David Boaz

When Americans suggest that government transfer programs might affect the way people vote, the mainstream media react with the indignation that greeted Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment. Of course, in other contexts the media certainly know that programs like Social Security, Medicare, and farm subsidies impact voting, but Republicans seem to get pounded for making that point.

But when it comes to other democracies, such as India, journalists don’t seem to have any trouble seeing the electoral advantages of government spending. Jim Yardley reports from India for the New York Times:

Frustrated by delays in Parliament, and eager to gain favor with rural voters ahead of national elections, India’s cabinet has approved a sweeping executive order that establishes a legal right to food and will create what is likely to be the world’s largest food subsidy system for the poor….

For the governing Congress Party, the new ordinance fulfills a campaign pledge made by Mrs. Gandhi and provides her party with something tangible to offer voters as the country prepares for national elections next year. The coalition government has been battered by corruption scandals and a sinking economy. With polls suggesting a loss of public support for the Congress Party, the food ordinance is good politics, some analysts say, if uncertain economics.

I noted a few months ago that the Washington Post had made a similar point:

Trying to rekindle the fire of India’s economy, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram promised Thursday to rein in a runaway deficit even as he raised spending on welfare schemes that the government hopes will woo voters in elections scheduled for next year….

“The finance minister faced two counter-veiling pressures: to present a populist, voter-friendly budget and also control the huge fiscal deficit,” said Vir Sanghvi, a political analyst. “What he presented was a ‘this-is-the-best-we-can-manage-under-the-circumstances’ kind of a budget. .?.?. He is hoping that the economy will improve and prices will come down by the time of the election. That is a big political gamble.”

Chidambaram promised to increase spending on rural welfare schemes, rural roads and jobs, food guarantees for the poor, women’s safety programs, tax breaks on loans for first-time home buyers and a women’s bank.

Is it really so hard to imagine that American politicians might also see transfer programs as measures that would benefit them on election day? Of course, the more fundamental impact of transfer programs may be to make both parties afraid to cut spending. What politician in either party wants to propose cuts in Social Security, Medicare, student loans, or farm subsidies? It’s not that transfer recipients all vote for the same party; it’s just that both parties fear the loss of votes if they interfered with the flow of subsidies. And not just in India.

What are the protesters in Istanbul upset about? Well, I noted last week that a survey by a Turkish newspaper gave us a partial picture. A headline from the Hurriyet Daily News in Istanbul reported: 

Protesters are young, libertarian and furious at Turkish PM, says survey

An online survey of 3000 protesters conducted by two academics found, among other things:

A majority of the protesters who completed the survey, 81.2 percent, defined themselves as “libertarian.” A total of 64.5 percent of the respondents defined themselves as “secular.”

And now the Washington Post tells us that one young protester, Aysun Yerlikaya, objects to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan because he’s, well, too much like Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg:

Erdogan “pokes into everything — what you drink, what you eat,” she said, referring to advice he gave earlier this year to eat “genuine wheat bread” with a lot of bran in it.

David Fahrenthold has another excellent article on waste in government in Sunday’s Washington Post. This time he finds a truly comic example of waste, duplication, and confusion:

[T]he U.S. government has at least 15 official definitions of the word “rural,” two of which apply only to Puerto Rico and parts of Hawaii.

All of these definitions matter; they’re used by various agencies to parcel out $37 billion-plus in federal money for “rural development.” And each one is different….

There are 11 definitions of “rural” in use within the U.S. Department of Agriculture alone.

It’s laughable. But the real question is, Why does the federal government even need to define “rural”? Well, of course the answer comes back to the real purpose of our modern tax-and-transfer state: The definitions define who gets the subsidies.

Every year, there are billions available to fund projects in rural communities. Money for housing. Community centers. Sewer plants. Broadband connections.

In a sidebar to the story, we get some details. The Census Bureau has one definition of “rural” so it can tell us how many Americans live in rural areas. Here are the purposes of the other 14 definitions:

Used for a variety of loan and grant programs, all meant to foster rural development…for loans and grants for “community facilities” in rural areas… for aid for water and waste-disposal systems… for aid for improvements in telecommunications systems…by farm-credit associations making housing loans… for certain lending programs for rural community development…to determine areas served by Office of Rural Health…by the National Rural Development Partnership…for grants to rural institutions of higher education…to determine what areas of Hawaii are eligible for rural-aid programs…to determine what areas of Puerto Rico are eligible for rural-aid programs…by various rural development loan and grant programs.

So let’s see. People in rural areas pay federal taxes. People in urban areas pay federal taxes. All that money goes to Washington – where a great deal of it stays – and then some of it is used to provide programs and services in rural and urban areas. Maybe both rural and urban Americans would be better off keeping their money at home and paying for whatever services they think are actually worth the cost. And then the federal government wouldn’t have to pay handsome salaries to well-educated people to form task forces to determine 15 different definitions of “rural.” And states, cities, and rural areas wouldn’t have to hire expensive lobbyists to get a piece of that federal pie.

Housing is expensive and hard to find in beautiful San Francisco. In today’s New York Times, one would-be housing provider explains why. Scott James writes:

[A]fter renting out a one-bedroom apartment in my home for several years, I will never do it again. San Francisco’s anti-landlord housing laws and political climate make it untenable….

[A] complex legal structure has been created to make evictions for just cause extraordinarily difficult.

At first many of these rules governed only apartment complexes and larger properties with many units. But in 1994 the city applied the regulations to homes if they included just one rental on the property. In other cities, including New York City, such small-time landlords have far more rights over their own homes.

As he goes on to describe his experience with the last tenant in his downstairs apartment—a story featuring a sledgehammer, a flooded apartment, and a plugged-in appliance in an overflowing sink—I was reminded of the 1990 movie Pacific Heights, not coincidentally set in San Francisco.

It’s a thriller that is almost a documentary on the horrors of landlord-tenant law—and that is confirmed by today’s story. A young couple buys a big house in San Francisco and rents an apartment to a young man. He never pays them, and they can’t get him out, and then things get really scary. The lawyer lectures the couple—and the audience—on how “of course you’re right, but you’ll never win.” When I saw it, I just knew this happened to someone—maybe the screenwriter or someone he knew. Sure enough, when Cato published William Tucker’s book Rent Control, Zoning, and Affordable Housing, and I asked Pacific Heights director John Schlesinger for a jacket blurb, he readily agreed to say, “If you thought Pacific Heights was fiction, you need to read this book”; and he told me that the screenwriter had a relative who had gone through a tenant nightmare.

Want to instantly create 10,600 rental units in San Francisco? Reform landlord-tenant law so that small landlords come back to the market. In the meantime, watch Pacific Heights.

Today’s widespread outrage over reports that the National Security Agency is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans reminds me of this post from July 2012, in which Sen. Rand Paul reported on a private briefing he’d received. He couldn’t reveal what he’d learned, but he was able to report that the number of Americans subject to surveillance was closer to “a gazillion” than to zero. Now we have a bit more information. As I wrote then:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) gave a great speech on surveillance last week at FreedomFest. Actually, he gave two good speeches, but the one embedded below is his short 6-minute talk at the Saturday night banquet. He talks about our slide toward state intrusion into our phone calls, our emails, our reading habits and so on. You know how big the surveillance state has gotten? The answer is “a gazillion.” Watch the speech—complete with high-falutin’ references to Fahrenheit 451 and the martyr Hugh Latimer!

Is libertarianism a worldwide trend among young people? There are poll reports from the United States, Great Britain, and Turkey this week that point in that direction.

The College Republican National Committee put out a report finding that young voters are very much against excessive government spending (though they do support higher taxes on the wealthy) and are strongly in favor of gay marriage. They want to reform entitlements but see the Republican party as “closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

Meanwhile, the Economist, in an editorial titled “The strange rebirth of liberal England” (in an allusion to a famous history book), writes, “Young Britons have turned strikingly liberal, in a classical sense….The young want Leviathan to butt out of their pay cheques as well as their bedrooms.” An accompanying article declares, “Britain’s youth are not just more liberal than their elders. They are also more liberal than any previous generation”:

Young Britons are classical liberals: as well as prizing social freedom, they believe in low taxes, limited welfare and personal responsibility. In America they would be called libertarians.

More than two-thirds of people born before 1939 consider the welfare state “one of Britain’s proudest achievements”. Less than one-third of those born after 1979 say the same. According to [the long-running British Social Attitudes survey], members of Generation Y are not just half as likely as older people to consider it the state’s responsibility to cover the costs of residential care in old age. They are also more likely to take such a hard-hearted view than were members of the famously jaded Generation X (born between 1966 and 1979) at the same stage of life.

“Every successive generation is less collectivist than the last,” says Ben Page of Ipsos MORI, a pollster.

And finally comes this headline from the Hurriyet Daily News in Istanbul: 

Protesters are young, libertarian and furious at Turkish PM, says survey

An online survey of 3000 protesters conducted by two academics found, among other things:

A majority of the protesters who completed the survey, 81.2 percent, defined themselves as “libertarian.” A total of 64.5 percent of the respondents defined themselves as “secular.”

Maybe this really is the libertarian moment. Students for Liberty attracted 1,400 attendees to its February national conference, and another 365 to a European conference in March. Now, as the Economist says, if only the young people will vote – and the parties will offer them candidates.

George H. Smith is one of the best-read, most insightful libertarians living today. He is the author of most of the Cato University Home Study Course, which you should definitely download. He writes a weekly article for Libertarianism.org titled “Excursions into the History of Libertarian Thought.” He is the author of Atheism: The Case Against God (1974), Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies (1991), and audio series on “Great Political Thinkers,” “The Meaning of the U.S. Constitution,” and “The Ideas of Liberty.” And finally – finally – he has been persuaded to write down much of what he knows about the history of classical liberal thought in a new book from the Cato Institute and the Cambridge University Press, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism.

It’s a great study of classical liberalism and the relations among such liberal ideas as individualism, natural rights, utilitarianism, self-sovereignty, and what Lord Acton called “the polar star of liberty.” Along the way he answers such criticisms of liberalism as “atomistic individualism” and “social Darwinism.” It’s a college course in political philosophy in just 217 very readable pages. Buy it now for the low low price of $24.95.

Ezra Klein writes in the Washington Post that congressional Republicans have moved to the right on such issues as health care, stimulus spending, and a carbon tax, forcing Democrats to move to the center to find common ground. And thus:

If you imagine a policy spectrum that that goes from 1-10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy, and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold both moderate Democrats and Republicans, the basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9, or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.

His argument is that Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich used to support “the basic architecture of the Affordable Care Act,” John McCain (R-AZ) supported a cap-and-trade bill, George W. Bush pushed a stimulus bill in 2008—but now Republicans don’t want to support any of those policies. So, he says, Democrats have moved to the right, away from what they really want, like single-payer health care, command-and-control environmental regulation, and no cuts to entitlements plus massive new spending. He says that leads to center-right policy.

But another way to look at it is this: on his scale of 1 to 10, where 1 represents bigger government and 10 represents smaller government, what’s happening? Is government getting bigger or smaller? Take health care: if 1 represents national health care and 10 represents a free market in health care, then surely with income tax preferences for health insurance, Medicare, the prescription drug benefit, and government paying for more than half of all health care, we were at least at 5 by 2009. Everybody from Michael Cannon to Joe Biden thinks Obamacare is a BFD on the road to total government control of medicine. So let’s say it put us at 3 or 4.

You can see the same pattern in the other issues Klein discusses. Carbon tax, cap and trade, stimulus spending—they all make government bigger than it is now. So when Republicans endorse any of those policies, they are playing on bigger-government territory. Now, Republicans say they’re not going to do that any more. So Klein’s complaint is not really that Republicans are insisting on “8, 9, or 10” policies; they’re just no longer proposing policies in the 3 and 4 range, hoping that Democrats will agree to make government only a little bigger, rather than way bigger. Sounds like maybe the debate is moving back toward the 50-yard line, instead of taking place entirely in Democratic territory.

Note: Klein talked only about economic issues, so I’ve done the same. There’s a clear trend in a liberal/libertarian direction on social issues such as marriage and marijuana. And Republicans who propose further restricting immigration or getting involved in yet another Mideast war are hardly advocates of small government. This analysis deals only with fiscal, regulatory, and entitlements issues.

Continuing our ongoing series on the wealth of Washington, we bring you the lead story in Friday’s “Mansion” section of the Wall Street Journal:

The Journal reports:

As other American cities have been buffeted by an uneven economy, Washington’s property market has been buoyed two forces specific to the capital city: a surge of federal contractors and a rising tide of government spending. The result: what real-estate agents and developers are calling an unprecedented real-estate surge.

Yes, a rising tide of government spending may be bad for the American economy, but it’s great for the Washington area.

Washington is wealthy and getting wealthier, despite history’s slowest recovery in most of the country. As we’ve said here before, this of course reflects partly the high level of federal pay, as Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven have been detailing. And it also reflects the boom in lobbying as government comes to claim and redistribute more of the wealth produced in all those other metropolitan areas. 

Money spent in Washington is taken from the people who produced it all over America. Washington produces little real value on its own. National defense and courts are essential to our freedom and prosperity, but that’s a small part of what the federal government does these days. Most federal activity involves taking money from some people, giving it to others and keeping a big chunk as a transaction fee.

Every business and interest group in society has an office in Washington devoted to getting some of the $3.6 trillion federal budget for itself: senior citizens, farmers, veterans, teachers, social workers, oil companies, labor unions - you name it. The massive spending increases of the Bush-Obama years have created a lot of well-off people in Washington. New regulatory burdens, notably from Obamacare, are also generating jobs in the lobbying and regulatory compliance business.

Walk down K Street, the heart of Washington’s lobbying industry, and look at the directory in any office building. They’re full of lobbyists and associations that are in Washington, for one reason: because, as Willie Sutton said about why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

The wonder is why the taxpayers put up with it.

In his stirring speech to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, then-New York governor Mario Cuomo used an extended metaphor of the whole nation as a family. So maybe it should come as no surprise to discover that his son, current New York governor Andrew Cuomo, uses the New York State government as a jobs program for his friends and their families. The Empire State Development Corporation in particular is chock-full of his donors and friends, and their young sons–not to mention Cuomo’s political advisers.

He’s not alone in spending (other people’s) money to help family and friends. The Washington Post reported in December on the family-friendly atmosphere at the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority:

Meet the Kulle family: mom Helen, daughter Ann Kulle-Helms, son-in-law Douglas Helms, son Albert, daughter-in-law Michele Kulle and Michele’s brother, Jeffrey Thacker.

They all worked for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. All at the same time.

One MWAA board member, 

who has had at least three relatives, including a daughter-in-law, work at the agency, said family members are employed frequently, particularly among board members.

“If you ask a third of those folks, their relatives work there,” he said. “I never thought that we were doing anything wrong.”

…

“This is a government town and an agency town,” Crawford said. “If there’s a possibility that you can hire a relative … it was the norm.”

And yesterday the Post reported that MWAA isn’t just for family, it’s for friends, too. Two old friends, one at MWAA, the other at the D.C. Office of Aging, hired each other’s children and friends and issued numerous contracts and grants to companies run by relatives and friends.

At MWAA, government is truly one big family.

And today comes this touching story from Alabama:

Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., will resign from Congress later this year to take a job at the University of Alabama, CQ Roll Call has confirmed…

He will take on the newly created position of vice chancellor of government relations and economic development…

Bonner’s sister, Judy Bonner, is president of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

It bears repeating: “The vice chancellor job is a newly created position in the UA system.”

Anything for family.