David Boaz

A law that would prevent fast-food restaurants from opening in South Los Angeles neighborhoods was unanimously approved by the LA City Council on Tuesday.

Paternalist? You bet. Violation of equal protection? It would seem so. The City Council trusts white people, but not the blacks and Latinos who live in South Los Angeles, to make their own food decisions? Ouch.

But I was particularly struck by this statement from Councilwoman Jan Perry, sponsor of the measure: “I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options.”

Greater food options? All the council is doing is banning some restaurants. How will that give residents more options? Maybe — maybe — other restaurants will open in South Los Angeles because fewer fast food restaurants will open over the coming year. But residents will still not have “greater food options,” just different options, courtesy of those who know best.

Thomas Sowell wrote in Knowledge and Decisions of the “surprising . . . persistence and scope of the belief that people can be made better off by reducing their options.” Twenty-eight years later, the belief persists. But now people who reduce other people’s options claim they are increasing options. That’s progress, of a sort.

The citizens of South Los Angeles should rebel against the unchosen nannies who think that they can run adults’ lives better than those adults can run their own lives.

Kudos to the Adam Smith Institute of London, which has succeeded in remarkably short order in commissioning, funding, and erecting a statue of Adam Smith “on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile – right in the heart of Scotland’s capital city, where Adam Smith worked and died.” Appropriately enough, the statue stands on the site of an ancient marketplace.

Adam Smith’s importance as a founder of modern liberal society can hardly be overestimated. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1952,

The ideas that found their classical expression in the two books of Adam Smith demolished the traditional philosophy of mercantilism and opened the way for capitalist mass production for the needs of the masses. Under capitalism the common man is the much-talked-about customer who “is always right.” His buying makes efficient entrepreneurs rich, and his abstention from buying forces inefficient entrepreneurs to go out of business.

Smith’s wisdom might be especially useful in this election season when Republicans and Democrats compete to spend more taxpayer dollars:

“[Governments are] … without exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.”

“Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct…. Those unproductive hands … may consume so great a share of their whole revenue … that all the frugality and good conduct of individuals may not be able to compensate the waste and degradation of produce occasioned by this violent and forced encroachment.”

For a lively and readable introduction to Adam Smith, read P. J. O’Rourke’s On the Wealth of Nations or watch him discuss the book here.

The world’s worst central banker, Gideon Gono of Zimbabwe, gets a hearty chuckle out of the hyperinflation that has destroyed his country’s economy:

Of all the world’s central bankers, Zimbabwe’s gets the biggest — or at least the longest — salary. Mr. Gono won’t say how much he earns exactly as head of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe but does claim to have “more digits” on his pay slip that any of his peers. He earns trillions of Zimbabwe dollars. It now takes more than 16 billion of these to buy a single U.S. dollar. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke earns only six figures, $191,300.

Ha, ha. Maybe he should be more direct and simply take credit for producing the world’s highest inflation. That’s something to be remembered for.

Missouri politicians are trying to block the purchase of St. Louis beer maker Anheuser-Busch by the Belgian brewer InBev. Sen. Christopher Bond, a senior member of the party of free enterprise, has written to both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, asking them to examine the merger for any possible antitrust problems.  Sen. Claire McCaskill said she would “do everything I could to stop this sale from going through” because “we do not have a ‘For Sale’ sign on our front lawn in America.”

Of course, nobody’s proposing to sell America. The question on the table is whether the people who have invested their money in Anheuser-Busch will choose to sell their shares at the handsome price offered by InBev. And that really should be their decision, not the business of Bond or McCaskill.

What really is the concern here? That beer prices might rise? Surely that’s something that could be left to a robustly competitive marketplace with lots of new entrants. Or that some people in St. Louis might lose their jobs? That’s understandably a concern for Missouri’s senators, but there’s constant job churn in a dynamic market — between 1993 and 2002 in the American economy, 327.7 million jobs were added, while 309.9 million jobs were lost — and there’s no good reason for senators to thrust a monkey wrench in a few high-profile cases. At least no good economic reason.

Maybe the real concern is that an “iconic” American brand will be owned by foreigners. Anheuser-Busch is indeed a classic piece of Americana, a company founded by German immigrants in a city founded by Frenchmen and named for the French king. And now, in an increasingly globalized world, it might be owned by a Belgian company that has been controlled by Brazilians since a 2005 merger. This sort of globalization is increasingly common. As Robert Reich said as far back as 1991, “It’s very hard to separate out any longer who is us and who is them. If you want to buy an American-made car today, you have a better chance buying an American-made car if you buy a Honda than if you buy a Pontiac LeMans, most of which is produced outside of the United States. People forget or they don’t understand the extent to which globalization has taken over these corporations  — foreigners coming here, we’re going there. Chrysler owns a big chunk of Mitsubishi, Ford owns 25 percent of Mazda.”

Have a cold Bud and chill out, senators.

The New Yorker reviews Beijing Coma, a novel by Ma Jian, a Chinese exile who was at the Tiananmen protests in 1989. Reviewer Pankaj Mishra says that, like Milan Kundera, Ma knows that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” He wants to make sure that the Chinese don’t forget the Tiananmen protesters and what they were protesting. Even before 1989, Ma Jian had been denounced as an example of ”bourgeois liberalism” and “spiritual pollution.”

I was particularly struck by a couple of lines in the review:

Reciting Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to a fellow-writer, he mocked Ginsberg’s angry rejection of America. “He implies his country is not fit for humans to live in. Well, he should live in China for a month, then see what he thinks. Everyone here dreams of the day we can sing out of our windows in despair.”

In his memoir, Red Dust, published in 2002, Ma described his travels through China in the mid-1980s, in the midst of Deng Xiao-ping’s economic liberalization and before the Tiananmen crisis:

Ma Jian not only seems to have relished his own improvised life; he also appears to have embraced some of his country’s entrepreneurial exuberance. In one of the book’s many bracingly unexpected scenes, he finds himself exhorting the residents of an isolated village, “This country is changing, opening up. You can’t just stay here like vegetables. You should travel, broaden your minds. Haven’t you heard about Shenzhen Economic Zone?”

Ma Jian says his next book will be about China’s inhuman family-planning policy. It’s no wonder that his books are banned in China; if only American writers understood the liberating potential of economic freedom and the comforts of life in capitalist society as well as writers who lived under the alternative.

According to the Washington Post, Barack and Michelle Obama

wanted to step up from their $415,000 condo. They chose a house with six bedrooms, four fireplaces, a four-car garage and 5 1/2 baths, including a double steam shower and a marble powder room. It had a wine cellar, a music room, a library, a solarium, beveled glass doors and a granite-floored kitchen.

It sounds — and looks – like a home fit for a Roosevelt. Of course, the old-money Roosevelts had their homes, so they didn’t have to go through the costly and distasteful process of taking out a mortgage to buy them. Fortunately for the Obamas, the Chicago-based Northern Trust made the process a lot less costly than it might have been for other people. (See also a comment here from Clio1, who claims to know that the deal was even better than the Post suggested.)

I’ve just been reading Bill Kauffman’s fine book Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism (see him talk about it here), and I ran across this quotation from Bill Clinton in 1997:

It’s hard when you’re not threatened by a foreign enemy to whip people up to a fever pitch of common, intense, sustained, disciplined endeavor.

Indeed it is. Outside of wartime it is difficult, even impossible, to rally millions of free citizens around a common aim. When you’re not threatened by war or occupation, people have their own endeavors, their own purposes, their own “pursuits of industry and improvement,” as Jefferson put it, to worry about. That’s why collectivists and statists are always trying to gin up war fever in metaphorical wars like the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the Energy Crisis.

And as I wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, this martial spirit remains a temptation to our current candidates. Barack Obama told Wesleyan graduates that “our individual salvation depends on collective salvation.” John McCain calls on us to serve “a national purpose that is greater than our individual interests,” preferably by doing calisthenics in uniform in front of city hall. Politicians like that, as Michelle Obama, “will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual.”

The Washington Post has a front-page story on how Barack Obama is playing in the heartland of America, Findlay, Ohio. Not so good, judging by the lengthy interviews with good solid middle-Americans who believe things like this:

“I think Obama would be a disaster, and there’s a lot of reasons,” said Pollard, explaining the rumors he had heard about the candidate from friends he goes camping with. “I understand he’s from Africa, and that the first thing he’s going to do if he gets into office is bring his family over here, illegally. He’s got that racist [pastor] who practically raised him, and then there’s the Muslim thing. He’s just not presidential material, if you ask me.”

There’s plenty more in the story. Which is why Obama is now running his famous television ad, titled “Country I Love.” And judging by the Post story, the ad is working very well with those who see it, at least those who are sympathetic to Obama in the first place. Reporter Eli Saslow writes:

The new advertisement running in Findlay, in which Obama is pictured with his white mother and white grandparents as he talks about developing a “deep and abiding faith in the country I love” while growing up in the Kansas heartland…

But of course Obama didn’t grow up in Kansas. He was born in Hawaii and grew up there and in Indonesia. And the ad doesn’t claim that he did. In the ad Obama says:

I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents….They taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up.

Talk about a guy who isn’t well known yet, on whom everybody can project both good and bad images. People all over America are hearing on the internet or at the beauty salon that he’s a Muslim born in Africa, and a Washington Post reporter somehow thinks he grew up in Kansas.

Today I saw a John Edwards bumper sticker — the first one I can really recall — on a beautiful Audi convertible parked in a luxury development in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C. Just an idle question: Do you think it’s more likely that this John Edwards supporter is part of Edwards’s much touted constituency of mill workers and “regular, hard-working Americans” or of Edwards’s real constituency of trial lawyers and lobbyists?

Sen. John McCain issued a ringing endorsement of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision:

Today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right – sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.

You can’t get much stronger than that. Except . . .  wait . . . what was it McCain said about our sacred right to free speech? Oh, right, two years ago on the Don Imus show he said, “I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt.” So when McCain says that our Second Amendment rights are just as fundamental and sacred as our First Amendment rights, maybe he’s pulling a bait-and-switch. Because he’s thoroughly indifferent to the First Amendment.

In his statement on the Heller decision McCain went on to say, “This ruling does not mark the end of our struggle against those who seek to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens. We must always remain vigilant in defense of our freedoms.”

So true.