MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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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 Waxman – an investigation that continues today. Former Senator George Mitchell prepared a report on drugs in December, a report that helped shift Congress’s attention from steroids to HGH, which players allegedly are using increasingly because it’s not detectable through urine tests. Senators Charles Schumer (D.-N.Y.) and Charles Grassley (R.-Iowa) are co-sponsoring legislation (another example of my rule of thumb about the worst laws having bipartisan support) that would put HGH on par with steroids as a controlled substance – in other words, to expand the federal “War on Drugs” to include HGH. (Their bill would make it a crime to possess HGH without a prescription and force distributors and manufacturers to register with the Drug Enforcement Administration.) And another House committee, the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on commerce, trade, and consumer protection (chaired by Rep. Bobby Rush, D.-Ill.), has considered expanding the power of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees drug testing for Olympic sports, to include compulsory drug testing for all major pro sports. (Perhaps it’s apt that the Energy and Commerce subcommittee is chaired by a man named “Rush,” for the idea of government drug-testing for pro sports certainly seems a precipitous “rush” to action.) And perhaps it’s especially apt that the House Government Reform Committee hearings are chaired by Henry Waxman, a man whose physiognomy, with his unusually large nostrils, like a pig’s snout, aptly resembles his political career – which has been built on poking his nose into other people’s business. And whether or not Major League Baseball players are using steroids, HGH, or any other kinds of performance-enhancing substances is, quite simply, none of Congress’s business. (It’s yet another example of how Congress has tried to stretch its power to “regulate commerce among the States” well beyond the power’s legitimate, constitutional bounds, to include vast police powers over how Americans choose to live their lives. If drug use is indeed a problem in Major League Baseball, or in any other professional sports, it’s something that properly should be handled, not by the coercive hand of government, but by the private sector – by the leagues, through their contracts with the players.) Drugs aren’t the problem; an out-of-control Congress, which sees no limits on its investigatory (or legislative) powers, is the real problem. Three years ago, in my first “Spring Briefs” blog essay, written just as Congressman Waxman’s House Committee on Government Reform was just beginning its hearings, centered then on steroid use), I discussed the problem that I called “Congressmen on Steroids.” What I wrote then deserves repeating: “The conceit on which these hearings were premised is that the sport’s steroid problem is a `public health’ issue because the players’ behavior influences youngsters to use performance-enhancing drugs. Some members of Congress cite professional baseball’s exemption from the antitrust laws as an additional rationale for the hearings – which shows yet another reason why the antitrust laws ought to be repealed: they make it too easy for government to blackmail people, one way or another (either directly through the laws themselves or indirectly through exemptions from the laws). . . .
“Why is the House Committee on Government Reform, of all things, poking its nose into professional baseball, when there are far more urgent matters for this committee to consider – for example, the propensity of members of Congress to abuse their power by investigating matters clearly outside the legitimate, constitutional powers of the federal government? If members of Congress are truly concerned about the health of the body politic, they should focus their attention on their own drug habits. Political power is clearly the most addictive and the most dangerous drug in modern American society.”
(from “Spring Briefs,” March 24, 2005.)
n The Politics of Freedom I recently skimmed The Politics of Freedom, the new book by my friend David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. It’s a splendid collection of essays on various political topics written by Boaz over the past two decades. I especially like his essays on “Rights and Responsibilities” (unlike many libertarians, Boaz understands that the two go hand in hand); “The Importance of History” (a splendid op-ed I distribute to students in my Legal History class each year); “Prisoner Held for Ransom” (an op-ed on the Microsoft antitrust case); “Does Anybody Believe in Federalism?” (like so many of Boaz’s excellent op-eds, it’s critical of both Republicans and Democrats); “Liberals, Conservatives, and Free Speech” (ditto); “Franklin Delano Bush” (comparing W’s post-Katrina massive federal bail-out to FDR’s infamous “New Deal”); “The Rise of Big-Government Conservatism” (a splendid summary of what’s wrong with the Bush administration and today’s “conservative” movement); “What Does It Mean To Abolish an Agency?” (an insightful analysis of the failure of the “Reagan Revolution”); “The Selective `Right to Choose’” (it shouldn’t be limited just to abortion); “Privatize Marriage” (a truly libertarian solution to the same-sex marriage debate); “The Benefits of Private Regulation” (a mini-primer on how well the free market orders society); “The War on Drugs” (Boaz’s excellent summary from the 1999 Cato Handbook for Congress); and “Liberty at the Movies” (a provocative list of Hollywood films with libertarian themes – especially provocative because it calls to mind additional movies that Boaz neglected to mention!) I have two minor quibbles with a couple of Boaz’s essays in the final section of the book, on “The Politics of Freedom.” In “Libertarian Voters in 2004 and 2006” (a piece he coauthored with David Kirby for the Jan./Feb. 2007 Cato Policy Report), David optimistically suggests that between 10 and 20 percent of U.S. voters are libertarian; I wish he were right, but I fear that the number of Americans who truly and consistently value liberty (both “personal” and “economic” liberty) and who are willing to bear the responsibility that comes with freedom is much less. And in his 2007 essay “Are We Freer?” David, again, seems much too optimistic in his conclusion that Americans today are “more free than any people in history.” I think, in many important ways, the rise of the 20th-century welfare/regulatory state (which continues to grow bigger and more intrusive) has made Americans generally far less free today than they were a century ago. The much-reviled (by the Left) “Gilded Age” of the late-nineteenth and early-20th century was (and, for a long time to come, will continue to be) the “Golden Age” of American freedom. America at the turn of the 20th century was not only a rising industrial power, but a society that assimilated millions of dirt-poor immigrants – giving them economic opportunities (and, with them, opportunities for freedom in their individual pursuits of happiness) without parallel in the history of the world.
n Idol Speculations Another new season of American Idol has been airing on Fox TV, to record-high ratings. The news media, predictably, has tried to stir up controversy, even where there isn’t really any. First were the stories about some of the top-24 contestants being professionals with experience in the music industry (for example, 24-year-old Carly Smithson, the gal from Ireland who signed a contract with MCA in 1999 for a debut album, under her maiden name, that sold just a few hundred copies; 24-year-old Kristy Lee Cook, who in 2001 signed a recording contract with Arista Nashville, from which she was released within a year; or 17-year-old David Archuleta, who in 2003 at age 12 earned $100,000 as a winner on Star Search). Despite the media’s attempt to stir up controversy (see, for example, the Feb. 18 USA Today feature story, “Some `Idol’ hopefuls aren’t exactly neophytes”), the show’s fans haven’t seemed to mind; they’re judging the contestants, as they should, based on their singing ability. Then, earlier this month, news stories surfaced about 24-year-old David Hernandez having worked for three years as a nude dancer at a male strip club in Phoenix. The show’s producers, thankfully, decided that Hernandez’s background (nor, apparently his foreground), should disqualify him (stripping’s a legal occupation); and, most importantly, the fans again don’t seem to mind, because Hernandez is undoubtedly a talented singer. (The fact that he might be a superb all-around entertainer only enhances his appeal.) Like shit being thrown on a greasy wall, none of the media-stirred controversies have seemed to stick – not even stories about Paula Abdul’s loony comments (most notably her reaction to Archuleta, whom she said was so cute, she’d like to squeeze his head off and dangle him from her rear-view mirror); again, fans don’t mind because they’re used to Paula’s craziness – and seem to love her for it! (Her conflict with fellow judge Simon Cowell, with Paula’s over-the-top gushing over the contestants balancing out Simon’s cruelly blunt criticisms, has become an indispensable part of the show’s schtick.) This season’s contestants seem to be a quite talented bunch, and the men seem especially strong. I’m predicting a repeat of the Season 2 outcome, with two guys making it to the final round of the competition – then it was Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken; this year, I think it will be David Archuleta and either David Cook or Michael Johns. Archuleta’s clearly the favorite (even Simon has found little to criticize in his performances, with the exception of this week’s disappointment), but I’ll defy conventional wisdom and predict that one of the other guys will be the ultimate winner. Right now, if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on David Cook (who did a fine rendition of Eleanor Rigby on last night’s Lennon/McCartney songbook-themed show).
| Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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