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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 20th 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 11th: 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 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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-reliant persons to sacrifice a part of what they achieve for the sake of others whose only claim is their professed “need”). The modern regulatory/welfare state (what David Harsanyi in his book aptly calls the “Nanny State”) has transformed free, responsible adult Americans (with the freedom to live their own lives as they choose and the responsibility for their own lives and actions that freedom entails) into a nation of animals – or, worse, a nation of children, dependent upon a “nanny” government that treats them as mere wards of the state.
. . . under the “Nanny State”
David Harsanyi is a journalist in Denver, Colorado; a staff columnist at the Denver Post, he has written op-eds published in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. In his fascinating book, Nanny State, he details the myriad ways in which Big Brother is intruding upon Americans’ lives – stripping us of our liberties, robbing us of the freedom to make our own decisions, and turning America into a nation of children. All this is being done because there’s an insidious group in American politics – the “nannies,” whom he’s quick to point out aren’t “the stroller-pushing set,” but rather the “busybodies,” both politicians and social activists – who are popping up all over the country. What these “nannies” have in common is a desire to enact more laws – their constant refrain is “There ought to be a law,” to do X – typically, in the name of protecting people’s health, safety, or “decency.” The subtitle of the book puts it aptly: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children. (A brief historical note: The “nannies” whom Mr. Harsanyi describes aren’t a new, or even a recent, phenomenon in American politics. Their forerunners were the social activists or “reformers” whom William Graham Sumner contemptuously described as “social doctors” in his 1883 book, What Social Classes Owe To Each Other. These “social doctors” were activists, first, in the so-called Populist movement of the late 19th century and the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early 20th century. Like today’s self-described “progressives,” they truly weren’t progressive at all; rather, they were reactionaries who harkened back to the old paternalistic policies of medieval, feudal, pre-capitalist Europe – just as the “welfare state” programs so venerated by self-described “progressives” today, programs such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, and government-provided health care, really owe their origins to Otto von Bismarck’s fascist state in 19th-century Germany. For more on this, see my previous entry, “Reactionary `Progressives’,” March 16, 2006. As I concluded in that essay, the only people today who can truly call themselves “progressive” are libertarians or radical individualists – people who reject the paternalistic policies advocated by the “nannies” because they have confidence in the ability of ordinary persons to make choices for their own good (as they see it) and who, accordingly, support free markets. It is the free market system which coordinates the millions and millions of various choices, desires, and hopes of free, responsible persons in society – and which coordinates them in the fairest, most just way possible, according to the objective, impersonal economic laws of supply and demand. To have confidence in the market system is to have confidence in the ability of individuals to govern themselves, free of the heavy, coercive hand of governmental controls.) Among the various examples Harsanyi cites of the “Nanny State” today are the following:
(As Harsanyi observes, America’s experiment with liquor prohibition in the 1920s – the Eighteenth Amendment – was “the most infamous and counterproductive intrusion into lifestyle choices” in American history,” from which, unfortunately, today’s neo-prohibitionists have failed to draw the appropriate lessons. Especially insightful is his criticism of such groups as MADD, whose “zero-tolerance” approach to the real problem of drunk driving, has made us all less safe.) (Focusing especially on the bans on public smoking that several cities and states have enacted in recent years, Harsanyi notes that the campaign “to transform the trivial dangers of secondhand smoke into a national trauma,” has denied both employees and customers of business their freedom to choose what risks they’re willing to take with their own health and lives. (For more on this issue, also see my previous entry, “Smokers’ Rights as Everyone’s Rights,” Oct. 31, 2006.) I also agree with Harsanyi when he writes that his basic view toward smoking was nicely summed up by an axiom he saw on someone’s T-shirt in a Washington, D.C. bar: “Smoking Is Healthier Than Fascism.”) (As Hansanyi documents, after Congress enhanced the FCC’s powers to sanction “indecency,” the Commission went on a “witch hunt” against broadcasters that has amounted to “nothing more than censorship,” as the FCC “takes on the task of deciding what is essential, artistic, educational, smart, or even profane,” resulting in the absurdity of banning such words as bullshit or fucking (even when used as an adjective) from the airwaves. For more on this issue, see my previous entry, “Abolish the F*CCing FCC!” Feb. 8, 2006.))
(He discusses how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), created under the 1966 federal Highway Safety Act and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, has imposed this and other mandates through its powers to set automotive industry and highway standards that supposedly keep us “safe.” With good reason, he questions whether regulations such as the air-bag mandate or state seat-belt laws (which the feds “blackmail” the states to pass under the threat of withholding highway funding) really have made us safer. They certainly have made us less free. As he writes, “Two decades ago wearing a seat belt was a choice and the now-forgotten distinction between personal and public safety was still well-defined. . . . [Today], two decades after such laws were codified, I bitterly protest mandatory seat-belt laws as an inexcusable intrusion on my personal liberty. Whether I want to protect myself in such a manner is nobody’s business but my own.”) Countless other examples, not cited or just briefly mentioned in Harsanyi’s book, come to mind. These include state occupational licensing laws that limit entry into all sorts of ordinary occupations (Harsanyi briefly discusses the Institute for Justice’s litigation to help free African-style hairbraiders from the onerous requirement, imposed by several states, that they obtain full cosmetology licenses, before they can braid hair); “water-saving” mandates imposed by the federal government that have resulted in toilets that don’t properly flush or washing machines that don’t properly wash clothes, or “energy-saving” mandates (such as those in the recently-passed energy bill) that dictate what kinds of light bulbs Americans must use in their own homes. As these examples show, today’s “nannies” – advocates and enablers of the “Nanny State” – come from both sides of the traditional liberal versus conservative political spectrum; they include both left-liberals (so-called “progressives,” who are really reactionaries, as discussed above) and conservatives, that is, both paternalists of the “left” and paternalists of the “right.” And their tyranny is perhaps the worst form of tyranny of all, as a quotation from C.S. Lewis at the beginning of the book (on its frontispiece page) notes: “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
The “busybodies’” arguments on behalf of “Nanny State” programs or policies generally proceed from two erroneous assumptions about the role of government in American society. First, they assume that it’s proper for government to “legislate morality,” whether it’s the “traditional,” “family-values,” Judeo-Christian religious morality asserted by conservatives or the secular, “politically correct” values asserted by left-liberals. But, as noted more fully below, government does not properly concern itself with morality at all; its sole function is to protect individuals’ rights. Some actions (like theft or murder) are not only immoral but also violate other people’s rights; they are within the proper scope of the criminal laws, not because of the former but only because of the latter. Other actions (including many things that some people might find immoral, “indecent,” or offensive) that do not violate anyone’s rights are not legitimately within the scope of government’s powers at all, even if virtually everyone in society regards them as “wrong,” in a moral sense. (The sanction for such “wrongful” acts is not to be found in the realm of politics – that is, in the law and the legal system, which has the power to impose force – but rather in the realms of ethics or etiquette, which do not have the power to impose force. An immoral person ought not to be fined or jailed; but he may legitimately be subjected to others’ criticism or to ostracism – that is, to the sanctions that other individuals can impose, in a non-coercive way, by simply refusing to deal with someone who’s immoral.) The fallacy behind the notion that it’s proper to “legislate morality” is that it confuses the realms of ethics and politics. Actions that are “wrong,” in a moral sense, but which nevertheless violate no one’s rights are not within the legitimate scope of the law (or government), properly considered. The second, and even more fundamental, erroneous assumption about the role of government is that it exists to “protect” people from all sorts of harm – the fallacy that President Bush committed when rationalizing the “War on Terror,” as identified by Judge Napolitano in the discussion above. According to America’s founding principles – the philosophy of government held by the consensus of America’s founders and expressed so eloquently in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence – the legitimate function of government is not to “protect people” but rather to protect people’s rights. Moreover, “rights,” properly speaking (not the pseudo-rights that “nannies” advocate such as the so-called “right to housing,” or a “right to a living wage,” or a “right to health care”) involve an individual’s freedom of action, in a social context: legitimate rights are all aspects of the fundamental, natural, inalienable rights that human beings have – the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (including property rights). As Thomas Jefferson observed, the legitimate powers of government extend only to such actions as are injurious to others – actions that deprive others of these fundamental rights (such as murder, kidnapping, theft, invasion of privacy, destruction of property, etc.). The legitimate powers of government, including those broad regulatory powers of the state collectively called “the police power,” do not extend to any actions not harmful (in a direct, physical way) to others; they do not extend to actions that only indirectly harm others (under some sort of imagined harm to “society”), and they certainly do not extend to actions that only directly harm oneself. Yet a vast number of the “Nanny State” laws passed over the past several decades – such as the drug laws, smoking bans, highway safety laws (laws mandating seat-belt use or motorcyclists’ helmets), labor laws (such as minimum-wage laws, or mandatory overtime or sick leave laws, or OSHA regulations), or mandatory “insurance” programs like workers compensation programs for employers or Social Security for both employers and employees – all involve, essentially, protecting people from themselves; that is, they limit the freedom of individuals to choose what risks they are willing to take with their own lives. Thus, rather than protecting people’s rights, these laws instead violate them. Government has ceased being the entity created to “secure” individuals’ rights, as it is described in the Declaration of Independence; rather, it is the entity in modern society that poses the most danger to all of our genuine rights. It’s not a “protector”; rather, it’s an aggressor – merely a criminal, but an especially dangerous criminal, because every crime it commits against individual rights is sheltered under the sanction of the law. Ultimately, government today is no less tyrannical than the British government against which our American founders rebelled: like that government, as described in the Declaration of Independence, modern “Nanny State” government has become “destructive” of the “ends” for which American government was created. The “Nanny State” thus is not just bad public policy that’s destroying the humanity of the American people. It’s also, quite literally, un-American.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday, April 30, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer
Charlton Heston: A Tribute
This month marks the passing of one of the true greats from Hollywood’s golden age. On April 6, 2008 actor and political activist Charlton Heston died in Beverly Hills, at age 84, six years after revealing that he had Alzheimer’s. The tragedy of Heston’s final years was that he suffered from the disease and the slow mental death that it brings – as in the final years of another great American, Ronald Reagan, whose career as actor-turned-political activist (and “conservative icon”) often has been compared with Heston’s. But, also as with Reagan’s, the triumph of Heston’s life was that it was a complete one, filled with tremendous achievement. Both in the characters he portrayed on the screen and in his political advocacy, Heston championed the dignity of the individual, and it is his pro-individualist legacy for which he will be remembered. Born in 1923 as John Charles Carter, Heston studied acting at Northwestern University, in his hometown of Evanston, Illinois, where he met his wife of 64 years, Lydia Clarke (who was at his bedside when he died). At age 17 he appeared in his first film, a 1941 version of Peer Gynt. During World War II he served in the Air Force; then, after the war, appeared as Marc Anthony in filmmaker David Bradley’s Julius Caesar, described as a low-budget film that became a staple of 1950s and `60s high school English classes. He made his broadway debut in Anthony and Cleopatra in 1947. His stage experience, coupled with many late-40s roles in early TV programs, gave Heston sufficient reputation to land the lead in his first Hollywood feature, the 1950 crime thriller/film noir Dark City. He immediately became a star and was cast as a circus manager in Cecille B. DeMille’s over-the-top 1952 film, The Greatest Show on Earth. Then came Heston’s signature role as Moses in the last and biggest film DeMille directed: The Ten Commandments in 1956. That blockbuster was the first of the “big three” historical epics in which Heston starred; the other two were 1959’s Ben-Hur (winner of 11 Oscars, including best picture and Heston’s best actor) and 1961’s El Cid, a portrait of Spain’s legendary hero that until recently was one of the most-wanted movies on DVD. (A two-disc deluxe edition of El Cid finally was released just earlier this year.) Perhaps it was Heston’s larger-than-life screen persona that made him particularly well-suited for historical epics: besides the previously-mentioned “big three,” he also starred in the Civil War epic Major Dundee (1965), the medieval action drama The War Lord (1965), and the story of British general Charles George Gordon’s defense of Khartoum (1966). He also played Cardinal Richelieu in director Mark Lester’s entertaining romps, The Three Musketeers and its sequel, The Four Musketeers (1973-74). And he played Andrew Jackson – one of his most convincing historical portrayals – in two films, The President’s Lady (1953) and The Buccaneer (1958). (The Buccaneer is a personal favorite of mine, in which Heston as General Jackson is so convincing that he almost steals the movie from its star, Yul Brynner, playing pirate Jean Lafitte at the time of the Battle of New Orleans.) Heston starred in just a couple of Westerns – The Big Country (1958), where he played a ranch hand, and Will Penny (1968), one of his personal favorite roles, as a middle-aged cowpoke – but he also starred in the quasi-Western, set in the jungles of South America, The Naked Jungle (where he co-starred with Eleanor Parker and millions of red ants). Heston’s film career was rounded out by starring roles in several science-fiction and disaster films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Planet of the Apes (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), The Omega Man (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Earthquake (1974) and Airport 1975. Mike Clark, in his cover-story obituary in USA Today (“Heston’s epic style defined an era,” April 7), summed up Heston’s film career by quoting film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, whom (Clark wrote) “said it best: `Charlton Hestron might be said to achieve his apotheosis as Moses – unless one decides that it’s Moses who’s achieving his apotheosis as Heston.’” Equally memorable with his film performances – and equally important, as a legacy of Charlton Heston’s life – was his political activism. Most of the media’s obituaries last week described Heston’s activism as starting with a “liberal” bent: campaigning for Democrat presidential candidates Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960, picketing the opening of one of his films at a segregated Oklahoma theater in 1961, and joining with Martin Luther King, Jr. in his historic 1963 march on Washington. “But,” the obituaries then pointedly reported, Heston’s political activism turned to the “right,” with his support for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. Typical of the media coverage of Heston’s political activism is the feature article by Peter Eisler in USA Today (April 7), the headline of which proclaimed that “Through the years, Heston’s politics defined classification.” After noting that Heston “drifted right” in 1964, the article added, “but he maintained ties across the political spectrum. From 1966 to 1971, he led the Screen Actors Guild – the longest tenure of any SAG president.” However, the article also notes, he backed Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election and campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1980. His friendship with Reagan allegedly made him “more partisan” – meaning, more active in promoting conservative causes – for, like Reagan, he had concluded that the Democratic Party had left him while his values remained the same. By the late 1980s he was an outspoken foe of abortion and an advocate of gun rights, serving as president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) from 1998 to 2003. His presidency of the NRA made him a full-fledged “conservative icon,” the article reports. At the 2000 NRA convention, Heston blasted Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore for his anti-gun stance, memorably raising an antique gun in the air and declaring Gore would have to wrest the right to bear arms “from my cold, dead hands.” Many NRA members displayed bumper stickers on their cars, proudly declaring “Charlton Heston is my President.” Only left-wing paternalist/elitists would see any contradictions in Heston’s politics. His early-60s “civil rights” activism is entirely consistent with his late-90s activism on behalf of gun rights, for the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is one of the most important (and, because it is based on the individual’s natural right to self-defense, one of the most fundamental) “civil rights” we Americans have. (Indeed, the NRA is truly the nation’s largest civil-rights organization. It certainly has a better claim to the label “civil rights” than do other so-called civil rights groups that, rather than championing the rights of the individual, seek to increase government’s coercive power over individuals and to erase individuals’ uniqueness by classifying them according to race or sex.) The difficulty some people have in seeing the consistency in Heston’s career as a political activist is one of the great fallacies caused by a “left” versus “right,” “liberal” versus “conservative” view of politics. Those popular, traditional labels of political orientation are virtually meaningless and quite misleading, for they have no relevance to the fundamental political issue of our time: the freedom of the individual versus the tyranny of the collective. Rather than “defying classification,” Heston’s career of political activism is that of a consistent, life-long defender of individual rights. Wayne LaPierre, NRA vice president, nicely summed up this side of Heston’s legacy by noting he was “an American who devoted himself to civil rights, to correcting injustices . . . and for standing up for what he knew was right.”
| Link to this Entry | Posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer
An Open Letter to the GOP
In my previous entry “R.I.P., GOP: The McCain Mutiny” (March 4), I discussed my objections to Senator John McCain, various reasons why – because of his political philosophy, his public policy positions, and his temperament – I cannot support his candidacy for president of the United States. I reported that I’m writing as someone who, until recently (the presidency of George Bush the Younger), had been a life-long Republican, and who indeed still calls myself a “Goldwater Republican” – that is, someone who supports the principles that the late Senator Barry Goldwater represented (limited government, individual freedom and responsibility, and the rule of law). Sadly, these are principles that the Republican Party no longer supports. The Party’s choice of John McCain as its presidential candidate this year is, to me, the final straw. It demonstrates that the “Grand Old Party” ain’t so grand any more – that it no longer stands for liberty, individualism, free markets, and limited government. It’s become nothing more than a pale imitation of the modern Democratic Party, with its embrace of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state and all the ways that collectivism has undermined not only individual rights and responsibility but also the system of limited, constitutional government established by America’s Founders. (Today’s Republicans, by and large, differ from the Democrats only in the details about how to expand the “nanny state.” Even today’s self-described “conservatives” have forgotten the pro-liberty, limited-government conservative principles articulated by Goldwater: "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is `needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' `interests,' I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
(Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1964).) Although I’ll continue to support some Republican candidates individually – those Republican candidates for Congress, for state and local government offices who share my pro-individualist, limited-government principles – I’ve ceased supporting the Republican Party generally because I’ve stopped hoping that it might recover those “Goldwater Republican” principles. Indeed, I’ve updated my “open letter to the GOP,” which I often send (in postage-paid return envelopes) back to the Party in response to its fund-raising letters. “Our records show that your membership has lapsed,” those form letters typically say. “Have you given up on the Republican Party?” My answer is, emphatically, YES!!! And here are my reasons why:
An Open Letter to the GOP
I will not contribute any money to, or in any other way support, the Republican Party, nationally or at the state level. Far too much of my hard-earned wealth is being confiscated by taxes at all levels of government, and it is being used to support public policies which penalize people like me for my abilities and which rewards other people for their incompetence, laziness, and imprudence – in the name of some nonexistent entity called "the public good." I see the leadership of the Republican Party doing nothing to end this manifest injustice. I see instead the Party relying on the Democrats' tactics – the politics of fear, envy, and resentment – promising only to not confiscate quite as much of my wealth, or to not limit quite as much of my freedom, as the other party. I see, in short, a difference only in degree, not in kind. On other key political issues of the past seven years, since George W. Bush has been president, I see no significant difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. Consider the deplorable record of President Bush’s administration and the past Republican-controlled Congress: the pork-laden farm bill, steel tariffs, ethanol mandates, and other special-interest legislation; more unconstitutional campaign-finance regulations, with the McCain-Feingold law; the “No Child Left Behind” law that expands the federal government’s unconstitutional intrusion into education; the Medicare prescription-drug legislation that expands the federal “welfare state”; Mr. Bush’s program unconstitutionally spending tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer money to combat AIDS in Africa; and most deplorably, the exploitation of the September 11, 2001 militant Islamic terrorist attacks as an excuse not only to further limit Americans’ freedoms but also to expand the federal government bureaucracy, while squandering taxpaying Americans’ dollars as well as the lives and limbs of American servicemen and servicewomen in the misguided “war” that’s really nothing more than the bloody military occupation of Iraq. (The Iraqi misadventure is just the sort of failed “police-action,” “nation-building” foreign policy, inappropriately using U.S. military forces, that Republicans rightly criticized when engaged in by the Clinton administration in such places as Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia/Kosovo in the 1990s.) Now that the Democrats have regained control of both houses of Congress, neither President Bush nor the Republican minority leaders in Congress have offered any strong, principled opposition to the agenda being pushed by the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The result has been such foolish (and harmful) legislation as the federal minimum-wage increase; an energy bill that will wreck the U.S. economy (sacrificing sound energy policy to radical environmentalist agenda, including the “global warming” myth); a so-called “economic stimulus” tax-rebate program that’s sheer gimmickry; and various appropriations bills heavily laden with “earmarks” (a fancy name for pork-barrel spending projects). In cooperating with the Democrats on these “bipartisan” programs, President Bush and the Republican Party demonstrate that they offer no real alternative to the failed welfare-state policies of the past: Democrats advocate more socialism; the Republicans, what I call “socialism light.” Neither major party supports my highest political values: freedom, capitalism, and government strictly limited to its essential (and sole legitimate) function of protecting individuals’ fundamental rights. Moreover, on those few issues where Republicans have differentiated themselves from the Democrats, they have taken worse positions than the Democrats, abandoning the Republican Party’s historic commitment to limited government, individual rights, and free markets and instead embracing “social conservative” policies that amount to nothing more than what I call “collectivism of the Right.” These issues include “pro-life” policies that deprive pregnant women of their constitutionally-protected rights to privacy and violate the constitutional principles of federalism and separation of powers (the federal ban on “late-term” abortions and the attempted special legislation in the Terri Schiavo case); “pro-family-values” policies that deprive same-sex couples of their right to equal protection under the law (a proposed constitutional amendment imposing a federal ban on same-sex marriages) and which increase the powers of the FCC to censor so-called “indecent” speech, thereby violating First Amendment rights; and a misguided immigration policy that further curtails civil liberties (in a paranoid attempt to “crack down” on the supposed evils of “illegal” immigration), depriving both foreign workers and U.S. employers of freedom of contract and other essential economic freedoms. Such policies are contrary to the Republican Party’s foundational principles of equality under the law and freedom of contract. Such policies, moreover, show that the party of Abraham Lincoln and Barry Goldwater has become the party of religious fanatics, prudes, homophobes, and nativists (if not downright racists). The Republican Party’s all-but-certain nomination of Senator John McCain to be its presidential candidate in the 2008 election is, for me, the final straw. Selecting this “maverick” RINO (Republican in Name Only) whose policy positions on key issues mirrors those of his Senate Democrat colleagues is the final proof that today’s Republican Party has abandoned all principle and is willing to do anything merely to win elections. Unless and until the Republican Party offers me something positive to support, I will not give up one more penny of my hard-earned money to politicians who want to spend it on someone else, by expanding the 20th-century “welfare state,” and who want to deprive me of my basic freedoms, by expanding the 20th-century regulatory state. Like today’s Democrats (who misrepresent themselves as “progressives”), most Republican politicians today are not looking forward to the kind of great, free society the United States of America ought to be in the 21st century. Instead, they cling to the failed paternalistic policies of the past. Today’s Republicans have forgotten the wisdom of the most memorable line from President Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” To earn my support, the Republican Party must take a clear, unequivocal stand in favor of such things as: · a significant, permanent reduction in income tax rates across the board, coupled with genuine tax reform, aimed at phasing out altogether the federal income tax · a major reduction in all government regulations that stifle the freedom of American businesses (including repeal of federal antitrust laws and federal labor laws such as those mandating minimum wages and “family leave”) · energy policies that really do promote American energy independence, by repealing federal laws that interfere with the freedom of U.S. oil and gas companies to exploit our fossil-fuel reserves (including drilling in Alaska and offshore), instead of pandering to radical environmentalists’ anti-industrial agenda · limitation of the federal government to its legitimate powers, as enumerated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution (which means, among other things, the repeal of all federal education laws) · a restored commitment to the principle of federalism, including a repeal of all federal laws that have unconstitutionally nationalized matters that the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution reserves to the states or to the people (and also abandoning support for a proposed federal constitutional amendment that would interfere with the freedom of the states to define marriage, allowing the states to recognize the legality of same-sex marriages) · a major reduction in the federal laws and regulations that intrude on Americans' everyday lives, ranging from the products they use in their homes (toilet tanks, washing machines, and light bulbs) to the vehicles in which they travel on the highways (in other words, an end to federal “energy-saving” mandates of all kinds – including abolition of that abomination called “Daylight Saving Time”) · abolition of most federal regulatory agencies, starting with those that most blatantly violate Americans’ constitutional rights (such as the FCC, or Federal Censorship Commission) · a commitment to the protection of Americans' property rights, and a repeal of federal "wetlands" regulations and other environmental laws that prevent landowners from using their property as they see fit · real Social Security reform, which means replacing the existing Social Security system with a privatized system that gives individual Americans the freedom to control their own pension plans · real reform of the U.S. healthcare system, which means reduction (not expansion) of the socialized parts of the system (Medicare and Medicaid), coupled with market-oriented reforms that will give individual Americans the freedom (and responsibility) to purchase their own health care, with private insurance, tax-free medical-savings accounts, etc. · no new federal gun-control measures, and a repeal of most existing gun legislation · abolition of the federal campaign finance laws · repeal of all so-called "affirmative action" programs and all other governmental acts that classify people by race or sex rather than treat them as individuals · genuine free trade, both within and outside the United States (including the repeal of all import/export restrictions, except for those inspection laws absolutely necessary for national security) · an end to the so-called "War on Drugs," by repealing all federal drug-prohibition laws (which have worsened drug-abuse problems and have wasted valuable law-enforcement and penal resources on non-violent offenders) · a strong national defense, for the legitimate purposes of defending the United States from foreign aggression but not for any U.N.-sponsored "peacekeeping" missions or any other military interventions in which the vital interests of the United States are not at stake · an immigration policy which opens U.S. borders to all self-reliant persons of ability · and (last, but certainly not least), a party that does not ask individuals to sacrifice for the sake of their country because it understands that the glory of the United States of America is the extent to which we value the individual – and that the sole legitimate function of government is to protect each individual’s natural, inherent, and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
A Republican Party which takes a firm stand on issues such as these, on behalf of individual freedom and limited, constitutional government, would deserve my support. But until the leadership of the Party embraces these principles – and begins implementing them in Congress and in state legislatures where Republicans hold the majority – I will continue to withhold my support.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Friday, March 28, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer
Spring Briefs 2008
As the spring weather heats up, so too do controversies in the world of politics and popular culture. Here are my comments on some current developments:
n Barack Obama’s Fraudulent Campaign My last two blog entries focused on two of the three remaining major-party candidates for U.S. president, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. In “The Worst U.S. President” (Feb. 15), I reminded Americans about how corrupt Bill Clinton’s presidency was – and how disastrous it was for the rule of law in America – and argued that it would be horrible to return Hillary Clinton, Bill’s “partner-in-crime,” to power in the White House. And in “R.I.P., GOP: The McCain Mutiny” (Mar. 4), I argued that it also would be disastrous – for both the Republican Party and for the country – for a megalomaniac like John McCain to become president. Lest my readers assume that by my silence I’m in any way endorsing the other Democrat candidate, Barack Obama, I now turn to the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois. Barack Obama is, in a word, a fraud. He campaigns as “a uniter, not a divider,” yet both in his rhetoric and in his positions on the issues he’s a run-of-the-mill Democrat, using class-warfare rhetoric to exploit feelings of envy (of the economically successful), resentment (against achievement) and fear (of the consequences of one’s own failings). The only “hope” that Senator Obama offers is the “opportunity” for the have-nots in American society (the people who are not self-reliant) to become even more dependent on the federal government, by using its coercive powers to forcibly redistribute wealth from those who’ve produced it (and therefore earned it) to those who haven’t – in other words, the only “hope” he offers is more loot for the looters. (His policies essentially are indistinguishable from the class-warfare policies of John “Two Americas” Edwards; see my previous entry, “`Social Justice’ and the Two Americas’” (Jan. 31), on how the Democrats’ divisive politics, in the name of “social justice,” amount to nothing more than socialistic injustice. There’s nothing hopeful in Obama’s message that we’re the “keeper” of our “brothers” and “sisters” – which is to say that those of us who are virtuous and competent enough to take care of ourselves and our own families must also bear the burden of taking care of those of us who aren’t.) Senator Obama also presents himself as the candidate of “change,” and yet, like any other Democrat, he offers nothing new: just an expansion of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state, which has been a massive failure that has not only undercut individual freedom and personal responsibility in fundamental ways but has exacerbated virtually all major social problems. More government control over Americans’ lives is not “change”; it’s just more of the same old shit.
n You Call Him an Orator? There is yet another way in which Barack Obama is a fraud: in his reputation for eloquence. One of his campaign commercials run frequently on TV here in Ohio during the two weeks prior to the state’s March 4 primary showed Senator Obama speaking to an audience in what appeared to be a deli or a restaurant about the loss of American jobs overseas. (Of course, Obama neglected to mention the real reasons for the loss of U.S. jobs: the high cost of employing American workers, thanks to labor unions and government mandates.) At the end of his talk, Obama concluded, “We’ve got to stop giving tax breaks to companies that are moving overseas, and give those tax breaks to companies investigating in the United States of America” (emphasis added). That’s right: if I heard the commercial correctly, Obama said “investigating” rather than “investing.” I’m not faulting Obama for the verbal faux pas (a minor slip of the tongue that even good public speakers make from time to time), but I find it amazing that his campaign staff deliberately chose that particular sound bite for a television commercial. Have they no attention to detail? Or (what I fear may be the best explanation) doesn’t anyone pay attention to what Obama’s actually saying? Hillary Clinton’s clumsy attempt to call attention to Obama’s alleged plagiarism (his propensity to borrow bromides from other politicians), in her ridiculous “Xerox” barb during one of the debates in Texas, barely scratched the surface of Obama’s campaign rhetoric and the kind of rigorous analysis it ought to be given. What’s most troubling about Obama’s rhetoric is how empty – how devoid of anything really substantive – it is. The emperor truly has no clothes. That someone as vacuous as Barack Obama is considered eloquent in America today is, well, a sad commentary on America today.
n You Call This a Choice? As I’ve previously noted here, this year’s candidates for U.S. president from both major political parties have been a bunch of mediocrities; it’s been the most discouraging field for president that I have seen in my half-century (or so) lifetime. (See my discussion of “Demopublican/Replicrat Fascism,” in “2008: Prospects for Liberty” (Jan. 11, 2008), or “A Plague on Both Their Houses,” in “Labor Day 2007 BFDs” (Sept. 3, 2007).) 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!” (I associate Mrs. Clinton with strychnine because Ohio Governor Ted “Strychnine” Strickland has been one of her most ardent supporters. (As to why I call him “Governor Strychnine,” see my discussion of that topic in last year’s “Spring Briefs 2007” (April 10, 2007).) The only question left for debate is which of the other two poisons, arsenic or cyanide, we should associate, respectively, with McCain and Obama.) Mrs. Clinton’s recent wins in the Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island primaries have left her and Barack Obama still deadlocked in their struggle for the Democrats’ nomination. Obama has a slight mathematical lead in elected delegates, and his supporters display a fervor that often seems more like that of a religious revival rather than a political campaign. But Mrs. Clinton has her partner-in-crime, Slick Willy, and the Clinton political machine, with all its connections to the Democratic party establishment; as I noted at the end of my essay “The Worst U.S. President” (Feb. 15), we can expect the Clintons to stop at nothing – to use all sorts of political chicanery – in their effort to recapture the power of the White House. Accordingly, we can expect the Clintons to try to boost their elected-delegate count by getting the party to change its rules and to seat the phony delegates from Michigan and Florida (where, contrary to the party’s decision to ignore the early primaries in those states, Hillary Clinton ran virtually unopposed); we can also expect the Clintons to do everything they can – including blackmail and bribery -- to persuade the party’s “super-delegates” (party activists and politicians) to support Mrs. Clinton rather than Obama; we even might expect the Clintons to even try poaching Obama’s pledged delegates. Nevertheless, there are signs that the Clintons’ control of the party establishment is slipping – and that the extreme leftist activists, who tend to favor Obama, are beginning to take the party over. (For example, Moveon.org, in conjunction with other leftist activist groups, ran a full-page ad in USA Today on February 20, imploring the Democratic Party to “live up to its name” by having the superdelegates support “the people’s choice,” whatever candidate has a majority of popular votes – in other words, Obama.) I still expect the Clintons somehow to win in the battle against Obama (even if it means a brokered convention that divides the Democrats, as a Clinton nomination undoubtedly would), and so I’m sticking by the prediction I regretfully made over two years ago, in my 2006 New Year’s essay (see my discussion of “The Demopublican/Replicrat Monopoly” in “2006: Prospects for Liberty,” Jan. 4, 2006): “Looking ahead to the 2008 presidential election, if the pundits are right in their prognostications, the Demopublican/ Replicrat race will be between Hillary Clinton and John McCain – in other words, a power-hungry bitch versus a megalomaniacal bastard, each of them equally an enemy of liberty. Such a contest, too, will be irrelevant to individualists, one that will arouse little emotion other than nausea.”
In case I’m wrong about Clinton defeating Obama, however, one might substitute the words Barack Obama for Hillary Clinton, and the phrase political fraud for power-hungry bitch, and my prediction, sadly, will still come true.
n “All the Slander, Gossip, and Innuendo That’s Unfit To Print” Surely no fair-minded rational person can still regard The New York Times as a credible newspaper. For several years (at least) now, it’s been quite evident that the Times is nothing more than a partisan rag, a propaganda tool for the Democrats. Perhaps nothing so starkly illustrates this fact as the “news” story published in the New York Times on February 20, reporting (according to some anonymous sources) that Senator John McCain several years ago was having a romantic relationship with a female lobbyist, a relationship that allegedly concerned McCain’s former staffers (those same anonymous sources). As readers of this blog know, I’m no fan of John McCain – indeed, I’m about as far from being a “McCainiac” as anyone can be, for my previous post details the reasons why I regard Senator McCain to be unfit to be president, because of his political philosophy, his policy positions, and his temperament. But I regard the Times story as complete bullshit, a prime example of “hatchet journalism,” a “non-story,” as McCain’s attorney (Bob Bennett, Bill Clinton’s former attorney) aptly characterizes it. “All the news that’s fit to print”? The Times readers ought to sue the paper for false advertising, for misrepresenting their product. What’s especially ludicrous about the New York Times’ clumsy effort to attack McCain is how it has actually helped McCain’s candidacy, by giving some conservative Republicans a reason to become enthusiastic about him. Apparently abandoning all principles – except, perhaps, the fatuitous principle, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” – these idiotic conservatives unwittingly have allowed the Times’ shoddy journalism to give them an excuse to rally around McCain. But he’s still the same lousy candidate he was before the Times story was published – an “authoritarian maverick,” a megalomaniac obsessed with certain issues, including government regulation of campaign financing and lobbying – an obsession which, as the Times story reveals (and this is its true significance, barely noticed by political pundits), opens McCain to the charge of hypocrisy. As with the Democrats whose policies he emulates, however, McCain has so many flaws, that hypocrisy is among the lesser ones.
n Spitzer Under Fire New York’s Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer is in political and legal hot water – as of this writing, he’s expected to resign the governorship, and he’s likely to be indicted by federal prosecutors – because of his connections to a high-priced prostitution ring. Although “tragedy” is the word that many media commentators have used to describe Spitzer’s troubles, I think the word “justice” is more apt: the end of his political career and a possible jail term are exactly what Spitzer deserves. Let me make myself perfectly clear here. The so-called “crime” that Spitzer allegedly committed (transferring thousands of dollars of his own money, in interstate commerce, in order to pay for the services of a prostitute charging over $3000 per night, whom he met in a Washington, D.C. hotel room last month) is something that ought NOT be a crime, in a free society. Laws criminalizing prostitution (whether targeting the pimps, the hookers, or the johns – like Spitzer) ought not to exist, because prostitution truly is a “victimless crime”: it’s a private matter between consenting adults that should be none of the government’s business and indeed should be regarded as part of the fundamental right to liberty (both personal “privacy” liberty and economic liberty) that’s protected by the due process clauses of the Constitution. (The fact that Spitzer’s a married man makes no difference here: whatever “harm” he causes to his marriage or to his wife is a private moral matter that’s none of the government’s business, either. The criminal laws should punish only those acts that harm other people by violating their rights – not all acts that people may regard as “immoral.” Criminalizing immorality is especially troublesome in the realm of sexual morality, where what is “moral” or “immoral” is largely a matter of subjective opinion, especially today when “traditional” Judeo-Christian moral rules are being challenged – and rightly so.) Moreover, the federal law under which he may be prosecuted – the so-called Mann Act, which criminalizes prostitution across state lines – ought to be regarded as doubly unconstitutional: as not only a violation of individuals’ constitutionally-protected liberty rights, but also as an abuse of Congress’s power to “regulate” commerce “among the States,” because it’s a morals law and not a valid regulation of commerce. (Unfortunately, neither “liberal” nor “conservative” judges are likely to agree with me on this latter point.) But – and this is the critical point – Spitzer is a man who built his political career, first as New York’s state Attorney General and then as Governor, prosecuting people for all sorts of things that similarly ought not (in a truly free society) be considered crimes, not just prostitution and other “moral” offenses but also so-called “white-collar crimes.” An excellent article by Roger Donway, entitled “Eliot Spitzer: Ayatollah General,” published in the April/May 2005 issue of The New Individualist, details how Spitzer paved his way to the New York governorship by building an image of himself as a moral crusader against unethical businessmen – by abusing the law (including antitrust laws and New York’s Martin Act, a broadly-worded anti-fraud law), violating the rights of businessmen who did nothing that actually harmed anyone else, and also undermining the rule of law. Describing Spitzer’s crusade against business, Donway calls him a “Jacobin” and compares Spitzer’s moral authoritarianism to that of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini: “[H]e is willing to sacrifice the political principles of a free society—individual rights, the rule of law, and democratic processes—when they stand in the way of his moral views. “In recent years, liberals have created a bugaboo of America's religious Right, finding in it the makings of a dictatorship of virtue, such as the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini introduced after Iran's 1979 revolution. This is straining at gnats while swallowing a camel: to find a genuine threat from demagogic virtue-crats, liberals need look no further than the rise of their own Eliot Spitzer.” Spitzer’s real crime – the reason why he ought to be forced to resign, under threat of impeachment – has been his abuse of the powers of his political offices to violate the rights of individuals. His real offense, with regard to the interstate prostitution ring, is simply hypocrisy: this moral crusader, whom admirers called “the Sheriff of Wall Street” and whom the media regard as a “corruption-buster who made ethics his trademark” (as USA Today put it this week), has himself violated the laws, the same kind of laws he has prosecuted others for violating. It’s especially ironic, as law professor Orrin Kerr has recently noted on the Volokh Conspiracy blog, when we consider how Spitzer got caught: “[I]t looks like Spitzer got caught because the prostitutes he hired were so expensive that he needed to shuffle several thousands of dollars around each time. Spitzer knew that banks report suspicious money transfers to the IRS to combat financial frauds and money laundering, so he tried to structure his money transfers to avoid suspicion. But the banks thought his activity was still suspicious, so they reported him and the IRS opened an investigation under the assumption that Spitzer was trying to launder money he had obtained from bribes. But he wasn't laundering money — he was paying prostitutes. So Elliot Spitzer, aggressive former white collar crime prosecutor, was brought down because he couldn't outsmart banks looking for evidence of white collar crimes.”
For Spitzer himself to fall victim to such laws is a splendid example of someone being “hoisted on his own petard” – and is a form of justice, analogous to, say, Robespierre (Jacobin architect of the French Revolution’s infamous Reign of Terror) himself eventually falling victim to the bloody “revolution” he helped create and being executed on the guillotine, in the name of “the people” whom Robespierre (like Spitzer) claimed to represent.
n The Folly of “Gun-Free” School Zones Another tragic shooting on a college campus – the murder of five college students by an armed former student in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on February 14 – has revived the debate over gun control and particularly over bans on firearms on campus. As I wrote last year, in the wake of the Virginia Tech campus shootings (“The Folly of `Gun-Free’ School Zones” (April 30, 2007), “it’s sheer folly to try to ban guns from campuses – it’s folly to try to create so-called `gun-free zones,’” which make schools actually less safe by rendering students, faculty, and staff powerless to defend themselves from maniacs (like the lone gunmen at both Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois) who come on campus to kill. I concluded, “There’s one reform, however, that would simply and effectively help avert similar tragedies on college campuses in the future: “gun-free” zone laws and policies (at both public and private places) should be repealed. Let’s not continue making people on campus (students, staff, and faculty alike) sitting ducks for the next deranged shooter; let’s give members of university communities the same right that all citizens should have in a free society – the right to defend themselves, effectively, which includes the right to carry concealed guns.”
I’m pleased to report that, after the most recent campus shootings, more and more commentators are agreeing with me. As USA Today reported in a recent news article, legislatures in twelve states – Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Caroline, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington – are considering bills that would allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry guns at public universities. (So far, only Utah allows permit holders to carry guns on the campuses of its nine public universities. 38 states and the District of Columbia prohibit guns in schools; 16 of those specifically prohibit guns in colleges and universities.) As the news story also reports, “Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, an Internet-based organization with 11,000 members in its Facebook group, is calling attention to the issue with a protest from April 21 to 25, a week after the one-year anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16.” (“12 states debate guns on campus,” Feb. 15, 2008.) (Just a few days after receiving national media attention because of this article and other coverage, membership in Students for Concealed Carry has grown to over 15,000!) Nevertheless, the left-liberal editors of USA Today, in an editorial published just a few days after this news report (“Gun control vs. gun rights,” Feb. 18), concluded, unbelievably, “Short of turning campuses into armed fortresses with metal detectors everywhere, there may be little that schools can do to stop a determined, suicidal murderer,” like the shooter at NIU. How sadly typically of left-wing supporters of gun-control that the simple, common-sense solution – a change in school policy to allow responsible gun-owning students, faculty, and staff to carry weapons for their own self-defense – doesn’t even occur to them. As they do on so many other issues, left-liberals don’t even think of individual self-reliance as an option; their only “solution” to social problems is to make people even more dependent on government.
n Oil’s Well Many people erroneously belief that the world is “running out of oil” – a myth convenient to radical environmentalists’ anti-carbon agenda. In truth, the world has abundant petroleum reserves, as Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills demonstrate in their book, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Noting that pessimists have been predicting the exhaustion of fossil fuels since the 1880s, Huber and Mills observe that “all such predictions center on what [oil reserves] today’s technology, driven by today’s forms of power, makes reasonably accessible.” But they add, “No one seriously disputes that with better technology, and better power, we could retrieve far more.” Today, the amount of fossil fuel that humanity consumes per year is about 345 Quads (quadrillion British Thermal Units, or Btus); oil shale deposits hold 10 million Quads. Bjorn Lomborg, in his splendid book The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2002), estimates that shale oil can supply oil for the next 250 years at current consumption and that, all in all, there is oil enough to cover our total energy consumption for the next 5,000 years. (For more on the global warming myths and other radical environmentalist hysteria, see my previous entry, “Merchants of Fear,” May 17, 2006.) Eric Cheney, professor emeritus of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, says that the most common question he gets is, “When are we going to run out of oil?,” then adds that the correct response is, “Never." "It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon." Changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world's mineral resources virtually infinite, said Cheney. For instance, oil deposits unreachable 40 years ago can be tapped today using improved technology, and oil once too costly to extract from tar sands, organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. "Mineral resources are vitally important to our industrial and service economy," he said, adding that gas prices today, adjusted for inflation, are about what they were in the early 20th century. (“Despite popular belief, the world is not running out of oil, UW scientist says,” Oct. 19, 2006.) The recent spikes in gasoline prices can be attributed to a number of factors – among them, the rise in worldwide demand for oil and the fall of the U.S. dollar in world currency markets – but one factor stands out as particularly significant: a mid-February explosion at an oil refinery in Texas that will keep the facility closed for longer than two months. There’s plenty of oil, but there’s a real shortage in the United States’ oil refining capacity, because new oil refineries haven’t been built in years – thanks to the hostile business climate that Congress has created for the oil and gas industry. Because of our limited refining capacity, just one refinery going off-system for a couple of months can cause a significant spike in gas prices. Yet virtually all Demopublican/Replicrat politicians, despite their rhetoric about making the U.S. less dependent on oil imports, are doing nothing to address the bad government policies that have discouraged industry from building new refineries – just as few politicians (except for a few Republicans who aren’t afraid of standing up to the radical environmentalist lobby) advocate the common-sense solution of eliminating government barriers to oil drilling in the Alaska wilderness or offshore the continental U.S. All Americans who are concerned about rising gasoline prices ought to demand that politicians repeal the bad laws that are standing in the way of a free market in energy, including use of fossil fuel resources.
n Great Snakes Alive! The news media generally like to focus on scary, sensationalistic stories – playing on a gullible public’s fears (and other negative emotions). That’s especially true when it comes to media coverage of “climate change,” or global warming, stories as well as other myths propagated by radical environmentalists. (For more on global warming hoax and other scares, see my discussion of “Eco-Fascism” in “2008: Prospects for Liberty” (Jan. 11, 2008), as well as my previous essay, “Merchants of Fear” (May 17, 2006).) One striking example – so absurd it’s actually humorous – is the USA Today page-one story on February 21, “Pythons have us in their grasp.” The opening sentence of the USA Today story reports, “As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas, and the South and up north along the Virginia coast,” citing recently-released “U.S. Geological Survey maps” and accompanied by a map of the USA showing most of the South as an area “where the climate is now similar to the Burmese python’s native habitat.” Yet, when one reads the story, one learns that the only place in the USA where pythons actually have been found in the wild is in the Florida Everglades, where the first specimens were discovered in the mid-1990s, released by pet owners who no longer wanted them. Reading more of the story, one learns that Burmese pythons, although large snakes (they can be 20 feet long and weigh up to 250 pounds), are not poisonous and not considered a danger to humans; in Florida, they have eaten wildlife, including “bobcats, deer, alligators, raccoons, cats, rats, rabbits, muskrats, possum, mice, ducks, egrets, herons, and song birds.” Finally, reading the story even more carefully, one learns that two federal agencies – the Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service – concerned about the dangers the snakes might pose to endangered species, “estimated where [pythons] might live” in the USA, based on “global warming models for [the year] 2100”! (emphasis added). It’s worth emphasizing again: pythons have been spotted only in Florida, where they were released into the wild by dissatisfied pet owners. Indeed, the story also reports, quoting one of the government researchers, that it would be “decades” before the pythons move into other states. Yet, obviously, casual readers of the paper might conclude that, thanks to global warming, pythons will infest the entire southern part of the United States! That’s either a prime example of global-warming hype-steria, or else the editors of USA Today are following the same marketing strategy of those Hollywood geniuses who brought us the movie Snakes on a Plane.
n Congress’s Stimulant Addiction Another one of “Mayer’s rules of thumb,” as I frequently tell my students, is that typically the worst legislation is passed by Congress (or the state legislatures) with bipartisan support. Think, for example, of the Sherman Antitrust Act – co-sponsored by a Republican (Senator John Sherman of Ohio) and a Democrat (Senator John Reagan of Texas) in 1890 – the origin of our subjective, unjust antitrust law. Or think of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulatory law. Any time both Republicans and Democrats (or, as I like to call them, Demopublicans and Replicrats) agree to support a new law, it’s a safe bet that that new law is bad public policy, contrary to Americans’ freedom and prosperity. Another prime example of misguided legislation passed with bipartisan support is the Economic Stimulus of 2008 Act, signed into law by President Bush the day before Valentine’s Day, the much-hyped $168 billion measure that will supposedly help avert recession by “stimulating” the economy, through increased consumer spending, thanks to the “rebate” checks to be mailed to middle-income taxpayers by early summer. As I recently was watching The Power of Choice, the superb documentary about the life and ideas of the late, great free-market economist (and Nobel laureate) Milton Friedman, I was struck by the stupidity of the members of Congress, who have failed to learn the basic lessons of sound economics that Friedman and other free-market economists have taught us over the past several decades. The most important of those lessons is that Keynesian economics (the theories expounded by the 20th-century British socialist economist, John Maynard Keynes) simply don’t work: a society cannot achieve prosperity through government spending. But, apparently, the ghost of Keynes still haunts our policy-makers in Washington, who fail to understand (among other things) that people don’t spend a temporary increase of income as readily as a permanent increase – as our experience with past rebates (and Friedman’s Permanent Income Hypothesis) have shown. Thus, the “stimulus” law will not work, as Independent Institute senior fellow William F. Shughart II writes in a February 20 op-ed, “A Failure to Stimulate.” Those $600 rebate checks ($1,200 for married couples who file jointly) will largely go toward credit-card payments, rather than to make new purchases, Shugart observes. Except for one provision that encourages businesses to make more capital investments, the stimulus package is “merely a feel-good measure by which politicians can show voters that they are `doing something’ to shore up an ailing economy during an election year.” Moreover, in the long run, the “stimulus” law actually will make our economy worse, as Shughart explains: “The federal government has no means of its own, so the $168 billion needed to finance the package can come from just three sources: taxing, borrowing, or printing money. For obvious political reasons, raising taxes is not an option during the run-up to an election. The economic stimulus plan thus will be paid for through a combination of new deficit spending and currency creation. The former implies higher future taxes to pay interest to bondholders and to retire the debt when it matures; the latter adds to the inflationary pressures already evident in the economy. Both impose a heavier burden on the private sector, and auger slower rates of economic growth in the years to come.” As he concludes, “If our elected representatives truly were interested in jumpstarting a sluggish economy, they would have acted to reduce uncertainty about future tax bills by cutting marginal income tax rates now and forevermore. Predictably, they chose political grandstanding instead.”
n Despicable Social-engineered Time Once again, all Americans have been forced to switch all their clocks forward one hour, to comply with the Congressionally-mandated Daylight Saving Time (DST). Thanks to an omnibus “energy” bill passed into law by Congress in 2005, DST starts even earlier now (the second Sunday in March) and ends even later (the first Sunday in November). I’ve previously noted my opposition to DST – which I call “Despicable Social-engineered Time” – not just because of the massive inconvenience the twice-a-year time change causes in our lives, but also because it epitomizes what’s wrong with our national government: its constant tinkering with our lives, in the name of “saving energy” or some other bromide. (For my previous discussions of the issue, see my last two entries in “Tricks and Treats” (Oct. 31, 2005) and my entry on “Daylight Savings Bust” in “Spring Briefs 2007” (April 10, 2007).) I was pleased to see USA Today founder Al Neuharth agree with me, in a recent editorial (“Daylight saving time should be dumped,” March 7). He first briefly reviews the history of DST: started during World War I as an alleged “energy saver” and reenacted during World War II, it was repealed after the War only to be reenacted in 1966 “as a peacetime permanent part of our lifestyle,” in effect from April to October, until Congress “compounded the felony” by extending it from March to November, making us “stuck with this silliness for eight months of the year.” Neuharth argues that DST doesn’t save time, or energy: It “just shifts an hour from morning to evening, so that grownup gadabouts can spend extra time in bars and clubs and other late-night joints. Morning people – including farmers, city folks with early jobs, parents of school-age children – all oppose it. But lobbyists for the night crowd have cowed Congress.” Perhaps Neuharth exaggerates, if not the “silliness” of the DST mandate, then the reasons for it. Many people (including the members of Congress who voted to extend DST) actually believe that it saves energy. But that’s debatable. Neuharth calls the energy-saving rationale “phony,” citing a recent study at the University of California-Santa Barbara by economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant, showing that “DST’s introduction in one state alone, Indiana, cost multimillions more in electricity bills.” As I noted last year in “Spring Briefs 2007,” “[T]here’s been no measurable impact on power usage, and in fact [DST] has resulted in increased gasoline usage (and with it, a rise in gas prices) because that “extra” hour of daylight has led people to drive to places, such as golf courses, parks, and shopping malls, that they wouldn’t otherwise visit after work this time of year. `Daylight savings time simply pushes us out of our houses,’ explains Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, and a critic of D.S.T.”
If all the studies of DST included its costs in their entirety – including the costs of putting everyone through the inconvenience of changing all our clocks twice a year, when we “spring forward” and then “fall back” – they’d show no net savings of energy, for we’re all wasting a vast amount of energy just making the time-switch. (Indeed, a recent op-ed by William Shughart, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, estimates the costs of moving from standard time to daylight saving time and back each year at $2.93 per person twice a year—a total of about $1.7 billion per year.) DST, this despicable social-engineered time, is another example of how Congress has abused its powers, tinkering with things (like the standardization of time) that are best left to the free market. As I concluded in “Spring Briefs 2007,” “It’s time for Congress to stop tinkering with Americans’ daily lives, particularly with something so fundamental as time. Some people erroneously believe that government needs to regulate time, in order to bring uniformity; but history tells us that it wasn’t Congress but business – specifically, the railroad industry (which had a strong incentive in uniformity in its time schedules) – that brought us Standard Time in the late 19th century, and with it, the time zones into which the United States are divided. Let’s repeal D.S.T. in its entirety, and stay on good old Standard Time, that marvelous invention of the free market.”
n Castr(o)-(n)ation In late February Raúl Castro, Fidel Castro’s 76-year-old younger brother, formally became Cuba’s president (technically, president of Cuba’s Council of State and Council of Ministers), ending his older brother’s 49-year dictatorial rule. Some naïve (or perhaps unrealistically optimistic) commentators declared that a “new era” had begun for Cuba, but hopes for positive change were quickly dashed by Raúl Castro’s declaration that Fidel will remain the “commander in chief” and will be consulted on important state matters. Even if Fidel were dead and buried, however, one ought to expect any noticeable change in policies: as head of the armed forces, Raúl had been his older brother’s right-hand man, the enforcer of the Communist dictator’s policies. And, of course – this is the critical point – both Castro brothers are Communists; and when they’re both gone, they’re likely to be succeeded by other Communist dictators – just as in the former Soviet Union, when the death of one thug (Lenin) didn’t bring any freedom to the people, for he was succeeded by another thug (Stalin), and so on, so long as the Communist dictatorship remained. Communist dictators essentially are fungible; one’s just as bad as any other, for it is communism itself that is inherently tyrannical. True, there’s a personality cult in Cuba, centered on Fidel Castro, that has helped Communist rule in by keeping it relatively popular, despite the clear evidence that communism has brought only misery and economic stagnation to the Cuban people. The only hope for a free Cuba is for its people to reject communism, a system antithetical to individual freedom and prosperity because it denies people the right of private property, the most fundamental of our rights. The only true cure for the disease under which the people of Cuba have been suffering for the past half-century is capitalism: a capitalist revolution, like that which has taken place in other formerly communist nations (such as the former Soviet bloc nation of Estonia, which thanks to its post-1989 free-market revolution, has become one of Europe’s greatest success stories). Unless and until Cuba repudiates its Communist past and embraces property rights and economic freedom, Castro (or Castro’s ghost) will still haunt the Caribbean nation.
n Congressmen on Steroids -- Revisited Noted professional baseball player Roger Clemens, seven-time winner of the Cy Young Award, is under investigation by Justice Department lawyers, for the possible “crimes” of perjury and obstruction of justice, allegedly because he lied in his recent testimony to Congress, denying reports that he had used steroids or human growth hormone (HGH). Clemens’ legal problems are just among the latest developments in a long string of events involving Congress’s investigation of drug use in baseball. Over three years ago, Senator John McCain helped start the crusade, with Senate hearings; then the investigation began by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, now chaired by Democrat Congressman Henry Wax | |