.”

And then he makes this analogy: “Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated capitalism. ”

Where to begin? Certainly we haven’t had any unregulated capitalism lately. As I put it the other day, the kind of capitalism that has encountered the current crisis is “the kind in which a central monetary authority manipulates money and credit, the central government taxes and redistributes $3 trillion a year, huge government-sponsored enterprises create a taxpayer-backed duopoly in the mortgage business, tax laws encourage excessive use of debt financing, and government pressures banks to make bad loans.”

As for conservative intellectuals, some of them may wish for some form of “unregulated capitalism,” though plenty of them — from Russell Kirk to David Brooks and Michael Gerson and that Arkansas Aristotle, Mike Huckabee — have been pretty darn skeptical about capitalism. But whatever the more free-market conservatives may have dreamed of, they didn’t get laissez-faire. Nor did they ever make capitalism their deity, the way communists truly did make the workers’ state their god.

But let’s think about the comparison that Meyerson is making. Some intellectuals once supported communism, and that failed. Some intellectuals, we’ll concede for the moment, were just as enraptured with capitalism; and that system, too, in Meyerson’s view, has failed. Are these equivalent failures?

Communism’s failure involved Stalin’s terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Che Guevara’s executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam, Pol Pot’s mass slaughter — a total death toll of 94 million people, according to the Black Book of Communism. Prominent American leftists — from Lillian Hellman and Dalton Trumbo and lots of other writers to Alger Hiss of the State Department and FDR speechwriter Michael Straight, who became the publisher of The New Republic — were members of the party that did these things. And that party had total control in the countries that it ruled. There were no opposition parties, no filibusters, no election-related maneuverings that prevented the party in power from getting what it wanted.

What the Communist Party wanted, it got. Communism in practice was communist theory made real.

In the United States, on the other hand, economic and political outcomes are always the result of jockeying between parties and interest groups. So even if Ronald Reagan and his advisers wanted to give Americans “unregulated capitalism,” they had to deal with Tip O’Neill and the Democrats, and with critics in the media, and with many other players. As these forces played out, in the late 1970s and early 1980s some deregulation did occur, along with some tax-cutting. And indeed there was some financial deregulation in the Clinton years as well.

And what is the “failure,” as Meyerson puts it, of this semi-deregulated capitalism? Does it involve mass starvation? Does it involve terror-famines? Does it involve millions of deaths? No, so far it involves a sharp decline in the stock market from record levels. Taking 1980 as the starting point for Meyerson’s nightmare vision of “unregulated capitalism,” here’s what has happened to the S&P 500. It’s had some dips, but it still reflects vast wealth creation, and vast increases in the assets of our IRAs and 401(k)s.

(click for larger version)

The “failure” of capitalism and the failure of communism are not morally equivalent, and Meyerson should be embarrassed to even imply such a comparison.

The Chicago Tribune quotes me this morning on issues the candidates aren’t talking about and may not anticipate. It’s true that issues are likely to arise in the next four years that no one anticipates today. But there are also some issues that are pretty easy to identify that the candidates aren’t being pressed to talk about. Some of those include:

• The proper role and scope of the federal government. Both candidates have a laundry list of things they want the federal government to do, and maybe they could each mention something they don’t want it to do. But what’s the framework behind their policy choices? What should government do? What should be left to state and local governments, and what should be left to the non-coercive sectors of society? What’s the proper and/or constitutional role and scope of the federal government?

• The looming entitlements crisis. Entitlements are already about 40 percent of the federal budget. In 20 years they may double as a share of national income. Can we afford that? Do we want a tax burden that high? Do we want that many people dependent on a check from the federal government? Do we have the nerve to say that transfer payments should be cut? Tough choices that nobody wants to confront, partly because each politician hopes that the problem won’t explode until he leaves the scene.

• We now have 2.5 million people in prison. Isn’t that something to talk about? Should they all they be there? Some 400,000 of them are nonviolent drug offenders. A million arrests don’t stop people from using drugs, and meanwhile the war on drugs costs us some $40 billion a year, increases crime rates, destroys poor neighborhoods, makes criminals out of lots of peaceful people, engenders civil liberties abuses, and funds the Taliban and other nefarious groups abroad.

On the campaign trail, reports MSNBC, Sarah Palin is telling audiences Barack Obama would raise taxes and expand the federal government. Her punch line:

“America, we just cannot afford another big spender in the White House.”

That’s for sure.

In the November issue of Liberty magazine I write about one factor that I think reduces the political impact of libertarian-leaning voters: the fact that they’re all over the map about which party or faction represents the lesser of the evils:

One reason why libertarians underperform politically is that they are politically split, not just between radicals and incrementalists, as can happen in any political movement, but also among various political movements — while being too small to influence any of them very much.

It seems to me that libertarians come in several political groupings:

(1) Those who care primarily about free markets and thus support conservative Republicans. Given the candidates on offer, that means helping to move the GOP to the right on social issues (and war and civil liberties) as well as on economic issues. This group would include the Club for Growth, Republican “Leave Us Alone” activist Grover Norquist, many donors to free-market thinktanks, and probably most libertarian-leaning politically active people.

(2) Those who want to make the GOP more socially tolerant and thus support moderate Republicans, which effectively means Republicans who aren’t very free-market. This would include Log Cabin Republicans, pro-choice Republicans, and lots of Wall Street and Silicon Valley businesspeople.

(3) Those who think the GOP is irredeemably bad on social issues and civil liberties and thus support Democrats. This would again include some Silicon Valley businessmen who are pro-entrepreneurship and fiscally conservative but just can’t support a party that is opposed to abortion rights and gay rights. A dramatic example is Tim Gill, the founder of Quark, who calls himself a libertarian but has contributed millions of dollars to Democrats because of Republican opposition to gay rights. There are also broadly libertarian people involved in the ACLU, the drug-reform movement, and other civil libertarian causes.

(4) Those who support the Libertarian Party. They don’t get many votes, but they include a large percentage of libertarian activists.

If only some candidate or movement could bring them all together.

Jonathan Chait, a journalist who frequently attacks supply-side economics, derides Peter Robinson of National Review for making a big deal out of a statement by 100 economists (or maybe it’s only 90) warning about the dangers of Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes and restrict international trade. Robinson may have gone a bit far in calling the statement “The Booming of the Big Guns.” As Chait says, 100 economists isn’t all that many. After all, 200 economists warned against the Wall Street bailout, and you see how much good that did.

But Chait also sneers at the quality of the economists who signed this statement opposing new burdens on production and trade. “The list certainly does not suggest excessive discrimination about credentials. It’s heavily larded with GOP apparatchiks now residing in the right-wing think tank world.” Actually, it’s not. There are maybe half a dozen who list think-tank affiliations, including people like Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution, who–perhaps Chait does not know–holds a Ph.D. from MIT and taught for years at the highly regarded University of Rochester econ department. And then there are five Nobel Laureates–Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Vernon Smith.

After his snipe at “GOP apparatchiks now residing in the right-wing think tank world,” Chait says “(my favorite is “economist” George Schultz of the Hoover Institution).” OK, let’s think about that. First, it’s Shultz, not Schultz. And just who is this “GOP apparatchik George Schultz”? Well, Chait probably thinks that seven successful years as Secretary of State doesn’t qualify you as an expert on taxes and international trade. Maybe not. But Shultz also has a Ph.D. from MIT. And he taught economics for 20 years at MIT and the University of Chicago. He then served as director of OMB and Secretary of the Treasury. Qualified to comment on U.S. economic policy? I’d say so.

But if you insist on academic credentials–and 20 years at MIT and Chicago in the past doesn’t count–that still leaves you five Nobel laureates. And lots more economists of substantial accomplishment and reputation, including some who just might get a Nobel Prize one of these days, people like Robert Barro, Mike Jensen, John Taylor, Michael Boskin, Martin Feldstein, Anne Krueger, Glenn Hubbard, Burton Malkiel, Kevin Murphy, and Cato’s own Bill Niskanen. The fact is, I’ve seen a lot of petitions from economists, and this one is more top-heavy with academic credentials than most.   

It’s intriguing to note that the statement does not endorse McCain’s economic proposals, it just criticizes Obama’s. Perhaps they couldn’t get five Nobel laureates and the other accomplished economists on the list to do that.

At the top of today’s front page, the Washington Post joins other Big Media in dancing on the grave of capitalism and smaller government. And compared with such past headlines as “A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets” or “Crisis Turns Free Marketeers into Regulators,” the Post goes all the way: “The End of American Capitalism?” It does have a question mark.

But what is the Post‘s evidence that “American-style capitalism” is a casualty of the financial crisis? Well, for one, “The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks.” I’m not sure that an administration that has given us nationalized schools, expanded entitlements, burdensome Sarbanes-Oxley securities regulations (how’d those work out, by the way?), nation-building around the world, and a trillion-dollar increase in federal spending is exactly an example of free-marketers finally giving in to the lure of big government.

But it’s not just American politicians, the Post tells us, who have lost faith in capitalism. “European leaders . . . are calling for broad new international codes to impose scrutiny on global finance.” So the people who run the U.S. government and the people who run European governments are united in seeking more power for governments.

But wait, there’s more. “To some degree, those calls are even being echoed by the International Monetary Fund.” So even an intergovernmental organization devoted to forced wealth transfers also wants more power for governments.

Also Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz: “We told them if you wanted to be like us, here’s what you have to do — hand over power to the market. The point now is that no one has respect for that kind of model anymore given this crisis.” So the most left-leaning Nobel laureate thinks our policies should move to the left. But if reporter Anthony Faiola had interviewed such recent laureates as Vernon Smith, Ed Prescott, Robert Mundell, Gary Becker, Myron Scholes, Douglass North, or James Buchanan, he might have gotten a different answer.

There’s no question that the global financial crisis is causing people to question how well capitalism works. But we’re still not in any Great Depression. And the evidence in this article is almost entirely that governments are — as usual — taking advantage of a crisis to expand their scope and power.

Of course, if this crisis leads us to question “American-style capitalism” — the kind in which a central monetary authority manipulates money and credit, the central government taxes and redistributes $3 trillion a year, huge government-sponsored enterprises create a taxpayer-backed duopoly in the mortgage business, tax laws encourage excessive use of debt financing, and government pressures banks to make bad loans — well, it might be a good thing to reconsider that “American-style capitalism.”

But I couldn’t help thinking of him when I read this Washington Post headline:

Ex-Sailor Guilty of Pretending to Be an Admiral
Delaware Man Gave Speech to Vietnamese American Group in Va.

And I was transported back to 1987, when Biden withdrew from the presidential race after appropriating the details of British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock’s life in his speeches, falsely claiming to have three college degrees, and boasting of a much higher rank in his law school class than he actually achieved.

I remembered a purported “Joe Biden resume” that circulated widely back in 1987. Being from prehistoric days, alas, it’s not on the World Wide Web, so I have to recall it from memory. But as I recall, in standard resume fashion it recounted Biden’s achievements in life: NCAA basketball championship, Heisman Trophy, top of his law school class, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Nobel Prize in physics, Pulitzer Price for literature, Oscar, chief justice of the United States, and so on.

Of course, if he actually had all those accomplishments, Sarah Palin would dismiss him as an elitist.

In his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama stirringly declared that all people are connected: “It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper — that makes this country work.” And in his appearance at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, he said, “America’s greatest moral failing in my lifetime has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept of Matthew — whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.”

And some conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh suggested that it was hypocritical of Obama to declare his belief that each of us is “my brother’s keeper” while his own half-brother lives at subsistence level in Kenya. Shouldn’t being your brother’s keeper start with, you know, your brother?

But maybe that’s unfair. This particular half-brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama, is 20 years younger than Barack Obama, and they’ve met only twice. Why should he be responsible for his half-brother’s welfare?

But then I noticed something else. Barack and Michelle Obama gave almost nothing to charity until their income skyrocketed after his election to the Senate in 2004. Between 2000 and 2004, for instance, they made about $1,218,000 and gave $10,770 to charity, a bit less than 0.9 percent. In 2005 and 2006, Obama earned much more from his books, and his wife’s salary at the University of Chicago doubled. In those two years they made more than $2.6 million and gave just over 5 percent to charity.

And then Joe Biden released his tax returns. And as the TaxProfBlog says, “the returns show that the Bidens have been amazingly tight-fisted when it comes to their charitable giving.  Despite income ranging from $210,432 – $321,379 over the ten-year period, the Bidens have given only $120 – $995 per year to charity, which amounts to 0.06% – 0.31% of their income.” The average American in that income category gives far more.

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