David Boaz

Sometimes I complain that the media give us a distorted picture of the world by reporting bad news and ignoring the sea of good news, like the drop in heart disease deaths that I celebrated here. I understand why bad news is news and good news isn’t, but I do worry that we get a misleading picture of the world.

But then other times, perhaps contradictorily, I open the newspaper and see a story that seems so obvious that I almost wonder why it’s reported. Like this one in the Washington Post today:

Several projects subsidized by Maryland’s economic development agency are in financial trouble, legislative auditors reported yesterday, citing, in particular, a resort in Western Maryland and a golf course in Calvert County.

Rocky Gap Lodge & Golf Resort, the state-subsidized retreat built for $45 million a decade ago to revive an economically depressed area, has operated in the red for years and is $27 million in debt, the auditors said.

Chesapeake Hills, a golf course that the Maryland Economic Development Corp. took over from Calvert County five years ago, is running a $1.3 million deficit and cannot pay its operating costs without help from the county, the auditors said.

Whattaya know? Projects that weren’t financially viable without a subsidy from the taxpayers turn out to be . . . not financially viable, even with the subsidy. If there just wasn’t much market demand for a resort in an economically depressed area or a golf course in Calvert County, then it’s no surprise that the projects can’t even make their operating expenses. And of course, projects that are owned, managed, or subsidized by government tend not to be run as efficiently as projects in which individuals and businesses are risking their own money.

We’ve seen a bigger example of this recently in the subprime mortgage market, of course. People who borrowed money they really couldn’t afford discover that they can’t pay it back. That’s why it’s probably best to let the market work in deciding which mortgages, business start-ups, and other projects are financially sound.

Billionaire Oprah Winfrey is making a million-dollar contribution to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. And despite all the campaign finance restrictions of the past 30 years, it’s perfectly legal. That’s because Oprah is making her contribution in the form of time on her television show, appearances with him on the campaign trail, and other uses of her celebrity. But if a rival media mogul, someone like Sumner Redstone or John Malone, wanted to make a contribution of more than $2,300 to a presidential candidate, that would be illegal. Because, you know, it’s corrupt to make a large contribution. Wouldn’t want the next president to be indebted to a businessman who gave him a $10,000 contribution.

This Saturday, “Winfrey will host her first-ever presidential fundraising affair on the grounds of the Promised Land, her 42-acre ocean- and mountain-view estate in Montecito, Calif. — an event that is expected to raise more than $3 million for Obama’s campaign.”

Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post outlines some of the other ways Winfrey might help her preferred candidate.

Among the weapons in Winfrey’s arsenal: the television program that reaches 8.4 million viewers each weekday afternoon, according to the most recent Nielsen numbers. Her Web site reaches 2.3 unique viewers each month, “O, the Oprah Magazine,” has a circulation of 2 million, she circulates a weekly newsletter to 420,000 fans and 360,000 people have subscribed to her Web site for daily “Oprah Alerts” by e-mail.

More than that, though, the Nielsen tracking data show that her most loyal viewers are women between 25 and 55 — a group that also votes in large numbers in Democratic primaries.

Oprah’s well aware of her power:

The fundraiser may be only the start. The Winfrey and Obama machines have maintained silence on the exact nature of their talks over what her role will be, but the idea of her appearing in television ads and other appeals is very much in play. She offered during a recent interview with CNN’s Larry King: “My money isn’t going to make any difference. My value to him — my support of him — is probably worth more than any other check that I could write.”…

Winfrey said in an audio Web chat last week that, this year, the Obamas will be her only political guests.

Campaign finance reform was promised as a way to make everyone equal in the political process, to squeeze out the power of big money. But one of its effects is to make some rich people more equal than others. If Oprah–or Rupert Murdoch, or Donald Graham–decides to use his or her resources to help a particular candidate, that’s legal and very powerful. But the rich man who runs a software company is forbidden to use any significant part of his financial resources to help a candidate.

All power to journalists and celebrities in the reformed political process.

At The Hill, I have an article about a little-known dip into the pork barrel: big bonuses for congressional staff if there’s money left over at the end of the year, especially if the money will fall into the hands of the other party at the end of the year.

How can there be money left over when the government is running multi-hundred-billion dollar deficits? Well, you might ask. But each department has its own appropriation, and those accounts often have “money left in the budget” as the end of the year approaches, necessitating the famous end-of-the-year spending spree.

In the congressional case, I found examples like this on committee staff budgets:

The House Energy and Commerce Committee showed similar patterns. In 2005, when the Republican leadership was spending its “own money” on year-end bonuses, several staffers received less than 10 percent of their annual salaries, while a few lucky staffers received extra payments of as much as 17 percent.

But when GOP Energy and Commerce bosses faced losing their chairmanship after the 2006 election, they decided to leave no dollar behind for the Democrats. Lucky staffers then got windfalls of 31 percent on a $35,000 salary, 30 percent on a $50,000 salary, 18 percent on a $100,000 salary, and so on. At least 15 committee staffers got bonuses of between $11,000 and $17,600.

And I concluded, cheekily:

Members of Congress are free to pay their staffers whatever they choose, up to an annual ceiling, so there’s nothing illegal about year-end bonuses, even year-end, post-election, before-the-other-party-gets-in bonuses.

But this pattern illustrates a big difference between the private and public sectors. In the private sector, if your customers become dissatisfied with your product, you tend to make less money. In the public sector, you get a couple of months to double-dip before you lose control of the money. For participating in a Congress that voters booted out of office, these bonuses are a handsome parting gift.

A big tip of the hat to Cato interns Schuyler Daum and Jonathan Slemrod for poring over payroll records, and to LegiStorm for making such information about Congress public and accessible.

John Edwards says that his universal health care plan will be mandatory not just for taxpayers and doctors, but for patients: You will get preventive care, and you will like it:

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.”

As Jon Henke notes, Edwards also proclaims that “the right to choose and the right to privacy are fundamental constitutional rights.” But apparently abortion is the only thing you have a constitutional right to choose. You have no fundamental right to choose not to get a mammogram. Or any other kind of preventive care. Shades of This Perfect Day and Brave New World.

This is, of course, a fundamental problem with socialism, or with socialization of the cost of anything. Edwards sincerely believes, with good reason, that preventive care helps to reduce costs by catching problems early and helping people stay healthy. (Though he may not be right about that.) But why is my health care budget his concern? Because he plans to socialize the costs of health care. So indeed, if I fail to take care of myself, I’m imposing costs on the collective. And as the collectivist-in-chief, Edwards wants to treat me as a national resource, not as a free adult individual.

This isn’t the first time such arguments have been made. What’s the argument for requiring adults to wear bicycle helmets and seat belts? That otherwise the taxpayers might have to pay for the costs of injury. Activists who want to restrict smoking, trans fats, and other unhealthy habits make the same argument: The collective is going to be paying for your health care, so you owe it to us to hold down our costs.

When we realize that socializing costs creates such unpleasant conflicts, we can respond in one of two ways: We can move away from socialization and allow people to make their own decisions and bear the consequences, or we can increasingly restrict freedom in order to hold down collective costs. Libertarians prefer the former approach, John Edwards the latter.

In One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched was a tyrannical nurse who forced medical care on people who didn’t want it. She was known as “Big Nurse,” which might be a better metaphor for our increasingly therapeutic state than “Big Brother.” Democrats love Hollywood celebrities (and vice versa). Maybe Edwards can get Louise Fletcher to do a health care tour with him. She could wear her state nurse’s uniform and sing “You Belong to Me.”

In an article on the 2007 Virginia legislative elections, the Washington Post reports:

GOP candidates will also make the argument that if the party retains control, it would mean lower taxes, controls on development and more education spending.

Lower taxes AND more spending on good stuff — it’s hard to beat that combination. And it’s worked so well at the federal level. But it may be harder to deliver in a state that’s required to balance its budget.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales presumably resigned because he had lost support in Congress, especially over issues relating to the firing of U.S. attorneys. But Tim Lynch, director of Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice, has long insisted that the real problem with Gonzales was not incompetence, faulty memory, or his confusing explanations of how the U.S. attorneys came to be dismissed. Rather, he wrote in May:

In area after area — from habeas corpus to separation of powers to executive responsibility — he has sought to strip out the limits that the Constitution places on presidential power. His fiasco regarding the firing of federal prosecutors is a petty offense when compared to the legal advice that he has conveyed to the President. The real scandal is his disregard for constitutional principles.

That’s why you have to appreciate Gonzales’s decision to resign effective September 17, Constitution Day. Maybe he wants to send a subtle signal that the end of his tenure could be an occasion to recover our commitment to constitutional limits on federal power and on presidential power.

Constitution Day is also, of course, famous as the day that the Cato Supreme Court Review is released at an all-day symposium on the Supreme Court’s most recent term.

The Washington Post reports today that John Edwards’s new strategy is to reposition himself as a “straight talker,” emulating the model that worked for John McCain in 2000. As someone said, “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Meanwhile, the Post also tells us about the lifelong congressional insider who’s helping Barack Obama craft his image as a Washington outsider.

What a country. It reminds me of the presidential campaign manager who once told me, “We’ve made a tentative decision to run a bold campaign.”

A fascinating headline in the New York Times today:

The Kibbutz Sheds Socialism and Gains Popularity  

It seems that one of the proudest accomplishments of socialism – one that never degenerated into totalitarianism! – the Israeli kibbutz, began to decline in the 1980s as even small-scale socialism proved not to work very well. People left the kibbutzim, and they seemed doomed. But now, as the Times puts it, “most are undergoing a process of privatization,” though just as in China and other reforming socialist societies, they prefer not to use such a word. Nevertheless, the Times says,

On most kibbutzim, food and laundry services are now privatized; on many, houses may be transferred to individual members, and newcomers can buy in. While the major assets of the kibbutzim are still collectively owned, the communities are now largely run by professional managers rather than by popular vote. And, most important, not everyone is paid the same.

Once again, people are lining up to get in.

One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a libertarian society allows for voluntary experiments in socialism, while a socialist society can hardly accommodate people who prefer to live in a libertarian community. In a free society, if kibbutzim or other experiments in communal living can make a go of it, more power to them. And if the original design doesn’t quite work, then adjustments can be made. And the rest of us benefit by having more patterns and models available to choose from.

“As some of the leading presidential candidates trooped before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City this week, there was one thing largely missing at the lectern — veterans of foreign wars,” writes Peter Baker in the Washington Post, contrasting this year’s campaign with past election years.

Baker grades both former presidents and current candidates on a steep curve. He writes, “Every president from Harry S. Truman to George H.W. Bush served.” But LBJ, already a congressman, went on investigative missions for FDR, admittedly flying around the South Pacific combat zone. And the nearsighted Ronald Reagan made propaganda films in Los Angeles. He even counts George W. Bush as a veteran on the basis of his Texas Air National Guard service.

As for the current candidates, 

“The torch is being passed to a new generation that’s never worn a uniform,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a military historian at Columbia University. “It’s a significant change. It means people are now coming of age who are really the post-Vietnam generation.”

But is that really true? The leading Democratic candidates are a woman and a man born in 1961. But John Edwards, born in 1953, Bill Richardson (1947), and Joe Biden (1941) are not “the post-Vietnam generation.” They’re the non-Vietnam generation. A blogger has some more details about the Vietnam records of 2008 candidates here.

As for the Republicans, John McCain famously served, as Baker notes. But Mitt Romney (1947), Rudy Giuliani (1944), Fred Thompson (1942), and Newt Gingrich (1947) are, like their Democratic counterparts, within the age cohorts who went to Vietnam. They weren’t post-Vietnam, just nowhere-near-Vietnam. Mike Huckabee (1955) and Sam Brownback (1956), along with Barack Obama, would seem to the only candidates who are actually from the post-Vietnam generation.

Does this matter? It used to matter to voters. When I asked my parents in the 1960s, about 20 years after the end of World War II, why all the local candidates listed themselves as veterans on all their campaign literature, my mother told me that you’d wonder what was wrong with a man who hadn’t served in “the war.” Today, some worry that military veterans might be more eager to go to war. Historian Jackson sees it differently: “When you have leaders who haven’t gone [to war], I do think it changes the equation a little bit,” he told the Post. “It’s a little bit worrisome. People who have actually been to war . . . are actually a little less inclined to go to war. Generals know what war’s about, and they’re less enthusiastic to go rocketing off than civilians.”

That reminds me of Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers, often denounced as militaristic or even fascist, especially by people who have only seen the movie. In the novel, only military veterans were citizens with voting rights. But the basis for that was classical republicanism: that only those who were willing to defend the society, and who by facing combat had come to understand the real meaning of power and war and violence, could be trusted to lead the society.

At the very least, candidates who have never served in a war should have some special humility in urging that other Americans be sent to war.

On TCM, that is. This Friday, the world’s greatest TV channel will broadcast 15 of Reagan’s movies from 6 a.m to 6 a.m. In primetime, they’ll start with “John Loves Mary.” I hope my sister Mary, who married a man named John, gets to watch it. And then at 8 p.m. it’s the classic “Bedtime for Bonzo.” It’s actually pretty amusing to see Reagan as a young liberal college professor trying to prove the “nurture” side of the nature-vs.-nurture argument and saying that there are no bad kids, just bad environments. And then stay tuned for two of Reagan’s best, “Kings Row” — which gave him the title for his first autobiography, “Where’s the rest of me?” — and “Knute Rockne, All American,” in which he said for the first but certainly not the last time, “Win one for the Gipper.”

Now if only TCM would bump one of the lesser movies and stick in “The Speech” from 1964, we could hear Reagan say something more important, like

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

And wouldn’t that be a welcome alternative to alternating images of Bushes and Clintons on our TV sets?