David Boaz

Voters in a New Mexico county appear to have approved a tax increase to build the nation’s first commercial spaceport. Two other counties will also hold tax referendums before the project can proceed. British billionaire Richard Branson and his company Virgin Galactic have signed a long-term lease to use the spaceport.

But why should the taxpayers of rural New Mexico be paying for facilities for billionaire space entrepreneurs If the spaceport is going to be profitable, then businesses could pay for it. And even if it weren’t profitable, the space business has attracted the attention of a lot of people with a sense of adventure and billions of dollars, from Branson to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, the seventh richest man in America.

The argument to spend tax dollars on the spaceport is very similar to the argument for tax-funded stadiums and convention centers. Proponents say it will bring jobs and tax revenues to the three rural counties. But apparently it isn’t a sure enough thing for businesses to invest their own money.

Cato scholars have argued for years against corporate welfare. The spaceport is a classic example of corporate welfare, though in this case it might better be called billionaire welfare. It will transfer money from middle-class and working people to subsidize businesses and billionaires who won’t have to invest their own money — just like the typical stadium deal, paid for by average taxpayers to benefit millionaire players and billionaire owners.

At least in this case the voters get to decide, which rarely happens with stadium subsidies. The vote pitted “political, business and education leaders” against retirees and groups representing the poor.

“I’m not opposed to the spaceport, but I think it’s a terrible idea to tax poor people to pay for something that will be used by the rich,” said Oscar Vasquez Butler, a county commissioner who represents many of the unincorporated rural colonias where the poorest New Mexicans live, often without proper roads and water and sewage systems. “They tell us the spaceport will bring jobs to our people, but it all sounds very risky. The only thing we know for sure is that people will pay more taxes.”

More than a week after Senator John Edwards’s decision to remain in the presidential race despite the recurrence of his wife Elizabeth’s cancer, pundits are starting to sharply criticize the decision. They say that he is consumed by ambition and that his priorities are out of whack. They say that he should be spending time with his wife and especially with his two small children.

I had a similar reaction: these two children need their parents with them now more than ever. They may lose their mother soon. And if their father spends two years campaigning, they won’t see much of him. If his campaign is successful, they won’t spend time much time with him for the rest of their childhood.

But who am I to judge the intimate family decisions of John and Elizabeth Edwards I can’t possibly know as much about their values and goals as they do.

If John and Elizabeth Edwards have spent the past ten—or fifteen—or twenty years working toward the White House, it may well be their very considered decision that that effort should continue. In particular, it may be that the one thing Elizabeth Edwards wants most in her life is to see her husband in the White House. Assuming that Elizabeth Edwards genuinely believes that John would be a good president (I don’t, but I’m not making the decision), then she may very well have decided that what he can do for the country is more important than what he can do for his children. As Rick said to Ilsa in Casablanca, “it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

So pundits would do well to assume that no one knows the trade-offs involved in the Edwardses’ decision better than the Edwardses. In this case, as in so many others, it makes sense to let the people most closely involved in the decision make that decision.

But here’s the irony. John Edwards doesn’t believe that families should be allowed to make the important decisions about their lives. He doesn’t think families should be allowed to decide where their children will go to school. He doesn’t think families should be allowed to decide how or whether to save for retirement. He doesn’t think families should be allowed to decide what drugs to use, either pharmaceutically or recreationally. He supports a national health care system that would deny families the right to choose their own doctor.

In this presidential year, it would be good for Americans to reaffirm our commitment to the principle that families—not pundits and not government—should make the important decisions about their lives.

Someone, most likely an aging baby boomer with sticky fingers, has been lifting CDs from the music library at the Voice of America, which uses them for its radio shows. Looks like an inside job. The library is open only to employees. The M.O. is that the person goes into the stacks and takes the CD but leaves the plastic case.

The thefts were noticed recently when someone tried to check out a Judy Collins disc but found only an empty case. In fact, the entire Collins collection is gone. A check of other collections showed that Peter, Paul & Mary and Bob Dylan recordings were also missing.

–Washington Post, April 2

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance compared voter turnout in national elections from 1945 to 1998 in 140 countries. Italy ranked first, with 92 percent, and the United States was 139th, with an average turnout of 48 percent.

–Bill Bradley in the Washington Post

In an article on a pleasant suburban community near Washington, Roxanne Sweeney says, “It’s like ‘Leave It to Beaver,’” praising the neighborhood’s friendliness and strong community ties. Later, reporter Rebecca Kahlenberg writes,

Recently, a group of River Falls mothers used the e-mail group to coordinate food preparation for Roxanne Sweeney when she wasn’t feeling well following treatment for colon cancer.

“I can’t even count how many meals were brought to me,” Sweeney said. “I hate this line because I’m not a Democrat, but this is really an it-takes-a-village sort of place.”

No, Ms. Sweeney! Friendship and community were not invented by Hillary Clinton. As the reference to “Leave It to Beaver” suggests, such ties go back long before Senator Clinton put her name on the book “It Takes a Village.” And long before “Leave It to Beaver.” Family, parish, and village are natural connections that predate not just Clinton but government and even formal social organization. They are the first building blocks of civil society. Clinton’s contribution to the topic is to confuse the natural ties of love and neighborliness with the artificial and imposed order of a vast and distant federal government.

As I wrote in a recent article and in Libertarianism: A Primer, Hillary calls for a national consensus and a common vision of what the government should do for families. But there can be no such common consensus in a pluralistic society. People don’t agree about all the values involved in rearing children, helping others, worshiping God, and forming associations. That’s why a successful society leaves such choices to individuals. Even in the little community of River Falls, it isn’t a formal community organization that came to Roxanne Sweeney’s aid. It was her friends.

At so many points in our lives, it takes friends, it takes a village, but it doesn’t take the federal government.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Times economics columnist David Leonhardt reviews Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty.

It might have made sense to get a libertarian, or someone familiar with the libertarian movement, or a political historian to write the review. Instead, the Times turned to someone who knows something about economics. Since the Times is the most important book review venue in the country, it’s worth taking a close look at Leonhardt’s complaints.

The first half of the review retells the story of Ayn Rand and the Objectivists, which is fine. It’s an interesting story, though it’s probably the part of the book most likely to be already familiar to Times readers. After the Randian opening, Leonhardt writes:

The story of the American libertarian movement, like the story of its most famous salon, has been a combination of small numbers and big influence. It has never really emerged from the fringe, for the simple reason that most Americans want their government to educate the young and care for the old. But over the last few decades, they have also grown increasingly skeptical of collectivist policies that go beyond the basics. Libertarian thinkers — Rand, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and others — have helped foment this skepticism and then enthusiastically pointed to the alternative.

Fair enough. Most movements are small, even those that have big effects. “Fringe” is a subjective issue; if a movement produces several Nobel laureates and a chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and plays a role in such policy reforms as the end of the draft, deregulation, sharply reduced taxes, and freer trade, is it still on the fringe

(more…)

On Tuesday, it was Nebraska senators Chuck Hagel (R) and Ben Nelson (D) who provided the winning margin for a Senate bill to begin a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Today it’s five-term congressman Lee Terry (R-Neb.) deciding that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should resign.

Pretty soon, the neocons are going to be calling for an invasion of Nebraska.

Several years ago, I appeared on the radio show of the late and much-missed David Brudnoy to discuss deregulation of taxicabs. I advocated a free market and an end to licensing and medallions. We got a call from a spokesman for the taxicab industry, who was outraged. Public safety! he exclaimed. “Without licensing, you could have some crazy person driving a cab and have an accident and you could have a mudda an’ a dotta killed! Do you want to be responsible for that !”

I remembered that call when I saw the letter in the Washington Post from Michael C. Alin, executive director of the American Society of Interior Designers. Responding to George Will’s column on the absurdity of licensing for interior decorators, Alin writes:

In one of the worst hotel fires in U.S. history, 85 lives were lost and more than 700 people were injured at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in November 1980, partly because some of the materials in the interior finish and furnishing fueled a rapid spreading of the fire. If furniture is placed in such a manner that it impedes egress during an emergency, people will die. Should a nonqualified, non-educated person select the materials for the interior of a hospital, school or high-rise building

Will had blithely and insensitively mocked the idea of criminal penalties for impersonating an interior designer:

In Las Vegas, where almost nothing is illegal, it is illegal — unless you are licensed, or employed by someone licensed — to move, in the role of an interior designer, any piece of furniture, such as an armoire, that is more than 69 inches tall. A Nevada bureaucrat says that “placement of furniture” is an aspect of “space planning” and therefore is regulated — restricted to a “registered interior designer.”

Placing furniture without a license Heaven forfend.

I hope that Will is suitably chastened now that he understands the real risks of letting just anyone pick out wallpaper and position furniture.

I was surprised to see left-Democratic lawyers Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt casually acknowledge in a Washington Post op-ed that “Lyndon Johnson won a 1948 Senate race after his partisans famously ‘found’ a box of votes well after the election.” Johnson’s “miracle of Box 13″ has been discussed for years, but I didn’t expect to see Democrats at the Brennan Center casually accept it.

It certainly makes you think about LBJ’s huge influence on American politics. The Great Society was the biggest expansion of the state since the New Deal, and no one, including Ronald Reagan, has made a dent in it since.

Johnson apparently won election to the Senate through fraud, and there’s pretty good evidence that he also became vice president in a fraudulent election. (Not to mention the argument that Kennedy-Johnson didn’t even win the popular vote, since he shouldn’t be credited with Alabama’s votes for unpledged Democratic electors who did not vote for the Democratic ticket.) Would America be a very different place if Lyndon Johnson had not won one of those controversial elections

It seems ironic that Waldman and Levitt’s reference to a monumentally important stolen election comes in a parenthetical aside in an article titled “The Myth of Voter Fraud.”

Twenty-seven years after his election as president, journalists still like to take a poke at Ronald Reagan whenever they get the chance. A Washington Post story today on lawyer-actor-senator Fred Thompson’s possible presidential candidacy notes that equal time rules could require TV stations to take “Law and Order” off the air during if Thompson becomes a candidate and then says

In the 1970s and 1980s, stations dropped “Bedtime for Bonzo” and other Reagan movies during his campaigns for governor of California and for president.

Yes, no doubt they did drop Reagan’s most amusingly titled movie. But they presumably also dropped such movies as Dark Victory, Brother Rat, Knute Rockne All American, The Hasty Heart, and Kings Row. But those just don’t sound as goofy.

I wonder how many liberal journalists have ever watched Bedtime for Bonzo. It’s actually quite funny to see Reagan as a young liberal college professor trying to prove the “nurture” side of the nature-vs.-nurture and saying that there are no bad kids, just bad environments.