David Boaz

For Dick Cheney’s daughter, pregnancy has the usual frustrations. Morning sickness. Sore back. Political attacks from left and right.

A New York Times article from the day after Thanksgiving falls into a familiar trap of assuming that equality — among people, among regions, among growth rates, etc. — is a natural condition, so that any deviation from equality is not only worthy of note but a “problem.” Reporter Ian Austen writes:

But [Canadian finance minister Jim] Flaherty did not address a much broader economic problem that has been troubling people who follow the nation’s economy. Although Canada’s economy as a whole is expected to grow by a healthy 2.8 percent this year, there is an expanding gulf between the eastern and western halves of the country.

Indeed, in the past year economic growth has been stronger in oil-rich Alberta than in industrial Ontario, the largest province. Alberta remains the wealthiest Canadian province. But Ontario is not far behind, and it’s wealthier than the other western provinces. The main point is that it would be absurd to expect Canada’s provinces to show the same growth rate each and every year. Yet the Times calls disparity in annual growth rates “a much broader economic problem that has been troubling people.”

The reality is that nothing is equal. The world is diverse and complex. Different provinces (or states or nations) have different resource endowments, different histories, different policies. Why would we expect them to have the same outcomes, annually or otherwise? The same is true for individuals; we’re all different in infinite ways, so it’s crazy to expect us to end up with the same incomes or assets or accomplishments. And crazy to think that Harvard or the NBA or the Wal-Mart workforce would “look like America.”

Footnote: Google isn’t helping any. When I searched for the New York Times headline “In Canada’s Economic Divide, West Surges While East Struggles,” Google responded:

Did you mean: In Canada’s Economic Divide, West Surges When East Struggles  

On government radio Friday, a panel of journalists were bemoaning the high cost of politics. The two leading candidates for president in 2008 might end up spending $500 million each — a billion-dollar election, the pundits wailed in italicized outrage.

It would be nice if politicians and special interests didn’t think it was worth half a billion dollars to gain the most powerful office in the world. But it is. The president not only has the power to bomb people, invade countries, hold citizens in jail without a lawyer, burn down churches, and strongly influence policy on issues ranging from abortion to youth unemployment — all of which might cause opinionated citizens to contribute money to political campaigns — he or she also plays a huge role in allocating $2.8 trillion a year of federal spending to favored clients, not to mention tweaking government regulation to help or hurt a candidate’s friends.

In Saturday’s New York Times, lefty journalist Tom Edsall gloats over the Republican-leaning interest groups who can expect to bear the brunt of Democratic wrath:

Topping the Democratic hit list are the G.O.P.’s closest corporate allies, including the oil and gas industry, student loan companies, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers known as Big Pharma. The list is much
longer. . . .

In many cases, Democrats can exact reprisal against companies that financed the Republican revolution and won special legislative favors in return . . . with the same avoidance of public scrutiny.

A billion dollars for the presidency? Coincidentally, that’s just about what Nintendo will take in on the 4 million units of Wii it intends to sell in the last five weeks of 2006.

A Turkish academic has been fired for expressing his views.

Young liberals are being arrested in Egypt for voicing their opinions online, and it’s making the fight for freedom all the more important.

Noted civil libertarian Janet Reno has signed an amicus curiae brief objecting to indefinite detention of alleged enemy combatants.

Maybe Reno would have a more positive attitude if the Bush administration sentenced the detainees to live under Castro’s tyranny, sent them to jail for decades on bogus charges, or simply launched a military assault on the Guantanamo prison and killed everyone inside.

The New York Times writes that Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is beginning to develop after being “held back by a half-century of war and privation.”

A slightly more accurate statement would be that economic development in Vietnam has been held back by “a half-century of war and socialism.” The privation was a result of the socialism, not a cause.

Richard Cohen speculates that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg might spend as much as half a billion dollars of his personal wealth on a race for president. He could certainly afford to. His company may be worth as much as $25 billion, and it has recently been reported that …

I hate to keep picking on Sen. Rick Santorum, but he’s the most articulate and principled opponent of individualism and individual rights since Hillary Clinton first rose to prominence. I noted previously the NPR interview in which he rejected ââ?¬Å?this whole idea of personal autonomy, . . . this idea …

Richard Cohen speculates that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg might spend as much as half a billion dollars of his personal wealth on a race for president. He could certainly afford to. His company may be worth as much as $25 billion, and it has recently been reported that he could realize $7 billion from a “leveraged recap” while retaining 70 percent of the company. And a top Republican fundraiser pointed out to me that if you don’t have any fundraising expenses, then half a billion is the functional equivalent of a billion-dollar campaign fund. If a lunatic billionaire could get 19 percent of the national vote by spending $70 million in 1992, how much better could a sane and stable billionaire with ten times that much money do?

Cohen writes that “there is no doubt that Bloomberg has done a terrific job managing New York, and there is no doubt that the federal government is a mismanaged mess.” True enough.

But if anyone thinks that a good manager can make the federal government run like a well-oiled machine, he’s going to be disappointed. In the first place, the federal government is far larger than Bloomberg LP or even the New York City government. It’s not amenable to hands-on management. And more importantly, government failure is systemic. It’s not a product of stupid or lackadaisical presidents or Cabinet secretaries. It results partly from inherent disagreements about what would be good policy; a corporation may have one goal or mission, but a society does not. And if government is supposed to reflect society, then it can only have a clear mission as long as that mission is to protect citizens from rights violations and leave them otherwise free to pursue happiness in their own ways. Once government begins taking on broader duties, citizens will disagree about what it should do.

And then there are the institutional obstacles to lean and effective government. As Milton Friedman told President Bush (pdf) in 2002, “if you spend someone else’s money on someone else, you are not very concerned about how much is spent, or how it is spent.” The problems of incentives, concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, the concentration of power, and bureaucratic self-interest cannot be solved by a hard-nosed manager who’s good at hiring, firing, and delegating.