David Boaz

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.”

When it comes to India, Washington Post reporter Rama Lakshmi seems to have no trouble recognizing that government benefits just might attract votes:

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 impossible to suspect that similar programs might have similar effects in the United States?

My long-ago colleague Norman Leahy, once a young research assistant at the Cato Institute, has an op-ed in the Washington Post today. I wonder where he got the idea that an act of the legislature is invalid just because it violates the state constitution.

Those praising the Virginia General Assembly’s transportation compromise may not realize that the bill runs afoul of the plain language in the state’s constitution.

Virginia’s constitution is clear that the General Assembly can impose only uniform taxes across the state for similar activities. But the bill that emerged from the House-Senate conference committee last weekend upsets the historic balance between localities and state government; it contains new provisions about taxation, some of which would effectively set up a two-tier system for residents in certain parts of the state. It’s difficult to see how some of these provisions could survive legal challenge….

As a constitutional matter, these local tax provisions could probably be struck down without affecting the rest of the legislation.

But few should know better than Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) that state legislators don’t have the power to impose a discriminatory local tax. He was the state’s attorney general when his office defended before the state Supreme Court the General Assembly’s previous attempt at a transportation tax package. The court rejected the argument.

Attention high-school and college students: The Moorfield Storey Institute has announced the Vision of Ayn Rand essay contest. Students are invited to submit essays related to issues discussed in the book The Vision of Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden.

The book has a fascinating history. For ten years, from 1958 to 1968, Branden delivered lectures on “Basic Principles of Objectivism” at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City and, via tape transcription, to groups in more than 80 cities throughout the United States and abroad. More than 35,000 students attended those lectures. Along with Rand’s books, the lectures helped to create one of the first modern organized libertarian movements. But until 2009, the lectures were never available in printed form. Now they are. Buy the book here.

Back in 2009 I said this in a jacket blurb:

This is the most important work on Objectivism not written by Ayn Rand, available at last in book form. These lectures were delivered by the person closest to Ayn Rand, designated by her as her intellectual heir, often with her sitting in the audience and answering questions about them, and endorsed by her. Rand’s subsequent falling out with Nathaniel Branden over personal matters doesn’t change that. This is the organized, comprehensive treatise on Objectivism that Ayn Rand never wrote. Philosophers, historians, and economists may – and should – debate the claims of Objectivism. In this book they have a systematic work with which to engage. These lectures were also a milestone in libertarian history, as the lecture sessions brought together for the first time large numbers of young people who shared an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and the individualist philosophy. The lectures were given as taped courses in more than 80 cities, and people drove for miles to listen to them on tape. Wasn’t that a time! 

Tonight at 9 pm on the Fox Business Network, John Stossel interviews a vast array of characters – Gov. Gary Johnson, Rep. Justin Amash, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Cato Media Fellow Radley Balko, John Bolton, Ann Coulter, and even me – in front of a cast of thousands. Literally. Some 1400 attendees at the Students for Liberty conference joined in asking the questions. As Stossel’s website says,

This week, Stossel does a special show at the 6th annual “Students for Liberty” conference in Washington….

Fireworks fly when Stossel and the mostly libertarian crowd spar with Ann Coulter about gay marriage and drug laws. Coulter is in rare form, passionately denouncing libertarians, and at one point calling Stossel and the crowd out for focusing on drug laws and gay marriage.

It may not make it into the final version, but Coulter said libertarians should stop spending time on, you know, issues of personal freedom and equality under the law and focus on more important issues. Like privatizing the New York City subways. I kid you not.

9 pm ET tonight. Be there.

Cato Institute highlight reel featured at the 25th Annual Benefactor Summit.

As government workers – though only about a third of private-sector office workers – get a day off for Presidents’ Day, I thought I’d offer some reading about presidents.

First, my own tribute to our first president, the man who led America in war and peace and who gave up power to make us a republic:

Give the last word to Washington’s great adversary, King George III. The king asked his American painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence. West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.”

“If he does that,” the incredulous monarch said, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Then, of course, Gene Healy’s book The Cult of the Presidency, which argues that 200 years after Washington, “presidential candidates talk as if they’re running for a job that’s a combination of guardian angel, shaman, and supreme warlord of the earth.” Buy it today, at a 50 percent discount!

Gene updated that argument with a short ebook, False Idol: Barack Obama and the Continuing Cult of the Presidency. As they say, start reading in minutes!

And then you can read my short response to Politico’s question, who were the best and worst presidents? I noted:

Presidential scholars love presidents who expand the size, scope and power of government. Thus they put the Roosevelts at the top of the list. And they rate Woodrow Wilson – the anti-Madisonian president who gave us the entirely unnecessary World War I, which led to communism, National Socialism, World War II, and the Cold War –8th. Now there’s a record for President Obama to aspire to! Create a century of war and terrorism, and you can move up from 15th to 8th.

Hmmm, maybe it would be better to just read a biography of George Washington.

Galileo was born 449 years ago, which is reason enough for the publication of several books about him in 2013. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a great review-essay about Galileo, his trial, and the new books. I’m intrigued by the argument he presents that Galileo could have avoided a lot of trouble if he’d been just a little less stubborn and impolitic. Gopnik defends “the originality of the scientific revolution.” He talks about Galileo’s authorship of “the most entertaining classic of science ever published.” He even throws in an apropos Milton Friedman reference. Perhaps most impressively, he does a good job of helping us understand the perspective of the church hierarchy, which seems so foreign to our modern liberal sensibilities.  

If only he would work as hard to understand and present the views of modern market liberals.