David Boaz

Over at the Guardian blog I offer some thoughts about presidential “signing statements,” with this challenge to conservative defenders of the administration:

When the Bush administration claims some power and promises to use it wisely, conservatives should ask themselves: would you want Hillary Clinton to have this power?

We’ve all heard about how actor-director Rob Reiner sponsored an initiative in California in 1998 to raise cigarette taxes to fund preschool programs. Reiner then became chairman of the state agency created by the initiative. And then he funneled $230 million of state spending through the ad and PR agencies that had worked on the initiative. And then he spent another $23 million of state money to support Proposition 82 this spring, to create universal preschool programs. He had to resign from his position, and voters turned down Prop 82.

But he’s not the only person sponsoring an initative that would benefit himself, his family, or his friends. A wealthy real estate developer who thought stem cell research would benefit his diabetic son spent $3 million of his own money to get Californians to create a $3 billion taxpayer-funded stem cell research organization, which he then became chairman of.

And now comes Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems and former partner in the fabulously successful Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, and recently number 1 on Forbes magazine’s Midas list of “the people who most successfully use venture capital to create wealth for their investors.” He’s been the subject of two admiring profiles in the Washington Post (one reprinted from Slate) in the past two days for his latest venture: ethanol. If Vinod Khosla says ethanol is a good investment, don’t bet against him. Or against fellow Silicon Valley megamillionaire Bill Gross, who says that “reinventing energy . . . dwarfs any business opportunity in history.”

But if it’s such a good investment, why is Khosla “supporting an initiative on this fall’s ballot in California that would tax oil companies to generate $4 billion to help encourage the use of alternative energy,” as Slate writer Daniel Gross notes? Khosla told Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby that he wants just a little help from the federal government, too: “Khosla wants government to require auto companies to make more flex-fuel cars that run on gasoline or ethanol. . . .  Khosla wants government to require big gasoline distributors to install ethanol pumps at a tenth of their gas stations.” Oh, and a better subsidy.

Taxing your competitors to subsidize your industry is a rent-seeker’s dream. Usually you have to be more subtle about it. But if you have a “green” business idea, you can get liberal journalists to write gushing stories about you without even stopping to ask, “Hey, aren’t you going to benefit from these initiatives and laws you’re pushing? Isn’t that sort of like, you know, corporate welfare? Like we’re always accusing the oil industry of?”

We shouldn’t bet against Khosla. But if his latest investment is really such a great business opportunity, we should feel free to vote against subsidizing it.

By teaming up with the Democratic Leadership Council, is Hillary Clinton moving to the center in preparation for a presidential run? Or is the DLC moving left to get closer to the front-runner? Yesterday Senator Clinton released a DLC plan, the “American Dream Initiative,” a laundry list of government transfers and handouts.

The New York Times called the programs “modest” and “relatively small-scale.” Taxpayers might have a different view if they read the Washington Post, which noted that DLC president Bruce Reed estimated the cost of the programs at $500 billion over 10 years — and taxpayers have learned by now that government entitlement programs often cost far more than their advocates estimate in advance. (Remember when Medicaid was projected to cost $1 billion a year? Oops.) And the DLC promises to raise taxes to cover the costs.

There are millions of libertarian-leaning voters disgruntled with the Republicans’ social conservatism, soaring spending, and ill-fated war. And Democrats are doing everything they can to discourage those voters from switching parties.

In an online fundraising letter, President Bush (or someone authorized to sign his name) writes, “Republicans are also working to cut the deficit. The best way to reduce the deficit is to keep pro-growth economic policies in place, and be wise about how we spend your money — which is exactly what Republicans are doing in Washington.”

Just how high would spending be if the Republicans weren’t being wise about how they spend our money?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has launched www.medicalmatters.org, a medical website and blog, as a special project of his PAC. Maybe MedicalMatters should partner with YouTube and give readers a chance to send in home video of themselves so they could be diagnosed by Dr. Frist.

There were 15,000 divorces in Massachusetts last year. Guess which one made the front page of the Washington Times, above the fold, today. Well, none of them, actually. But the separation of Julie and Hillary Goodridge, plaintiffs in the landmark same-sex marriage case Goodridge v. Massachusetts, did. With a classic Washington Times headline:

“Gay ‘marriage’ first couple splits up in Massachusetts“

It’s not a real marriage, you see, no matter what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts says, so “marriage” has to be in ironic quotes.

But what’s the point of such a prominent display of this story? Is the (apparent) failure of one marriage, even that of a landmark plaintiff couple, supposed to undermine the case for legal equality? If Linda Brown had flunked out of high school, would that have undermined the moral authority of Brown v. Board of Education? If John Peter Zenger’s newspaper failed, would that undermine the case for freedom of the press?

Discussing the massive failures of the $14.6 billion Big Dig project in Boston, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney told reporters, “I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t always ask for federal money whenever I got the chance.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that “as gas prices again approach $3 a gallon, consumers are buying new vehicles that are faster and heavier than ever,” much to the annoyance of the EPA. Sometimes, no matter how much we hector and even tax and regulate them, the masses just persist in doing what they want to do in defiance of elite opinion. The story reminded me of several other stories that I wrote up recently at the Guardian blog:

A weekend article in the FT comes with this teaser: “A generation ago, Shin Dong-jin was trying to stop South Korean women from having babies. Now his planned parenthood foundation has the opposite problem–there aren’t enough babies being born. He must persuade the country to go forth and multiply.”

Apparently Shin Dong-jin is just the only person in South Korea who knows, at any given time, how many children people should have. But people make their own decisions.

The FT piece reminded me of some other recent articles about how stubborn people just won’t do what the planners want. A front-page headline in the Washington Post read: “Despite planners’ visions, outer suburbs lead in new hiring.” I was particularly struck by the lead:

As a consensus builds that the Washington region needs to concentrate job growth, there are signs that the exact opposite is happening.

Over the past five years, the number of new jobs in the region’s outer suburbs exceeded those created in the District and inner suburbs such as Fairfax and Montgomery counties … contradicting planners’ “smart growth” visions of communities where people live, work and play without having to drive long distances.

Maybe if tens – hundreds – of thousands of people aren’t abiding by the “consensus,” there is no consensus: there is just a bunch of government-funded planners attending conferences and deciding where people ought to live. It’s like, “Our community doesn’t want Wal-Mart.” Hey, if the community really doesn’t Wal-Mart, then a Wal-Mart store will fail. What that sentence means is: “Some organised interests in our community don’t want Wal-Mart here because we know our neighbours will shop there (and so will we).”

Similarly, another Post story reported that the Ford motor company has dropped a pledge to build 250,000 gas-electric hybrid cars per year by the end of the decade. Environmentalists accused the company of backpedalling: it seems not many people want to buy hybrid cars – even though the planners want them to.

Again and again, individuals insist on making their own decisions rather than conforming to planners’ visions and purported consensuses.

Christian Coalition co-founder Ralph Reed lost the Republican primary for lieutenant governor of Georgia yesterday by more than 12 points. After a career at the top of Republican politics — chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, Southeast Regional chairman of Bush-Cheney, one of Time’s 50 future leaders of America — it’s got to be galling to lose a Republican primary for a ceremonial job like lieutenant governor. Reed was tarred by his association with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He became a poster boy for the downward spiral of the Republican Party — the born-again activist with the choirboy face who helped transform the GOP into a religious party and then got caught taking millions of gambling dollars to lobby against rival gambling firms. Makes the K Street Project look positively, well, saintly.

Ralph Reed lost a Republican primary election on the same day the anti-marriage amendment failed to pass in the House of Representatives. Maybe one day we’ll look back on July 18 as the day that the Republican party decided not to be a religious party and started to become once again a broad-based conservative political party.

Can pharmacists have a conscience? Activists are demanding that Congress and state legislatures pass laws forcing pharmacists and other health workers to act against their own conscience in such matters as abortion, morning-after pills, and gay parenting.

Some doctors say it violates their conscience to perform abortions or provide artificial insemination for unmarried or gay people. Some pharmacists believe that the morning-after pill is a form of abortion, and their religious commitment forbids them to dispense it.

And now some patients and activists are demanding laws to force health professionals to dispense the care the patients want, no matter how it violates the health worker’s conscience. Activists who march for a woman’s right to choose want the government to overrule a pharmacist’s right to choose.

I was reminded of Arnold Kling’s question “Is Bioethics an Oxymoron?” when I read in the Washington Post the comments of official bioethicist R. Alta Charo: “As soon as you become a licensed professional, you take on certain obligations to act like a professional, which means your patients come first.” As I wrote in an online debate for Legal Affairs magazine,

this is an example of how one state intervention generates the demand for additional interventions. We say you can’t be a pharmacist unless you get a state license, and now you want to say that that license should empower the state to impose morally offensive obligations on those who were required to get the license.

Similarly, we require a prescription to get many drugs, including some forms of contraception. Why should a woman need a prescription for contraception? Why not just grant access to contraception by allowing it to be sold over the counter? Here we’ve created one intervention—the requirement that people get a prescription from a licensed doctor, which they must take to a licensed pharmacist—and it has led to a situation you don’t like, in which some tiny number of pharmacists are refusing to dispense a particular prescription. So you say we should have another rule, another regulation, another intervention.

As philosopher Loren Lomasky of the University of Virginia puts it in the Post article, “Freedom of conscience has been central to our political notions since even before the United States existed. People should not be forced into doing things that they find morally odious.”

Do the people who want doctors and pharmacists to be forced to provide abortions and morning-after pills want anesthesiologists to be forced to participate in executions? I’d bet not. These activists want their moral values enforced by law, they don’t want a neutral rule that all doctors must obey the laws of the state. If they did take such a consistent position, of course, I’d still disagree: anesthesiologists shouldn’t be forced to participate in what they may regard as murder, any more than gynecologists should.

This seems like such a clear issue to me. Yet most of the people in the Post‘s online chat about the issue were insistent that health workers must be forced to do as they’re told, regardless of their own conscience. Whatever happened to the liberal claims of individual autonomy, of the right of conscience, of the individual exercising his or her own mind? Gone with the wind, it seems, when liberals have the power to impose their values on other people’s consciences.

In a country of 290 million people and 14 million businesses, we should let these issues sort themselves out in the marketplace. Chances are that major drugstore chains like CVS and Walgreen’s are going to insist that their stores fill all prescriptions. If they have more than one pharmacist on duty at a time, then they may be willing to tolerate pharmacists who avoid filling certain prescriptions. If they do insist that all pharmacists be prepared to fill any prescription presented by a customer, then pharmacists who can’t accept such rules will have to look for jobs elsewhere. And if customers encounter a pharmacy that won’t give them what they want, then they will have to find another pharmacy.

A prime reason for freedom is pluralism. In the modern world we don’t all share the same moral and religious perspectives. The fact of moral diversity is a good reason for toleration and allowing people to sort themselves out in society according to their own moral choices. Freedom in a pluralistic society should mean that individuals get to make their own choices. Sometimes other people aren’t willing to do what we want them to do. But frankly, it’s involuntary servitude to force other people to work for us when they prefer not to. And it’s appalling that 141 years after the Thirteenth Amendment, some people still want to hold others to involuntary servitude.