David Boaz

The new book The Locavore's Dilemma, which will be presented at Cato on Wednesday, got a good review in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu seem to have had the most fun among this group of authors. "The Locavore's Dilemma" argues that the benefits of eating local have been vastly overstated by food activists and its serious detriments swept under the rug. The tone is distinctly upbeat, no doubt because being a gleeful debunker is fun but also because the two authors are resolutely cheerful about the world's food situation. Mr. Desrochers and Ms. Shimizu, a married couple who are both professional economists, present a counterintuitive but well-supported case that local self-sufficiency is the worst thing you can do for the environment, since it requires many crops to be grown in the wrong places, with damaging ecological consequences. American farmers, they observe, used to grow wheat locally in the Shenandoah Valley, tilling steep and rocky slopes—and unleashing a torrent of soil erosion. With the shift of grain farming to the far more productive and erosion-resistant soils of the Midwest, "more grain is now being produced on fewer acres and, overall, more habitat is available for wildlife." Their study of the history of American agriculture is one of the strongest points of this book. Famines were common in the past precisely because food security rested on the vagaries of local conditions rather than the resiliency of trade, they observe: "Subsistence farmers periodically starve while commercial agricultural producers who rely on monocultures for their livelihood don't."

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We're saddened to note that William H. Peterson, a longtime friend of the Cato Institute, died this week at 91. Bill was a student of Ludwig von Mises at New York University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1952. He was later professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business Administration at NYU;  Scott L. Probasco. Jr. Professor of Free Enterprise and director of the Center for Economic Education at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; and Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy at Campbell University in North Carolina. He also worked in business, consulted with governments around the world, and wrote a book review column for the Wall Street Journal. In 1982, he lectured on free-market economics in Romania, East Germany, Ireland, and Canada. He wrote an essay on Mises that appeared in the 1971 book Toward Liberty: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises, edited by F. A. Hayek. In recent years he reviewed books, including many Cato Institute books, for the Washington Times. I'm pleased to have published his article "Is Business 'Administration'?" in Cato Policy Report in 1983, in which he made the case that business is "dynamic, competitive, synergistic, literally wealth-creating"---entrepreneurial, not merely administrative---and therefore the coveted MBA degree is misnamed and perhaps wrongly taught. Bill's wife of 62 years, Mary Bennett Peterson, died last year. She also studied with Mises at NYU. She worked as a stockbroker, a foundation officer, and a lobbyist for General Motors. She also wrote a book, The Regulated Consumer, that was ubiquitous among libertarians and conservatives in the 1970s. She criticized such agencies as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board for harming consumers, helping to set in motion a policy agenda that resulted in deregulation of both airlines and trucking.

Last month George Will pushed back against the bipartisan Washington wish for bipartisanship:

Bipartisanship, the supposed scarcity of which so distresses the high-minded, actually is disastrously prevalent. Since 2001, it has produced No Child Left Behind, a counterproductive federal intrusion in primary and secondary education; the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act); an unfunded prescription drug entitlement; troublemaking by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government-directed capitalism from the Export-Import Bank; crony capitalism from energy subsidies; unseemly agriculture and transportation bills; continuous bailouts of an unreformed Postal Service; housing subsidies; subsidies for state and local governments; and many other bipartisan deeds, including most appropriations bills.

And today I see this banner headline in the (actual paper edition of the) Washington Post:

In Senate, farm bill produces a rarity: cooperation Some see signs of renewed bipartisanship

Paul Kane reports:

To the purported short­list of certainties in life — death and taxes — add large, bipartisan support in the Senate for the farm bill. Despite the pattern in recent years of intense partisan acrimony, backroom bickering and publicly staged fights over nearly every piece of legislation, the Senate has begun to plod through a nearly $1 trillion farm bill that is likely to get a bipartisan vote for its approval by week’s end.

A trillion dollars. For a farm bill. Have we become so accustomed to throwing around the phrase "a trillion dollars" that this isn't headline news?  Not to worry, though, Congress is thinking of the taxpayers: They say they've cut $23 billion out of the trillion. Sure, let's look back in a decade and see if those cuts really happened. Meanwhile, shoveling out money to the farmers isn't the only time Congress can be bipartisan. There's also shoveling out money to Boeing and a handful of other big companies with the Export-Import Bank, as the Los Angeles Times reported on May 30:

President Obama has signed into law a bill reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, saying the rare example of bipartisan cooperation should be a model for a future legislation.

Yessiree, as George Will said, the one thing Congress can join hands and agree on is giving taxpayers' money to interest groups -- whether it's farmers or airplane manufacturers or college students and their parents or Medicare recipients. Bipartisanship is typically a conspiracy against the taxpayers.

Libertarians have often complained about the selective and hostile portrayal of business in Hollywood movies. A couple of little-known Hollywood movies that offer a different view are going to be on television this week. The 1960 film "Cash McCall," starring James Garner as an early "corporate raider," was voted "Best Libertarian Picture" at the 1994 First International Libertarian Film Festival. Take that as you will. But arguably it does show, as the late lamented Miss Liberty website said,  "a talented investor who overcomes envy and anti-success prejudice." And it's on TCM Saturday night at midnight. USA Network meanwhile, is broadcasting "Taking Woodstock" 22 hours early, at 2 a.m. Saturday (i.e., very late Friday night). I wrote about that movie for Liberty magazine in 2010 (not online):

The movie Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee, led me to the book of the same name by Elliot Tiber. I knew of Woodstock as a hippie happening a bit before my time. What I found interesting about the movie and the book was the portrayal of the Woodstock Festival, “Three Days of Peace and Music,” as an impressive entrepreneurial venture. In 1969 Tiber was a 33-year-old gay designer living in Manhattan, while spending his weekends trying to save his parents’ rundown Catskills motel. One weekend he read that some concert promoters had been denied a permit in Wallkill, N.Y. He came up with the crazy idea of inviting them to hold the festival on his parents’ property. Lo and behold, they showed up to check it out. Taking the lead was 24-year-old Michael Lang, who went on to become a prominent concert promoter and producer. The Tiber (actually Teichberg) property wasn’t suitable, but Elliot drove Lang and his team down the road to Max Yasgur’s nearby farm. At least that’s Tiber’s story; other sources say he exaggerates his role. He did play a key role, however, in that he had a permit to hold an annual music festival, which up until then had involved a few local bands. There’s a wonderful scene, better in the movie than in the book, when Lang and Yasgur negotiate a price for the use of the farm. We see it dawning on Yasgur that this is a big deal. We see Elliot panicking that the deal will fall through, and that without the festival business his parents will lose their motel. And we see Lang’s assistant reassuring Elliot that both parties want to make a deal, so they’ll find an acceptable price, which indeed they do. And then, with 30 days to transform a dairy farm into a place for tens of thousands of people to show up for a 3-day festival, Tiber describes (and Lee shows) a whirlwind of activity. “Within a couple of hours, the phone company had a small army of trucks and tech people on the grounds, installing the banks of telephones that Lang and his people needed.” Helicopters, limousines, and motorcycles come and go. A few hundred people are erecting scaffolding, stage sets, speakers, and toilets. The motel keepers are trying to find rooms and food for the workers and the early arrivals. The local bank is eagerly providing door-to-door service for the mountains of cash flowing into bucolic White Lake, N.Y. Meanwhile, there are a few locals who don’t like the whole idea. In Tiber’s telling, they don’t like Jews, queers, outsiders, or hippies. Maybe they just didn’t like a quiet village being overrun with thousands of outsiders. In any case they had a few tools available to them. A dozen kinds of inspectors swarmed around the Teichbergs’ motel. The town council threatened to pull the permit. Tiber writes, “Why is it that the stupidest people alive become politicians? I asked myself.”  At the raucous council meeting Lang offered the town a gift of $25,000 ($150,000 in today’s dollars), and most of the crowd got quiet. Max Yasgur stood and pointed out that “he owned his farm and had a right to lease it as he pleased.” That didn’t stop the opposition, but in the end the concert happened. The psychedelic posters and language about peace and love – and on the other side, the conservative fulminations about filthy hippies (see John Nolte’s movie review at BigHollywood.com – can obscure the fact that Woodstock was always intended as a profit-making venture. That was the goal of Lang and his partners, and it was also the intention of Tiber, Yasgur, and those of their neighbors who saw the concert as an opportunity and not a nightmare. The festival did rescue the Teichberg finances. It ended up being a free concert, however, which caused problems for Lang and his team. Eventually, though, they profited from the albums and the hit documentary Woodstock.... Tiber writes, “One of the great benefits of Woodstock—a benefit that, to my knowledge, has never been written about—was its sexual diversity.” But I think the fact that there were gay awakenings at Woodstock — and three-ways and strapping ex-Marines in sequined dresses — would surprise people less than the realization that Woodstock was a for-profit venture that involved a lot of entrepreneurship, hard-nosed negotiation, organization, and hard work. Taking Woodstock (the book, but better yet the movie) is a great story of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and capitalism.

Those of a different political persuasion may prefer TCM's Dalton Trumbo extravaganza tonight.

Time magazine's cover story looks at the power and mystery of Justice Anthony Kennedy. He's often the pivotal vote on a divided Supreme Court, Massimo Calabresi and David Von Drehle write. Sometimes he sides with the conservatives, sometimes with the liberals. It seems to mystify them:

Over that time, Kennedy cast the pivotal vote in cases dealing with abortion, the death penalty, gay rights, the war on terrorism, campaign finance and school prayer.... Efforts to fit Kennedy's major opinions into a clear, coherent philosophy have met with little success. He generally sides with the court's conservatives but is not tethered to any particular constitutional doctrine. "There is no grand unified theory for Justice Kennedy's jurisprudence," says Viet Dinh, a leading conservative court watcher.... More and more cases are decided based on his idiosyncratic values.

They do provide a few hints:

Instead of grounding abortion in a "right to privacy," which is never mentioned in the Constitution, Kennedy declared it to be part of the well-established right to liberty.... [In the Texas sodomy case] Kennedy wrote broadly, "Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions" and "includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct."... Opponents of Obamacare focused their Kennedy briefs on a number of opinions in which he maintained the importance of limiting government intrusions into individual liberty.

Hmmm. Justice Kennedy seems to be very concerned with liberty. He often sides with conservatives on economic issues (which are actually never mentioned by Time) and campaign speech, and with liberals on civil liberties, gay rights, and school prayer. Pretty inconsistent, huh? Or then again, maybe Justice Kennedy has a basically libertarian view of the world and the Constitution. The word "libertarian" never appears in the article. Perhaps it should. And it's not like the idea of Justice Kennedy's libertarianism is a deep, dark secret. The writers might have consulted Helen Knowles's book The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Liberty. Or Frank Colucci's book Justice Kennedy's Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty. Or Randy Barnett's Cato Supreme Court Review article on the Texas case, "Justice Kennedy's Libertarian Revolution." I'm not saying that Justice Kennedy is a down-the-line, Nozick-reading, Cato Institute libertarian. He did join the Court's statist majority in the medical marijuana case Raich v. Gonzales. And he infuriated libertarians by joining the majority in striking down state term limits and upholding state eminent domain. But the books and article cited above, and the Institute for Justice's 1997 rating of Supreme Court justices, do point to a strong libertarian streak in Kennedy's jurisprudence. Time's inability to point that out reminds me of a column I did in 2010, on another distinguished journalist's inability to apply the obvious label to Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's political views -- which are clearly libertarian, or as he would put it, liberal. Are journalists really so stuck in a red/blue, liberal/conservative world that they can't identify libertarianism even when they describe its elements?

As President Obama devotes his weekly radio address to "plenty of big ideas" on how to expand the size, scope, and power of government in a putative effort to get the economy going again, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum reminds us of the congenital inefficiency of government:

In 2002, the British government estimated the cost of hosting the Olympic Games at $2.8 billion. Ten years later, the price has passed $15 billion and is still rising. When everything is added up — lost business, as many as 13,500 British soldiers patrolling the streets of London (more than are in Afghanistan) — the expenses may come to $38 billion.

The scandal, of course, is that this is no scandal. It's just standard operating procedure in government. Everyone knows that government programs -- from stadiums to Medicare to reconstruction projects -- will likely suffer massive cost overruns. The question is why we keep believing the promises.

NPR reports that in an Ohio campaign speech, President Obama praised the post-World War II "era of compromise" and "broad consensus" when both parties worked together for the national interest. He gave some specific examples:

As much as we might associate the GI Bill with Franklin Roosevelt, or Medicare with Lyndon Johnson, it was a Republican---Lincoln---who launched the Transcontinental Railroad, the National Academy of Sciences, land-grant colleges. It was a Republican---Eisenhower---who launched the Interstate Highway System and a new era of scientific research. It was Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency; Reagan who worked with Democrats to save Social Security---and who, by the way, raised taxes to help pay down an exploding deficit.

That is, President Obama's idea of compromise and consensus is that Republicans support expanded government and higher taxes. He offers no examples of Democrats supporting tax reduction, spending restraint, or deregulation. It seems that in his view, the national interest is entirely and exclusively the expansion of the size, scope, and power of government. Remember that when you hear the president and his allies call for compromise and consensus. Compromise is a one-way street in President Obama's world.

Sen. Rand Paul, recently hailed as “America’s most important anti-war politician,” will join the distinguished list of speakers at this year’s session of Cato University. This year Cato University will be held for the first time in the magnificent new F. A. Hayek Auditorium at the Cato Institute in Washington. From July 29 to August 3, join fellow libertarians from around the country and the world to listen to lectures on economic, political, historical, and philosophical foundations of liberty. Speakers include

• the widely published economist Steve Landsburg,
• the scintillating speaker and West Point historian Rob McDonald,
• the polymath Tom Palmer,
• Cato scholars Roger Pilon, Bob Levy, Christopher Preble, Malou Innocent, Mark Calabria, Michael Cannon, and even me —
• plus the special dinner address on Capitol Hill by Senator Paul.

Note that Cato University is not just for students — there will be participants from college age to retirement. Check out Cato University here.

Like Walter Olson, I was struck yesterday by Tim Carney's admonition that “Libertarians need to reassess their allegiances on social matters” in light of government infringements on religious liberty. Walter did a good job of demonstrating that libertarians, even those who are not themselves religious, have been "on the front lines" in defending religious liberty in such cases as Catholic hospitals' objections to paying for birth control and the wedding photographer in New Mexico who didn't want to photograph a gay wedding. Libertarians don't have to be conservatives to object to "liberal" infringements on personal and religious freedoms. But there's another problem with what Carney wrote. I'm not quite sure what "Libertarians need to reassess their allegiances on social matters" means. But perhaps he means that libertarians should stop thinking of themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" and recognize that a lot of infringements on freedom come from the left. In my experience libertarians are well aware that in matters from taxes to gun ownership to Catholic hospitals, liberals don't live up to the ideal of true liberalism. But what about conservatives? Are conservatives really the defenders of freedom? Carney seems to want us to think so, and to line up with conservatives "on social matters." But the real record of conservatives on personal and social freedom is not very good. Consider:

• Conservatives, like National Review, supported state-imposed racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. (I won't go back and claim that "conservatives" supported slavery or other pre-modern violations of freedom.)
• Conservatives opposed legal and social equality for women.
• Conservatives supported laws banning homosexual acts among consenting adults.
• Conservatives still oppose equal marriage rights for gay couples.
• Conservatives (and plenty of liberals) support the policy of drug prohibition, which results in nearly a million arrests a year for marijuana use.
• Conservatives support state-imposed prayers and other endorsements of religion in public schools.

This is how the culture war generally plays out these days: The Left uses government to force religious people and cultural conservatives to violate their consciences, and then cries "theocracy" when conservatives object.

Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics—though that is hardly the most significant aspect of her work—has died at 78. My old friend Mario Rizzo of New York University examined her scholarly accomplishment in 2009 when she won the Prize:

The work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, is not very well-known among economists. In fact, I would venture the guess than most economists had not heard of her before the prize was announced yesterday morning. Two reasons for this are that her degree is in political science and she has written for publications outside of the mainstream economics journals. Additionally, her work, by and large, lacks the high degree of mathematical formalism now so characteristic of economics. Yet the Nobel Prize Committee has done a great service to economics and the greater social-scientific community. When a well-known economist receives the prize little is gained apart from the recognition of a job well done and perhaps some wider public recognition. I do not think that great contributions are made in any discipline because of the incentive effects of an improbable prize. However, in this case the Nobel Committee has brought extraordinary work to the attention of an economics discipline that has become excessively specialized and, perhaps increasingly irrelevant to the real world, as Paul Krugman and others have recently suggested. Professor Ostrom’s work is highly relevant to important issues in economic development, common-pool resources, the development of social norms, and the solution of various collective action problems. Her work is also methodologically diverse. She uses experimental methods, field research, and evolutionary game theory. She is not afraid to draw on various disciplines when appropriate: economics, political science, evolutionary psychology, cultural anthropology and so forth. She is a very worthy intellectual descendant of Adam Smith who realized that the study of trade based on self-interest needed to be supplemented by a broader view of humankind – individuals capable of the so-called “moral sentiments” like honesty, benevolence, and loyalty, as well as the standard vices. Much of Ostrom’s work centers on developing and applying a broader conception of rationality than economists usually employ. The standard conception of rationality is not the rationality of real human beings but the rationality of cognitively-unlimited lightning-fast calculators. This is a purely imaginary construct. On the other hand, Olstrom’s “thick rationality” is the result of trial and error, use of relatively simple heuristics, employment of rules, and the embodiment of cultural norms. To reject standard, improbable rationality is notto reject rationality. It is rather to develop more sophisticated, and yet more realistic, models of rationality. “Thick rationality” is a bottom-up phenomenon. It recognizes the importance of local knowledge and diverse approaches in the management of resources. For example, many top-down irrigation projects in developing countries have failed because they have concentrated on the physical aspects of water delivery. Ostrom believes that the institutional aspects are more important. Irrigation systems built by farmers themselves are often more efficient. They deliver more water, are better repaired, and result in higher farm productivity than those built by international agencies. Often these agencies take no notice of local customs, knowledge and incentive structures; the knowledge of the bureaucrat is inferior to the knowledge of the individuals on the ground.

The central problem on which her employment of the notion of “thick rationality” can shed light is what she calls “social dilemmas.” These are circumstances in which interacting individuals can easily succumb to maximizing their short-term interests to the detriment of their long term interests. To return to our irrigation example, suppose farmers share the use of a creek for irrigation. They face a collective problem of organizing to clear out the fallen trees and brush from the previous winter. Each farmer would like to have the others do it. There are incentives to free-ride on the “public spiritedness” of others – however, everyone may think this way and nothing will get done. Ostrom finds that cooperation will often take place while the “thin” theory of rationality predicts that it will not. She finds that factors such as face-to-face contact (likely when there are small numbers), the equality of each farmer’s stake in the benefits of irrigation, and the ease of monitoring the farmer’s contribution to brush removal all make the likelihood of cooperation greater.

Elinor Ostrom has and continues to expand the power of a broader conception of rationality – one that Adam Smith would have recognized and been comfortable with – to explain the multifarious forms of human cooperation that conventional economists have been unable to explain. This is a major contribution.

Paul Dragos Aligica and Peter Boettke of George Mason University showed excellent prescience in publishing a book in the summer of 2009, just a few months before the Nobel Prize was awarded, on the work of Ostrom, her husband Vincent, and their colleagues at Indiana University, Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School.