MayerBlog: The Web Log of
David N. Mayer

 

 

Thoughts for Summer 2008

 

        It’s time for another annual tradition:  once again, MayerBlog will be on a summer hiatus, for the next three and a half months (until Labor Day), while I continue writing the manuscript of my book on the U.S. Constitution and other summer writing projects.

         Before going on hiatus, however, I could not resist the temptation to comment on a number of important issues in public policy and popular culture – issues that are in the news today and are likely to remain in the news throughout the summer.  (Also included is my annual preview of summer movies.)

   

 

n    Gas-Price Hysteria, Again 

As summer begins, it’s time again for what, unfortunately, has become another annual summer tradition – the hysteria over high gasoline prices.   As I wrote two years ago, in my “Thoughts for the 2006 Summer Hiatus”  (May 30, 2006), 

Two things are sure to happen this summer:  first, gasoline prices will increase (that’s the natural consequence of the economic law of supply and demand); and second, demagogues (both politicians and political commentators) will blame the high prices, erroneously, on “oil company profits” and on so-called “price gouging” (that’s the natural consequence of the laws of human nature, on the dark side).  Politicians, by demonizing “Big Oil,” are attempting to create a scapegoat for their own bad policies; in reality, it’s “Big Government,” not “big oil,” that’s responsible for high gas prices.

 

Those basic facts will again hold true this summer, with the hysteria reaching new highs (or lows) as experts predict gasoline prices ranging between $3 and $4 per gallon, and even occasionally exceeding $4 per gallon, throughout the season.  Again, demagogues in Congress will try to blame the oil companies for their “record profits,” in their push for legislation that actually would exacerbate the problem.  Many factors – chiefly, the rising prices for oil on the world-wide market, the declining value of the U.S. dollar, and insufficient refining capacity in the U.S. – are behind the higher prices, and most of them have nothing to do with the alleged “greed” of the oil companies but rather everything to do with bad legislation passed by Congress, including the environmental laws that stand in the way of increasing domestic oil and gas production and the huge ethanol boondoggle (discussed more fully below).   

The oil companies whom politicians love to demonize are earning well-deserved profits for their efforts to bring petroleum products (including gasoline) to market, despite all the legal obstacles that Congress has put in their way.  Oil company profits are “high” only when the numbers are viewed in isolation; compared to other major industries, oil companies are able to keep little in the way of profit – about half the profit margin of other major industries – because of unjust (and, in my view, unconstitutional) taxes and regulations that the U.S. government imposes on the oil industry.  The so-called “windfall profits” tax that some members of Congress (the worse of the demagogues – that is, the Democrats) are threatening to add to the taxes already imposed on the industry would only prevent the industry from investing additional capital in oil production – particularly from the vast reserves of shale oil in the western United States, oil that’s costly to tap.  (For more on this, see my previous discussion of “Oil’s Well” in “Spring Briefs 2008” (Mar. 12).)  If Congress were really serious about helping lower gas prices, it would repeal those bad laws standing in the way of increasing domestic oil production – including the ban on oil drilling in northern Alaska and offshore continental U.S., as well as those laws already unjustly taxing the oil industry and discouraging the building of new oil refineries.  Imposing additional taxes and regulations on the oil industry will not lower gas prices; indeed, they would have the exact opposite effect.    

The sad truth (which no politician will acknowledge) is that many policymakers really want gas prices to remain high, to discourage Americans’ consumption of fossil fuels – some, because they are enthralled with the radical environmentalists’ mystical agenda; others, because they really dislike the automobile and the independence that it gives to individual Americans.

   

n    The Ethanol Boondoggle 

There’s not a single major problem in the United States today that hasn’t been caused, ultimately, by some misguided legislation passed by the U.S. Congress.  That’s certainly true of the increase in gasoline prices and the increase in food prices – two of the many problems caused by one of the worst boondoggles ever created by Congress, the ethanol mandate in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.  (To call the ethanol boondoggles “one of the worst” is really saying something because Congress, throughout U.S. history, has created many horrible boondoggles, including the protective tariffs of the 19^th century and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of the early 20^th century, which was one of the triggers of the Great Depression.) 

As economist Walter E. Williams discusses in his March 20 op-ed, “Big Corn and Ethanol Hoax,” the 2005 Act – which calls for oil companies to increase the amount of ethanol mixed with gasoline – makes no economic sense.  “Ethanol is 20 to 30 percent less efficient than gasoline, making it more expensive per highway mile.  It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank.  That’s enough corn to feed one person for a year.”  Moreover, considering the amounts of fossil fuel needed in the growing, fertilizing, harvesting, and trucking of corn to ethanol producers, it actually takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel to produce one gallon of ethanol – so, contrary to President Bush’s claim that ethanol will help alleviate Americans’ “addiction” to oil, it actually saves no resources at all.  (Indeed, as Williams also notes, it takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol.)  “If our total annual corn output were put to ethanol production,” it would reduce gasoline consumption by only 10 to 12 percent, he reports. 

Ethanol “is so costly that it wouldn’t make it in a free market,” which is why it’s only being produced because Congress has so heavily subsidized it – by about $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which doubly taxes consumers, first by direct subsidies to ethanol producers (lead by the Archer Daniels Midland corporation) and second by handouts to corn farmers (“to the tune of $9.5 billion in 2005 alone”).  The reason for the “ethanol hoax”?  Politics:  “Ethanol producers and the farm lobby have pressured farm state congressman into believing that it would be political suicide if they didn’t support subsidized ethanol production,” Williams notes.  That’s why the mandate has such strong bipartisan support in Congress.  It’s an illustration of “a problem economists refer to as narrow, well-defined benefits versus widely dispersed costs.  It pays the ethanol lobby to organize and collect money to grease the palms of politicians willing to do their bidding, because there’s a huge benefit for them,” while “the millions of gasoline consumers, who fund the benefits through higher fuel and food prices, as well as taxes,” have little incentive to oppose it.  That’s, sadly, the basic reason why “welfare state” programs are so politically difficult to reform or to abolish.  (Consider the role the AARP plays in standing in the way of meaningful Social Security reform.) 

Higher fuel costs aren’t the only price being paid by Americans for the ethanol boondoggle.  As a result of the higher demand for corn, ethanol production has (as Williams also notes) “driven up the prices of corn-fed livestock, such as beef, chicken, and dairy products, and products made from corn, such as cereals.”  Moreover, prices for other grains, such as soybean and wheat, also have risen dramatically.  (A March 15 AP news wire reports that the price of wheat has more than tripled in the previous 10 months, making 80% of grocery prices to spike, too, and they are predicted to remain steep for years.  “It’s going to affect everything . . . impact on every section of the grocery store,” said a flour company executive.  The cause, according to the article?  In addition to poor wheat harvests in Australia and Europe, which have caused China and other Asian countries to buy more American wheat crops, the American crop is shrinking, because of the federal ethanol mandate.)  Higher food prices – and the declining U.S. wheat market, in particular – have worldwide ramifications, contributing to a growing crisis in food shortages around the world.  As Williams notes, “the fact that the U.S. is the world’s largest grain producer and exporter means that the ethanol-induced higher grain prices will have a worldwide impact on food prices.”  Thus has Congress’ sop to corn producers harmed not only other Americans but also people all over the world.  (Among other effects, it has made the tortilla, a staple of Mexicans’ diet, too expensive for many poorer Mexicans to eat, and it has so driven up feed prices, it has caused a shortage of pork in China in 2007 – ironically, in the Year of the Pig.)  As Iain Murray bluntly sums up the policy implications of the ethanol mandate in Chapter 2 of his new book The Really Inconvenient Truths (discussed below), “save the planet, starve the world.”

 

 n    Green Bullshit 

I’ve written previously about the great “global warming” (or, as it’s now euphemistically called, “climate change”) hoax – the theory that man-made “greenhouse gases,” chiefly carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal), are causing average world temperatures to increase, with disastrous consequences for the Earth’s ecosystems – a theory that is based on faulty science but which is accepted as gospel truth by vast numbers of naïve persons (including many scientists, sad to say, influenced more by politics than by scientific evidence).  For many people, acceptance of the global-warming myth is akin to religious faith.  (Indeed, belief in “climate change” theory may be likened to belief in “Intelligent Design,” or creation theory, which is really religious belief masquerading as science.  Global-warming myth-makers, like former V. P. Al Gore, similarly play fast and loose with genuine scientific theory and instead push their theory – quite literally, bullshit – on a credulous public who are taught, erroneously, that the theory is based on sound scientific principles.  For many, radical environmentalism is the new religion.  See my previous discussions of “Eco-Fascism” in “2008: Prospects for Liberty” (Jan. 11, 2008) and “Merchants of Fear” (May 17, 2006).) 

The truth (as understood by a minority of scientists, including those who truly have an expertise in climatology) is that, first, it is uncertain whether average Earth temperatures really are warming – or are warming to the extent predicted by the fear-mongers (the models on which they base their predictions have too many variables to be reliable); second, even if there is global warming, it’s even less certain that man-made “greenhouse gases” are the cause (the best scientific evidence is that natural causes – including solar activity – beyond human control are the real causes of changes in global temperature, and that the correlation between CO2 and warming – much-touted by Gore and other fear-mongers – does not show that increased CO2 causes warming, but rather is the effect of warming).  Finally, and perhaps most importantly (the critically important point that, unfortunately, is almost never debated by policymakers), even if there were global warming and even if there were indisputable proof that it is caused by man-made activities, there’s no scientific evidence justifying the huge costs of cutting back on use of fossil fuels (and the other policies being pushed by radical environmentalists).  Indeed, as Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg shows in his important book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, in virtually every area, there are ways to mitigate or reverse the harmful effects of global warming at a fraction of the cost demanded by the global-warming alarmists.  (For more on all this, see not only this book by Lomborg but also the works I’ve previously recommended:  Lomborg’s previous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2002), Patrick J. Michaels’ Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (2004), and Christopher Horner’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (2007) (Chapter 10 is a brilliant, point-by-point refutation of the bullshit in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth).  Two excellent websites that I recommend are the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI’s) Globalwarming.org, the website of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an international group of non-profit organizations dedicated to smarter thinking on the subject of global warming and climate change; and Robert Bidinotto’s ecoNOT website, which shatters the myths and superstitions of radical environmentalists generally.) 

Two additional, recently-published books that I recommend, for separating real science from the “junk science” of the global-warming alarmists, are:  Roy W. Spencer, Climate Confusion (New York: Encounter Books, 2008, $21.95); and Iain Murray, The Really Inconvenient Truths (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2008, $27.95).  Spencer, a climate research scientist at the University of Alabama, writes (in clear layman’s terms) about “how global warming hysteria leads to bad science, pandering politicians, and misguided policies that hurt the poor” (as the subtitle of his book declares).  Of special value are the middle chapters of the book – Chapter 4, “How Global Warming (Allegedly) Works” (a primer on the popular explanation and why it’s probably wrong); Chapter 5, “The Scientists’ Faith, the Environmentalists’ Religion” (which nicely discusses my thesis above, that belief in dangerous global warming is more faith than science); and Chapter 6, “It’s Economics, Stupid” (which shows the correlation between radical environmentalism and socialism, or anti-capitalism).  Iain Murray, senior fellow in energy, science, and technology at CEI, in his book discusses (as its subtitle states) “seven environmental catastrophes liberals don’t want you to know about – because they helped cause them.”  Among those seven catastrophes, in addition to global-warming hysteria (the Introduction to the book discusses how Al Gore, in various ways, truly is not the “savior” but rather is “bad for the planet”), are: the global ban of DDT (which has made malaria once again a devastating disease); “burning food” by replacing gasoline with ethanol (which has created a world-wide crisis in food, discussed below); and “Yellowstone in flames” (the increased danger of fires in federally mis-managed national parks and forests).  Murray, too, writes about what he calls “Ecopaganism,” the way in which radical environmentalism has become a new kind of religion for many, in Part II of the book, “Blind Faith in the Green God.” 

But what can the average (rational) person do, in the face of such widespread popular belief in the global-warming myth? (I’m frequently asked).  The answer is simple:  Fight against the belief – shatter the myth, and force anyone (whether a government official or a privately-owned business) who wants to make your life more costly or inconvenient by adopting policies based on the myth, to “check their premises,” by questioning the assumptions on which it’s based.  That means, among other things, writing members of Congress or state legislatures in opposition to proposed legislation (misnamed “energy” bills) that would force utilities to cut back on use of fossil fuels in favor of far more expensive (and less reliable) “alternative” energy sources.  It also means not patronizing businesses that are trying to capitalize on the global-warming craze (or other parts of the radical environmental agenda) by going “green” (for example, by pledging to reduce their so-called “carbon footprint” – which really means pledging to increase costs to their customers by abandoning perfectly fine fossil fuel sources for energy and replacing them with costly, less efficient sources).  Tell those businesses in no uncertain terms that you aren’t in support of their “green” bullshit and will patronize instead their competitors until they stop it.  There are even a few politicians who deserve our support and praise, for fighting against the hysteria and bad public policies based on it.  Among these are Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (R.-Minn.), who has introduced in Congress the “Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act,” to repeal the fluorescent-bulb mandate (the phase-out of incandescent light bulbs) contained in the 2007 energy law.

  

n    “Pick Your Poison!” 

National partisan politics during the summer of 2008, as it has thus far this year, will continue to obsess over the upcoming 2008 presidential election (even though the Congressional races are arguably far more important).  As I’ve previously noted, the contest between the three leading major-party candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain – is one that, for devotees of individualism and limited government like myself, arouses little emotion other than nausea.  As I wrote earlier this year, “Choosing between Clinton, McCain, and Obama is like choosing between arsenic, cyanide, and strychnine:  all three are deadly poisons, differing only in the ways they make us suffer before we die.  Perhaps, then, the slogan for the 2008 presidential election should be `Pick Your Poison!’” (See “You Call This a Choice?” in “Spring Briefs 2008,” Mar. 12).   

And media coverage of the presidential race continues to focus mostly on the battle between Clinton and Obama for the Democrats’ nomination – a battle that’s still ongoing, after Mrs. Clinton’s May 13 landslide victory in the West Virginia primaries, and probably will keep the Democrats’ selection up in the air until early June (after all the primary elections are over) or perhaps until the Democrats’ National Convention late in the summer.  Obama continues to have an apparently unsurmountable mathematical lead, in terms of number of pledged delegates (as well as half or so of the so-called “superdelegates”), while Mrs. Clinton – thanks to her recent primary victories – seems to have captured the “momentum.”   Many Democrat leaders are getting increasingly uncomfortable about the near-50-50 split in their party’s rank-and-file support and what the split might bode, once the party does select its nominee later this summer, in the fall race against the other Demopublican/ Replicrat candidate, McCain. 

This is delicious irony, for the Democratic Party is merely sowing what it has been reaping.  For many years (indeed, for many decades, since FDR assembled his invidious “New Deal” coalition of special-interest groups), Democrats have repudiated the American principle of individualism and have instead embraced group-identity politics.  In their zeal to “make history,” in a superficial way that only Democrats could regard as important – nominating either the “first” female or the “first” African-American, or black, major-party candidate for U.S. President (even though he’s actually biracial) – the Democrats have created a scenario in which their party is hopelessly divided over sex and race.  (They’re also divided by age and class, as elderly and blue-collar Democrats generally favor Mrs. Clinton while young and college-educated Democrats generally favor Obama.  There’s probably a great deal of truth in Shelby Steele’s March 18 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Obama Bargain,” where he argued that Obama’s run at the presidency “is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance.”  Hence, the coalition that’s giving him his core support are African-Americans and affluent, college-educated white Americans, both motivated by race rather than by substance.)     

The real irony – considering how much John McCain and the “new” Republican Party have in common with either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama and the Democrats (see my previous entry “R.I.P., GOP: The McCain Mutiny,” Mar. 3),  is that it all makes little difference, when it comes to the 2008 presidential election, whether the winner is a “Demopublican” or a “Replicrat” (as I call the major parties), or their likely candidates, “O’Cain” or “McBama.”

 

 n      The only acceptable candidate for President of the United States . . . 

. . . for those of us who truly value individual freedom and limited government, is the man – or woman – who will be nominated as the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party.  The LP will hold its National Convention on May 22-26 in Denver, Colorado.  Several candidates have announced for its presidential nomination, including some of the usual flakes who, unfortunately, have vied for (and sometimes captured) the party’s nomination in the past (including some anti-tax activists who maintain, erroneously, that Americans are not legally required to file income tax returns or to pay income taxes).  Fortunately, this year at least, some credible candidates (not just anarchist flakes but sensible advocates of limited government) will vie for the nomination, including my favorite – Bob Barr, former Republican congressman who joined the LP in 2006 and who formally announced his candidacy for the LP nomination on May 12.  (Some “purist” libertarians – mostly anarchists and/or anti-war libertarians – question Barr’s libertarian credentials because of his earlier support for drug criminalization or his failure to embrace the radical non-interventionist, pacifist views of the Libertarian-turned-(real)maverick-Republican candidate, Congressman Ron Paul.  But these are the kind of “purists” who have saddled the LP with lousy presidential candidates – including Paul himself, in 1988 – since the pragmatists lost control of the party in 1980.  Someone like Barr, who has distinguished himself by his championing of privacy rights and his vocal opposition to the Patriot Act, would add real credibility to the LP, if it would be wise enough to choose him as its nominee.  By the way, Paul has announced that he will remain a Republican – and thus will not seek the LP nomination – and his supporters are planning to disrupt the GOP’s National Convention, to protest its choice of McCain.  Paul, however, has not ruled out an independent run for the presidency.)   

I’ll be rooting for Barr, obviously, but plan to vote for whomever the LP nominates, even if it’s another flake:  in any event, the LP nominee would be infinitely better than either McBama or O’Cain and my vote for the LP candidate will be a protest against the two major parties’ repudiation of individualism and limited government and their embrace of paternalism.

[Update added 5/26/08:  At the Libertarian Party’s National Convention in Denver on May 25, former Congressman Bob Barr was elected the LP’s presidential candidate after six rounds of balloting.  Barr beat out libertarian activist Mary Ruwart, with whom he’d tied for first place on the third ballot.  By the sixth ballot, third-place candidate Wayne Allyn Root dropped out, endorsing Barr; on the sixth ballot, Barr received 54% of the vote, Ruwart 46%.  It was a victory of pragmatism over purity of principles:  Libertarians hope that Barr, an experienced politician with national name recognition, might finally capture more than 1% of the national vote – the high point of the LP, with Ed Clark’s candidacy in 1980.  I am thrilled.  In the two most important elections during the month of May, my favorites won:  David Cook is the new “American Idol,” and Bob Barr is the Libertarian presidential candidate.  It will be great to have someone I’m happy to vote for in November.]

 

 n    Multiple Obasms No More? 

Barring some truly unforeseen events, Barack (Barry Hussein) Obama will be the Democrats’ candidate for U.S. president in 2008.  As indicated by the flap over his ties to the controversial black pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however, much of the mystique that had made Obama appear so attractive to the news media and his supporters has vanished.  Obama’s campaign has been based on a fantasy, or a myth, that he was somehow different from other politicians.  Not surprisingly, he’s losing support as that myth begins to unravel and Americans realize he is indeed a politician – and a flawed politician, too.  The closer Americans look at Obama, the less attractive he looks:  the more Americans understand the real Obama, not the mythical persona created by his campaign, the more they’ll realize how truly out of touch he is with basic American political values.  

As I’ve previously noted, Obama is a political fraud – someone who campaigns as a “uniter” but whose politics are those of a typically divisive class-warfare Democrat; someone who promises “change” but whose programs would continue and expand the failed regulatory/welfare state policies of the past.  (See “Spring Briefs,” Mar. 14, 2008.)  Moreover, like other Democrat politicians, he claims to disdain “special interests,” but he uses that misleading phrase to refer only to business or corporate interests; otherwise, he panders to those special interests that form core Democrat constituencies, including radical environmentalists and Big Labor.  (With respect to the latter, it’s especially revealing that Obama obtained the endorsement of the Teamsters union basically by promising he’d be their “friend” in the White House, by ending the consent decree that provided for federal oversight of the union’s racketeering activities.) 

Notwithstanding Obama’s recent (and long-awaited) repudiation of his former pastor (and spiritual mentor), Jeremiah Wright, for the preacher’s controversial comments (“God damn America,” AIDS, “chickens coming home to roost” on 9-11, etc.), there remain many disturbing questions about Obama’s ties to Wright and to his church.  Those outrageous comments by Rev. Wright are really only superficial problems compared to the deeper problem with both Wright and the church:  the embrace of so-called “black liberation theology,” which is less a theology and more a political ideology – specifically, a Marxist, anti-capitalist ideology – masquerading as a religion and relying on black racism to carry its dangerous collectivist message.  To what extent does Obama share that ideology?  Before political pressures forced him to repudiate Wright, Obama gave a more honest, and probably a more accurate, reflection of his own attitude and views, in his earlier press conference where he stated that he could no more repudiate Wright than he could “the black community.”  (That was the occasion, incidentally, when Wright seemed to go out of his way to label his white grandmother a racist and to explain her racism by asserting she was “a typical white person.”) 

Obama truly is an “elitist,” though not merely in the superficial way for which Mrs. Clinton has attacked him, following his controversial remarks caricaturing small-town Pennsylvanians as gun-totin’, Bible-thumpin’ “bitter” persons.  He’s an elitist in a more fundamental way, which he shares with Mrs. Clinton (and with Senator McCain – indeed, with most Demopublican/Replicrat politicians):  he’s a paternalist.  As a so-called “progressive,” he doesn’t trust the average American to be competent enough to govern him/herself, to take responsibility for their own lives, but instead he wants government planners (paternalistic bureaucrats) to govern them instead, for their own (presumed) good.   In this respect, he’s remarkably similar to the other extreme left-wing paternalistic politicians the Democrats have nominated as presidential candidate in the past – George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry – losers all.  If the Democrats lose the presidential race to the Republicans and their “progressive” paternalist candidate, John McCain, it won’t be (despite the predictable Democrat claims to the contrary) because Americans are “racist”; it will be because they see even someone as flawed as McCain as the lesser of two evils.

  

n    Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead! 

One positive thing about Obama being the likely Dem nominee:  it means (at least for the next four years) the death of Hillary Clinton’s ambition to recapture the White House.  Obama, despite all his flaws, at least (apparently) is not a criminal.  Mrs. Clinton, in contrast, was her husband’s “partner in crime” in virtually all the major scandals of the Clinton presidency, the most corrupt in American history.  (See my previous entry, “The Worst U.S. President,” Feb. 15, and especially the last section, discussing Hillary’s role especially in the Whitewater, Filegate, and Travelgate matters – and her success, undoubtedly learned from her experience during the Watergate years, in covering up her crimes.)  Like hubby Bill, Hillary is also a serial liar:  claiming at one time she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, even though she was born several years after his headline-making feat climbing to the summit of Mt. Everest; and apparently her biggest gaffe on the campaign trail this year, her claim to be under “sniper fire” in Bosnia.  Her disingenuousness, to put it mildly, has become so widely accepted that it’s been a staple of satire on Saturday Night Live opening skits this year.  

It’s more than a little ironic that conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was instrumental in keeping Mrs. Clinton’s campaign alive into the month of May.  It was Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” – his encouraging of Republicans to vote for Hillary in open primary states, like Indiana, in order to keep the Democrats’ presidential contest going as long as possible – that arguably gave Hillary her narrow 51% to 49% margin of victory in Indiana.  (TO those Democrats who cry foul at “Operation Chaos,” Limbaugh replies – with justification – that it’s only fair, considering how many Democrats and independents voting in the open Republican primaries earlier this year helped tip the GOP nomination to McCain.)   

But Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” is only partially responsible for Hillary staying in the race.  Her real motives, as several pundits have observed, probably have more to do with recouping some of her campaign debts (her campaign is bankrupt and she’s counting on some deal with the DNC and the Obama campaign to help her bail it out, once she finally concedes the nomination to him), as well as her long-range plans to again be a presidential candidate in 2012.  (Indeed, there may be substantial merit in some pundits’ speculation that Hillary may be deliberately sabotaging the Democrat contest because she wants Obama to run and lose in 2008 so she can make another run in 2012.  When will Democrats – especially those naïve enough to support Mrs. Clinton – ever learn that both Bill and Hillary Clinton will do and say anything – and shamelessly sacrifice the interests of their party as well as their country – in order to advance their own unquenchable thirst for power?) 

(Incidentally, one of the best commentaries I’ve read about Hillary Clinton’s campaign appeared on the website of Megan McArdle, who describes herself as “the world's tallest female econoblogger”: 

“What do Americans care most about this election season? The troubled housing market, and the short supply of oil. That's why Hillary is here with a plan. Specifically, a plan to discourage investment in the oil industry through a windfall profits tax, and to destroy the mortgage market by freezing foreclosures and interest rates. That way, no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.”

 

That’s a dead-on accurate assessment of Mrs. Clinton’s politics.) 

And that’s why it feels so good to write:  “Hillary – begone!  Before someone drops a house on you!”

 

 n    It’s Not the Economy, Stupid! 

Politicians – particularly those of the Democrat variety – and their friends in the news media (such as CNN, the Communist News Network, and it’s so-called “Issue #1” segments) have been fostering the myth that the U.S. economy is in a “recession.”   It’s a great example of one of the truths I teach my students:  that when it comes to law-making (or, more broadly, politics in general), people’s perceptions of reality (however erroneous), rather than objective reality itself, usually determines public policy.  In reality, by the objective criteria most economists use to define a recession (two quarters of negative economic growth), the United States is not in a recession.  The economy grew (albeit at the paltry rate of 0.6 percent) during the first (Jan.-Mar. quarter) of this year, the same as in the final three months of last year, the Commerce Department reported in late April.  The economy may be weak or sluggish, but it is not collapsing – and politicians who seek to count on Americans’ fears of a recession to vote them into office (ironically, again, these are mostly Democrats whose policies truly would worsen the economy by saddling businesses with more taxes and regulations) will need to reassess their strategy. 

Similarly, talk of a so-called housing “crisis,” or subprime mortgage “crisis,” is vastly exaggerated.  Housing values have declined, because the housing market (like the stock market) was over-valued over the past decade or so, and now is making some much-need adjustments, putting the value of houses more in line with reality.  And many people who really have no business owning homes – people whose income isn’t sufficient to cover their mortgage obligations – were given mortgages by overly-generous (and in some cases, fraudulent) lenders.  But as George Will reported in an April 13 column, “So far during this `crisis,’ the homeownership rate has declined just three-tenths of 1 percent since it peaked in 2004.  At 67.8 percent, it remains higher than it was when President Clinton left office.”  Moreover, so-called “subprime mortgages” are a small minority of mortgages, and only a minority of subprime borrowers are not making their payments.  For example, here in Ohio, one of the states hardest hit by this so-called “crisis,” it’s only about .0025, or .25 percent – that is, less than one-fourth of one percent – of borrowers who are in trouble.  And, though it’s unpopular for politicians (especially elitist paternalists who don’t trust ordinary people to live their own lives) to say so, the trouble these people are in is of their own making, as they freely signed their mortgage contracts.  It was their choice, and they’re now paying the price for making a bad choice.  That’s their problem – not the problem of other, more responsible Americans – nor is it the legitimate concern of government (except for those mortgage lenders who actually engaged in fraudulent practices and thus violated people’s rights). 

The so-called “crisis” is nothing more than the inevitable conflict between personal irresponsibility and economic reality.  As I’ve previously noted, the real crisis in the U.S. is the crisis in personal responsibility:  people evading responsibility, and politicians being more than happy to increase the power of government over Americans’ lives in order to help them evade their responsibilities.

  

n    More Supreme Nonsense? 

Of the major cases left to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court before its 2007 term ends (probably by late June, just before the Court’s summer recess), none is more important than District of Columbia v. Heller, a challenge to the District’s ban on firearms.  For the first time in some 70 years (since its decision in United States v. Miller in 1939), and really, for the first time in U.S. history, the Court will be deciding a case that requires it to interpret and to squarely apply the language of the Second Amendment:  “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” 

At first glance, the case should be an easy one to decide:  the language of the Second Amendment protects “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” a right that seems to be clearly violated by the D.C. law that basically forbids all District residents to keep functional firearms in their homes to defend themselves and their families if the need arises.  (The D.C. law is one of the most onerous in the nation; it bans all handguns not registered before 1976 and requires that lawfully owned shotguns and rifles in the home be kept unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times.)  If any law is a palpable violation of the Second Amendment, it’s the D.C. law.   

So why all the drama over this case?  There are two principal reasons, one concerning the public debate over the Second Amendment and the other concerning the Court itself.  In the past 25 years or so, with the rise of anti-gun organizations like the Brady Center, there has been a concerted effort on the part of gun-control activists to limit Americans’ Second Amendment rights.  Scholars who sympathize with the gun-control movement have formulated a theory – generally called the “collective rights” theory – that interprets the Second Amendment by limiting the right protected in the Amendment’s principal clause to the context of the “well-regulated militia” mentioned in the introductory clause.  In its extreme version, the collective rights view of the Second Amendment maintains that it doesn’t protect any individual right at all; it only protects the “right” of state governments to form militias.  Although a handful of scholars still cling to this view, the vast majority of scholars in recent years – including many left-liberal scholars (like Laurence Tribe at Harvard, Akhil Amar at Yale, and Sanford Levinson at Texas), who might on policy grounds support gun-control laws – have concluded that the Second Amendment really does protect the rights of individuals, “the people” referred to in other provisions of the Bill of Rights, including the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments.  States have no “rights” (only powers); moreover, as the Supreme Court recognized in its 1939 Miller decision, the “militia” in early American law consisted of all able-bodied males of age, possessing privately-owned firearms.  The history of the Second Amendment and its original meaning are clear:  it does not merely guarantee a right to possess arms during active service in an organized militia, or a “right” of a state to maintain a militia; rather, it protects the rights of individuals to have arms – a right that the Founders understood to be a corollary of each individual’s natural right to self-defense, a right that’s not surrendered to the government. 

If the Supreme Court is serious about protecting the rights guaranteed by the Constitution – and if it takes seriously the plain language of the text – it must declare the D.C. law to be an unconstitutional infringement of Second Amendment rights.  As Robert Levy (co-counsel to Dick Heller and the other D.C. residents challenging the law) noted in a March 19 op-ed, “Fighting for Our Right To Bear Arms,” the Heller case is really simple:  “It’s about self-defense: Individuals living in a dangerous community who want to protect themselves in their own homes when necessary.  The Second Amendment to the Constitution was intended to safeguard that right.  Banning handguns outright is quite plainly unconstitutional.”  Randy Barnett (who joined several scholars – including myself – in an amicus brief filed by Academics for the Second Amendment), in his “Layman’s Guide to Heller” (printed in full March 19 on the Volokh Conspiracy blog and in an edited version in a March 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed), similarly has concluded that the Court should recognize that the Second Amendment protects an individual right and the D.C. law is not a “reasonable” regulation but a complete abridgment of that right. 

Whether the Court will follow the Constitution and protect the right guaranteed by the Second Amendment against a law that clearly abridges that right, however, is questionable, given the modern Court’s failure to follow the Constitution, even where its language is explicit.  As the Court’s infamous opinion in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) shows, a majority of the justices currently on the Court are willing to disregard the clear language of the Constitution – in the Kelo case, the language in the Fifth Amendment limiting government’s power to “take” private property “for public use” – to reach a desired outcome (the power of government to take property, not for “public use” strictly speaking, but merely to promote economic development).  As Henry Mark Holzer has observed in his fascinating book Sweet Land of Liberty?: The Supreme Court and Individual Rights (2000), the Court’s justices historically have shown little regard for individual rights; rather, even in their seemingly “libertarian” decisions, they tend to read their own policy preferences into the Constitution and decide cases accordingly.  And as I previously have noted here (see my entries “Supreme Nonsense, Part I” (Mar. 7, 2005), “Supreme Nonsense, Part II” (Mar. 14, 2005), and “More Supreme Nonsense” (June 24, 2005)), the Court’s justices in recent years are more apt to get the Constitution wrong than to get it right.  (The Court’s 2005 decisions in not only Kelo but also the medical-marijuana case, Gonzales v. Raich, and the juvenile death-penalty case, Roper v. Simmons, suggest that Justice Kennedy, the “moderate” swing vote on the Court, in particular cases is likely to side with the four “liberal” justices on the Court to reach a certain result – allowing government to take property for economic development, or to prosecute the drug laws even against people who grow marijuana at home for medicinal purposes, or to prohibit the government from executing persons under the age of 18 – that’s appealing to left-liberal activists.  

With this Court, and its narrow “conservative” majority (a core group of four of the nine justices, occasionally joined by Kennedy), it’s quite possible for the justices to allow the D.C. law to pass constitutional muster.  That would mean, as Robert Levy warns, that the Court “intends to rubberstamp just about any regulation [of guns] a legislature can dream up – no matter whether the government has offered any justification at all, much less a justification that would survive strict scrutiny.  That would, in effect, excise the Second Amendment from the Constitution.  A right that cannot be enforced is no right at all.”  Under the double standard the “liberal” Court has followed since 1937 (even when the Court has an apparent “conservative” majority, as it has had under the chief justiceships of Rehnquist and now Roberts), the justices essentially have excised a number of rights – rights not highly valued by left-liberals, especially economic liberty and property rights –  from the Constitution.  Relegating “gun rights” (that is, the right of individuals to protect themselves, free of government interference) to a similar second-class status is, unfortunately, quite foreseeable.  (It’s a policy favored not just by left-liberal anti-gun activists but by a large number of “moderates” and even some conservatives who buy into the gun-control advocates’ irrational fears of guns, even when possessed by law-abiding citizens.)   

That’s why I was dismayed to hear that the U.S. Supreme Court decided to review the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit, which ruled that the D.C. law was indeed an unconstitutional violation of the Second Amendment.  Judge Silberman’s opinion for the D.C. Circuit, unequivocally interpreting the Second Amendment right as an individual right, was a sound, well-reasoned opinion – much better than any opinion I expect to see issue from this Supreme Court.  Sadly, I fear something like a 5-4 decision (with Kennedy again joining the four “liberal” justices, Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer) upholding the D.C. law under some collectivist rationale.  But I really hope I’m wrong in making this prediction!

[Update added 6/27/08:   Yesterday the Supreme Court concluded its 2007 term by issuing its long-awaited decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.  I'm happy to concede that I was wrong in my pessimistic prediction:  it was indeed a close, 5-4 decision, but with the majority consisting of Justice Kennedy joining the four conservative justices in declaring the D.C. law banning private possession of handguns to be unconstitutional and affirming that the Second Amendment indeed protects an individual right to have firearms.  To quote legal historian Joyce Lee Malcolm: "What a great day for individual rights!"  Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett praises Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion for the majority, in his June 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed, "News Flash: The Constitution Means What It Says," and a roundtable discussion by several civil libertarians (including both Professors Barnett and Malcolm) in ReasonOnline, "The Second Amendment Goes To Court," nicely discusses the significance of the decision and its implications for future gun-rights litigation.  Finally, a splendid op-ed by Professor David Bernstein of George Mason University School of Law, on "Liberals, Conservatives, and Individual Rights," discusses how this decision -- like the Court's previous decisions in First Amendment and property-rights cases -- calls into question the popular myth that "liberal" justices are better supporters of individual rights and civil liberties.  As the dissenting opinions by Justices Stevens and Breyer in Heller so dramatically illustrate, the Court's "liberal" justices seem to defer to government assertions of power and have little regard for the rights of individuals.]

 

n    The Ever-Expanding Nanny State 

As noted in my previous post (“A Nation of Sheep” under the “Nanny State,” April 30, in part reviewing David Harsanyi’s book, Nanny State), the rise of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state – or “Nanny State” – over the past century or so in the United States has transformed Americans into a “nation of sheep” – or of children, incapable of looking out for themselves, but rather dependent upon a paternalistic government.  The trend shows no signs of abating in the 21^st century, as the three major candidates for the U.S. presidency this year – Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama, and Mrs. Clinton, each of them an advocate for more paternalism (albeit in different forms) – help demonstrate.  And literally every day in the newspapers one can read stories about the Nanny State growing even larger, becoming more intrusive on Americans in their daily lives. 

One illustrative case in point:  the anti-smoking “nannies” (or Nazis, as I think of them) and their “war on tobacco,” which they continue to push, on various fronts.  One aspect of that “war,” which I’ve previously critiqued, has been the campaign to eliminate smoking in “public” places, a campaign that has resulted in government bans on smoking that violate the rights of both smokers and non-smokers alike (and particularly violates the rights of business owners, who ought to be free to decide for themselves whether or not to permit smoking in their establishments).  (For more on this, see “Smokers’ Rights as Everyone’s Rights,” Oct. 31, 2006.)  Another disturbing trend, as reported in USA Today (“Pressure mounts for pharmacies to put out smokes,” May 9), is that some government officials want to ban pharmacies – including big chain drugstores like Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid – from selling cigarettes.  San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (a poster boy for nanny fascism) has proposed a city ban on drugstores selling all tobacco products, including cigars, pipes, and smokeless tobacco.  He asserted, “This will be the beginning of a national movement,” and was “absolutely confident” the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (another bunch of super-nannies/Nazis) will approve the ban by early June, to take effect October 1.  Bills to bar pharmacies from selling tobacco are pending in several states, including New Hampshire (ironically, the state with the motto “Live free or die!”), Illinois, Tennessee, and New York.  “Pharmacies are places we go to get healthy,” says Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, author of the New York proposal (and would-be “pharmacy czar” for the state of the New York).  “It just seems inappropriate that on the other hand, they sell something that kills,” he added. 

What’s disturbing about Hoyt’s simplistic reasoning isn’t just that it ignores consumer choice – depriving both the pharmacies and their customers of their freedom to sell and buy products people desire – but that it sets a truly dangerous precedent.  When government starts banning a product “that kills,” or products that in some politician’s eyes are “inappropriate” for sale in particular types of stores, where does it stop?  Many other products sold by pharmacies, as well as by grocery stores and other retailers, are potentially fatal, if misused.  (Consider not only over-the-counter drugs but also alcohol and even some food products.)  Other products are “deadly” in other ways, in the eyes of some people.  Might social conservatives now seek to ban sales of condoms or other birth control devices because they’re “immoral,” encouraging promiscuous sex, or even (in the case of IUDs, for example) because they might “kill” an unborn child in the form of a fertilized egg?  (Of course, many states did ban contraceptives on “moral” grounds, about fifty years ago, prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) ruling such bans on contraceptives to be unconstitutional violations of the right to privacy.  Why should the constitutionally-protected right to privacy be limited to birth-control products?  Why shouldn’t it include any products that people are willing to use, or to consume, in their own bodies, including tobacco products?)  Once again, the fundamental issue is whether people own their own lives or are they merely wards of the State.  If people are free, and do own their lives (including the risks they are willing to take with their health), they ought to be able to buy whatever products they wish, in pharmacies as well as all other kinds of stores.  It’s simply not the legitimate business of government to dictate what kinds of products stores may sell to their customers. 

   

n    The Criminalization of America 

Among the many unfortunate effects of the rise of the Nanny State in the United States has been the expanding number of activities that government has made criminal – and the burgeoning prison population, as more and more people are being convicted of violating “Nanny State” laws.  In a recent op-ed entitled “Prison Nation” (April 25), Lew Rockwell (president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute) observes that the United States has become “the world’s most jail-loving country, with well over 1 in 100 adults living as slaves in prison.”  The U.S. leads the world in prison population, with 2.3 million people behind bars.  China, with four times as many people, has 1.6 million in prison.  In terms of population, the United States has 751 people in prison for every 100,000, while the closest competitor in this regard is Russia with 627.  Cuba has 531.  The median global rate is 125. 

As Rockwell emphasizes, most of this imprisoning trend is recent, dating from the 1980s, and most of the change is due to the drug laws.  “From 1925 to 1975, the rate of imprisonment was stable at 110, lower than the international average, which is what you might expect in a country that purports to value freedom.  But then it suddenly shot up in the 1980s.  There were 30,000 people in jail for drugs in 1980, while today there are half a million.”  He also notes that other factors include “the criminalization of nearly everything these days, even passing bad checks or the pettiest of thefts.  And judges are under all sorts of minimum-sentencing requirements.” 

The “war on drugs,” as I’ve previously noted here, is a model “Nanny State” program:  it involves the government dictating what sorts of substances people ingest in their own bodies – in the name of protecting them against themselves or of protecting “society” (which is simply a euphemism for all the other individuals in a given political community).  People who use (or, if one insists, abuse) drugs cause direct harm only to themselves; the other harms purported to come from drugs really stem from the criminalization of drug use rather than from the use of drugs itself.  As libertarians understand, the use, possession, or sale of drugs is truly a “victimless” crime, for it directly harms no one by violating their rights.   

Other examples of “victimless crimes” – of activities that truly violate no one’s rights, but which nevertheless advocates of the “Nanny State” have made criminal – are “morals” laws, such as the laws criminalizing gambling or prostitution, as well as a vast array of laws regulating business activities (including minimum-wage laws, smoking bans, “white-collar” crimes such as bans on “insider trading,” and so on).  Virtually all these laws did not exist in the United States (or, if they did, they were at most sporadically enforced, by state and local governments) in the 19^th century; these “Nanny State” laws came into being with the rise of the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early 20^th, culminating in the “New Deal” of the 1930s and various other manifestations of legal paternalism over the past 75 years or so.  The United States, which once had the distinction of being the freest nation on earth (a nation founded on the principle of individualism, meaning the freedom and responsibility of individuals to exercise their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), has become just another modern “police state,” thanks to the policies of the paternalists. 

When government takes an activity that truly harms no one by violating their rights – an activity engaged in by adult individuals, by mutual consent, such as gambling, prostitution, or drugs – and makes it a crime, government is actually creating criminals.  And it does so, not simply by redefining victimless activities as “crimes,” but by enslaving persons convicted of these so-called “crimes” in our prisons, which are nothing more than breeding grounds for real crimes.  As Lew Rockwell notes, “the communities in which [people] exist in these prisons consist of other unvalued people, and they become socialized into this mentality that is utterly contrary to every notion of civilization.  Then there is the relentless threat and reality of violence, the unspeakable noise, the pervasiveness of every moral perversity.  In short, prisons are Hell.  It can be no wonder that they rehabilitate no one.”  Nor, I’d add, is it surprising that someone like Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “D.C. Madam,” recently committed suicide, rather than face going back to prison – potentially, a maximum of 55 years in federal prison, after being convicted April 15 of running a prostitution service that catered to members of Washington, D.C.’s political elite.   

The Ms. Palfreys of the world shouldn’t be forced to choose between suicide or a slow death in prison, for doing something that ought not to have been against the law in the first place.  That she was tried and sentenced to prison for operating a business that, apparently, provided a valuable service for willing customers – that’s the real tragedy (and the real crime) in this case, and countless others, across the former “Land of the Free.”

  

n    Pay Day for Politicians 

A bill currently being considered by Ohio General Assembly would cap the interest rates charged by “pay-day” loan companies to an annual percentage rate (APR) of 28 percent.  Advocates of the proposed law – who see the Ohio legislation as a “model” for the rest of the country – claim that current law permits payday loan companies to “crush” Ohioans with an APR of 391 percent on the money they borrow.  But using APR figures for payday loans is highly misleading; the whole point of a payday loan is that it’s for a short term – until the borrower’s next pay check (hence the name) – and indeed that same existing law (enacted in 1995) requires that payday loans not exceed $800 and have a duration of no longer than six months.  Most lenders in Ohio charge $15 per $100 borrowed for two weeks, which works out to a 15 percent interest rate – a far cry from the phony “391 percent” compounded rate claimed by the sponsors of the bill. 

What’s really behind this proposed law is a concerted effort to deprive low-income people of an important option that the financial market now provides them.  Because the payday loan industry (which charges the interest rates it does because they’re commensurate with the financial risks the companies take on making these kinds of loans) will probably be unable to stay in business under the proposed rate caps, the effect of the law would be to drive these companies – and the options they provide consumers – out of business.  It’s yet another example of the paternalism of the “Nanny State” run amuck, “protecting” consumers by denying them choices. 

In a recent op-ed published on the website of the Buckeye Institute (Ohio’s free-market think tank), Ohio's Payday Solution a Bigger Problem, Buckeye Institute president David Hansen and Citizens Against Government Waste President Tom Schatz warn of the unintended negative consequences for Ohio taxpayers if the Assembly imposes unnecessary new regulatory restrictions on the payday lending industry or drives it out of the state altogether. “Doing so could invite less appealing options, such as encouraging more credit card use or bouncing checks, both of which provide hefty fees to banks and credit unions, while hurting the credit ratings of individuals who may just need short-term financial help," they write, concluding: “As usual, politicians’ solutions are worse than any perceived problems.”  

 

n    Ohio Democrats’ Dann Hypocrisy 

Ohio’s attorney general, Marc Dann, a Democrat, is at the center of a scandal involving sex as well as allegations of abuse of power, by both Dann and subordinates in his office.  Dann has acknowledged at a news conference early in month of May that he had an affair with a female subordinate while one of his lieutenants was sexually harassing two other attorney-general staffers.  Another top aide tampered with the handling of the harassment complaints.  After an in-house investigation, two officials, General Services Director Anthony Gutierrez and Communications Director Leo Jennings III, were fired and a top adviser, Edgar C. Simpson, resigned, yet Dann himself – who claimed to “take full responsibility” for his “human failings” – adamantly refused to resign.  As the editors of The Columbus Dispatch noted in a May 4 editorial calling for his resignation (“Dann should go”), the problem for Dann, as “Ohio’s highest-ranking law enforcer,” is that the problems caused by the three men “are a direct result of Dann’s bad judgment and lack of leadership.”  He not only hired these incompetent cronies for important positions in the A.G. office, but he even shared living quarters with Gutierrez and Jennings, in a condo where some of the sexual harassment occurred while he was there! 

In an extraordinary development, Governor Ted Strickland (whom I call “Strychnine” because his tax-and-regulate policies are poison to Ohio business) sent a letter to Dann asking him to resign.  The letter was also signed by four other elected Democrats holding statewide office – including U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (whom I call “Brown-Nose” because he’s a shameless demagogue) – as well as the Democrat leaders of the two houses of the General Assembly and the state party chairman.  Now, Governor Strychnine and the Democrat leadership in the state are leading the move to impeach Dann and remove him from office – while Dann remains adamant in his refusal to resign.  (What makes all of this especially embarrassing, not just to Dann but to Ohio Democrats generally, is that they rode into office – sweeping four of five statewide offices in the November 2006 elections – because of ethics scandals involving the previous Republican administration of Bob Taft, or “Governor Daft” as I called him, who seemed oblivious to the gross mismanagement of state funds that occurred under his watch.  Democrats who claimed a higher ethical ground than Republicans are understandably concerned that Ohioans might realize they’re just sleazy politicians, too.) 

Governor Strychnine and Senator Brown-Nose, when they were U.S. congressmen in the late 1990s, both voted against the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which in many ways involved far more serious matters.  (Contrary to the Democrats’ propaganda at the time, the articles of impeachment against Clinton weren’t “about sex”; they alleged criminal acts committed personally by Clinton himself – perjury before a federal grand jury, and obstruction of justice in covering up the Lewinsky affair (in order to save his ass from a sexual-harassment civil suit brought by Paula Jones) – matters arguably far more serious, or at least comparable, to those alleged against Mr. Dann.  Yet Democrats rallied in support of Clinton in 1998-99, while today Ohio Democrats are taking the lead in the effort to push Dann out of office.  What’s the critical difference?  Simply this:  Clinton was head of his party and politically popular; Dann is expendible.  (State Democrats already have interim candidates for attorney general in mind.  And despite all their pubic posturing, they may be secretly hoping Dann will stay in office until fall – for if he leaves office before September 24, the replacement named by Governor Strychnine would be only temporary and a special election would be held November 4, giving Republicans a shot at the seat, filling out Dann’s term until 2010.  If, however, Dann stays in office until after September 24, the governor could appoint a Democrat to serve the remainder of Dann’s term.)  It’s all about politicians holding on to power – the sleaziest game of them all.

[Update added 5/19/08:  Shortly after posting this on May 14, Dann announced his resignation.  And the Columbus Dispatch reported on May 17 on a matter potentially far worse than the sexual harassment scandal:  that Dann mishandled a civil lawsuit against Mark D. Lay, who has been found guilty of criminal fraud in connection with his company’s management of an offshore hedge fund for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation.  Lay’s MDL Capital Management company lost $216 million of the bureau’s funds before it was shut down in 2005 – and the fraudulent investments since have cost Ohio businesses untold millions of dollars in higher workers’ comp premiums.  The Ohio attorney general’s office (under Dann’s Republican predecessor) filed the civil suit against Lay and others in 2005 to recover the $216 million, but Dann agreed to settle the case against Lay – who’s a top contributor to Democrats’ political campaigns – for a paltry $5 million, nearly $2 million of which will be spent on legal fees to outside counsel.  Ohio Democrats holding statewide office, who came into power by making political hay out of their Republican predecessors’ mismanagement of state funds, have been strangely silent about the Lay scandal, but as the deputy chairman of the Ohio Republican Party noted in a news release last month, Dann “allowed the criminal responsible for the biggest rip-off in the history of the bureau to walk away with a simple promise to try to pay back 3 cents on the dollar” – in other words, letting this friend of the Democrats “off the hook.”  The bottom line:  Ohio Democrats are still a bunch of hypocrites.]

  

 n    Coleman’s Folly: A Desire Named Streetcar 

Columbus, Ohio mayor Mike Coleman has a not-so-bright idea:  a 2.8-mile electric streetcar line connecting the Ohio State University campus and downtown Columbus, to be funded by taxpayers (through a 4 percent surcharge on tickets to concerts and sporting events and prking-lot and garage fees within six blocks of the route, plus a 75-cent increase in parking meter rates in the area), to the tune of $103 million.  Although the proposed streetcar line would basically follow the same route as the existing No. 2 COTA (Central Ohio Transit Authority) bus – a bus that’s usually half-empty – Coleman hopes that “a new, sleek, futuristic-looking streetcar will attract those who typically don’t ride the bus, bringing new customers to stores and restaurants and residents to fill nearby apartments, condominiums and houses,” according to a March 29 Columbus Dispatch article that reads like a press release from the mayor’s office.  The article also reports that Coleman claims a streetcar system “would stimulate development along the route while serving as a pilot for a regional commuter-rail system that proponents have touted for years as a way to ease growing traffic congestion.”   In other words, the project is founded on the dream that “if we build it, they will come” (what I call the “Field of Dreams” fallacy). 

The problem with all Mayor Coleman’s hopes and dreams is that they bear no relationship to economic reality.  As other cities have learned, taxpayer-funded “intrastructure” projects like sports arenas or light-rail systems often fail to pay for themselves, bringing little if any of the economic development opportunities their proponents predict.  One inherent problem with such government-funded programs – the reason the “Field of Dreams” hope is just a fallacy – is that they always succumb to another fallacy, pointed out by the 19^th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat, known as the “broken-window” fallacy.  Bastiat tells a hypothetical story involving a boy who breaks a shop window.  A group of onlookers try to console the shopkeeper by pointing out how repair of the window will help the local economy: “What would become of the glaziers if no one ever broke a window?” they rhetorically ask.  The six francs that the shopkeeper pays to the glazier to replace the glass in the window is “what is seen,” Bastiat observes. “What is not seen,” however, is what the shopkeeper would have done with his six francs if the window had not been broken – for example, replacing his worn-out shoes or buying a book for his library. Generalizing from this simple story, Bastiat argued that the advocates for government action – those who propose a taxpayer-funded public works project, for example – commit the fallacy of considering only “what is seen” (the jobs created by government spending) and failing to take into account “what is not seen” (the other jobs, or other forgone activities, that would have been created by private investment had money not been taxed away).   

Streetcars – or even the more ambitious dreams of a “light-rail” commuter system – may make economic sense for some cities, like Chicago or Washington, D.C., which have one or more natural axes along which many commuters daily travel.  For a city like Columbus, Ohio, which is not defined by its placement along a waterway (like Lake Michigan or the Potomac River) and which has grown outward from the center city in all directions more or less equally, such mass-transit systems make no economic sense.  They will not pay for themselves; they fall within the “broken-window” fallacy because their proponents fail to acknowledge “what is not seen,” the hidden costs of such expensively wasteful taxpayer-funded projects.  (If the streetcar line is built, I predict pretty much the same kind of half-empty cars that now exist on the No. 2 buses, along with crime, teenage punks and homeless bums, graffiti and other physical damage to the “sleek, futuristic-looking” cars, and other problems that come with public control of transportation – which will discourage downtown residents and other commuters from using the streetcars for the same reasons they now shun the No. 2 COTA buses.) 

Columbus voters several years ago wisely rejected a ballot proposal for taxpayer funding of a new sports area for the Columbus Bluejackets NHL franchise and the Columbus Crew major-league soccer team.  In so doing, they were bucking a national trend for taxpayer funding of such sports facilities.  The arenas were built – Nationwide Arena and Crew Stadium, both of which are touted as model facilities and are used not just by their respective pro sports franchises but by other groups, with great success – with private funding.  Let’s hope that Columbus City Council, which will make the final decision on Coleman’s expensive fantasy, will show similar wisdom.  (I won’t hold my breath waiting for it, however; the City Council is monopolized by Democrats, who show little scruples about spending other people’s – i.e., taxpayer’s money – on wasteful projects.)

  

n    Ben Stein, Where’s Your I.D.? 

Philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand once told William F. Buckley that he was too intelligent to believe in God – which could be a fitting obituary for the late conservative editor and political commentator.  I feel like saying something similar to Ben Stein, the economist/actor/political commentator, because of his new “documentary” movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.  The movie purports to defend academic freedom, showing how the scientific community has “expelled” scientists who adhere to the theory of Intelligent Design (ID), which purports that life is the result of a creator (its earlier incarnation was called “creation science”), and thus challenge Darwinian evolution theory, which sees life as evolving from simpler organisms to more complex ones.  Stein’s movie is simply a polemic against the Darwinian theory of evolution (which Stein unfairly compares to the Holocaust – for example, using the same eerie music during a visit to Darwin’s home that’s used for a tour of Dachau); like the similarly heavy-handed polemical films of Michael Moore, it’s not a true “documentary” but rather merely propaganda for the filmmaker’s own biased view.  Here, the bias is in Stein’s passionately-held belief – based ultimately on his religious beliefs – that ID is a valid scientific theory, with valid critiques of Darwinian evolution theory, when the objective evidence is that ID is nothing more than religion masquerading as science – and seeking to undermine objective standards of scientific inquiry.  (For more on this, see my previous entry, “Unintelligent Designs,” May 1, 2006.) 

I’ve liked Ben Stein for many years, since his unforgettable performance as the monotone-voiced economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  I was a fan of his game show, Win Ben Stein’s Money, and (when I used to subscribe to the conservative magazine The American Spectator) a regular reader of his column “Ben Stein’s Journal.”  Moreover, I’ve read his books – and even followed some of his advice – on investments.  But when it comes to the debate over evolution and ID – the modern equivalent of the “Scopes monkey trial” debate some 85 years ago – I’m not at all persuaded by Stein’s point of view, which smacks of chip-on-the-shoulder religiosity.  As a member of both the National Association of Scholars and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.), two organizations devoted to the protection of academic freedom, I do not take lightly charges of intellectual tyranny.  But I also believe in objective standards, especially when it comes to scientific inquiry.  ID is not science; as noted above, it is religion masquerading as science.  Ben Stein should be ashamed of himself, for confusing the two.

  

 n    The Real Adams Family 

The recently-broadcast John Adams miniseries on HBO was another hit for the cable channel, and the series DVD – to be released this summer – is expected to sell well.  The seven-part, eight-and-a-half hour miniseries, produced by Tom Hanks, was based on David McCullough’s best-selling biography of John Adams.  It aptly illustrates the truth in one of Mayer’s rules of thumb:  that popular history generally is NOT good history. 

HBO’s John Adams is a highly flawed production.  Its lead actors – Paul Giamatti as John Adams and Laura Linney as John’s wife, Abigail – were not well-cast:  Giamatti portrays Adams as a kind of pathetic, hound-dog figure, showing little if any of Adams’ intellect or his good sense of humor; while Linney portrays Abigail as a morose, weepy figure, a far cry from the strong, stoic historical Abigail Adams.  Most of the supporting cast are similarly ill-suited, including Tom Wilkinson as Benajmin Franklin, David Morse as George Washington, and Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson (inexplicably delivering his lines in a northern English accent).  Worse yet is the story told in the HBO miniseries, in the screenplay written mostly by Kirk Ellis, which plays fast and loose with historical facts.    

The series started off well, in the first episode “Join or Die,” which focused on Adams’ role as defense attorney for the British soldiers on trial for murder in the so-called “Boston Massacre” of 1770.  (The episode nicely dramatized Adams’ dilemma – doing his duty as an attorney in defending men who truly were innocent, soldiers who fired in self-defense against an unruly mob, while the policies of the British government that the soldiers served were repugnant to Adams and his Patriot friends – and thus told the audience an important fact about Adams, his commitment to the rule of law, while also anticipating the coming American Revolution.)  But subsequent episodes of the series failed to live up to the promise of the first.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the series dwelled inordinately on the personal side of Adams’ life – including more than one passionate love scene between John and Abigail – and gave short shrift to Adams’ public life and career.  Important parts of Adams’ career – such as his authorship of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution and his vitally important role as U.S. commissioner in negotiating the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the peace treaty in which Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States – were almost entirely ignored, while less important aspects of his career (such as Adams’ obsession with the issue of titles, as vice president when he first presided over the U.S. Senate) were given inordinate attention.  (It’s not simply that the screenwriter chose those aspects of Adams’ life that were most dramatic, for in the hands of an able screenwriter, something like the Treaty of Paris negotiations could be made quite dramatic.) 

The next-to-last episode, “Unnecessary War,” focused on Adams’ presidency, was the second-best episode of the series.  It showed Adams’ greatest weakness as president, his willingness to sign into law the partisan Federalist legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts (particularly the Sedition Act, which criminalized criticism of the federal government and was aimed at silencing the opposition Republican party), while also showing Adams’ greatest achievement, his ability to break free of the influence of the Hamiltonian wing of his party and thus avoid the war with France that the Hamiltonians sought – an achievement, ironically, that split Adams’ party, guaranteeing a Republican electoral victory in 1800.  Adams truly was a “peacemaker,” as this episode aptly dramatized.  (Indeed, “Peacemaker” ought to have been the title for this episode.) 

The final episode, “Peacefield,” focusing on Adams’ retirement years, however, was atrocious.  Not only did it suffer from the same basic problem of balance that affected the whole mini-series – giving inordinate (and grisly) attention to the breast-cancer surgery of Adams’ daughter – but it also failed to do justice (and in fact did grave injustice) to the extraordinary events of July 4, 1826, when John Adams and his old (and reconciled) friend, Thomas Jefferson, both died, within hours of each other, two of last surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence, on the Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary.  The episode failed to show the importance of the American Revolution to Adams and Jefferson (one scene, showing a grumpy Adams lambasting artist John  Trumbull’s monumental “Signing of the Declaration” painting, showed only a mean-spirited, grumpy Adams, while no mention was made of Adams’ famous last toast, “Independence Forever!”).  And, in the dual deathbed scenes – Adams, at his home in Massachusetts, and Jefferson, at Monticello in Virginia – the screenwriter (thankfully, not David McCullough in his book) gratuitously inserted the ludicrous presence of Sally Hemings at Jefferson’s bedside, thus bowing to the popular (but mythical) belief that Jefferson not only fathered Hemings’ children but had a kind of common-law marriage with his slave.  (Historical accounts of Jefferson’s death – told by various members of Jefferson’s extended family at Monticello – make no mention of Sally Hemings, who in truth was, sadly, just one of Jefferson’s slaves, of no special significance to Jefferson.  His true family members who were present at his bedside, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph and his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, weren’t even depicted.) 

Anyone who liked HBO’s John Adams because they were intrigued with the historic Adams ought to forego purchasing the series DVD and instead buy the recently-released DVD set (a 4-disc set, distributed by Acorn Media) of The Adams Chronicles, the superb 13-episode series originally broadcast on PBS in 1976.  Lauded by critics as “the best and highest-rated series in the history of American public television,” the series was known for both its vitality and historical integrity.  Though produced with a far more limited budget than the HBO series (and hence lacking in some of its more glitzy “production values”), The Adams Chronicles was much better written – and thus does as far better job telling the story of both John and Abigail Adams (portrayed brilliantly by George Grizzard and Kathryn Walker), as well as the next three generations of Adamses.  Grizzard was simply superb as John Adams – the best portrayal thus far on film – even better than William Daniels (who starred as John Adams in the musical 1776, both on the stage and screen), who in The Adams Chronicles plays the elder John Quincy Adams (John Adams’ oldest son), not only during John Quincy Adams’ presidency (which, in this miniseries, includes a far more apt portrayal of the events of July 4, 1826), but also the final, post-presidential stage of his career, when as a Congressman he valiantly fought against the U.S. House “gag rule” barring anti-slavery petitions.  The series also shows the critically important role John Adams’ grandson, Charles Francis Adams, played as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain during the time of the American Civil War, and concludes with the story of the fourth generation of Adamses, including railroad tycoon Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and historian Henry Adams, during the so-called “Gilded Age” of the late 19^th century.   Lovers of good historical drama – buy The Adams Chronicles DVDs!  (The set is priced at $42 on Amazon.com, just $3 more than the HBO series – and a real bargain, considering you get not only 13 hours and 4 generations compared to 8½ hours and just one generation, but also better writing, better acting, and of course, much better history!)

  

n    25 Years of Risky Business 

Summer 2008 marks the 25^th anniversary of the theatrical release of the 1983 coming-of-age classic, Risky Business, one of my favorite summer movies (because it’s everything a good summer movie should be – especially light-hearted and fun).  It’s memorable for several reasons, starting with Tom Cruise’s film debut as Joel Goodsen, a 17-year-old high school senior in Glencoe, Illinois, who engages in some “risky business” at home while his parents are out of town.  The supporting cast includes Curtis Armstrong (Revenge of the Nerds’ “Booger”) as Miles, Joel’s trouble-making friend; Rebecca De Mornay as the alluring but dangerous call girl, Lana; and Joe Pantoliano as Lana’s manager, “Guido, the killer pimp.”  Other memorable features of the film include Joel’s celebration of his first night home alone, dancing in his briefs to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” (a scene amusingly parodied on Saturday Night Live by Ron Reagan, Jr.); a superb sex scene (for an R-rated movie) – Joel and Lana making love on a Chicago train, with original music by Tangerine Dream and Phil Collins’ hauntingly beautiful song “In the Air Tonight”: Joel becoming instantly cool with just a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a cigarette; and one of the all-time-best movie tag lines, “Sometimes ya gotta say, `What the fuck.’”

  

n    Summer Movie-ocrities: A Preview 

Like the field of Demopublican/Replicrat presidential candidates in 2008, this year’s summer movies are, generally, a bunch of mediocrities.  The most striking characteristic of 2008 summer movies is their lack of originality:  most of the films (including virtually all the expecting “blockbuster” movies) are either sequels or movies that follow predictably successful formulas (for example, the comic-book superhero films now being produced by Marvel Studios); or they are film versions of successful TV shows (like the much-anticipated Sex and the City film); or else remakes of older movies (sometimes not so old movies); or a combination of these features. 

The biggest box-office success so far this year is Marvel’s Iron Man, starring Robert Downey, Jr. in a performance that has earned the blessings of the comic-book’s creator Stan Lee (who makes a cameo appearance in the film, as he has in the Spider-Man movies and other Marvel films) –  which opened May 2 and raked in $100 million in U.S. box-office sales its first weekend (almost as good as the first Spider-Man movie).  Other movies worth anticipating in May (notwithstanding their lack of originality) are The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (opening May 16), the second Narnia film (starring the four young British actors who played the Pevensie kids in the first film, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, plus another young British actor, Ben Barnes, in the title role), based on the fourth book in the C.S. Lewis series;  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (May 22), the much-anticipated fourth Indy film, starring 65-year-old Harrison Ford who (if we are to believe the teasers) passes the torch on to his young co-star, Shia LaBeouf (whose character might be Indy’s illegitimate son); and the Sex and the City movie (May 30), with all the TV cast in a story that promises to be faithful to the lighthearted spirit of the HBO series. 

In June, there’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (June 6), the new Adam Sandler film with perhaps the most original plotline of the summer (an Israeli commando fakes his own death to take up his real passion, hairstyling); and, near the end of the month, two other marginally original films -- WALL-E (June 27), the new Pixar computer-animated film about a robot left operating centuries after mankind has abandoned Earth (think of Star War’s R2D2 starring in a feature-length biography); and Wanted (also June 27), an action-thriller starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy (need I say more?).  In the middle of the month are several unoriginal films that either aren’t worth seeing at all or worth seeing only during bargain matinees:  Kung Fu Panda (June 6), an animated film of interest only to young kids and fans of Jack Black (whom I find not at all amusing but rather incredibly annoying – even just his voice I find annoying);  The Happening (June 13), another absurdly mystical M. Night Shyamalan film; The Incredible Hulk (June 13), another Marvel Studios film starring Edward Norton as Bruce Banner (a new $150 million adaptation by Marvel’s own studio that’s a remake of a film made just five years ago – Ang Lee’s Hulk movie, starring Eric Bana, which flopped at the box office); Get Smart (June 20), a remake of the classic TV secret-agent comedy starring Steve Carell (Carell may be generally amusing, but this remake – like most remakes of classics – won’t hold a candle to the original, especially the brilliant performance of Don Adams as Maxwell Smart); and The Love Guru (June 20), starring Mike Myers as another character out of the 1970s, an Indian “wise man” (think of Austin Powers, but with a different accent and a different costume).    

In July, there’s perhaps the summer’s hottest movie – The Dark Knight (July 18), the second Batman movie from director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale, featuring the late Heath Ledger in one of his final roles, a darkly disturbing Joker.  There are also two other movies of special interest to select groups of fans:  for fans of TV’s X-Files, there’s a new X-Files movie, I Want To Believe (July 25), again starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Agents Mulder and Scully; and for fans of the hit Broadway musical (or the music of ABBA), there’s the film adaptation of Momma Mia! (July 18), which adds some star power from Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth.  The rest of July is filled with other movies I have no intention of wasting either the time or the money seeing:  Hancock (July 2), another special-effects vehicle for Will Smith; Hellboy II: The Golden Army (July 11) (I’ve never seen the first “Hellboy” movie and do not plan to see the second); Religulous (July 11), a “documentary” that’s just a vehicle for Bill Maher’s smarmy left-wing political rants; Brideshead Revisited (July 25), a totally unnecessary remake of the classic Evelyn Waugh novel, done superbly (and in my view, definitively) in the early 1980s mini-series starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews (available on DVD); and Journey to the Center of the Earth (July 11), another totally unnecessary remake (but in 3-D!!!) of the classic Jules Verne novel (which was done superbly in a 1959 movie starring James Mason and Pat Boone, a film that’s also available on DVD and much more faithful to the Verne story than this new splashy remake, with high-tech special effects and starring Brendan Fraser) (more on Fraser below). 

Finally, in August, as the summer winds down, so do the summer movies.  There’s only one movie on my “plan-to-see” (but not quite “must-see”) list, the new film from the Judd Apatow comedy company, Pineapple Express (Aug. 8), a “stoner” comedy about a pot-head (Seth Rogen) and his dealer (James Franco), who go on the run after witnessing a slaying (worth seeing because Rogen’s always funny and Franco, even as a stoner, is always interesting).  For die-hard Star Wars fans, there’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Aug. 15), an animated feature intended to lead into a series on the Cartoon Network in the fall.  (As one reviewer has commented, “Its action falls somewhere between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and might represent the fulfillment of George Lucas’ goal to eliminate live actors completely.”)  The other August movies, again, are either not worth seeing at all or worth seeing only during a bargain matinee, if there’s nothing better to do:  The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Aug. 1), another installment in the high-tech, computer-animated, big-budget “Mummy” franchise starring Brendan Fraser (Brendan Fraser is a talented actor, both in comedic roles (Encino Man, Blast from the Past) and more serious dramatic roles (Gods and Monsters); his talents have been truly wasted in this franchise, lost amid the overwrought special effects and mysticism); Swing Vote (Aug. 1), a (supposed) comedy about an average Joe (Kevin Costner, first strike against the film), who in a wildly improbable plot (second strike) becomes the single voter to decide the presidential election (as if the election hasn’t been covered enough this year – third strike, and it’s out!); Tropic Thunder (Aug. 15), an anti-war farce directed by (and starring) Ben Stiller and a bunch of other annoying actors (including Jack Black, Robert Downey, Jr., and a cameo by Tom Cruise); and Crossing Over (Aug. 22), starring Harrison Ford in a dramatic role that just may be way too serious for a summer film (the movie explores the effects of illegal immigration and has a cast that includes the not-so-fun actors Sean Penn and Ray Liotta).   

As I said above, except for a few that promise to stand out of the pack, a summer of mediocre films!  The best that perhaps can be said for the films of Summer 2008 is that they’ll make us all the more eager for the much-anticipated movies of Fall 2008 – themselves all sequels (or parts of franchises), including Quantum of Solace (Nov. 7), the 22^nd James Bond film (and Daniel Craig’s second as 007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Nov. 21), the 6^th film based on the J.K. Rowling novels; and the new Star Trek film (Dec. 25), the 11^th film in the franchise exploring the origins of James T. Kirk, Spock, and the crew of the USS Enterprise (all played by new actors) from the original TV series.

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday,  May 14, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

---

 

A “Nation of Sheep” under the “Nanny State”

  

 

            This essay reviews two recently-published books:  Judge Andrew Napolitano’s A Nation of Sheep (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2007; hardcover, $25.99), and David Harsanyi’s Nanny State ( New York: Broadway Books, 2007; hardcover, $24.95).  Both are excellent books that I highly recommend.   

            Taken together, the two books discuss topics related to what I see as the most important crisis faced by people in the United States of America today.  That crisis is “a moral crisis” (as philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand observed, nearly 50 years ago), one that I would describe essentially as the loss of the sense of individual responsibility.  (It also can be described as a loss of the sense of individual freedom, for in a state of true individualism, responsibility and freedom go hand-in-hand.  If individuals truly are free to live their own lives, they also must take responsibility for their lives, including all the actions they choose to do.)  This underlying moral crisis is indeed reflected in economics, politics, and the law – not only because the modern American economic, political, and legal system reflects it, but also illustrates, and indeed, exacerbates, the crisis, in a myriad of ways.  Increasingly, more and more Americans no longer live as if they are complete adult human beings – individual beings capable of rational thought, of volition (choice) and with freedom to live their own lives as they choose (that is, according to the choices they make).  Rather, they are living as if they are not humans (farm animals, like the “sheep” Judge Napolitano discusses in his book), or at least not adult humans; rather, like animals or human children, they expect others – a “shepherd,” or a “parent” figure – to “take care of” them, to provide them with “security,” which really means to help them evade the responsibility for living their own lives. 

            This crisis in individual responsibility is of profound importance.  It’s far more important than any other “crisis” that’s discussed daily in the news media, whether it’s housing, health care, energy, the environment, etc., etc., for it’s the fundamental crisis that underlies all the other problems that people perceive in modern American society.  Nevertheless, don’t expect to hear any of the politicians running for office this year – or any of the “mainstream” media sources – to discuss the crisis I’m describing here, because both politicians and the news media help to foster it.  (Indeed, all three major Demopublican/Replicrat candidates for U.S. president today – Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, and Mr. McCain – all advocate government programs that would make the crisis even worse.)  The principal reason for it?  The growth of paternalistic government.  For over a century now, since the rise of the regulatory/welfare state (what David Harsanyi aptly calls “The Nanny State”) in the early 20^th century, the power of government to control our lives steadily has increased while the freedom of individuals to take responsibility for their lives steadily has decreased.  It’s not just that we have “Big Government,” consuming a huge portion of the nation’s wealth (forcibly taken by taxes from the individuals who produced it); nor is it just that “Big Government” intrudes upon more and more aspects of our lives, denying us freedom to choose.  It’s that government has become so big and so intrusive in order to “protect” us from ourselves:  in the name of providing “security” to citizens, government today has deprived us of our basic rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness – the rights that define us as human beings.  We’re becoming mere creatures of the State – a far cry from the nation of free individuals that America’s Founders meant to create.

 

 

“A Nation of Sheep” . . .

  

Andrew Napolitano was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in New Jersey history.  A former adjunct professor of law at Seton Hall, where he taught constitutional law and jurisprudence, Judge Napolitano has been the senior judicial analyst for the Fox News Channel since 1998.  Essentially libertarian in his political and legal philosophy, Judge Napolitano offers a fresh perspective – a real alternative to the standard “left” versus “right,” “liberal” versus “conservative” debates one hears – on current controversies, on such Fox programs as The Big Story, Fox & Friends, and The O’Reilly Factor.  His two earlier books, Constitutional Chaos (2004) and The Constitution in Exile (2006), both warned about the loss of individual rights – and the failure of the U.S. Constitution to protect them – as the powers of government have increased, including (but not just limited to) the growth of government power, in the name of greater “national security” (but at the cost of losing important civil liberties), in response to the militant Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  He continues this theme in A Nation of Sheep. 

In the introduction to the book, Judge Napolitano declares that he has written the book “to generate a debate about freedom; a debate, regrettably, that government does not want us to have.”  Citing President Bush’s statement that his job is to “protect the homeland,” because government’s “most important job” is “to protect the American people,” the judge exposes the basic fallacy behind Bush’s rhetoric:  it’s not the function of government to protect people or their “homeland” (which, as Napolitano notes, sounds disturbing “Teutonic”); rather, it’s the function of government (according to America’s founding principles) to protect people’s rights, including the freedoms guaranteed in the United States Constitution.  Yet it’s those very rights, or freedoms, that are imperiled – in the name of “protecting” the people and their “homeland” – by the U.S. government’s so-called “War on Terror.”  As Judge Napolitano notes in Chapter 6 (“Post-September 11^th: An Orwellian New World?”), that so-called “War” really has become (with such legislation as the USA PATRIOT Act) “a war on Americans’ privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of thought, individuality, and civil liberties.” 

            The title of the book is explained in Chapter 2 (“Are You a Wolf or a Sheep?”).  Judge Napolitano observes that “[t]here are two types of people who stand out in the United States today:  sheep and wolves”: 

“Sheep stay in their herd and follow their shepherd without questioning where he is leading them.  Sheep trust that the shepherd looks out for their safety.  Sheep believe that the shepherd would never do anything to cause them harm, that he only wants to protect them from the dangers of the world that lie outside the safety of his herd.

 

“Wolves, on the other hand, do not aimlessly follow a shepherd.  In the darkness of night, wolves howl, alerting the shepherd to their presence.  Wolves are the people who do not passively accept the rules and direction of the shepherd without questioning his decisions.  Wolves question the shepherd and act in a way that forces the shepherd also to question his decisions.  Wolves challenge government regulations, reject government assistance, and demand that the government recognize and protect their natural rights.  They are rugged individualists.”

 

More fully explaining his analogy (or, more precisely, his metaphors), Napolitano adds that the sheep are “the millions of American citizens blindly following all levels of the government,” while the wolves are “the people and the groups within America that continuously question and challenge the decisions of the government.”  Sadly, he observes, “the majority of Americans are sheep”: 

“How else can you explain the lack of outrage regarding the National Security Agency’s having access to our telephone records, e-mails, financial documents, credit card numbers, medical records, and mail?  How else can you account for the sheeplike acquiescence to unwarranted surveillance of public gatherings by police departments, random bag searches on subways and buses, and cameras on nearly every street corner?”

 

People once cared about protecting their constitutional rights; but today, “alas, people are too busy panicking about terrorism to pay much attention to reality – too busy being sheep.”  The federal government, at the same time, uses “fearmongering as a tactic to seduce the sheep into compliance with unconstitutional laws; and it has worked!” 

Throughout most of the rest of the book, Judge Napolitano discusses the various ways in which the so-called “War on Terror” has provided the government a pretext for violating the rights of the American people.  In my favorite chapter (Chapter 11, “Everyday Life as a Sheep”), he analyzes “the slow, ineffective, and invasive screening process” of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the new federal bureaucracy supposedly created to provide airport security but which, for many of us, has ruined air travel – without making it much safer at all.  And although most of the book discusses the consequences of the “War on Terror,” the final section of this chapter discusses at least one other way in which government has taken away fundamental rights:  the loss of property rights, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrously broad interpretation of the government’s eminent domain (or “takings”) power, in the Court’s 2005 Kelo v. City of New London decision. 

As correct as I believe Judge Napolitano is in his analysis – and indeed, as apt as I think the “sheep” metaphor is, as a description of most Americans today – the problem I find with the book is that he does not go far enough in his analysis.  Of course, the Bush Administration and Congress has overreacted to the events of 9/11 – and the consequence of that overreaction has been a far greater “hit” on Americans’ freedoms than anything that al-Qaeda, or any other militant Islamic terrorist group, could commit.  The so-called “War on Terrorism” (truly a misnomer, because terrorism is only a tactic, one that is used by the Islamic religious fanatics who are the true enemies) indeed did exacerbate the problem of growth in governmental power while civil liberties shrink.  But, as I’d emphasize, that problem was only exacerbated by the political response to 9/11:  what makes legislation like the Patriot Act truly dangerous (and what also has made it politically palatable to America’s “sheep”) have been a series of government programs and policies, over the past century or so, and especially in the last half of the 20^th century.  Those programs and policies include other “wars” supposedly waged by the U.S. government – the “War on Poverty,” which brought us Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal “welfare” (or so-called “entitlement” programs) on top of the “welfare state” programs created in the 1930s as part of FDR’s “New Deal”; or the “War on Drugs,” which started in the early 20^th century with the Harrison Narcotic Act (1914) but really took off in the 1970s with the federal Controlled Substances Act and the “drug police” policies of virtually every presidential administration since Nixon’s.  (Indeed, many of the horribles now authorized by the Patriot Act, such as the warrantless searches and government surveillance of e-mail and bank records, were first proposed by the Clinton administration and earlier presidential administrations to help further the federal “war” on drugs.) 

The chief reason why we are “a nation of sheep” today isn’t just post-9/11 fear of “terrorism”; it’s the cumulative effect of a century of policies and programs, since the rise of the regulatory/welfare state in the early 20^th century, that have trained Americans – like Pavlovian dogs – to look to the government to make them “safe” and “secure,” to “protect” them, not only from criminals who threaten to kill or terrorize them, but even from themselves, from their own folly (such as, for example, their failure to save money to help pay the costs of living in their old age, or their failure to buy sufficient insurance). 

Another problem I have with Judge Napolitano’s thesis is the “wolf” part of his metaphor.  With due respect to the judge’s apt characterization of the “sheep,” I think he errs in considering their opposites to be “wolves.”  In particular, I don’t regard the “rugged individualists” whom he describes – activists on behalf of individual freedom and limited, constitutional government – to be “wolves”; certainly, that’s not how I see myself (though I do regard myself as such an activist).   Wolves are predators who survive at the cost of killing their prey; true individualists do not further their own interests at the expense of anyone else but rather deal with others as beings who must be treated with respect, for they have equal rights, and enter into contracts with others for their mutual advantage.  Wolves are no more “human,” essentially, than are sheep.  The “rugged individualist” stereotype (both as Judge Napolitano seems to use it and as it’s generally used today) is quite misleading, for it ignores the value of free associations that true individualists find in human society.   

Human beings, if they live the lives proper to human beings, are not animals of any type (other than human); they are neither “sheep” nor “wolves,” but are men (or women), in the true sense of the term.  The greatest harm done by the regulatory/welfare state over the past century in the United States is that it has practically destroyed the moral character – the humanity – of a large part of the American people, by transforming many of them into “sheep,” or into “wolves” or even into “shepherds” – that is, into beings that, rather than living lives of their own, are dependent upon others (typically, the government – which in turn means dependent upon a coercive system that forces self