David Boaz

A Southern California law firm . . . claimed that Noland’s on the Wharf [in Santa Cruz] was violating a trademark by printing the words “Surf City USA” on a $17 T-shirt. The rights to that combination of words belong to the Huntington Beach Conference & Visitors Bureau, the letter said…. Huntington Beach, with its warm weather, sandy beaches and steady waves, has long argued that the Surf City title is its exclusive property, granted to it by the 1963 Jan & Dean song hit “Surf City.”

Jan and Dean may have been surfer royalty, but who knew they had the power to grant patents and monopolies You never know what you’ll learn in the Wall Street Journal.

Jacob Grier, the blogger-barista-magician with a highly coveted Vanderbilt degree, has been writing about Montgomery County’s plans to evict Barry’s Magic Shop from the site in Wheaton, Md., where it has survived for 31 years. As he wrote last June:

The real story is that simply because a few county planners have decided that the land could be better used to attract developers than as a magic store, the man who owns the building has had his property forcibly taken from him and a small business that has thrived for decades is being evicted years before its lease is up.

The county used eminent domain to take the building in order to build a walkway as part of a grand plan for Wheaton. The plan has been in the works for years, and there are no immediate plans for actually building the walkway, but the building has been seized.

But today there’s good news! For Barry’s and its customers, anyway, if not for Maryland taxpayers and property owners. In addition to spending over $2 million to take the building and build the walkway, taxpayers — in the person of Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett — are also going to spend $260,000 to relocate the magic shop.

So first the county spends taxpayers’ money to seize private property in the name of its own vision of what that corner of Wheaton should look like. Then it spends more taxpayers’ money to subsidize a small business.

Here’s an idea: Why not let the market decide where businesses locate, without subsidizing the businesses and without seizing their property As Jacob says,

This is a story that should make people angry. Angry that George Chaconas had his land taken from him. Angry that Barry Taylor and Suzie Kang are being evicted years before their lease is up. Angry that this is all being done with taxpayers’ money to subsidize the developers who will eventually move into the area, just because some guy named Joseph Davis thinks that’s the way things ought to be.

Montgomery County, Maryland: Where everything goes according to plan. Or else.

No, probably not. He called himself a socialist. But his satires of war and government often sounded libertarian themes. One libertarian argues that his 1952 novel Player Piano, though usually understood as a critique of technology and automation, can also be seen as a prescient criticism of “neocon America,” in which “the centralization of corporate/government power over the economy and security forces is a legacy of the last war, which was largely responsible for putting engineers and managers in charge of a command economy.”

And he did write one of the great libertarian short stories, “Harrison Bergeron,” the story of a world in which the U.S. Handicapper General gives everyone “handicaps” in order to make us all equal–masks for the beautiful, weights for the strong or fast, buzzers in the brains of the smart. The tagline of the 1995 Showtime movie starring Sean Astin and Christopher Plummer was “All men are not created equal. It is the purpose of the Government to make them so.”

Socialist or not, we could use more satirists and fewer red team/blue team party-liners. We will miss Kurt Vonnegut.

Bertelsmann AG of Germany has agreed to buy out Time Inc.’s interest in Bookspan, their book-club joint venture that includes Book-of-the-Month Club, American Compass, and other clubs. The Wall Street Journal reports that

The deal, announced today, would leave Bertelsmann as the only major operator of book, music and DVD clubs in the U.S.

Uh-oh! Sounds like a monopoly. Should we call the FTC Launch a congressional hearing No–first because nothing has actually changed; the joint venture was apparently already the only operator of such clubs. The only difference is that Bookspan is now solely owned by Bertelsmann.

But if two sets of book clubs had merged, then we might be hearing the same sorts of calls for antitrust investigation that we heard in regard to the proposed merger of the XM and Sirius satellite radio networks. And the argument would be just as ridiculous. A monopoly book club would not control book consumers; it would still compete with Amazon and Laissez Faire Books and other services for mail-order book consumers; and also with actual bookstores for book consumers generally; and with magazines and newspapers for readers; and with movies, television, radio, and iPods for the time and attention of consumers. Just like–as the Journal said a week or so ago–”a combined Sirius-XM would have to compete not only with free broadcast radio but also with MP3 players, online radio and even music channels offered by cable providers.”

Sure, an hour a year ought to be plenty.

One of the changes that House Democrats pushed through at the start of the new Congress is a requirement that all members and staffers get annual ethics training. And for those of you who are lucky enough to be working this week, you can start your training Wednesday, according to a recent memo from the House ethics committee.

Under House rules, all lawmakers and staff must receive one hour of ethics training a year. And House officers and senior aides, as well as those lucky staffers designated “principal assistants,” will have to get an additional hour of training.

Each office and committee must name an “ethics certification officer” by the end of this month, and that person will make sure the rest of you receive the training.

When you can’t trust people to be responsible, and you’re unwilling or unable to monitor irresponsibility and unethical behavior within your normal systems, you end up creating layers of regulation, red tape, and bureaucracy — like annual training and official “ethics certification officers.” And then you call them “ethics certification officers” instead of actual ethics officers, because the goal is to certify that you’ve completed ethics training, not to actually ensure ethical behavior.

Newt Gingrich, who continues to vigorously — though unofficially, so he can do it with million-dollar donations — campaign for president, appeared in Washington yesterday at what was billed as a debate with John Kerry on global warming. Some conservatives, disillusioned by the prospect of choosing among Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, have looked to Gingrich as an actually Reaganite candidate. He should have dispelled those thoughts yesterday.

Instead of disagreeing with Kerry, Gingrich said that global warming is a problem and that “we should address it very actively.” He raved about Kerry’s book on the environment. He refused even to disagree with Kerry over the urgency of government action. Perhaps most un-Reaganesquely, he declared that while he preferred tax incentives to government mandates, “I am not automatically saying that coercion and bureaucracy is not an answer.”

There’s a Republican mantra for the new century.

Back during a blogosphere brouhaha about “libertarian Democrats,” Jesse Walker of Reason offered this advice to Democratic candidates who wanted to attract libertarian votes:

The short answer — and this applies to Republican candidates too — is: (a) Don’t be as bad as the other guy, and (b) Be actively good on at least one important issue.

He went on to urge Democrats to “Be good on the issues where the left is supposed to be good.” Like, you know, peace and civil liberties. And the problem for libertarians who are tired of being yoked to an increasingly less libertarian Republican party is that the Democrats aren’t following this advice. Not only have they seized on their narrow 2006 victory to start pushing for national health insurance, more regulation, public housing, and a budget that implicitly requires a massive tax increase, they have dithered about the war in Iraq and completely ignored real civil liberties reforms. Democrats are far more concerned about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys than about the authority the president claims to arrest American citizens and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge.

Now two leading lefty pundits have called the Democrats out on these issues. Arianna Huffington wants to know when the Democratic presidential candidates are going to say something about the war on drugs. She’s embarrassed to have to admit that a conservative Republican senator from Alabama, Jeff Sessions, thinks the penalties for crack cocaine use are excessive, while liberal Democrats look the other way.

And John Nichols of the Nation thinks Democratic candidates ought to be able to endorse a package of constitutional reforms being supported by the chairman of the American Conservative Union. The American Freedom Agenda, endorsed by several prominent conservatives, envisions such reforms as

• Restore habeas corpus to prevent the illegal imprisonment of American citizens;
• Prohibit torture and extraordinary rendition;
• Prohibit unconstitutional wiretaps, email and mail openings via warrantless searches.

Nichols thinks Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards don’t endorse such goals because they’re cautious politicians. Maybe. Or maybe it’s because they want to be president, and they want to exercise just as much power as President Bush exercises.

So far it’s hard to find the issue(s) on which Democrats are “actively good.” Maybe their 2008 strategy for attracting moderates, centrists, and libertarian-leaning voters is to hope the Republicans keep on spending, centralizing, preaching, incarcerating, and struggling in Iraq.

In the Democratic party’s weekly radio response to President Bush, Democratic National Chair Howard Dean said, “It’s time for the President to show respect to the American people, who voted overwhelmingly to leave Iraq.”

One can support withdrawal from the floundering war with Iraq without getting carried away. The Democrats indeed took control of Congress in the last election, but the results were hardly overwhelming, nor is it clear that the vote was primarily about Iraq. In the House elections, Democrats carried the total popular vote by almost 5 million, or 52.0 to 45.6 percent. In the previous election, the Republicans had a margin of almost 3 million, but then about 37 million more people voted that year, so to some extent the shift in 2006 was a result of more Republicans than Democrats staying home.

As for Iraq, Democrats did best in 2006 among voters who said Iraq was “extremely important” or “not at all important” to them. A Democratic polling firm found that Iraq was the most important issue in the election, especially among people who voted for Democrats, though it was still only cited as most important by 37 percent. And in the exit polls corruption, terrorism, and the economy were all named as “extremely important” by slightly larger numbers of voters than Iraq.

Republican over-spending, corruption, the religious right, health care, perceptions of a weak economy, immigration, Iraq – lots of issues pushed voters toward the Democrats in 2006. We should be careful not to over-interpret the results of any election, as elections inevitably involve many factors. In any case, a swing of 3 or 4 percent toward the Democrats in a low-turnout election is hardly evidence of any “overwhelming” vote, much less an overwhelming referendum on any issue.

At last — a big story about people deciding to work together to solve a widespread individual problem without asking for taxes, regulations, subsidies, or general pestering from the government.

Spearheaded by Ian Smith, a doctor and fitness guru, the 50 Million Pound Challenge is a national campaign underwritten by State Farm Insurance Co. to improve the health of African Americans.

Heart disease and diabetes are among the leading causes of death for African Americans. If that is to change, public health experts say, people must exercise more and eat better, which is easier said than done, given the dearth of high-quality supermarkets and restaurants in poorer black communities.

With the 50 Million Pound Challenge, organizers hope to rally African Americans to trim waistlines by keeping tabs on their blood pressure, cholesterol levels and body mass index and by trimming some of the fat out of their diets.

Leave aside the reporter’s irresistible temptation to suggest that the lack of high-quality restaurants in poor neighborhoods is why many poor African Americans are overweight. I was in a high-quality restaurant last night, and it wasn’t easy to watch my diet there. (Besides, poor people presumably can’t afford expensive restaurants, even if they are in the neighborhood.)

The point is, most stories about obesity these days throw around misnomers like “public health” and call for government programs and restrictions on our freedom. In this case a doctor, an insurance company, and some popular entertainers got together to encourage individual people to improve their own health. Let’s hear it for the 50 Million Pound Challenge!

Of what other group can it be said that you really can’t trust anything they say Sure, Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” But she didn’t say that about writers as a group.

Mitt Romney’s newfound deep commitment to social conservatism has drawn lots of skepticism. But now he’s rewriting his life story in the fashion of lifelong Yankees fan Hillary Clinton and coal miners’ boy Joe Biden:

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) is taking some heat for not packing it.

Campaigning in New Hampshire this week, the candidate for the Republican presidential nomination told an audience that he is a “lifelong hunter,” according to the Associated Press. “I’ve been a hunter pretty much all my life,” the news service reported.

But the campaign now acknowledges that the former governor has been hunting twice in his life — once when he was young and lived on a ranch in Idaho, and more recently on a quail-hunting trip in Georgia with GOP donors.

Politicians — you gotta love ‘em.