David Boaz

Kudos to Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch for dominating the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section the way Ron Paul supporters dominate online polls.  And kudos to the Post for running an article on the Ron Paul phenomenon by writers who actually sympathize with it. Gillespie and Welch write about “a new and potentially transformative force . . . in American politics”:

That force is less about Paul than about the movement that has erupted around him — and the much larger subset of Americans who are increasingly disillusioned with the two major political parties’ soft consensus on making government ever more intrusive at all levels, whether it’s listening to phone calls without a warrant, imposing fines of half a million dollars for broadcast “obscenities” or jailing grandmothers for buying prescribed marijuana from legal dispensaries.

Paul, who entered Congress in 1976, has been dubbed “Dr. No” by his colleagues because of his consistent nay votes on federal spending, military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere, and virtually all expansions of federal power (he cast one of three GOP votes against the original USA Patriot Act). But his philosophy of principled libertarianism is anything but negative: It’s predicated on the fundamental notion that a smaller government allows individuals the freedom to pursue happiness as they see fit. …

Paul’s “freedom message” is the direct descendant of Barry Goldwater’s once-dominant GOP philosophy of libertarianism (which Ronald Reagan described in a 1975 Reason magazine interview as “the very heart and soul of conservatism”). But that tradition has been under a decade-long assault by religious-right moralists, neoconservative interventionists and a governing coalition that has learned to love Medicare expansion and appropriations pork.

The Reason editors cite a 2006 Pew Research Center poll that found 9 percent of libertarians holding basically libertarian values. I’m sorry that out of all such calculations they picked the one that found the smallest number of libertarians. As David Kirby and I pointed out in “The Libertarian Vote,” Gallup found 21 percent. Using somewhat more restrictive criteria, Kirby and I found that libertarians were 13 percent in the Gallup and American National Election Studies surveys, 14 percent in a different Pew survey, 15 percent of actual voters in the ANES survey, and 15 percent in a Zogby survey of 2006 voters.

Of course, some of the Ron Paul supporters wouldn’t show up in any of those estimates. They’re conservatives who are fed up with Republican spending, liberals who want to stop the war, and previously apolitical folks who are attracted to straight talk. Gillespie and Welch do a good job of describing the quintessentially American spirit that draws them together.

Naomi Wolf has an article in today’s Washington Post tied to her new book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. The essay is actually a lot less leftist than the book. She deplores the civic illiteracy among young people that leaves them feeling ”depressed, cynical and powerless.” And she blames influences on both left and right: the Bush administration’s portrayal of “freedom and checks and balances as threats to national security,” of course, and also the No Child Left Behind Act’s emphasis on math and reading rather than civics and history. But also, she notes, “When New Left activists of the 1960s started the antiwar and free speech student movements, they didn’t get their intellectual framework from Montesquieu or Thomas Paine: They looked to Marx, Lenin and Mao.”

Perhaps her most interesting claim is this:

Teenagers and young adults often have no clue why the United States is different from, say, Egypt or Russia; they have little idea what liberty is.

Few young Americans understand that the Second Amendment keeps their homes safe from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world; few realize that “due process” means that they can’t be locked up in a dungeon by the state and left to languish indefinitely.

I rather suspect that this lefty writer who has written a whole book and launched an organization to “protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President” meant to cite the Fourth Amendment, not the Second Amendment.

But maybe I’m being cynical. Maybe Naomi Wolf knows full well that it is the Second Amendment that ”keeps [our] homes safe from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world.” The Fourth Amendment may promise “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” But without the Second Amendment, and the well-armed citizenry it protects, how secure would our rights be? Certainly there’s no Second Amendment in Egypt or Russia, the countries she notes in contrast. The Soviet Constitution guaranteed its citizens freedom from search and seizure. But it did not guarantee the right to keep and bear arms.

So welcome, Naomi Wolf. And as the effort moves forward to protect our Fourth Amendment rights and to get Congress to remember its Article I powers, remember that there’s also an effort currently underway in the Supreme Court to protect our Second Amendment rights.

In Sunday’s “Opus” cartoon, Berkeley Breathed suggests that Opus, becoming middle-aged, will naturally find himself sliding straight into the welcoming arms of the Republican party. The general idea of middle-aged conservatism is understandable enough. There’s an old saying, attributed to many different authors, that “if you’re not a socialist at 20, you have no heart. If you’re still a socialist at 40, you have no brain.”

But Breathed reveals his own advancing age when he depicts the Republican organizers wooing Opus with the promise of “Balanced budgets — and smaller government! And no nation building! We’re not the world’s policemen!” When’s the last time Republicans offered such a platform?

Oh, right, George W. Bush in 2000. But seven years is a lifetime in politics. Today’s Republican party offers massive deficits, a government virtually unlimited in size and scope, and a Wilsonian-neocon foreign policy that is both policeman and nursemaid to the world. I wonder if even a middle-aged penguin would sign up for that.

Ira Levin should be remembered for his dystopian novel This Perfect Day, which ranks alongside Brave New World and 1984

Ira Levin – who died this week at the age of 78 – was known for his bestselling novels Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, all of which became successful movies. But another of his novels, This Perfect Day, deserves to be better known than it is. Indeed, given its tight plot about a revolt against an all-providing world government, I don’t know why it hasn’t gained the attention of Hollywood. As libertarian historian Ralph Raico wrote in The American Enterprise back in 1998:

This Perfect Day belongs to the genre of “dystopian” or anti-utopian novels, like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. Yet it is more satisfying than either. Not only is its futuristic technology more plausible (computers, of course), but the extrapolation of the dominant ideology of the end of the 20th century is entirely convincing.

The novel is set 141 years after the Unification, the establishment of a world government guided by a central computer. The computer, Uni, provides all the members of the human race with everything they need – food, shelter, employment, psychotherapy, and monthly “treatments” that include vaccines, contraceptives, tranquilizers, a drug to prevent messy beard growth, and a medication that reduces aggressiveness and limits the sex drive.

It’s a perfect world, as described in the children’s rhyme that opens the book:

Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei, Led us to this perfect day. Marx, Wood, Wei and Christ, All but Wei were sacrificed. Wood, Wei, Christ and Marx, Gave us lovely schools and parks. Wei, Christ, Marx and Wood, Made us humble, made us good.

Everyone loves Uni, which gives them everything they could want. And the great medical advances of the Unification ensure that everyone lives to the maximum human lifespan of 62. No one questions the wisdom and benevolence of Uni. Except Chip, whose crotchety grandfather gave him that secret and illegal nickname and urged him to try to think about things just before he got his monthly treatment. Eventually Chip’s thoughts take a radical turn, and he meets a few other people who are similarly disgruntled at the perfect world. A rip-roaring plot ensues.

I love a good dystopian novel in which a few hardy rebels try to make a revolution. And Raico is right to note that Levin did a good job of imagining an extension of some of the intellectual trends of the 20th century. In today’s papers we can read of politicians and intellectuals on both right and left trying to use government to increase happiness and “socially desirable behavior.” Uni is the consummation of those desires, but Levin understands that government-provided happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But in one way Levin was himself caught in the intellectual milieu of his times. (The novel was published in 1970.) He understood the cost to freedom of a government that controlled and provided everything. But he did seem to believe that such central planning would be efficient. He had Chip worry that if the rebels managed to shut down Uni, planes would fall out of the sky, people would die, trains would crash, food wouldn’t get to the dinner table.

In this starry-eyed view of the economic efficiency of planning, Levin was led by the world’s most famous economists. John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, wrote, “the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.” And Paul Samuelson wrote in his widely used textbook: “What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth…. The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.” Actually, Levin, a novelist writing in the late 1960s, can be excused for his misconceptions more than Galbraith and Samuelson, economists who wrote those lines in the 1980s, only a few years before the final collapse of Soviet-style socialism.

In 1985, I had the economist Don Lavoie send Levin a copy of his fine book National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, inscribed something like “in the hopes of persuading you that central planning is no more workable than it is humane.”

But this is a minor quibble about a great novel. The big problem with This Perfect Day is that it’s out of print. If that isn’t a market failure, I don’t know what is. Publishers, filmmakers – wake up! Bring this book back into print and onto the big screen.

Ira Levin should be remembered for his dystopian novel This Perfect Day, which ranks alongside Brave New World and 1984

In Friday’s Washington Post, Michael Gerson hails “a groundbreaking essay by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin in Commentary magazine, which notes that most “social indicators” have improved:

“Over the past fifteen years, on balance, the American family has indeed grown weaker,” the authors argue, “but almost every other social indicator has improved.” Crime rates have plunged, teen drug use and pregnancy have declined, educational scores are improving, welfare caseloads have fallen 60 percent, and the number of abortions has dropped.

That is indeed important news, often lost in conservative jeremiads about the state of the culture. But I’m not sure it’s actually “groundbreaking,” considering that you could have read it more than a year ago in Cato Policy Report or indeed right here at Cato@Liberty. As Radley Balko wrote in the September/October issue of Cato Policy Report,

Nearly every social indicator is trending in a direction most of us would consider positive.

Here are just a few examples, culled from government agencies and advocacy groups: Teen pregnancy is at its lowest point since government researchers have been keeping statistics. Juvenile crime has been falling for 20 years (though there was, admittedly, a slight uptick last year). Crimes against children are down. The number of reported rapes has dropped dramatically over the last two decades, even as social stigma against rape victims has subsided. Despite a negligible increase last year, overall crime in the United States has also been in decline for 15 years.

(more…)

Ira Levin should be remembered for his dystopian novel This Perfect Day, which ranks alongside Brave New World and 1984

The New York Times reports:

Buried deep in the largest domestic spending bill of the year is money for a library and museum honoring first ladies. The $130,000 was requested by the local congressman, Representative Ralph Regula, Republican of Ohio. The library was founded by his wife, Mary A. Regula. The director of the library is his daughter, Martha A. Regula.

Other “namesake projects” in the bill include the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York, named for the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; the Thad Cochran Research Center at the University of Mississippi, named for the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee; and the Thomas Daschle Center for Public Service at South Dakota State University, honoring the former Senate Democratic leader.

The bill also includes “Harkin grants” to build schools and promote healthy lifestyles in Iowa, where Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat, is running for re-election.

The federal government is taking $2.9 trillion of our hard-earned money this year. That will include the need to borrow $155 billion because even the record $2.8 trillion tax haul isn’t sufficient to cover all of America’s vital needs. Like the National First Ladies Museum and the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service. Really, have they no shame? Politicians tax Americans to build monuments to themselves, or to provide jobs for their families.

Projects that are actually needed–federal courthouses, perhaps, or highways–might appropriately be named for great Americans of the past. But naming monuments for living politicians is a bit too reminiscent of North Korea or Turkmenistan. Perhaps if we’re going to name public works projects for living people, they should all be named for the people who actually pay for those projects–the taxpayers. So we could name them Taxpayers’ Highway, Taxpayers’ Federal Courthouse, Taxpayers Airport.

But at least those are useful projects. The earmarks mentioned above are for fripperies and indulgences and monuments to the ego of politicians. Members of Congress should be ashamed to spend the money taxed away from working people on these tributes to themselves.

John Boehner, the leader of House Republicans, responds to a Washington Post editorial challenging him to identify what he would cut out of the budget to avoid “an irresponsible tax increase” to offset a reduction in the Alternative Minimum Tax. Seeking to restore the GOP’s fiscally conservative image, publicly challenged to offer a plan, employing all the resources of the House Republican Caucus, these are the budget cuts that Minority Leader Boehner came up with:

* $3.2 billion to revive outdated programs, such as one funding exchanges “with historic whaling and trading partners.”

* $1 million for the Clinton School of Public Service in Arkansas.

* $300,000 for an “Exploratorium” in San Francisco.

* $100,000 for an educational program conducted aboard a catamaran in California’s Monterey Bay.

So out of the $2.9 trillion federal budget, the leader of the House Republicans manages to come up one $3.2 billion appropriation and three tiny earmarks that appear to be personal projects of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.

Boehner is right when he goes on to say, “Moreover, the editorial missed the point. Congress doesn’t have a revenue problem. Revenue is at an all-time high after the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which have triggered economic growth that is ‘paying for’ an AMT patch many times over.” But he then notes, “Rather, Congress has a spending problem.”

Indeed. The Republican Congress of which Boehner has been a leader has increased spending by a trillion dollars in six years. And out of that massive gush of taxpayer dollars, Boehner can find only $3.2 billion in unnecessary spending. Which is perhaps why polls now show that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on the issue of cutting government spending.

William Kristol, a top Republican strategist and editor of the Weekly Standard is pushing Democratic senator Joe Lieberman for vice president, on the strength of Lieberman’s full-throated support for the war without end. Pete Wehner, the leading intellectual in the Bush White House (OK, but still–that carries some weight in the Bush party), backs the idea in National Review. 

True, Lieberman is one of the few Americans still solidly behind Bush’s war. But that couldn’t be sufficient for Republicans to put himself a heartbeat from the presidency, right? He must share Republican values on other issues, right?

Not really. 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.

Only if you believe that continuing to support the war in Iraq outweighs all other issues combined–for the next five years–could a conservative reasonably support Joe Lieberman. And apparently some Republicans and conservatives are willing to toss aside his commitment to high taxes, higher spending, more regulation, and entitlement expansion in order to get a vice president firmly committed to long-term entanglement in Iraq.