David Boaz

News reports quote President Obama, in discussing the debt ceiling and the ongoing argument over tax and spending policy in his press conference yesterday, saying:

It turns out the American people agree with me. 

Do they? It’s true that a majority of respondents told pollsters that they wanted to raise taxes on someone else. And Congress did that in the “fiscal cliff” legislation.

But what about the president’s insistence on a larger government and essentially no cuts in federal spending? The election day exit polls shed some light on those questions.

51 percent of voters polled said the government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals—8 points higher than in the 2008 election. Only 43 percent of voters said they believe government should be doing more.

49 percent said the 2010 health care law should be repealed, with only 44 percent of voters supporting it.

And 51 percent said they prefer smaller government with fewer services, while 43 percent prefer larger government. As usual.

There are many reasons that Mitt Romney lost the election, from the Republicans’ alienation of everyone except straight white men, to an effective campaign of demonization, to “legitimate rape.” But the polls don’t show that voters agree with President Obama on constant expansion of the size, scope, and power of government.

But maybe think twice before taking them as authorities on complex environmental and economic matters.

The used lunch trays Emily Fox took home about four years ago from the loading dock outside her elementary school were gross, some still plastered with ketchup. Emily stacked the trays in piles of 10. She wanted to know just how many polystyrene lunch trays Piney Branch Elementary School students went through in a day.  “Three hundred and twenty-five,” said Emily, now 12... On Friday, the Hermosa Beach City School District in Southern California started replacing foam trays with recycled paper trays once a week, thanks in part to the advocacy of Max Riley, a fourth-grader at Hermosa Valley School, and his sister Reece, a second-grader. “No Foam Friday” will run through the end of the school year, and the siblings say they’re pushing for permanent change. Max said he worries about the health repercussions of littering Earth with foam.

Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, writes in the Washington Post that his country "once was independent and aspires to that status again." I regret that a major part of his argument with the Post's editorial board is whether Scotland would remain involved in global military intervention. You'd think the opportunity to extricate your country from quagmires like Iraq would be a great benefit to the Scots. But Salmond denies that an independent Scotland would mind its own business and live in peace. Still, independence for any country ought to appeal to Americans, especially to those of us with Scottish roots. Some scholars argue that the Act of Union  in 1707 made the Scots part of a larger and more advanced nation and opened the way to the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume, Adam Smith, and other scholars. And perhaps those modern ideas and the connection with England made possible the achievements of  the inventor James Watt, the architect Robert Adam, the road builder John MacAdam, the bridge builder Thomas Telford and later Scots such as Alexander Graham Bell and Andrew Carnegie. But whatever the benefits of union might have been in 1707, surely they have been realized by now. And alas, the land of Adam Smith has become one of the poorest and most socialist parts of Great Britain. So maybe a libertarian shouldn't look forward to Scottish independence. On the contrary, I think it's easy for Scotland to whine and demand more money from the British central government. An independent Scotland would have to create its own prosperity, and surely the people who produced the Enlightenment are smart enough to discover the failures of socialism pretty quickly if they become free, independent, and responsible for their own future. The Cato Institute's late, lamented magazine Inquiry got to the topic of Scottish independence long before the voters did, in 1978. Its article was written by Alexander McCall Smith, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Edinburgh but now much better known as the author of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series, and independence activist Peter Chiene. They haven't achieved their goal yet, but the landslide victory in 2011 for the Scottish National Party has made national independence a real possibility.

In my book Libertarianism: A Primer, I have a chapter of pop public choice called "What Big Government Is All About." The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority isn't really big government, just a local D.C.-Virginia-Maryland authority to run a couple of airports. But it demonstrates some of the problems you can expect from economic entities that don't face a market test. Here's how the Washington Post story today begins:

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.

And what about Dad, I wonder. No job for Dad? Anyway, officers of the agency don't seem perturbed by the story.

“There were no clear-cut guidelines,” said MWAA board member H.R. Crawford, who will leave the board next month when his term expires. Crawford, 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.”... “This is not a patronage mill,” said Davis, whose daughter worked in the fire department for two months in 2011. “Dozens of employees’ kids worked there.”

At this point the response of good-government liberals is always: Pass an ethics law. Yeah, that ought to work.

MWAA’s ethics code prohibits employees from hiring, supervising or working with relatives. They also cannot supervise family members — directly or indirectly — or “have influence over their work.”

Today is a great day for freedom. On this day in 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, thus repealing Prohibition. My former colleague Brandon Arnold wrote about it a few years ago:

Prohibition isn’t a subject that should be studied by historians alone, as this failed experiment continues to have a significant impact on our nation. Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a key force in the passage of Prohibition, survive to this day and continue to insist that Prohibition was a success and advocate for dry laws. Prohibition-era state laws, many of which are still on the books today, created government-protected monopolies for alcohol distributors. These laws have survived for three-quarters of a century because of powerful, rent-seeking interest groups, despite the fact that they significantly raise costs and limit consumer options. And because of these distribution laws, it is illegal for millions of Americans to have wine shipped directly to their door. To learn more about the history and legacy of Prohibition, check out my podcast and watch the live webcast of Cato’s policy forum, “Free to Booze: the 75th Anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition."

A front-page Washington Post article about the looming Virginia gubernatorial race between Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Friend of Bill Clinton Terry McAuliffe includes this point:

McAuliffe is known as “a dealmaker,” said Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes gubernatorial races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, and Cuccinelli “is far more ideological in a lot of ways.” “I think [Cuccinelli] walks around with a copy of the Constitution, and McAuliffe doesn’t,” she said.

Really? The fact that the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia, home of James Madison, carries a copy of the Constitution makes him an ideologue? Cuccinelli may well be strongly ideological, for better or worse. But surely carrying a copy of the Constitution in your pocket -- get yours today from the Cato Institute -- is not intrinsically ideological. For more ideologues, such as the ones below, see this article.

Somehow, election results continue to trickle in, and David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report continues to update his spreadsheet of the national popular vote. At this point, he shows President Obama reelected with 50.86 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney's 47.43 percent. For whatever reason, the late-arriving results all seem to widen Obama's lead. The total vote appears to be down by almost 4 million votes from 2008, and Obama has received about 4.7 million fewer votes than he did in his first campaign. Romney received slightly more votes than John McCain did. Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson received 1,265,000 votes, according to Wikipedia, whose mysterious editors show the votes for every candidate. That's the most any Libertarian presidential candidate has ever received. It amounts to 0.99 percent, just shy of Ed Clark's 1.06 percent in 1980. If Johnson had been on the ballot in Michigan and Oklahoma, he would surely have broken 1 percent, though he still probably wouldn't have exceeded Clark's percentage. (Michigan and Oklahoma haven't been very good states for Libertarian candidates.) Johnson's best states were New Mexico, where he served two terms as governor, followed by Montana and Alaska. The Libertarian Party reports that seven Libertarian statewide candidates in Texas and Georgia received more than a million votes. Don't forget to read the new ebook The Libertarian Vote: Swing Voters, Tea Parties, and the Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal Center, which discusses how the millions of libertarian-leaning voters in America tend to vote. (It does not have 2012 results.)

I'm always hearing that spending has been cut to the bone; we need to raise taxes, because there's just no more fat in the budget, federal, state, or local. Here are a few stories I read last night that might just lead you to a different conclusion. In the Washington Post . . .

A federal program that pumped a record $3 billion into failing schools has shown mixed early results, with more than one-third of the targeted schools doing worse after receiving funding, according to initial government results released Monday.

In Washington City Paper . . .

There were just two shoppers at the Yes! Organic Market in Fairlawn last Friday afternoon.... Owner Gary Cha plans to close Yes!’s struggling Fairlawn location in early December, ending the two-plus-year run of his only store east of the Anacostia River, despite a $900,000 grant from the city.

And two pages later . . .

When confronted with evidence of what one city contracting official later described as “admittedly fraudulent” behavior between two private construction companies, the District government and private employees working on its behalf ignored the problem, then eventually quietly offered to broker a settlement between the feuding companies that would have cost taxpayers $250,000. That’s what more than 500 emails LL obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show. The records also indicate that the commission tasked with enforcing the city’s local business development program punted on a chance to investigate the alleged fraud involving a joint venture that managed more than $50 million worth of construction at the newly renovated Anacostia Senior High School.

In a profile of Myat Thu, a Burmese dissident forced to flee the country after "the 1988 nationwide protests that were brutally crushed by the Burmese military," who now runs a cafe across the border in Thailand, NPR blandly notes that he has portraits on his walls of Aung San Suu Kyi -- and Che Guevara. Does Myat Thu know that Che was a brutal murderer who helped establish a Stalinist, military-backed dictatorship in Cuba that has lasted longer than the junta in Burma? Maybe he doesn't. But surely Jason Beaubien of NPR does.

Los Angeles Times columnist James Rainey writes:

Many debates have broken out about the meaning of last week’s election, including over whether conservatives should still push their claim that America is a “center-right nation.”... After 32 straight losses for same-sex wedding laws, four states approved marriage-equality proposals last week. Two other states legalized marijuana for recreational purposes.... But Americans appear to remain more receptive to conservative viewpoints on spending, debt and the size of government. A bare majority, 51%, of voters last Tuesday told exit pollsters that government should do less, with 43% saying it should do more.... A more precise verdict would be that the majority of the country remains slightly right of center when it comes to supporting lower spending, decreased debt and smaller government.  But America appears to have shifted left of center in allowing more liberal policies on drugs and the institution of marriage. So, left on social issues and right on economics. If you eliminated the desire to tax the rich, it would sound like we had a center-libertarian nation.

Good points! And of course reminiscent of arguments we've made here at Cato, including Brink Lindsey's "libertarian center" and of course the work David Kirby and I have done on "the libertarian vote," now available in a convenient ebook.