David Boaz

Some 75 new Republican members of Congress got there by promising to stop the federal government's massive overspending. And as Chris Edwards noted, there have been a number of lists of budget cuts proposed recently. Saturday Night Live did a sketch back in 2007 that might be useful to Tea Partiers and new members of Congress. It's about a self-help plan called "Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford." Since the federal government is running deficits well over a trillion dollars a year, I'd say this plan would be good advice: Hat tip to Jonathan Witt at the Acton Institute's PowerBlog, who points out that if this were a perfect analogy, the book author would be more agitated because "the couple has been spending the author’s money using a credit card he had idiotically loaned them a few years before."

Tea Partiers are celebrating the biggest swing against the incumbent party in the House of Representatives since 1938. It always feels great to win an election. But the real job for fiscal conservatives and smaller-government advocates starts now. The usual pattern is that after the election the voters and the activists go back to their normal lives, but the organized interests redouble their efforts to influence policymakers. That's part of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, which we talk a lot about here. People who want something from government organize PACs, hire lobbyists, fly to Washington, make phone calls, make political contributions, take senators to dinner, and otherwise "know no rest by day or night" (in the words of economist Vilfredo Pareto) in their effort to get their hands on taxpayers' money. Meanwhile, it's not in the interest of any taxpayer to become informed and seek to exert influence on each particular spending bill. Tea Partiers must change that pattern. They must keep up the pressure on Congress and state legislators. They must demand actual performance, not just promises. And they must also seek to change the attitudes of the American people. It's not enough to favor small government in principle; more voters have to agree to give up their own subsidies and benefits. There's some evidence that Tea Partiers know this. As Jonathan Rauch wrote recently in National Journal:

But, tea partiers say, if you think moving votes and passing bills are what they are really all about, you have not taken the full measure of their ambition. No, the real point is to change the country's political culture, bending it back toward the self-reliant, liberty-guarding instincts of the Founders' era. Winning key congressional seats won't do that, nor will endorsing candidates. "If you just tell people to vote but you don't talk about the underlying principles," [Tea Party Patriots coordinator Jenny Beth] Martin says, "you just have to do it again and again and again, in every election." ... One hears again, there, echoes of leftist movements. Raise consciousness. Change hearts, not just votes. Attack corruption in society, not just on Capitol Hill. In America, right-wing movements have tended to focus on taking over politics, left-wing ones on changing the culture. Like its leftist precursors, the Tea Party Patriots thinks of itself as a social movement, not a political one.

As George Washington said in his first inaugural address, "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." We have a chance in the next two years to demonstrate that republican government can still work rather than spiraling downward into endless debt and depression. And of course Congress has a big job facing it, too, especially the newly Republican House. To capitalize on their victory, the Republicans must demonstrate to the voters that they're serious — finally — about more freedom and less government. They destroyed the Reaganite Republican brand during the Bush years. And it's harder to rebuild a brand than to destroy it. But the backlash against the Obama-Reid-Pelosi big-government agenda has given them another chance. Read more...

Libertarians are getting strange new respect. Or at least the major media are mentioning libertarians and libertarian ideas more often. Just a few items I noticed this weekend: New York Times political reporter Matt Bai profiles David Kirkham, founder of the Utah Tea Party, one of the first Tea Party groups to draw political blood when it knocked off Sen. Robert Bennett in the Utah Republican caucuses. Kirkham, he says, is a classic car enthusiast and a father of four. He was largely apolitical until he saw how socialism worked in Poland and then was shocked by the bailouts and overspending here at home. And, Bai says, now he's a "self-described libertarian." The Los Angeles Times reports from Flushing Township, Michigan, on how four "budget hawks," including libertarian economist Mike Gardner, got themselves elected to the township Board of Trustees and started cutting the budget. So far they have "shrunk the Police Department from 13 officers to six, eliminated the building inspector and park staff positions, and cut board members' dental, vision and guaranteed pension benefits." And my favorite: The Washington Post speculates on how a newspaper in 2020 might look back on the legalization of drugs if it happened in 2010. One of their fantasies:

As Ohio and other states ask their voters to make a choice on marijuana, the decades-old debate over coast-to-coast legalization shows signs of becoming a central focus in the 2024 presidential campaign. Hillary Rodham Clinton, again seeking her party's nomination, may back legalization as a way to win over libertarian-minded voters who still think of her as a big-government Democrat, even after her stint as chairman of the board at the American Enterprise Institute.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine those libertarian-minded voters not liking Ms. Big Government, even after she allied herself with the think tank that housed many of the intellectual architects of the Iraq war. Meanwhile, here's a story on a non-libertarian politico. In a wrap-up of Democratic problems in the Midwest, the Washington Post tells of one activist at Ohio State University:

Joey Longley, a 19-year-old sophomore, showed up on campus as an evangelical Republican. But five of the seven young men in his Bible group were Democrats, and he found that his Democratic friends shared his socially conservative, fiscally progressive views.

David Kirby and I have written a lot about fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters and how they give a libertarian tilt to voters often called "moderate" or "centrist." But this is a reminder that some swing voters hold the opposite set of views.

In his recent book Ill Fares the Land, a passionate defense of the democratic socialist ideal, the historian Tony Judt writes that Hayek would have been (justly) doomed to obscurity if not for the financial difficulty experienced by the welfare state, which was exploited by conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Yes, if Hayek had been wrong about the viability of the welfare state, then his warnings would have had less resonance. This line appears in a generally thoughtful treatment of how The Road to Serfdom has stayed in print for decades and become a bestseller in the past two years. The article by Jennifer Schuessler appeared in the New York Times Book Review last July, but has only just come to my attention.

Colbert King, the Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning columnist, has a pretty good handle on how D.C. mayor-elect Vincent Gray's call for "more public input" on the budget would work out in practice:

The council is elected to make decisions, not to take polls. What's more, people know a set-up when they see it. Gray's scenario, intentionally or not, is a prescription for raising taxes. Here is how it would work: Council members, with the elections safely behind them, produce a deficit-closing term sheet that reads like a doomsday manifesto. It describes deep cuts in areas likely to produce the most screams: public safety, education, health care, workforce reductions, arts and culture, etc. That is followed by council hearings at which long lines of witnesses representing nonprofit advocacy groups and employee unions produce gripping testimony that predicts untold pain and agony resulting from the projected program and payroll cuts. Following the hearing, which stretches late into the night or the next morning, the lawmakers conclude, reluctantly of course, that there is strong "public" opposition to cuts in government and that they, as conscientious legislators, have no alternative but to keep the government at its current size and, instead, close the deficit with tax increases on middle- and high-income D.C. wage-earners.

King, a longtime close observer of D.C. politics, is describing an example of the general problem of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs -- every government program has a few beneficiaries who will show up to defend it, while the taxpayers who will pay for each of these programs have much less incentive to devote time and money to opposing proposals for spending.

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike generated a lot of spit-takes in the blogosphere when she wrote on October 2 about how Tea Party activists are reading "once-obscure texts by dead writers":

The Tea Party is a thoroughly modern movement, organizing on Twitter and Facebook to become the most dynamic force of the midterm elections. But when it comes to ideology, it has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas. It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon. Recommended by Tea Party icons like Ron Paul and Glenn Beck, the texts are being quoted everywhere from protest signs to Republican Party platforms. Pamphlets in the Tea Party bid for a Second American Revolution, the works include Frédéric Bastiat’s “The Law,” published in 1850, which proclaimed that taxing people to pay for schools or roads was government-sanctioned theft, and Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” (1944), which argued that a government that intervened in the economy would inevitably intervene in every aspect of its citizens’ lives.

So that's, you know, "long-dormant ideas" like those of F. A. Hayek, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, who met with President Reagan at the White House, whose book The Constitution of Liberty was declared by Margaret Thatcher "This is what we believe," who was described by Milton Friedman as "the most important social thinker of the 20th century" and by White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers as the author of "the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today," who is the hero of The Commanding Heights, the book and PBS series by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, and whose book The Road to Serfdom has never gone out of print and has sold 100,000 copies this year. So that's Kate Zernike's idea of an obscure, long-dormant thinker. Meanwhile, over the next few weeks after that article ran, the following headlines appeared in the New York Times:

• Cuts in Britain Ignore Views of Keynes

• What Would Keynes Say Today?

• Democrats Are at Odds on Relevance of Keynes

Apparently the Times isn't always opposed to looking in the dusty books of long-dead writers. By the way, Keynes died in 1946, Hayek in 1992.

There's been lots of talk lately about a turn to the right in American politics. President Obama's declining poll numbers, the sharp rise in opposition to his health-care plan during 2009, the growth of the grass-roots Tea Party movement, and the polls predicting a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives all point to a resurgence of conservatism in the electorate. But as I noted last year, there are also trends in the direction of social tolerance these days. Some indeed have described current political trends as a libertarian resurgence. California voters are getting ready to vote on a marijuana legalization initiative, and polls show rising support. The New York Times points to other signs of change on the marijuana front: Pot has already become essentially legal for anyone in California who can tell a medical marijuana clinic that it would make him feel better. Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the federal government would back off its attempt to enforce the federal laws against medical marijuana in the 13 states that have legalized medical use. The threats to prosecute Michael Phelps for a bong hit were widely ridiculed. Those developments have led Andrew Sullivan, Jacob Weisberg, and CBS News to speculate about a “tipping point” for change — at last — in marijuana prohibition. Meanwhile, TPM and AOL’s PoliticsDaily also see a tipping point for marriage equality. A majority of New Yorkers now join Gov. David Paterson in supporting same-sex marriage. That same ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that “in 2004, just 32 percent of Americans favored gay marriage, with 62 percent opposed. Now 49 percent support it versus 46 percent opposed — the first time in ABC/Post polls that supporters have outnumbered opponents.” Since the passage of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, several states and the District of Columbia have granted marriage rights to same-sex couples. This chart, prepared for me by Garrett Reim, shows recent trends in public opinion polls on several issues -- support for smaller government, marriage equality, and marijuana legalization along with opposition to President Obama's health care plan and to the job the president is doing. The latter two have moved more sharply, but all five lines move at least marginally in a libertarian direction: Longer-term charts would show more of a trend on marijuana and marriage. See Nate Silver's chart on rising support for marijuana legalization over the past 20 years. And here are three depictions of rising support for marriage equality over the past 15 to 20 years. As some analysts have noticed, what's going on in American politics is a shift in a libertarian direction. This chart provides some more evidence.

P. J. O’Rourke, Cato’s H. L. Mencken Research Fellow, is touring the country to talk about his new book, Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards. Today he has a commentary on NPR. And the day after the election, he'll be discussing the book and no doubt the election results at a Cato Book Forum. You can find more book signings and media appearances at www.pjourke.com.

Looking to election day and California's vote on a marijuana legalization initiative, I have some comments on "the right to control your body" at Britannica Blog:

People have rights that governments may not violate. Thomas Jefferson defined them as the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When I’m asked what libertarianism is, I often say that it is the idea that adult individuals have the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about their own lives. More categorically, I would say that people have the right to live their lives in any way they choose so long as they don’t violate the equal rights of others. What right could be more basic, more inherent in human nature, than the right to choose what substances to put in one’s own body? Whether we’re talking about alcohol, tobacco, herbal cures, saturated fat, or marijuana, this is a decision that should be made by the individual, not the government. If government can tell us what we can put into our own bodies, what can it not tell us? What limits on government action are there?

It's part of a symposium on Proposition 19 and marijuana.

Peter Baker reports in the New York Times:

To better understand history, and his role in it, Obama invited a group of presidential scholars to dinner in May in the living quarters of the White House.* Obama was curious about, among other things, the Tea Party movement. Were there precedents for this sort of backlash against the establishment? What sparked them and how did they shape American politics? The historians recalled the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, the Populists in the 1890s and Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s.

I'm struck by the historians' choices (or maybe President Obama's recollection of their choices)? Who are the Tea Partiers like? The Know-Nothings and Father Coughlin's left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-semitic Union for Social Justice. (And the Populists, which is a more interesting comparison, being a mass movement that arose mostly spontaneously. But it was primarily a political party, which reflects the confusion that the term "Tea Party" seems to generate.) Nobody thought of, say, the antiwar movement of the 60s or the tax revolt of the 70s? Or even the counterculture and feminist movements, both of which pioneered the cultural-reform style that Jonathan Rauch finds in the Tea Party:

Raise consciousness. Change hearts, not just votes. Attack corruption in society, not just on Capitol Hill.

With a few rare exceptions like Rauch and John Judis, non-conservative intellectuals are just freaked out by a mass movement against big government. Jill Lepore, Sean Wilentz, E. J. Dionne, Frank Rich -- they just can't imagine that real middle-class Americans could honestly oppose President Obama's tax-and-spend agenda and march in the streets against it -- just like, you know, they did against the war and stuff. It's got to be racism, billionaires, extreme libertarianism, extreme authoritarianism, the John Birch Society, something. And so they tell the president that the Tea Party is reminiscent of "the Know-Nothings and Father Coughlin." Why oh why can't we have better historians? *It's not clear if this dinner is different from the widely reported July 2009 dinner with historians.