David Boaz

His Royal Highness Prince Charles, who lives, well, like a king, off wealth that his ancestors stole, appears at a Washington Post conference to tell his still-recalcitrant former subjects to change their economic system. As befitting a hereditary aristocrat, coming from a long line of people used to issuing orders, with little interest in spontaneous order or actual economic growth, he finds an

urgent need for . . . the willingness of all aspects of society — the public, private and NGO [non-governmental organizations] sectors, large corporations and small organizations — to work together to build an economic model built upon resilience and diversity.

Sure thing, guv'nor, we'll get right on that.

President Obama has been saying that if the United States government can find and eliminate Osama bin Laden after ten years of searching, it can do anything:

Already, in several appearances since the raid, Obama has described it as a reminder that “as a nation there is nothing that we can’t do,” as he put it during an unrelated White House ceremony Monday. On Sunday night, during his first comments about the operation, he linked it to American values, saying the country is “once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Finding bin Laden, difficult as it proved to be, was an incomparably simple task compared to using coercion and central planning to bring about desired results in defiance of economic reality. You can't deliver better health care to more people for less money by reducing the role of incentives and markets, even if you set your mind to it. As Russell Roberts said about a similar concept, "If we can put a man on the moon, then...":

Putting a man on the moon is an engineering problem. It yields to a sufficient application of reason and resources. Eliminating poverty is an economic problem (and by the word "economic" I do not mean financial or related to money), a challenge that involves emergent results. In such a setting, money alone—in the amounts that a non-economic approach might suggest, one that ignores the impact of incentives and markets—is unlikely to be successful.

Obama should listen to Bill Clinton, who last fall seemed to be channeling Hayek:

Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Bill Clinton, 9/21: “Do you know how many political and economic decisions are made in this world by people who don’t know what in the living daylights they are talking about?"

"National Public Radio (NPR) is paying the lobbying firm Bracy, Tucker, Brown & Valanzano to defend its taxpayer funding stream in Congress, according to lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Secretary of the Senate," reports Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller. Once again, a government-funded entity is using its taxpayer funds to lobby to get more money from the taxpayers. When the bailouts and takeovers started in 2008-9, I noted that there was lots of outrage in the blogosphere over revelations that some of the biggest recipients of the federal government’s $700 billion TARP bailout had been spending money on lobbyists. And I wrote:

It’s bad enough to have our tax money taken and given to banks whose mistakes should have caused them to fail. It’s adding insult to injury when they use our money — or some “other” money; money is fungible — to lobby our representatives in Congress, perhaps for even more money. Get taxpayers’ money, hire lobbyists, get more taxpayers’ money. Nice work if you can get it.

At the same time, Dan Mitchell wrote that companies that received government money and then lobbied for more "deserve a reserved seat in a very hot place." Taxpayer-funded lobbying is a scandal, but it's a scandal that has been going on for decades:

As far back as 1985, Cato published a book, Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics, that exposed how billions of taxpayers’ dollars were used to subsidize organizations with a political agenda, mostly groups that lobbied and organized for bigger government and more spending. The book led off with this quotation from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.” The book noted that the National Council of Senior Citizens had received more than $150 million in taxpayers’ money in four years. A more recent report estimated that AARP had received over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding. Both groups, of course, lobby incessantly for more spending on Social Security and Medicare. The Heritage Foundation reported in 1995, “Each year, the American taxpayers provide more than $39 billion in grants to organizations which may use the money to advance their political agendas.” In 1999 Peter Samuel and Randal O’Toole found that EPA was a major funder of groups lobbying for “smart growth.” So these groups were pushing a policy agenda on the federal government, but the government itself was paying the groups to lobby it. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for the very lobbying that seeks to suck more dollars out of the taxpayers. But then, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize banks, car companies, senior citizen groups, environmentalist lobbies, labor unions, or other private organizations in the first place.

What's harder to get into than Harvard? The Cato Institute summer internship. Harvard just announced that "an all-time low of 6.2 percent of applicants were offered admission to the Harvard College Class of 2015, beating records for the sixth consecutive year." Harvard's acceptance rate is slightly lower than the rate at Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia. But not lower than the Cato summer internship rate! Cato's incoming interns survived an application process more selective than Ivy League universities, with about 4 percent of applicants offered an internship. The process is a little less competitive for Fall and Spring internships, and we encourage students to check out the application deadlines for those upcoming classes. Also note: There are no more summer internships available, but you can still apply for a scholarship to Cato University this summer until Friday. Of course, non-students are also welcome at Cato University, which is being held this year in beautiful and historic Annapolis, Maryland, the city where George Washington returned his military commission to the Continental Congress and became, in the words of George III, "the greatest man in the world" by giving up power and establishing the new country on the firm path to republican government. We'll have a mix of people of all ages from all over the country and indeed the world, and we hope you'll sign up today. More on Cato's internships here, including last year's comparative acceptance rates.

Last week I wrote about "Hayek Day," when Russ Roberts and John Papola released their second rap video about Hayek and Keynes, and Bruce Caldwell, Richard Epstein, and George Soros came to Cato to talk about the new edition of The Constitution of Liberty. Now, it's looking like Hayek Week. Yesterday, on the 112th anniversary of Hayek's birth, The Constitution of Liberty was reviewed in the New York Times. I write about the new review by Francis Fukuyama, and the original 1960 review by Sidney Hook, at the Britannica today. Since Fukuyama managed to mention Glenn Beck three times in 1100 words, I noted Hayek's view of conservatism, which can be found in the very book under review:

Reagan and Thatcher may have admired Hayek, but he always insisted that he was a liberal, not a conservative. He titled the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He pointed out that the conservative “has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike.” He wanted to be part of “the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution.” And I recall an interview in a French magazine in the 1980s, which I can’t find online, in which he was asked if he was part of the “new right,” and he quipped, “Je suis agnostique et divorcé.”

Last Thursday must have been Hayek Day. In the morning was the release of the rap video, "Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two." And then in the afternoon a distinguished panel convened in the Cato Institute's F. A. Hayek Auditorium to discuss Hayek's great work The Constitution of Liberty, just released in a new definitive edition by the University of Chicago Press. The forum was moderated by Cato fellow in social thought Ronald Hamowy, who edited the new edition. Panelists were Hayek's intellectual biographer and editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Bruce Caldwell; the brilliant legal scholar Richard Epstein; and the hedge-fund billionaire and Open Society Foundations founder George Soros. (Find video and transcript here; easier-to-search video here.) Read more...

“This time they said, ‘We’re not going.’” That was the quote that caught my attention in last week's PBS broadcast of "Stonewall Uprising," a documentary about the "Stonewall riots" that launched the gay rights movement in 1969. And it made me think of other people who finally said "no" to oppression -- like Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, and Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia. At the Britannica blog I look at the connections among these resisters and movements and ask:

What causes some acts of resistance to succeed? Is it historical inevitability, just the right moment for the dry field of hidden dissatisfaction to be set on fire by a spark? Some libertarian — and other — radicals wonder why Americans don’t revolt against what the radicals see as tyranny.

Last week all the guests on NPR's Diane Rehm Show said Ron Paul was bad, very bad, to question the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve Board. (Very near the end of the show.) Diane responded by saying that Paul would be interviewed on the show the following week, but the show's website didn't confirm that. Now it does. Tomorrow, Tuesday, at 10 a.m. ET, Ron Paul discusses his new book Liberty Defined on the Diane Rehm Show. Expect tough questions and lots of callers. If taxes and inflation make it impossible for you to afford Paul's new book, you can always read his book The Case for Gold for free online.

Dale Carpenter of the University of Minnesota Law School, who wrote a Cato Policy Analysis on the Federal Marriage Amendment, has an op-ed today in the New York Times about changing attitudes among lawyers and judges about sexual orientation:

The prestigious law firm King & Spalding has not fully explained its decision this week to stop assisting Congress in defending the law that forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriage. But its reversal suggests the extent to which gay men and lesbians have persuaded much of the legal profession to accept the basic proposition that sexual orientation is irrelevant to a person’s worth and that the law should reflect this judgment.

And speaking of sexual orientation and the legal profession, don't miss our upcoming Policy Forum with superlawyers and co-counsels Ted Olson and David Boies, "The Case for Marriage Equality: Perry v. Schwarzenegger," on May 18.

In a remarkable coincidence, our friends at the Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty have chosen this week to celebrate a couple of great moments in republican (anti-monarchy) history. The quotation of the week is from that great libertarian radical, Thomas Paine, leading up to this conclusion:

We cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government, than hereditary succession.

And then the image of the week features two playing cards

from a charming collection of new designs for a deck which were issued during the French Revolution (1793-94). They were designed by moderate liberal republican supporters of the revolution (which included people such as the Marquis de Condorcet) who believed in the rule of law, free markets, the equality of women under the law, and the emancipation of slaves. As they said in their pamphlet they wanted to reinforce the principles of the revolution in such everyday items as playing cards, since the traditional designs had face or "court" cards depicting Kings, Queens, and Jacks who were the beneficiaries of the old privileged political order which had just been overthrown. It seemed obvious to them that a new design even for such mundane things as playing cards was required under the Republic to reflect the new principles of government and which "the love of liberty demands."

These cards depict "The Spirit of Peace" and "The Spirit of Commerce." The Online Library of Liberty is an amazing resource, with full electronic texts of many classic works on liberty plus articles, essays, biographies, bibliographies, and other educational material about the texts. Check it out.