Anticipating the inauguration of a rare Republican governor in Maryland, the state’s big Democratic jurisdictions are getting worried about their access to the state treasury:

Montgomery and Prince George’s officials are trying to make sure their counties are not forgotten by Gov.-elect Larry Hogan.

The Anne Arundel County Republican, who will be sworn in Wednesday, has pledged to pay more attention to rural Maryland, which he says was neglected during the administration of outgoing Gov. Martin O’Malley (D). Those rural counties also voted for Hogan by overwhelming margins….

“The uncertainty of the new administration creates more of an impetus . . . for larger jurisdictions to come together,” said Prince George’s County Council Chair Mel Franklin (D-Upper Marlboro), who wants to form a “large-county caucus” to lobby in Annapolis.

They have nothing to worry about, right? Surely a governor wouldn’t direct taxpayer dollars on the basis of political favoritism? As it happens, I’ve been watching Maryland politics for many years, and this story reminded of one that appeared in the Washington Post 20 years ago this week, when Parris Glendening became governor:

In his first major act as Maryland governor, Parris N. Glendening unveiled a no-new-taxes budget today that unabashedly steers the biggest share of spending to the three areas that voted most strongly for him: Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and Baltimore.

Glendening proposed cuts in welfare and other state programs so he can build more schools, fight crime and create jobs, particularly in those three urban areas, the only ones where Glendening (D) won a majority of votes Nov. 8.

I thought that was such a perfect encapsulation of politics at its finest that I’ve quoted it numerous times, including in my forthcoming book The Libertarian Mind. I also like to quote this charming and honest description of politics in a letter written by Lord Bolingbroke, an English Tory leader in the eighteenth century:

I am afraid that we came to Court in the same dispositions as all parties have done; that the principal spring of our actions was to have the government of the state in our hands; that our principal views were the conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us and of hurting those who stood in opposition to us.

I recall reading that Charlie Peters, the legendary editor of the Washington Monthly, used to say that state legislatures are just committees for dividing up the loot, though I can’t find it online. If he didn’t, he should have.

On NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Peter Overby discusses the way lobbyists are adjusting to the new Republican Congress. Some are hiring former Republican lawmakers and congressional staff. Some are reminding clients that there are still two parties, as in this nice ad for superlobbyist Heather Podesta, former sister-in-law of White House eminence John Podesta:

OVERBY: Even in a Republican Congress, lobbyists will need to court Democrats, too. Heather Podesta is happy to point that out. She runs her own small Democratic firm.

HEATHER PODESTA: The power of the Congressional Black Caucus has really grown.

OVERBY: In fact, she says CBC members are expected to be the top-ranking Democrats on 17 House committees and subcommittees.

PODESTA: Corporate America has to have entree into those offices. And we’re very fortunate to have the former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus as part of our team.

After every election, the lobbyists and the spending interests never rest. The challenge for the tea party and for groups such as the National Taxpayers Union is to keep taxpayers even a fraction as engaged as the tax consumers.

In the last analysis, as I’ve written many times before – and in my forthcoming book The Libertarian Mind – the only way to reduce the influence of lobbyists is to shrink the size of government. 

As Craig Holman of the Nader-founded Public Citizen told Marketplace Radio, “the amount spent on lobbying … is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.” Marketplace’s Ronni Radbill noted then, “In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say…. With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy, lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time.”

Big government means big lobbying. When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And today’s federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.

Through Tammany Hall, the New York City Democratic political machine in the late 19th century, “Boss” William M. Tweed essentially controlled the city’s government and much of the state’s. Like most political leaders he never felt entirely secure, and he tried to bully his opponents, including journalists. He is famously reported to have been especially outraged by cartoonists such as Thomas Nast, and to have roared to his associates,

Let’s stop them damn pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about—my constituents can’t read—but damn it, they can see pictures.

It seems that Islamic extremists may feel the same way. Theo van Gogh was murdered after producing a film about Islam. The publication of cartoons about Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten generated much outrage and numerous death threats. And now we have the brutal murders of cartoonists and other journalists from the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. At least Boss Tweed just used bribery and corrupt politics to ruin his enemies.

Walter Olson wrote eloquently in Time magazine yesterday about the Charlie Hebdo murders and the challenge they present to liberal society:

There is no middle ground, no soft compromise available to keep everyone happy–not after the murders at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Either we resolve to defend the liberty of all who write, draw, type, and think–not just even when they deny the truth of a religion or poke fun at it, but especially then–or that liberty will endure only at the sufferance of fanatical Islamists in our midst. And this dark moment for the cause of intellectual freedom will be followed by many more.

Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, writes about threats to free speech in his book The Tyranny of Silence, published recently by the Cato Institute, and in various articles and interviews.

And herewith my favorite Thomas Nast cartoon, not primarily about Boss Tweed’s corruption, but about “Peace with a War Measure” – peace and liberty shackled by the income tax.

While other matters dominate the headlines, American governments continue to spend more money, despite the presumed effects of the Great Recession. Washington Post reporter Abha Bhattarai lays out the latest details:

State and local governments in Maryland, Virginia and the District spent $7.82 billion more than they collected in revenue between 2007 and 2012, during the throes of the economic downturn, according to data released from the U.S. Census Bureau last month….

State and local governments in Virginia spent $1.03 billion more than they took in between 2007 and 2012, while expenditures in Maryland outpaced earnings by $6.07 billion….

Nationally, state and local governments spent $118.15 billion more than they collected between 2007 and 2012. Total expenditures during that period increased by 18.2 percent, from $2.7 trillion to $3.2 trillion, while total revenue declined 3.2 percent over the same five-year period, from $3.1 trillion to $3.0 trillion.

Over that five-year period, plenty of businesses, families, and nonprofits found their revenue declining by more than three percent, and most responded by spending less.

Of course, it’s often said that governments spend when times are good and the tax revenue is rolling in, then find themselves over-extended and facing painful cuts when growth slows down. But the evidence above suggests that governments just keep spending even as the money stops rolling in. It’s exceedingly difficult to get governments to spend less, especially when every government dollar helps to create pro-spending constituencies who will resist cuts. Spending interests never rest; taxpayer groups have to work twice as hard just to hold the line.

One side note: The online headline for this article is

State, local governments continue to spend more than they earn

Actually, I don’t think governments “earn” money. Merriam-Webster defines “earn” as “to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered.” Governments don’t earn, they take. Just try saying “I don’t find your services worth the money, and I won’t be renewing my contract.”

For more on state government spending, see Cato’s latest “Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors.”

The media are full of headlines about war, sexual assault, inequality, obesity, cancer risk, environmental destruction, economic crisis, and other disasters. It’s enough to make people think that the world of their children and grandchildren will be worse than today’s world.

But the real story, which rarely makes headlines, is that, to paraphrase Indur Goklany’s book title, we are living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner and more peaceful planet. (Allister Heath summed up his argument in a cover story for the Spectator of London, without all the charts and tables.) Fortunately, beyond the headlines, more people do seem to be recognizing this.

The Cato Institute, for instance, has created an ever-expanding website on human progress, known simply as HumanProgress.org.

Here’s Steven Pinker expanding on the information in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined in Slate:

The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. 

He has charts of the data in each of those areas. And here’s Pinker at the Cato Institute discussing why people are so pessimistic when the real trends are so good:

Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, writes that

2014 has been the best year ever – just as 2013 was, and just as 2015 will be. It is something that is, now, true every year but the point cannot be made enough. We’re living through a period of amazing progress – in medicine, prosperity, health and even conquering violence.

Nelson offers this brilliant graphic from the Lancet, a British medical journal:

And just today we learn in a new report from the American Cancer Society that cancer rates have fallen 22 percent in two decades. At Spiked Online, editor Brendan O’Neill points out “10 Kickass Things Humanity Did in 2014.”

Andres Martinez at Zocalo Public Square:

The “good old days” are a figment of our imagination. Life–here, there, everywhere–has never been better than it is today. Our lives have certainly never been longer: Life expectancy in the U.S. is now 78.8 years, up from 47.3 years in 1900. We are also healthier by almost any imaginable measure, whether we mean that literally, by looking at health indices, or more expansively, by looking at a range of living-standard and social measures (teen pregnancy rates, smoking, air-conditioning penetration, water and air quality, take your pick).

Martinez notes:

I’ll concede, very grudgingly, that all this whining can be a good thing. As Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, has written, we’re hard-wired to be disgruntled. It’s the only way we achieve progress. Evolution requires us to demand more and better, all the time.

So on Monday let’s go back to demanding more and better. But for tonight, Happy New Year!

Congratulations to former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, who has become concerned, as he writes in the Wall Street Journal, that

The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly one of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is five to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies, according to a groundbreaking, 464-page report released this year by the National Academy of Sciences. America puts people in prison for crimes that other nations don’t, mostly minor drug offenses, and keeps them in prison much longer.

Of course, if he’d been following the work of the Cato Institute, he could have read about the problems of drug prohibition and mass incarceration in this 2009 symposium at Cato Unbound, this 2013 paper on incarceration rates in the United States and other countries, this Washington Post article by Tim Lynch in 2000 when the U.S. prison population first exceeded 2 million, or indeed my 1988 New York Times article on the excessive arrests and intrusions on freedom in the drug war.

Meanwhile, on the same page of Friday’s Wall Street Journal, former senator James L. Buckley calls for ending federal aid to the states, an idea central to his new book Saving Congress from Itself and inspired by the work of Cato’s Chris Edwards.