David Boaz

David Friedman will talk about his new book, Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World, at a Cato Book Forum next Thursday, November 6.

Speaking at Google and to the San Francisco Chronicle, he describes his thinking this way:

“There are no brakes available. … If it can be done, it will be done,” he said at an event that was recorded and posted on YouTube. “So the interesting thing to me is not what should you stop but how do you adapt.” …

“I’ve got three different technologies that could wipe out the species,” said Friedman, a self-professed libertarian who is certain that neither politics nor central planning will avert a possible bad technological outcome.

“I am much more worried about the government making the wrong response and doing damage than I am about the government not protecting me,” said Friedman, adding: “It’s a mistake to think of the world as if there was somebody in charge. There’s never been anybody in charge.”

David Friedman has been one of the most interesting libertarian thinkers for more than 30 years, since he published his book The Machinery of Freedom. Don’t miss his take on the future of technology and freedom. Sign up here.

New York governor David Paterson’s top aide, Charles J. O’Byrne, has been forced to resign after revelations that he failed to pay his federal and state income taxes for five years. He owed some $300,000.

His attorney, Richard Kestenbaum, explained that O’Byrne suffered from “non-filer syndrome,” which “causes them not to be able to file their tax returns.” A spokesman for the governor, however, said he has not actually been diagnosed with what she called “late-filers syndrome.”

We often note that you could have read it in Cato Institute publications before it hit the mainstream media. In this case, we hate to think that O’Byrne and his lawyer might have gotten the idea from us. But in fact you can find it in law journals as far back as 1994.

If this syndrome ever gets listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it’s going to be more popular than ADD.

According to the New York Times, Sen. John McCain

stepped up his criticism of the Bush administration by pounding the lectern and demanding that the government support his plan to buy troubled mortgages from homeowners. “And why isn’t the Treasury secretary ordering them to do that?” Mr. McCain asked.

And then he went on:

“We finally learned what Senator Obama’s economic goal is. As he told Joe the Plumber in Ohio, he wants to, quote, ‘spread the wealth around.’ He believes in redistributing the wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs and opportunities for all Americans. Senator Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie.”

“Socialist!” someone in the crowd yelled.

Presumably the listener yelled “Socialist!” after McCain’s gibe at Obama’s “spread the wealth” plan, but it’s possible that the writing was a little sloppy and the charge actually came in response to McCain’s demand that the federal government buy up mortgages.

Robert Zoellick tells the presidential candidates to aspire to be “a 21st-century FDR” because “A World in Crisis Means A Chance for Greatness.” A new New Deal, a new Bretton Woods, a new multilateralism–holy cow, the president has it in his power to make the world over again. Poor Bill Clinton, who reportedly told friends after 9/11 that he was frustrated that he never got such a great defining crisis to deal with. Now another president is going to get a chance to knock some heads together and have historians call him great.

But what is Zoellick thinking, urging Barack Obama and John McCain to reach for greatness? Aren’t these two candidates megalomaniacal enough? McCain, who thinks that only corruption could explain anyone disagreeing with his position at any given moment, was a childhood admirer of Napoleon and now names the imperialist, meddlesome Teddy Roosevelt as his presidential model. And Obama of course said on the day he secured the Democratic nomination for president

that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation.

Don’t give these guys any more ambition than they have now. The cult of the presidency is quite enough already.

The New York City Council has gone along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s urgent and high-pressured request that it overrule two votes of the people and allow him to serve another term. The council’s joint project with the mayor to ignore the will of the people puts me in mind of Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem on the East German government, The Solution: 

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Citizens for Responsible Politics are wringing their hands over the fact that Americans may spend $5.3 billion on political campaigns this year. (And it’s not all the Obama campaign!) $5.3 billion.

So let’s see . . . the federal government just spent $700 billion on a bailout of Wall Street. Or maybe it’s $2.25 trillion, or $3 trillion, in the eventual total cost of the financial bailouts. And we’ve spent $600 billion–or maybe a trillion, or maybe $4 trillion–on the Iraq war. And so little things like a $25 billion bailout for the automobile industry become accounting errors. Meanwhile, under President Bush annual federal spending has soared past $2 trillion and past $3 trillion.

And with all this money available in Washington, people have only spent $5.3 billion this year to get a piece of it? What’s wrong with them? Political scientists from Gordon Tullock to Stephen Ansolabehere have pondered this question. Tim Harford says it’s not easy to get politicians to do what you want even when you spend money on them, and that’s why people spend so little.

But $5.3 billion to elect a president and 468 members of Congress? That’s less than we’ll spend on potato chips this year.

NPR reports this morning that the FBI is trying to find out whether the cause of the financial crisis was “simply greed, or whether laws were broken.”

Perhaps both institutions are just not attuned to the problem of misguided laws and bad institutions.

At the Guardian I point out that “Liberal journalists are combing the back roads of America looking for evidence of the resurgent racism being generated by the prospect of a black man becoming president. The striking thing is how little they’ve turned up.” Despite headlines like “Ugly reception for Obama” and “Racist attacks on Obama growing more heated,” the journalists have had to go to Danville, Va., and the Arkansas-Missouri border to find a few individual instances of racist attacks. Nothing like what the Catholic JFK faced in 1960.

Racist attacks on Barack Obama are few and far between, but that hasn’t stopped the media from sensationalising them

Liberal journalists are combing the back roads of America looking for evidence of the resurgent racism being generated by the prospect of a black man becoming president. The striking thing is how little they’ve turned up in a country of 300m people with plenty of racial conflict in its history.

Here’s how the Associated Press led a roundup story on Friday: “Race, an inescapable but explosive issue on which both presidential candidates have tread carefully if not tried to ignore, is increasingly popping up as it’s becoming more likely the country will elect its first black president.”

But since they couldn’t find anything coming from John McCain, Sarah Palin or any of their staff or surrogates that would justify such a claim, the first evidence cited was that Democratic congressmen John Murtha and John Lewis had accused Barack Obama’s opponents of racism.

Eventually the AP story got around to citing the evidence of racism directed toward Obama that its vast nationwide reporting staff had turned up:

• In San Bernardino County, California, the October newsletter of the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated, showed Obama’s face on a phoney $10 government food stamp coupon adorned with a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken. Diane Fedele, president of the group, apologised and she had no racist intent: “It was just food to me. It didn’t mean anything else.” The state GOP denounced the newsletter.

• In Nevada, Colorado and Michigan, TV ads show a clip of [the Rev Jeremiah] Wright declaring “God damn America!” in a sermon. “How can we forget these hateful sermons from Obama’s pastor for over 20 years?” says one ad by the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, a Sacramento, California-based group that was formed to campaign against Obama.

• In Danville, Virginia, The Voice, a local newspaper, published a column by McCain’s Buchanan County campaign chairman, Bobby May, that mocked an Obama administration. It said he would change the national anthem to the “Black National Anthem” while mandating that churches teach black liberation theology. Also, it said Obama would appoint Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to the Cabinet and put prominent blacks like Oprah Winfrey on currency. McCain’s campaign dropped May from his job.

• In West Plains, Missouri, a remote town of 10,000 people near the Arkansas border, a prominent highway sign by an unknown creator shows a turban-wearing cartoon caricature of Obama, with an exaggerated smile, full lips and oversized teeth. It says: “Barack ‘Hussein’ Obama equals more abortions, same-sex marriages, taxes, gun regulations.”

So what do we have here? One unknown group in Sacramento has run some ads reminding voters that Obama’s decades-long pastor and spiritual adviser is pretty radical. The fact that Wright is black doesn’t make that a racist argument. If McCain had sat in the pew for 20 years listening to a pastor who said, say, that “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians are responsible for the 9/11 attacks because they caused God to withdraw his protection for America,” you can bet that would be an issue.

Otherwise, the AP has found three individuals in remote towns who have directed racial slurs at the first black candidate with a real chance to be president. That’s pretty remarkable. We’ve made great progress since the civil rights revolution, but who would have guessed there’d be so little backlash?

That won’t stop journalists from looking for it, though. Google “Obama racism”, and you’ll find hits like “Racism is the only reason Obama might lose” (because of course the most liberal Democrat in the Senate would be a shoo-in otherwise) and “Racist attacks on Obama growing more heated” (yes, on white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites) and “Racist Obama effigy hung in Ohio” (yes, one guy in rural Ohio hung a white-sheeted ghost labelled “Obama” in his yard, and his white neighbours are appalled).

On the web Sunday we got the headline “‘Socialist’, ‘Muslim’ – Ugly reception for Obama”, who campaigned in the Cape Fear BBQ and Chicken in Fayetteville, North Carolina. But in fact it appears that there was just one woman who shouted “socialist” at him and also told a reporter that she suspected he was a “closet Muslim”. The other white diners told her to quiet down and be civil. Reporters descended on her, though, and she did manage to direct a slur at General Colin Powell, who had endorsed Obama that morning: She called him “a Rino, R-I-N-O, Republican In Name Only”.

Compared to the level of open anti-Catholic bias against John Kennedy in 1960, racism in the 2008 campaign is a dog that didn’t bark.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent $158 million on his two elections, now thinks he should stay in office despite the city’s two-term limit. So far it’s much cheaper–he’s just pressuring all the civic groups and charities in town that have received donations from him, or from the taxpayers, to get themselves down to City Hall and testify to his indispensability in a time of financial crisis. The voters have twice endorsed term limits, but the mayor doesn’t see any need to ask them again; he wants the City Council to overrule the voters.

Of course, as Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute has shown, New York’s revenues have risen 41 percent under Bloomberg, while he has jacked up spending even faster, so it’s not clear why he’s the man you need in a financial crisis.

But the striking thing about the plutocrat mayor is the way he’s using his personal wealth–and the city’s tax dollars–to pressure people to support his bid to stay in office. The New York Times reports:

The mayor and his top aides have asked leaders of organizations that receive his largess to express their support for his third-term bid by testifying during public hearings and by personally appealing to undecided members of the City Council. …

The requests have put the groups in an unusual and uncomfortable position, several employees of the groups said. City Hall has not made any explicit threats, they said, but city officials have extraordinary leverage over the groups’ finances. Many have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Bloomberg’s philanthropic giving and millions of dollars from city contracts overseen by his staff.

Sounds like a lot of overlap between his personal philanthropy and the city’s own spending, and the Times doesn’t seem to find anything odd about that aspect of the story. And then the New York Post found that the mayor’s tax-funded “slush fund” was being enlisted in the campaign, too:

Read more…