David Boaz

Urging Congress to spend more money on infrastucture, Rep. John Sarbanes (Big Government-Maryland) says, "You've got to kind of get past this mentality that you can't spend any money at all." Right. Because it's that kind of attitude that has given us a federal budget of $3.8 trillion, up more than 100 percent in a decade, and spending at permanently higher levels of GDP:

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman delivered this commentary on Marketplace Radio:

Mark Bittman: Florida state Sen. Rhonda Storms could never be thought of as progressive. But her bill puts her in the same camp as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who suggested something along similar lines, only to have it batted down by federal ag officials, who described it as "too complex." Well, what's not complex is our relationship with sugar. We eat too much of it: half a pound a day per person -- and it makes us fat. The processed food industry says sugar is not to blame. A calorie is a calorie, they say. Limit your total calories -- regardless of where they come from -- and your health will be fine. That's total nonsense. A calorie of refined sugar is far more likely to cause damage to your body than a calorie of, let's say, fiber. With sugar, we're in a situation where a dangerous substance is perfectly legal and available everywhere. It's sold without restriction to everyone, and it's marketed, with billions of dollars, to children before they can even speak, let alone reason… What choice do we have but to regulate it, just as we would -- and do -- regulate tobacco and alcohol and, for that matter, firearms? This is so obvious that Florida state senators not known as forward-thinkers can see it, though the Department of Agriculture evidently can't. But this is precisely what government is for: to protect us from the things from which we cannot protect ourselves. Sugar is not exactly an invading army, but it can be thought of as a hostile force, and the processed food industry has succeeded in getting us to eat way more of it than is good for us. Will power alone isn't enough to stop that: we need national defense.

Oh, my. First I note the reflexive use of the terms "progressive" and "forward-thinkers" to mean "believing that government should make your decisions for you." I look forward to a day when it won't be regarded as progressive to take autonomy away from adults. Second, note the hysteria and militarism: "a dangerous substance is perfectly legal and available everywhere. It's sold without restriction.... [like] firearms....Sugar is not exactly an invading army, but it can be thought of as a hostile force....we need national defense." Wow. Sugar . . . it's "the moral equivalent of war."

I'll be on the Stossel show this coming Thursday, along with nearly 1000 cheering Students for Liberty at their annual conference. Also taking questions from John Stossel and the students are Nick Gillespie of Reason, John Bolton (!), and Ken Klukowski of the Family Research Council (!!). Beginning this week, Stossel can be seen at a new time, 9:00 p.m. ET. (Which means 8 pm CT, 7 pm MT, and 6 pm PT.) Set your DVR for the Fox Business Network at 9 pm Thursday.

Today is some vaguely named "Presidents' Day," but Wednesday is the anniversary of George Washington's birth. So it's a good day to remember the contribution he made to the American republic. I wrote this several years ago:

George Washington was the man who established the American republic. He led the revolutionary army against the British Empire, he served as the first president, and most importantly he stepped down from power.

[caption id="attachment_44709" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="John Trumbull, "General George Washington Resigning His Commission""][/caption]

In an era of brilliant men, Washington was not the deepest thinker. He never wrote a book or even a long essay, unlike George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. But Washington made the ideas of the American founding real. He incarnated liberal and republican ideas in his own person, and he gave them effect through the Revolution, the Constitution, his successful presidency, and his departure from office. What’s so great about leaving office? Surely it matters more what a president does in office. But think about other great military commanders and revolutionary leaders before and after Washington—Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin. They all seized the power they had won and held it until death or military defeat. John Adams said, “He was the best actor of presidency we have ever had.” Indeed, Washington was a person very conscious of his reputation, who worked all his life to develop his character and his image. In our own time Joshua Micah Marshall writes of America’s first president, “It was all a put-on, an act.” Marshall missed the point. Washington understood that character is something you develop. He learned from Aristotle that good conduct arises from habits that in turn can only be acquired by repeated action and correction – “We are what we repeatedly do.” Indeed, the word “ethics” comes from the Greek word for “habit.” We say something is “second nature” because it’s not actually natural; it’s a habit we’ve developed. From reading the Greek philosophers and the Roman statesmen, Washington developed an understanding of character, in particular the character appropriate to a gentleman in a republic of free citizens. What values did Washington’s character express? He was a farmer, a businessman, an enthusiast for commerce. As a man of the Enlightenment, he was deeply interested in scientific farming. His letters on running Mount Vernon are longer than letters on running the government. (Of course, in 1795 more people worked at Mount Vernon than in the entire executive branch of the federal government.) He was also a liberal and tolerant man. In a famous letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, he hailed the “liberal policy” of the United States on religious freedom as worthy of emulation by other countries. He explained, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” And most notably, he held “republican” values – that is, he believed in a republic of free citizens, with a government based on consent and established to protect the rights of life, liberty, and property. From his republican values Washington derived his abhorrence of kingship, even for himself. The writer Garry Wills called him “a virtuoso of resignations.” He gave up power not once but twice – at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon, and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington. Give the last word to Washington’s great adversary, King George III. The king asked his American painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence. West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.” “If he does that,” the incredulous monarch said, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

I write on the Huffington Post that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is reaching into the age-old bag of anti-liberal smears to savage his newly nominated political opponent:

All of these epithets -- homosexual, Jewish, bourgeoisie, and more recently, "American" -- have been staples of illiberal rhetoric for centuries. Liberals -- advocates of democracy, free speech, religious freedom, and market freedoms -- have been tarred as "cosmopolitan" and somehow alien to the people, the Volk, the faithful, the fatherland, the heartland.

Read it all.

Readers of Cato-at-Liberty should also check out our latest blog, Free Thoughts on Libertarianism.org. Lots of interesting stuff there.  Like Aaron Powell on "Why We Get Mad at (some kinds of) Rich People." And Jonathan Blanks on "Black History and Liberty." And Jason Kuznicki on NPR and Ayn Rand. And Aaron's profound disappointment with Sam Harris's latest book. Not to mention, of course, an ever-increasing amount of other great material on Libertarianism.org, including

• George Smith's essays on libertarian ideas
• "Exploring Liberty," a series of original videos introducing libertarianism
• the complete text of the classic journal Literature of Liberty
• vintage, never-before-seen videos from people like Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard, and most recently David Kelley from 1991 on the faultlines in the Objectivist movement
• essays on major libertarian figures from Lord Acton to Mary Wollstonecraft
• and more!

Tonight HBO will broadcast "The Loving Story," a documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple whose marriage was banned by the state of Virginia and ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in 1967. Mildred Jeter, a black woman (though she also had Native American heritage and may have preferred to think of herself as Indian), married Richard Loving, a white man, in the District of Columbia in 1958. When they returned to their home in Caroline County, Virginia, they were arrested under Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, which dated to colonial times and had been reaffirmed in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The Lovings were indicted and pled guilty. They were sentenced to a year in jail; the state’s law didn’t just ban interracial marriage, it made such marriage a criminal offense. However, the trial judge suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. In his opinion, the judge stated:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Five years later they filed suit to have their conviction overturned. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which struck down Virginia’s law unanimously. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the court,

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival.

Here’s how ABC News reported the case on June 12, 1967: Some people, of course, see parallels between Virginia's ban on interracial marriage and its current ban (along with many other states) on same-sex marriage. One of them is Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute. Joined by John Podesta, with whom he co-chairs the advisory committee of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the nonprofit group that brought the Perry case against California's Proposition 8, he wrote in the Washington Post in 2010:

Now, 43 years after Loving, the courts are once again grappling with denial of equal marriage rights — this time to gay couples. We believe that a society respectful of individual liberty must end this unequal treatment under the law…. Over more than two centuries, minorities in America have gradually experienced greater freedom and been subjected to fewer discriminatory laws. But that process unfolded with great difficulty. As the country evolved, the meaning of one small word — “all” — has evolved as well. Our nation’s Founders reaffirmed in the Declaration of Independence the self-evident truth that “all Men are created equal,” and our Pledge of Allegiance concludes with the simple and definitive words “liberty and justice for all.” Still, we have struggled mightily since our independence, often through our courts, to ensure that liberty and justice is truly available to all Americans. Thanks to the genius of our Framers, who separated power among three branches of government, our courts have been able to take the lead — standing up to enforce equal protection, as demanded by the Constitution — even when the executive and legislative branches, and often the public as well, were unwilling to confront wrongful discrimination.

But tonight you don't have to worry about contemporary issues. Just enjoy "The Loving Story," a story about two people who loved each other and whose marriage eventually led to an advance for the American principle of equal liberty under the law.

It's being reported that in his 2013 budget President Obama will propose to increase spending now and reduce the deficit some day.  Isn't that what every budget promises these days? As I noted last summer during the debt ceiling fight at the Britannica Blog, fiscal conservatives should be very skeptical of plans and proposals that  promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next ten years:

As the White Queen said to Alice, "Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years—but never cuts today.

We’ve become so used to these unfathomable levels of deficits and debt—and to the once-rare concept of trillions of dollars—that we forget how new all this debt is. In 1981, after 190 years of federal spending, the national debt was “only” $1 trillion. Now, just 30 years later, it’s past $15 trillion. So here’s a graphic representation from the Washington Post (now about half a trillion behind) of debt dysfunction:   Those are the kind of numbers that caused the Tea Party movement and the Republican victories of 2010. And where did all this debt come from? As the Tea Partiers know, it came from the rapid increase in federal spending over the past decade: Annual federal spending rose by a trillion dollars when Republicans controlled the government from 2001 to 2007. It has risen another trillion during the Bush-Obama response to the financial crisis. So spending every year is now twice what it was when Bill Clinton left office 10 years ago, and the national debt is almost three times as high. Republicans and Democrats alike should be able to find wasteful, extravagant, and unnecessary programs to cut back or eliminate. And yet many voters, especially Tea Partiers, know that both parties have been responsible. Most Republicans, including today’s House leaders, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, the Iraq war, the prescription drug entitlement, and the TARP bailout during the Bush years. That's one reason that even voters outraged at the Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending surge can't quite get enthusiastic about Republicans. The problem on Capitol Hill is spending, deficits, and debt. Members of Congress need to tell the president that you don't rein in out-of-control spending by increasing it. And if voters want members of Congress to insist on cuts, they're going to have to let their representatives know that.

In his much-discussed New Yorker article on the strategy memos that have shaped the Obama administration, Ryan Lizza writes:

Most of Obama’s conservative dinner companions from his evening at George Will’s home now describe him and his Administration in the most caricatured terms. Will declared Obama a “floundering naïf” and someone advancing “Lenin-Socialism.”

Really? Mild-mannered George Will compared President Obama to Lenin? That set off my skepticism meter. So I summoned the vast fact-checking resources of the Cato Institute and Googled the phrase. Which quickly turned up this video: And as you can clearly hear at 1:30, Will isn't saying "Lenin socialism." He's making the much milder and entirely valid charge of "lemon socialism," which he described as "transferring wealth from the successful to the unsuccessful." That's an old term for the government takeover or bailout of failing firms. On the left it's often described in terms such as "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor" or "privatizing profits and socializing losses." People on the right deplore the practice of bailing out unsuccessful firms with taxpayers' dollars. That's a point that Will also made in his column, first when the Bush administration started bailing out failing banks and auto companies. And it's also been made by Charles Krauthammer on the auto bailout and again on the Solyndra deal. And by Cato adjunct scholar Lawrence H. White. And by lots of Cato-at-Liberty bloggers. Even Paul Krugman and Robert Reich. Where was the skepticism of a New Yorker reporter when he thought he'd found the prudent, mild-mannered George Will comparing the president to Lenin? Where were the famous New Yorker fact-checkers? Some things, I guess, are just too good to check. So to answer the question in the title, Is Barack Obama a Leninist? No, just a lemonist.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that California’s ban on same-sex marriage -- enacted in 2008 in a popular vote on Proposition 8 -- violates the constitutional right to equal protection. The court’s decision upheld a 2010 decision by former Judge R. Vaughn Walker, a Reagan-Bush appointee, that found marriage to be a fundamental right protected by the Constitution, and that the proposition “fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.” Proponents of Proposition 8 will likely appeal the decision either to the full Ninth Circuit or directly to the Supreme Court. The American Foundation for Equal Rights is the sponsor of the case, Perry v. Brown (originally Perry v. Schwarzenegger). Cato Institute chairman Robert A. Levy is co-chairman of AFER's Advisory Board. He and co-chair John Podesta wrote in the Washington Post in 2010:

Nearly a century after the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that "marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man.' " That 1967 case, Loving v. Virginia, ended bans on interracial marriage in the 16 states that still had such laws. Now, 43 years after Loving, the courts are once again grappling with denial of equal marriage rights — this time to gay couples. We believe that a society respectful of individual liberty must end this unequal treatment under the law.... The principle of equality before the law transcends the left-right divide and cuts to the core of our nation's character. This is not about politics; it's about an indispensable right vested in all Americans.

Levy and Podesta, along with AFER's lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies, spoke at this Cato Institute forum. And Levy also wrote about the case in this New York Daily News column. In this 7-minute video Levy, Podesta, Olson, and Boies make the case for equality in marriage law: