David Boaz

It's Car Free Day in Washington, and the traffic on I-66 was the worst in memory. Update: Link fixed.

It must be the week for libertarian podcasts. Right after my UnitedLiberty interview on the 2010 elections, NPR's Planet Money offers this podcast with Mark Calabria and me on libertarianism.   (By the way, "under libertarianism, you would be better-looking, you would be taller" is a joke....) When I did talk shows after the publication of Libertarianism: A Primer, I was always asked, “What is libertarianism?” I said then, “Libertarianism is the idea that adult individuals have the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about their lives. And of course today government claims the power to make many of those decisions for us, from where to send our kids to school to what we can smoke to how we must save for retirement.” Here’s another way to put it, which I believe I first saw in a high-school libertarian newsletter from Minnesota: Smokey the Bear’s rules for fire safety also apply to government: Keep it small, keep it in a confined area, and keep an eye on it. For more on libertarianism, check out my entry at the Encyclopedia Britannica. For longer treatments, see Libertarianism: A Primer and The Libertarian Reader. For deeper thoughts, take a look at Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice. Find an 80-minute interview on libertarianism here and a short talk here.

I answer a few questions from Jason Pye of UnitedLiberty in a 16-minute podcast here.

Social conservatives talk about real problems but offer irrelevant solutions. They act like the man who searched for his keys under the streetlight because the light was better there. Social conservatives tend to talk about issues like abortion and gay rights, stem-cell research and the role of religion "in the public square": "Those who would have us ignore the battle being fought over life, marriage and religious liberty have forgotten the lessons of history,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) at the Values Voter Summit. But what is the case for social conservatism that they've been making at the summit and in recent interviews?

• Mike Huckabee: "We need to understand there is a direct correlation between the stability of families and the stability of our economy.... The real reason we have poverty is we have a breakdown of the basic family structure."
• Jim DeMint:  "It’s impossible to be a fiscal conservative unless you’re a social conservative because of the high cost of a dysfunctional society."
• Rick Santorum: "We can have no economic freedom unless we have good, virtuous moral people inspired by their faith."

Those are reasonable concerns, but they have little or no relationship to abortion or gay marriage. Abortion may be a moral crime, but it isn't the cause of high government spending or intergenerational poverty. And gay people making the emotional and financial commitments of marriage is not the cause of family breakdown or welfare spending. When Huckabee says that "a breakdown of the basic family structure" is causing poverty -- and thus a demand for higher government spending -- he knows that he's really talking about unwed motherhood, divorce, children growing up without fathers, and the resulting high rates of welfare usage and crime. Those also make up the "high cost of a dysfunctional society" that worries DeMint. But take a look at the key issues of the chief social-conservative group, the Family Research Council -- 7 papers on abortion and stem cells, 5 on gays and gay marriage, 1 on divorce. Nothing much has changed since 1994, when I wrote in the New York Times:

The Family Research Council, the leading "family values" group, is similarly obsessed. In the most recent index of its publications, the two categories with the most listing are "Homosexual" and "Homosexual in the Military" -- a total of 34 items (plus four on AIDS). The organization has shown some interest in parenthood -- nine items on family structure, 13 on parenthood and six on teen pregnancy -- yet there are more items on homosexuality than on all of those issues combined. There was no listing for divorce. (Would it be unfair to point out that there are two items on "Parents' Rights" and none on "Parents' Responsibilities"?)

Back then, conservatives still defended sodomy laws, as Santorum continued to do as late as 2003. These days, after the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down such laws, most have moved on (though not the Montana and Texas Republican parties). Now they just campaign against gays in the military, gays adopting children, and gays getting married. Why all the focus on issues that would do nothing to solve the problems of "breakdown of the basic family structure" and "the high cost of a dysfunctional society"? Well, solving the problems of divorce and unwed motherhood is hard. And lots of Republican and conservative voters have been divorced. A constitutional amendment to ban divorce wouldn't go over very well with even the social-conservative constituency. Far better to pick on a small group, a group not perceived to be part of the Republican constituency, and blame them for social breakdown and its associated costs. But you won't find your keys on Main Street if you dropped them on Green Street, and you won't reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and not letting them adopt orphans.

NPR reports:

Black-market cigarettes are costing many states hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost tax revenue. And the lucrative, illicit trade is attracting violent criminal gangs that can be lethally ruthless. The rewards, and the risks, of dealing in contraband cigarettes became quite clear recently in northern Virginia, says Capt. Dennis Wilson of the Fairfax County Police Department. Undercover investigators working with his department "had two cases where contacts that we were working with had asked us to murder their competition," Wilson says.

The problem is that exorbitant taxes in New York state and especially New York City can add as much as $60 to the cost of a carton of cigarettes. No wonder criminals including "organized crime groups with ties to Vietnam, Russia, Korea and China" are getting into the business of buying cigarettes in lower-taxed states and driving trailers full of them to the high-tax states. A Cato Policy Analysis warned about the problem of black markets and crime back in 2003, when the New York City tax was only $3.00 a pack ($30.00 a carton):

The failure of New York policymakers to consider the broader effects of high cigarette taxes has been a mistake repeated across the country in the stampede to maximize tax revenue from this demonized product. Too often, policymakers do not consider these effects in the erroneous belief that people do not respond to government-created economic incentives. The negative effects of high cigarette taxes in New York provide a cautionary tale that excessive tax rates have serious consequences--even for such a politically unpopular product as cigarettes.

Lots of the criticisms of the tea party movement as "extremist" assume that the movement is some sort of "American Taliban" -- theocratic, censorious, antigay. The reality is that the highly decentralized tea party movement has done a remarkable job of staying focused on a specific agenda that is nothing like that. The Tea Party Patriots website proclaims its mission as "Fiscal Responsibility, Limited Government, Free Market." Many tea partiers say that "tea" stands for Taxed Enough Already. Toby Marie Walker, lead facilitator for the Waco [not Wacko] Tea Party, told NPR Thursday, "Well, we focus around three main issues, is constitutionally limited government, free markets and fiscal responsibility." In fact, some social conservative activists are annoyed that President Obama's big-government agenda and the robust tea party response have focused the country's attention on the issues of spending, debt, and the size of government rather than cultural war. On that same NPR interview Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association complained that "the leadership of the Tea Party movement is at a fundamentally different place . . . when it comes to social issues" and demanded that the movement "send a clear note on the culture of conservative issues." Walker explained that the tea party isn't opposed to social conservatism, it just doesn't take a position on those issues: "It would be like asking the NRA to take up an abortion issue. That's not what the NRA is about. They're about gun rights." As she said:

I think that the Tea Party movement is more of a Libertarian movement. I think that that's one of the things that has been like a myth out there, that it's a Republican-based. But not all of us are Libertarians. You know, we have Republicans, Democrats, independents, all over the spectrum. And that's why we stick to the issues that brought us together.

In the Washington Times social conservatives complain about the tea party movement's emphasis on fiscal issues:

"There is suspicion among our social-conservative base that the new tea party/libertarian Republicans might soon view restrictions on abortion as they would any government proscription of private conduct," said former Oklahoma Gov. Frank A. Keating. [Not clear if this is also the position of his current employer, the American Council for Life Insurance.] "Some of my law enforcement friends have expressed similar views about a worrisome second look at drug laws," Mr. Keating added. "Perhaps it is fringe thinking and a fringe worry, but it is still a worry." In fact, many libertarian-minded Republicans - among them Senate nominee Rand Paul of Kentucky - have raised questions about the wisdom of the country's strict laws on drug use.

Saturday's Wall Street Journal quotes me in a discussion of the Values Voter Summit and social conservatives' griping about the tea party:

[Christine] O'Donnell's appearance at the Values Voter Summit in Washington put a spotlight on the challenge facing social conservatives, prominent in GOP politics earlier in the decade, as they try to hitch themselves to the fiscal insurgents of 2010. They may be ideological soul mates, but that doesn't mean they'd govern the same way. "My sense of the average tea party-endorsed candidate this year is that what motivates them is their concern over spending and the national debt," said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. "If a gay-marriage ban came before Congress, they'd probably vote for it, but that's not what motivates them." Mr. Boaz predicted tea-party congressional freshmen would push for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, not an amendment to ban gay marriage. "I don't think there's likely to be a lot of social activism coming out of them," he said.... A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted in June found that just 2% of those identified as tea partiers put social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage at the top of their priority lists for federal action. 

The tea party is not a libertarian movement, but (at this point at least) it is a libertarian force in American politics. It's organizing Americans to come out in the streets, confront politicians, and vote on the issues of spending, deficits, debt, the size and scope of government, and the constitutional limits on government. That's a good thing. And if many of the tea partiers do hold socially conservative views (not all of them do), then it's a good thing for the American political system and for American freedom to keep them focused on shrinking the size and cost of the federal government. Liberals spend too much of their time being deathly afraid of the religious right. Brink Lindsey described contemporary American politics as a “libertarian consensus that mixes the social freedom of the left with the economic freedom of the right” in his book The Age of Abundance. Over the past 50 years, social conservatism has lost its battles against civil rights, against feminism, against sexual freedom, against gay rights. It hasn't even managed to reduce the illegitimacy rate.  The real challenge in American politics today is to constrain and reverse the past decade's accumulation of money and power in Washington. And in that effort the tea party movement is on the front lines.

Kentucky attorney general Jack Conway went on TV Tuesday with an ad attacking Rand Paul for . . . endorsing freedom. The ad shows a clip from a 2008 panel show in which, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal, there was a "wide-ranging discussion that involved such things as the wisdom of motorcycle helmet laws, the lottery and expanding gambling. In response to a question about whether he favors more gambling, Paul said he opposes 'legislating morality' and then added: 'I'm for having … laws against things that are violent crimes, but things that are non-violent shouldn't be against the law.'" The ad features that last sentence and then cuts rapidly to uniformed sheriffs criticizing Paul's position. But note that they never really criticize what Paul actually said. His comment came in the context of a discussion of motorcyle helmet laws, gambling, and the state lottery. The sheriffs suggest that Paul wants to legalize selling drugs to a minor, mortgage fraud, burglary, theft, and promoting prostitution -- and they say that we should "treat criminals like criminals." But of course, of the activities mentioned, "promoting prostitution" is the only one that a libertarian would be likely to legalize. (Paul has never said he would do that.) Burglary, theft, fraud, and selling drugs to children are clearly crimes, and it's dishonest to suggest that Rand Paul would change those laws. Conway may be a slick Louisville lawyer, but he may find that Kentucky voters won't find such claims credible. Paul might have been been wiser to use a term like "victimless crimes" or "actions that don't violate anyone's rights" in discussing "things that . . . shouldn't be against the law." Obviously burglary and theft violate rights and have victims, while gambling and riding a motorcycle without a helmet don't. And libertarian legal theorists might question the wisdom of putting nonviolent offenders in jail; it would often make more sense to demand restitution and fines for economic crimes, for instance, rather than putting the offenders in expensive and overcrowded prisons. But Rand Paul was making sense in 2008 when he said that a free society shouldn't punish people who aren't harming other people. And the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Kentucky should be embarrassed to broadcast such a dishonest twisting of Paul's statements. If Conway thinks people should be imprisoned for gambling and riding a motorcycle without a helmet -- the issues Paul was discussing -- let him put up an ad saying so. And then see whose side the people are on in an honest debate. It's actually striking that in a conservative state, Conway did not mention any of the normal "victimless crimes" -- not gambling or helmetless riding, not pot smoking, not even pornography. He apparently thought he could only win this issue by claiming that Rand Paul held the ridiculous position that burglary, theft, and fraud shouldn't be illegal. Let's give two cheers for the social progress that his decision reveals.

In the Washington Post, columnist Courtland Milloy praises the "profound egalitarian insights" and "radical oneness" of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee (and billionaire Warren Buffett):

"I believe we can solve the problems of urban education in our lifetimes and actualize education's power to reverse generational poverty," Rhee wrote. "But I am learning that it is a radical concept to even suggest this. Warren Buffett [the billionaire investor] framed the problem for me once in a way that clarified how basic our most stubborn obstacles are. He said it would be easy to solve today's problems in urban education. 'Make private schools illegal,' he said, 'and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.' "

Milloy's not satisfied that Rhee is taking on entrenched interests, firing principals and teachers who aren't doing a good job, and apparently actually improving the schools in the District of Columbia. No, he's attracted to the "radical concept" of outlawing private schools and forcing everyone in the District into the same schools, with no hope of escape. There would be one method of escape, of course: moving to the suburbs.  And you can bet that lots more people would do that if Milloy and Rhee got their way. I wonder what a total government monopoly on education would look like. Are Buffett and Rhee right that a government monopoly forced on every citizen would work well? Would work so well that it would "solve the problems of urban education . . . and reverse generational poverty"? Well, one answer might be glimpsed on the same page B3 where part of Milloy's column appeared. In an adjacent column, columnist John Kelly discussed his "Kafkaesque" five-hour visit to the state of Maryland's Motor Vehicle Administration:

I was at the MVA. I was in Hell. I know that complaining about the MVA or the DMV is the last refuge of a scoundrel columnist, but I don't care. You don't know what it was like. You weren't there, man. I spent five hours at the Beltsville MVA on Thursday. Five hours. I could have driven to New York in that time.... I thought: Can this really be happening? Can I really have stepped into a Kafka story? Shouldn't every counter be filled with employees working as fast as possible? Shouldn't management be out there helping, and Maryland state troopers, too? This is the Katrina of waiting, people.

The MVA, of course, is a monopoly government bureaucracy. Everyone must go there -- CEOs, diplomats, even Washington Post columnists. And yet, somehow, that has not led to the MVA equivalent of solving problems and reversing poverty. Five hours to get a drivers' license just might be worse performance than that of the public schools. It's the system, Mr. Milloy and Ms. Rhee. Monopolies don't have much incentive to improve. Give everyone the chance to go to a different supplier, and then you'll see improvement. Giant Food wouldn't last long if it took five hours to buy your groceries -- because it has competitors. But as long as the schools are a near-monopoly, and the MVA or DMV is a total monopoly, don't expect real improvement.

One sign of the tea party movement's success is that the term "tea party" is becoming an all-purpose smear term for any more-or-less right-wing person or activity that the writer doesn't like. In fact, I think "Tea Party" is replacing "neocon" as an all-purpose word for "the people I hate." Take a look at this article, teased on the cover of Newsweek as "France's Tea Party" and online as "What a Tea Party Looks Like in Europe." When I saw the cover on the newsstand, I thought, "A tax revolt in France? Cool! And about time!" But what is the article actually about? It's about the National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who

for decades has played on the inchoate fears, xenophobia, knee-jerk racism, and ill-disguised anti-Semitism of many of his supporters.

Is that Newsweek's view of the "tea party"? The article went on to explain that at 82 Le Pen is yielding party leadership to his daughter, who is "a passionate advocate of its core message: strong French nationalism, relentless Euro-skepticism, and a lot of hard-nosed talk about fighting crime and immigration." And lest that you think that such culturally conservative and unsavory attitudes simply go hand in hand with a belief in lower taxes and smaller government, the authors point out that

she’s also a big believer in the state’s ability and obligation to help its people. “We feel the state should have the means to intervene,” she says. “We are very attached to public services à la française as a way to limit the inequalities among regions and among the French,” including “access for all to the same level of health care.”

That combination of nativism and welfare statism seems very different from the mission of the tea party movement. The Tea Party Patriots website, the closest thing to a central focus for tea party activists, lists their values as "Fiscal Responsibility, Limited Government, Free Market."  In fact, I note that writers Tracy McNicoll, Christopher Dickey, and Barbie Nadeau never use the term "tea party" in the body of the article. So maybe we should only blame Newsweek's headline writers and front-page editor. In another example, the Guardian newspaper of London wrote sensationally about "Lobbyists behind the rightwing Tea Party group in the US" arriving in London for "an event organised by the UK's controversial Taxpayers' Alliance." (Why is it controversial? Apparently because it agitates for lower taxes.) These groups, it is said, have "close links to the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch" and "have lobbied . . . to maintain tax breaks for the rich" -- and for everyone else, a point that author Phillip Inman inadvertently omitted. And, contrary to the article, Cato didn't sponsor a taxpayers' conference in London; we cosponsored the venerable European Resource Bank, a networking conference for free-market think tanks across Europe. Inman writes, "The Cato Institute, which promotes its views on Fox News and other rightwing media, is one of the Tea Party's main backers." That's sort of true, except for the point that our scholars have appeared more often on CNBC than on Fox. And that we don't back any political or grass-roots movements, though many of our scholars have written generous -- and sometimes more cautious -- articles about the tea party movement. My colleague Aaron Powell suggests that that many left-liberals, including many journalists, have a Manichean worldview that posits a fundamental conflict between corporations and government. And so if you dislike corporations, you perforce stand on the side of government. And when it's energy corporations, like the Kochs, then anything they touch becomes The Enemy. And "Tea Party" is now, to some people, the generic name for The Enemy. For more sensible views of the tea party movement from journalists, see this John Judis article that I praised before and a new analysis from Jonathan Rauch in National Journal.

In a Washington Post obituary for billionaire John Kluge, Terence McArdle explains how he made his fortune by creating Metromedia, the nation's largest chain of independent television stations:

Metromedia stations relied on a mix of local programs, old movies and syndicated reruns that often ran counter to what the big three network affiliates had in the same time slot.

Kluge's key insight was:

Mr. Kluge believed that if the networks had an 80 percent share in a major market, 20 percent of the market wanted to watch something else.

And that's a key difference between the market and government, one that's so obvious we may fail to notice it. Kluge figured he could make money by offering a product that only 20 percent of consumers wanted. Many television networks these days make money by attracting 1 percent or less of the market. But in the political world, it's usually one-size-fits-all. Politicians decide, and then that's what we all get -- phonics in the schools or not, prayer or not, instead of a market of schools from which parents could choose. Health insurance with 99 mandated coverages whether you want them or not. I made a similar point in Libertarianism: A Primer (p. 189), on politics as a package deal:

Sesame Street recently gave us an example of what that means.  In an election special, the Muppets and their human friends have $3 to spend, and they learn about voting by deciding whether to buy crayons or juice. "Rosita:  You count the people who want crayons.  Then you count the people who want juice.  If more people want juice, it's juice for everyone.  If more people want crayons, it's crayons. "Telly:  Sounds crazy but it might just work!" But why not let each child buy what he wants?  Who needs democracy for such decisions?  There may be some public goods, but surely juice and crayons don't count.  In the real world, one candidate offers higher taxes, legalized abortion, and getting out of the War in Vietnam, another promises a balanced budget, school prayer, and escalation of the war.  What if you want a balanced budget and withdrawal from Vietnam?  In the marketplace you get lots of choices; politics forces you to choose among only a few.