David Boaz

In Germany enrolled members of a church must pay a tax for the support of the church. I’m sure a lot of American churches would like to have such a revenue source. How’s it working out in Germany? Well, Marketplace radio reports:

Christians – Protestants and Catholics combined – are leaving their churches at a rate of about 300,000 people a year.

No doubt tax avoidance isn’t the only reason for that. But really, if you simply become less interested in religion, why bother to formally renounce your membership? The tax saving is an obvious reason. Marketplace’s John Laurenson talks to one ex-church member:

Stefan, though, no longer pays the church tax that used to gobble up four percent of his salary.

Was it really the money, I ask. Or was it loss of faith? No, he says, it was the money.

Back in April 2000 I attended a lecture at the Smithsonian Institution by Richard Dawkins. Afterward I wrote this to him:

I was struck by your answer to one question. A member of the audience asked why the United States has a stronger movement for religious fundamentalism than other countries even though it has separation of church and state. You replied that you didn’t know; it might be just a coincidence. I was surprised that you didn’t offer what I think is the clear “Darwinian” answer: competition makes individuals and enterprises stronger, while subsidies and protection make them weaker. As I wrote in Libertarianism: A Primer, “businesses coddled behind subsidies and tariffs will be weak and uncompetitive, and so will churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Religions that are protected from political interference but are otherwise on their own are likely to be stronger and more vigorous than a church that draws its support from government.”

And indeed scholars of religion often comment that American churches tend to be more vibrant and more robust than European churches, with far more Americans actually in church on Sunday morning than Europeans. Perhaps a guaranteed source of income isn’t all that helpful in the long run.

I was particularly amused by this comment in the Marketplace report, from a businessman who

travels quite a bit in the U.S. and doesn’t much like what he’s seen of the way they fund churches there.

In the States you see churches that sometimes “look a little like they have too much of a consumer orientation,” says Wendland. “Where they play rock music and do all sorts of crazy stuff. I have nothing against rock music but I would (prefer) a church that is doing the right thing for the community and for God but not do stuff to attract a sort of clientele.”

It strikes me that that’s just the argument made on behalf of tax funding for the arts. We have more arts in America than in any country in history. But much of it is labeled “entertainment” and disdained by those who “have nothing against rock music but would prefer arts organizations that are doing the right for the community” rather than having “too much of a consumer orientation.”

Which is why my argument that “Because art is just as spiritual, just as meaningful, just as powerful as religion, it is time to grant art the same independence and respect that religion has. It is time to establish the separation of art and state” seems entirely on point here. 

“If vitamin D does lower blood pressure in African-Americans, it can have a significant public health impact,” [nephrologist John] Forman says. [NPR]

No. It might have widespread impact on individuals’ health. But that’s not what “public health” should mean. 

The meaning of “public health” has sprawled out lazily over the decades. Once, it referred to the project of securing health benefits that were public: clean water, improved sanitation, and the control of epidemics through treatment, quarantine, and immunization. Public health officials worked to drain swamps that might breed mosquitoes and thus spread malaria. They strove to ensure that water supplies were not contaminated with cholera, typhoid, or other diseases. The U.S. Public Health Service began as the Marine Hospital Service, and one of its primary functions was ensuring that sailors didn’t expose domestic populations to new and virulent illnesses from overseas.

Those were legitimate public health issues because they involved consumption of a collective good (air or water) and/or the communication of disease to parties who had not consented to put themselves at risk. It is difficult for individuals to protect themselves against illnesses found in air, water, or food. A breeding ground for disease-carrying insects poses a risk to entire communities.

But a health problem is not a public health problem just because it’s a widespread health problem. Obesity, riding a motorcyle without a helmet, and getting too little Vitamin D may be bad for an individual. But the individual who engages in these activities isn’t endangering me. It may well be a good idea for African-Americans – and others – to get more Vitamin D in order to reduce high blood pressure. But that’s health advice for individuals, not a public health issue.

You know you’ve arrived when your name starts showing up in cartoons. Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s legendary “Pepper … and Salt” cartoon from last Thursday:

Of course, most inflation obsessives are deficit scolds, so it’s not clear that host is going to get much debate. 

One person who might be called both an inflation obsessive – that is, a person who objects to the robbery of savers through the erosion of the value of their money – and a deficit scold is David Stockman, former budget director for President Ronald Reagan. He has a new book out, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, which he summarized in the New York Times on Sunday. He’ll be speaking about his book at the Cato Institute on Wednesday. Don’t miss it.

Dan Balz writes in the Washington Post, as many reporters have this week, 

In 2004, Republicans used ballot initiatives barring same-sex marriage to spur turnout among their conservative voters. That strategy helped then-President George W. Bush win reelection.

But did it? I argued in 2006 that it didn’t:

It’s true that states with such initiatives voted for Bush at higher rates than other states, but that’s mostly because the bans were proposed in conservative states. In fact, Bush’s share of the vote rose just slightly less in the marriage-ban states than in the other states: up 2.6 percent in the states with marriage bans on the ballot, up 2.9 percent in the other states.

Political scientist Simon Jackman of Stanford has more here (pdf). He concludes that the marriage referenda tended to increase turnout but not to increase Bush’s share of the vote. And in a county-by-county analysis of Ohio, he found no clear relationship between increased turnout, support for the marriage ban, and increased support for Bush.

Matthew Dowd made the same point yesterday:

Speaking from experience as the chief strategist in 2004 for President Bush, I saw in close detail how little gay marriage could influence turnout of conservatives or evangelicals.   In 2003 and 2004, we did a series of public opinion tests on different messages related to the micro targeting project that would cause voter groups to turn out more in President Bush’s favor.  We tested social issues as well as messages related to the economy, national security, taxes and the size of the federal government.  Not a single social issue (which included gay marriage) fell on the effectiveness scale in the top eight messages.

Further, in analyzing the election returns in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential race an interesting set of data was revealed.   In states that had gay marriage amendments on the ballot including key target states, there was no statistical difference in turnout of conservatives from states that did not have these amendments on the ballot.  Gay marriage had no effect on turnout even among the most conservative potential voters in both the data before Election Day and the returns on Election Day.

Other senior officials from the 2004 Bush campaign confirm: It wasn’t gay marriage that brought social conservatives to the polls, it was national security and the war on terror.

At any rate, as Balz noted, the politics of gay marriage have changed for sure, in Ohio and elsewhere.

Jim DeMint, former senator and future president of the Heritage Foundation, writes a column for USA Today opposing gay marriage. But like so many social conservatives, he supports his position with a sleight of hand. DeMint writes:

Without strong families grounded in marriage, we cannot hold back the ever-expanding power of government. As the marriage culture weakens, Big Government grows. Just look how the welfare state has expanded as the unwed childbearing rate has grown from single digits in the 1960s to more than 40% today.

Marriage policy exists to encourage a man and a woman to commit to each other permanently and exclusively as husband and wife and to be father and mother to any children. Sound marriage policy strengthens civil society and reduces the role of government.

The erosion of marriage costs taxpayers. And it’s not just conservatives who say this. Even the left-leaning think tank, Brookings Institution, attributed $229 billion in welfare expenditures between 1970 and 1996 to the breakdown of marriage.

Yes indeed. Stable families are less likely to be on welfare. As Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of Brookings write,

Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent. 

But DeMint and other social conservatives make a logical leap when they connect that point to gay marriage. Gay people making the emotional and financial commitments of marriage is not the cause of family breakdown or welfare spending.

When DeMint says that “family breakdown” is causing poverty – and thus a demand for higher government spending – he knows that he’s really talking about unwed motherhood, divorce, children growing up without fathers, and the resulting high rates of welfare usage and crime. 

So why raise the problems of broken families and then propose to prevent gay people from getting married? Why all the focus on issues that would do nothing to solve the problems of “family breakdown” and what DeMint has elsewhere called “the high cost of a dysfunctional society”? Well, solving the problems of divorce and unwed motherhood is hard. And lots of Republican and conservative voters have been divorced. A constitutional amendment to ban divorce wouldn’t go over very well with even the social-conservative constituency. A legal ban on premarital sex would address the problem, but even social conservatives realize that it would be an imprudent exercise of state power. Far better to pick on a small group, a group not perceived to be part of the Republican constituency, and blame them for social breakdown and its associated costs.

But you won’t find your keys on Main Street if you dropped them on Green Street, and you won’t reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and not letting them adopt orphans.

President Obama is expected to issue an executive order today creating five new national monuments, including the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Leaving aside the questions about whether such decisions should be made unilaterally by the president, without input from Congress, Harriet Tubman is certainly deserving of national recognition. Cato senior fellow Jim Powell, author of The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History Told Through the Lives of Freedom’s Greatest Champions, wrote about Tubman two weeks ago on the 100th anniversary of her death:

Few freedom fighters were more tenacious than petite Harriet Tubman, the African-American slave-turned-abolitionist who died March 10, 1913 when she was about 92. She escaped to freedom, then was reported to have gone back into the Confederacy 19 times, risking capture as she “conducted” some 300 slaves to freedom….

She heard that her sister — a slave with children — was going to be sold away from her husband, who was a free black. Tubman decided she would return to Maryland and guide them to freedom. That was her start as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

Then in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act empowered Southern slave hunters to capture alleged runaways without a jury trial, and Tubman began conducting slaves hundreds of miles farther north — across the Canadian border. She knew the abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, whose three-story house in Rochester, N.Y., was the last stop for many slaves on the Underground Railroad before they boarded a steamer across Lake Ontario.

Harriet Tubman risked her life time after time to lead people out of slavery to freedom. She’s a libertarian heroine.

William Wan writes in the Washington Post that in China

Citizens have been punished for crimes as trivial as writing an unflattering blog post about a local official.

Trivial indeed. Worse than trivial. Not crimes at all. Just normal speech in a free society.  But of course China isn’t a free society. Despite its moves toward markets and profits, China remains a one-party state still characterized by state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. And that party is the Communist party, a party born to eradicate capitalism, a party that as it came to power in 1949 spoke of “the extinction of classes, state power and parties,” of “a socialist and communist society,” of the nationalization of private enterprise and the socialization of agriculture, of a “great and splendid socialist state” in Russia, and especially of “a powerful state apparatus” in the hands of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.” That’s a vision that doesn’t fit very well with “unflattering blog post[s] about a local official.” The problem is endemic to socialism. Robert Heilbroner, a distinguished American intellectual who called himself a socialist (though the New York Times declined to be so rude in its obituary), was admirably candid in explaining the place of dissent in a socialist society in a 1978 article in, well, Dissent:

Socialism … must depend for its economic direction on some form of planning, and for its culture on some form of commitment to the idea of a morally conscious collectivity… If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation. Indeed, that is what planning means… The factories and stores and farms and shops of a socialist socioeconomic formation must be coordinated … and this coordination must entail obedience to a central plan… The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal… Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.

That is, even an unflattering blog post about a local official threatens “the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal” under the direction of “a powerful state apparatus” in the hands of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.” So we deplore China’s use of labor camps “as an expedient way to silence critics,” in the words of the Post, but we shouldn’t be surprised by it. Indeed, a front-page article in today’s Post on Hugo Chavez’s legacy refers to

the tenets of what Chavez called 21st-century socialism—intervening in the economy, putting state institutions under the executive’s control and corralling opponents and the press.

Sounds a lot like 20th-century socialism.

Sure, everybody’s a Rand Paul fan this morning, from the Heritage Foundation to the Huffington Post. Well, maybe not President Obama, John Brennan, and Harry Reid. And alas my good friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial board. But still, a wide array across the political spectrum. Me, I was a Rand Paul fan back in 2010. Indeed, I blogged this picture from Kentucky’s legendary Fancy Farm picnic:

And a couple of weeks later on “The McLaughlin Group” I noted:

In Kentucky, the Democrats are calling Rand Paul an extremist. Rand Paul is responding by calling his opponent a Democrat. In the end, the voters will be more scared of a Democrat. 

But even before that, I’d written up Paul’s Republican primary victory with this graphic illustration:

 

And I’d pointed out that Washington’s neoconservative establishment – from Dick Cheney to David Frum, Mitch McConnell, and Rick Santorum – had campaigned hard against Paul in the primary, and been soundly repudiated. They ran some nasty ads against Paul, and his Democratic opponent kept up the attack in the fall. And again the voters saw the attacks on “radical” Rand Paul and voted for him.

So anyway, I’m happy today to welcome all the new fans who made #StandWithRand a number one topic on Twitter last night. And let’s hope they all stick around, and keep trying to rein in the president’s authority to incarcerate and even assassinate American citizens on American soil.

It’s hardly big news, right? Another of our freedoms gets banned in Washington every day. But this time it’s not just particular constitutional rights. They don’t like the whole idea. Or at least the word, on a license plate. 

The District of Columbia allows residents to purchase vanity license plates. And as Chris Moody and Chris Wilson of Yahoo! News describe, there are strict rules about what you can say on your vanity plate:

According to the official list of banned D.C. plate combinations, it may take some extra creativity to get your idea accepted by the city’s meticulous censors. The capital city’s DMV has a 53-page list of 26,993 license plate no-no’s that prohibit everything from praising the local baseball team to expressing disgust with the Internal Revenue Service. The list was made available through a Freedom of Information Request filed by the transparency website GovernmentAttic.org.

You can check out your own ideas at the interactive tester below. Moody and Wilson note that you can’t have such interesting plates as “GOPSUX,” “GODEMS,” “RONPAUL, “”GVTSUX,” ANTIIRS,” “OBAMA,” “BARACK,” or “OBAMA44.”

And that’s right, you can’t have a license plate reading “FREEDOM.”

You can have “LIBERTY,” though, which might suffice. Wonder how they made that distinction. I tried a few other ideas. I once noted that Starbucks wouldn’t let you print “laissez-faire” on a customized Starbucks card. D.C. is more accommodating and has no objection to “LFAIRE.” “GAY” is OK, and perhaps surprisingly so are “HOMO” and “ANTIGAY.” I’ll bet the list of banned words will be constantly growing. “FEMNIST” passes muster, and so does “ANTIFEM.” But don’t try “SEX” or “SEXY.”

Moody and Wilson noted that you can’t have “RONPAUL” or “OBAMA.” But you can have “JEBBUSH”—who is speaking at Cato tomorrow, by the way—or “JEB2016” or “JEB45.” Also “HILLARY” and “BIDEN16.” (“CHRISTIE” is too long, but you can have “CHRISTI” or indeed “CHRIST.”) Hmmm, I’m beginning to wonder why you can’t have “RONPAUL.” But you can have “RAND,” “RAND16,” or indeed “AYNRAND.”

Try your own combinations. Just don’t expect to get “FREEDOM.”