David Boaz

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice president, has endorsed Republican Sen. John McCain for president. It’s a coup for McCain, struggling to reignite his once frontrunning campaign. And looking over the rest of the field, libertarian voters might even conclude that McCain has a pretty good record on a lot of economic issues.

But the Lieberman endorsement will remind those libertarian voters of all the positions that pushed them away from McCain in the first place. Lieberman and McCain are perhaps the two leading supporters of the Iraq war in the Senate. They are coauthors of a bill to impose costly new regulations to fight global warming. They both support restrictions on political speech.

As I’ve noted before, some Republicans think no issue matters except doubling down on the floundering war effort, so they consider Lieberman an ally, even a man who should be a heartbeat from the Oval Office in the next Republican administration. But you have to ignore Lieberman’s entire career to see him as an ally of conservatives.

As Robert Novak pointed out back when Republicans were endorsing Lieberman for reelection,

Lieberman followed the liberal line in opposing oil drilling in ANWR, Bush tax cuts, overtime pay reform, the energy bill, and bans on partial-birth abortion and same-sex marriage. Similarly, he voted in support of Roe vs. Wade and for banning assault weapons and bunker buster bombs. His only two pro-Bush votes were to fund the Iraq war and support missile defense (duplicating Sen. Hillary Clinton’s course on both).

Lieberman’s most recent ratings by the American Conservative Union were 7 percent in 2003, zero in 2004 and 8 percent in 2005.

I actually agree with him on a couple of those votes, though I wouldn’t expect that conservatives would. The National Taxpayers Union said that he voted with taxpayers 9 percent of the time in 2005, worse than Chris Dodd or Barbara Boxer. Maybe because of all the Republican love in 2006, he soared to a 15 percent rating.

In a previous speech, Lieberman called for a tax increase so that we could continue the war without “squeezing important domestic programs, as we have been doing”–his view of a period during which federal spending rose by one trillion dollars:

During the Second World War, our government raised taxes and we spent as much as 30 percent of our Gross Domestic Product to defeat fascism and Nazism. During the war in Korea, we raised taxes and spent fourteen percent of GDP on our military…Today, in the midst of a war against a brutal enemy in a dangerous world, we have cut taxes and are spending less than five percent of GDP to support our military…It is not an acceptable answer to push the sacrifice of this war against terrorism onto our children and grandchildren through deficit spending, as we have been doing. And it is not an acceptable answer to pay the costs of this war by squeezing important domestic programs, as we have been doing.

Lieberman may help McCain with Republican hawks, but he’s not likely to help with New Hampshire’s growing contingent of disaffected libertarian, centrist, and independent voters, the ones who swung the state firmly into the blue zone last fall.

I have some thoughts in last Tuesday’s New Hampshire Union Leader about Senator Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, and the use and abuse of power:

Clinton, always eager to wield power on behalf of her vision of the public good, has just endorsed new government mandates on health care and energy along with a $50 billion spending program for global AIDS. Meanwhile, revelations about Giuliani’s secretive use of New York City police and his refusal to allow the city comptroller to audit his security spending reflect his lifelong affinity for using and abusing power.

Clinton calls herself a “government junkie.” She says, “There is no such thing as other people’s children” and promises to work on “redefining who we are as human beings in the post-modern age.”…

Giuliani seems much less committed to any particular vision of government’s role. Rather, throughout his career Giuliani has displayed an authoritarian streak that is deeply troubling in a potential President who would assume executive powers vastly expanded by President Bush….

Giuliani wants power concentrated in whatever position he holds at the time, and Clinton wants the federal government to have vast powers to do good as she sees it. Not a happy choice for the voters in a free country.

Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters writes, “In the first five years of his presidency, Bush could barely find his veto pen. Now, however, freed of the burden of defending a free-spending Republican Congress, Bush has discovered his inner Reagan.”

Maybe the veto pen really was lost for years, and it just turned up in the White House Book Room.

America shouldn’t try to correct its record-high trade imbalance with China by rushing to increase exports

As US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson meets in Beijing with Chinese vice-premier Wu Yi to discuss the US-China trade balance, the US commerce department has just released its monthly report on the widening trade deficit. Journalists report this in hand-wringing terms that consistently reflect little understanding of real economics. “Oh no, imports from China are up,” blares my radio. “The only solution is to increase American exports to China.”

And that’s supposed to be the free-trade position, a counter to the argument for tariffs or other coercive measures to prevent China from forcing its products on innocent American consumers. (I’m omitting the safety and health problems with Chinese products for now, as we heard the same economic complaints when Japan was the biggest non-white exporter to the US. Somehow we’ve never worried so much about imports from Canada, the UK and Germany.)

But this whole framework is misguided. Twenty-four years ago in the Cato Journal, the economist Ronald Krieger explained (comment beginning on page 667) the difference between the economist’s and the non-economist’s views of trade. The economist believes that “The purpose of economic activity is to enhance the wellbeing of individual consumers and households.” And, therefore, “Imports are the benefit for which exports are the cost.” Imports are the things we want – clothing, televisions, cars, software, ideas – and exports are what we have to trade in order to get them. (I see that Tim Worstall made the same point just last month on Comment is Free in response to the German foreign minister.)

Adam Smith wrote in 1776: “Nothing can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.” When two parties trade, each expects to gain. It doesn’t matter whether they live in different neighbourhoods, different states or different nations. Each of us seeks to give away as little of our own wealth as possible to get as much possible from others. And as consumers pursue their wellbeing, trade will inevitably balance, though monthly statistics will offer many “imbalances” to raise alarms about. Secretary Paulson shouldn’t worry too much about increasing exports, and he definitely shouldn’t pressure the Chinese to send American consumers fewer products.

America shouldn’t try to correct its record-high trade imbalance with China by rushing to increase exports

America shouldn’t try to correct its record-high trade imbalance with China by rushing to increase exports

George Will writes about proposals from Reps. Pete Hoekstra and Scott Garrett that “would enable states to push Washington toward where it once was and where it belongs regarding K through 12 education: Out.” Both Hoekstra and Garrett (pdf) have spoken at recent Cato forums on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Will offers a pithy if depressing prediction:

No Child Left Behind, supposedly an antidote to the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” has instead spawned lowered standards. The law will eventually be reauthorized because doubling down on losing bets is what Washington does.

Cato scholars have been pointing to the problems with NCLB for a long time. Back in 2001 Sheldon Richman and Darcy Olsen warned that getting the federal government involved wasn’t the way to improve accountability in schools. Larry Uzzell pointed out that the law not only intruded the federal government into matters best left to the states, but its actual effect would be to lower educational standards, just the opposite of what President Bush and his allies promised. Neal McCluskey and Andrew Coulson “find that No Child Left Behind has been ineffective in achieving its intended goals, has had negative unintended consequences, is incompatible with policies that do work, is at the mercy of a political process that can only worsen its prospects, and is based on premises that are fundamentally flawed.”

Florida quarterback Tim Tebow is the first sophomore to win the Heisman trophy as the nation’s outstanding college football player. Since 1935 every previous winner had been a junior or senior. He’s also surely the first homeschooled athlete to win the award. In the past decade or so we’ve gotten used to homeschoolers winning spelling bees and geography bees and science fairs. But who ever heard of a homeschooler winning a top athletic prize? Well, now we have.

Tebow benefited from a Florida law that allowed homeschooled students to play on public school athletic teams. Some states bar students who don’t attend a particular school from participating in extra-curricular activities. No doubt fans of the University of Florida Gators are glad that their state was so open to letting homeschoolers develop their athletic skills.

He sounds like a fine young man–born in the Philippines, where his parents were Christian missionaries and where he often spends summers preaching and doing charity work. And even more startling, he says he’ll return to the University of Florida for two more years rather than taking the big bucks from the NFL now.

Isabel Lyman wrote about homeschooling in a Cato study here. Of course, some people, like Russell Shaw at HuffingtonPost, don’t like homeschooling. They want to require that all parents turn their children over to the all-knowing, all-wise, efficient, effective, politically correct government schools. And they’re appalled at the idea that parents, not the state, should assume primary responsibility for the upbringing of the children they bring into the world. Shaw is afraid that Christian parents will teach their children creationism and other anti-scientific ideas. (Presumably not the parents whose homeschooled children are winning science fairs.) I wonder if he’d feel differently if he knew that homeschooling families are politically and culturally diverse; as Lyman writes, “There are two historical strains of homeschooling, a religious-right thread inspired by author Raymond Moore and a countercultural-left thread inspired by John Holt.” Or does he just think that, left or right, all children need to get the same thoughts drilled into their heads from the same textbooks?

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has a column on HuffingtonPost and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution arguing that the Supreme Court should uphold the D.C. gun ban and reject the idea that when the Constitution says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” it means that people have the right to keep and bear arms. His basic argument, summed up in the title, is that “The will of the people must not be overruled.” He pounds away at that theme:

Last March, the District of Columbia saw judicial activism replace the will of the people….

More than 30 years ago, the elected representatives on the D.C. City Council decided to enact a system of strict gun laws to help protect public safety. The people in D.C. strongly support these laws….

[The Court of Appeals] imposed their own policy preferences on the people of D.C.

It was a textbook example of judicial activism at its worst….

If the justices reject judicial activism and refrain from substituting their own policy preferences for the people’s elected representatives, then the District of Columbia will prevail. And so will the American people.

As a lawyer and a lifelong Republican, I have deep respect for judicial precedent, for American history and for a close reading of all the words in the Constitution. As one who served as mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., for 12 years, I also believe in the importance of local communities being able to pass the laws they believe will help keep them safe.

It’s a powerful argument, and it may well resonate with the conservative justices who think that judges often overreach and “substitute their own policy preferences” for those of the people’s elected legislators. But I wonder if Helmke really believes that judges should respect the will of legislators and not strike down laws. Does he believe that the Warren Court should not have struck down school segregation, which was clearly the will of the people’s elected representatives–and no doubt the people–in Kansas, as well as in South Carolina and Virginia, whose similar cases were combined with Brown? Does he believe that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down Virginia’s law against interracial marriage in 1967? The Texas law outlawing sodomy in 2003? The Communications Decency Act in 1997? Does he indeed think the John Marshall Court was wrong to invalidate the Judiciary Act of 1789 in Marbury v. Madison? That’s the implication of his ringing words in defense of legislative absolutism.

I don’t think he believes this for a minute. I am sure he agrees with Cato’s constitutional scholars that the Supreme Court has an obligation to strike down laws that exceed the powers granted to Congress or that violate the rights protected in the Bill of Rights. He just doesn’t want the Court to apply that rule to the right to keep and bear arms. But in fact there’s an increasingly broad consensus among scholars that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. And thus the Court should do its duty and find that an absolute ban on gun ownership by law-abiding citizens clearly exceeds any power of reasonable regulation that might be permitted under a properly understood Second Amendment.

Stephanie Coontz, a historian, suggests in the New York Times that government get out of the marriage business. Why, she asks, “do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry?”

For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

So, she says, “Let churches decide which marriages they deem ‘licit.’ But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.”

It’s a great idea. Indeed, it’s such a good idea that I proposed it in Slate back in 1997:

So why not privatize marriage? Make it a private contract between two individuals. If they wanted to contract for a traditional breadwinner/homemaker setup, with specified rules for property and alimony in the event of divorce, they could do so. Less traditional couples could keep their assets separate and agree to share specified expenses. Those with assets to protect could sign prenuptial agreements that courts would respect. Marriage contracts could be as individually tailored as other contracts are in our diverse capitalist world. For those who wanted a standard one-size-fits-all contract, that would still be easy to obtain. Wal-Mart could sell books of marriage forms next to the standard rental forms. Couples would then be spared the surprise discovery that outsiders had changed their contract without warning. Individual churches, synagogues, and temples could make their own rules about which marriages they would bless.

One of the problems with this whole idea is that, as usual, the state has entangled itself in our lives. There are 1049 federal laws that mention marital status, most of them dealing with taxes or transfer payments. If marriage becomes a matter of private contract, the federal government will still have to decide whether to recognize all such contracts for the purpose of handing out marital benefits. And that doesn’t even get into custody, inheritance, property, next-of-kin, hospital visitation and other sorts of laws usually handled at the state level. Just another example of how the intrusion of the state into every corner of society makes it difficult to privatize any aspect of life. But it’s good to see the idea getting some discussion.