David Boaz

In Virginia,

Pat S. Herrity wants a new elementary school and middle school for southern Fairfax County. Douglas R. Boulter wants to hire more zoning inspectors. Vellie S. Dietrich Hall calls for more and better-paid police. Gary H. Baise promises roads, an expanded auditor’s office and the newly created post of county ethics officer.

And they all pledge to lower property taxes.

Meet the Republicans running for the Board of Supervisors on Nov. 6.

In Virginia, as in Congress, voters get a choice between tax-and-spend Democrats and borrow-and-spend Republicans. As I’ve argued before, there’s a bit of fat in the Fairfax County budget. It’s too bad that voters aren’t offered any candidates who would trim it.

Move over, Arnold Schwarzenegger. America has a new political star.

Bobby Jindal, the 36-year-old son of Indian immigrants, was elected governor of Louisiana on Saturday. He’s the first non-white governor of a Deep South state, and one of very few non-whites to achieve political success in a majority-white constituency.

Talk about assimilation—Jindal is so American that when he was four years old he told his parents he wanted to be called Bobby, like the youngest of “The Brady Bunch,” rather than his given name of Piyush.

Although he’s a conservative Catholic who lives far from the bright lights of Hollywood, Jindal has a lot in common with Schwarzenegger. Both reflect America’s historic promise as the land of opportunity. Arnold’s election four years ago was improbable enough to impress even the French: “American democracy has tremendous resilience,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister. “Someone who’s a foreigner in his country, who has an unpronounceable name and can become governor of the biggest American state — that’s not nothing.”

Around the world, especially in Asia, people may be even more impressed with the slight young Jindal, a whiz kid Rhodes Scholar who became Louisiana’s state health secretary at 24, head of the University of Louisiana system at 27, and assistant secretary for health care in the Bush administration at 29. When he first ran for governor, no one thought a dark-skinned 32-year-old with no electoral experience could be elected. But he led the first round handily and then narrowly lost to lieutenant governor Kathleen Blanco in the runoff. After he got elected to Congress and Blanco botched the Katrina disaster, she chose not to run for reelection and Jindal waltzed to a 54 percent victory against 11 opponents in an open primary. With more than 50 percent, he avoids a runoff and is governor-elect.

Jindal’s future could be even more promising than Schwarzenegger’s. His mother was pregnant when his parents arrived in Baton Rouge from India, so he’s a natural-born citizen and eligible to run for president–if he can achieve success as governor of what is arguably the nation’s poorest and most corrupt state, which is still suffering badly from the hurricane. But watch for him to be featured by the Republican Party as a symbol of America and of the GOP’s welcoming approach to minorities.

Schwarzenegger and Jindal both campaigned as fiscal conservatives, but they part company on social issues. Jindal, a convert to Catholicism, ran radio ads attacking abortion, gay marriage, and Hollywood and supported the teaching of “intelligent design.” The pro-choice Schwarzenegger vetoed a gay marriage bill but has supported domestic partnerships.

In American politics, immigration is usually discussed as an issue for Hispanic voters, the largest group of recent immigrants. Republicans will hope that the combination of the Terminator and an Indian-American Republican governor in the Deep South can counter the party’s increasingly tough line on immigration and shake up immigrant voting patterns. Jindal and Schwarzenegger may play some role in improving the image of the Republican Party in America, and the image of America—land of freedom and opportunity—in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world.

The Washington Post reports:

President Vladimir Putin, Kremlin political consultants and state-controlled news media have found an American to admire: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR, according to a consistent story line here, tamed power-hungry tycoons to save his country from the Great Depression. He restored his people’s spirits while leading the United States for 12 years and spearheaded the struggle against “outside enemies,” as the mass-circulation tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda put it….

And Roosevelt ran for a third and fourth term because his country needed him. Translation: Putin, too, should stay.

Putin used the Roosevelt analogy Thursday when he spoke to reporters after a televised question-and-answer session with citizens….

In a glowing 90-minute documentary on FDR that aired Sunday on RTR, a state TV channel usually given to growling at Washington, a narrator said that America’s 32nd president “came to the conclusion that he was the only person in the country who could lead America in the right direction through the most difficult period in the country’s history.”

(more…)

Despite bans on smoking and trans-fats, we're not necessarily less free.

In the Washington Post, Anita Allen of the University of Pennsylvania reviews Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children by David Harsanyi. She makes a point that I've thought a lot about in discussions of our growing "nanny state":

But Americans were never as free as Harsanyi imagines... . It is true that in 1960 US automobile drivers did not have to wear seat belts. But overreaching rules of other sorts reigned supreme. Under "blue laws," most retail stores and virtually all liquor stores were closed on Sundays, presumably so everyone could stay sober and go to church. More profoundly, in 1960 married couples could not legally obtain birth control in Connecticut, mixed-race couples could not marry in Virginia, black kids in Georgia attended underfunded segregated public schools and homosexual sex was against the law.

No free-marketer, Allen leaves out a few other attributes of 1960, like 90% income tax rates and rigid regulation of transportation, communications and finance.

Open the newspaper on any random page, and you can find evidence of the growing tendency to meddle in our lives: seat-belt laws, smoking bans, trans-fat bans, potty parity and on and on. But are those things worse than the older laws that Allen cites? And if you go back further than she did, you can find worse indignities: established churches, slavery, married women denied property rights. So while we should deplore the deprivations of freedom that Harsanyi explores, we should not necessarily conclude that we're progressively less free.

Allen also complains that

Readers have to wait until the final pages of this book to learn exactly why Harsanyi thinks the nanny state is a bad thing. The nanny state creates a moral hazard, he claims. "People act more recklessly when (purported) risk is removed." Plus, "the rigidity of nanny regulations does not allow consumers to practice common sense and protect themselves."

That's a good consequentialist reason to oppose the nanny state, but it's not the best reason. The real reason that we should be free to make our own decisions about seat belts, smoking and fatty foods is that we're adults; that we're endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to be free is to have moral autonomy and personal responsibility.

Still, any author should be thrilled to have the Washington Post recommend that we "read Harsanyi as a 21st-century John Stuart Mill."

The New York Times reports:

Death rates from cancer have been dropping by an average of 2.1 percent a year recently in the United States, a near doubling of decreases that began in 1993, researchers are reporting.

“Every 1 percent is 5,000 people who aren’t dying,” said Dr. Richard L. Schilsky, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. “That’s a huge sense of progress at this point.”

I’ve complained in the past that good news like this gets buried or ignored, while even minor bits of bad news make the front pages. In this case the good news was bannered on the front page of USA Today and was the lead story on the CBS Radio News. (It was on page A18 of the Times, but teased on page 1.)

The Times did manage to find the cloud in the silver lining: As is universally the case in all human affairs, the decline is not uniform across all demographic groups. In particular, groups who still have high rates of smoking are not seeing cancer declines as large as other groups. But the news still fits the message of Indur Goklany’s book, The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet

At the Guardian’s “Comment is free” site, skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has some tart words for the Nobel committee:

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize justly rewards the thousands of scientists of the United Nations Climate Change Panel (the IPCC). These scientists are engaged in excellent, painstaking work that establishes exactly what the world should expect from climate change.

The other award winner, former US vice president Al Gore, has spent much more time telling us what to fear. While the IPCC’s estimates and conclusions are grounded in careful study, Gore doesn’t seem to be similarly restrained.

Gore told the world in his Academy Award-winning movie (recently labelled “one-sided” and containing “scientific errors” by a British judge) to expect 20-foot sea-level rises over this century. But his Nobel co-winners, the IPCC, conclude that sea levels will rise between only a half-foot and two feet over this century, with their best expectation being about one foot - similar to what the world experienced over the past 150 years. …

The IPCC engages in meticulous research where facts rule over everything else. Gore has a very different approach.

In the Washington Post today, Anita L. Allen of the University of Pennsylvania reviews Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children by David Harsanyi. She makes a point that I’ve thought a lot about in discussions of our growing “nanny state”:

But Americans were never as free as Harsanyi imagines….

It is true that in 1960 U.S. automobile drivers did not have to wear seat belts. But overreaching rules of other sorts reigned supreme. Under “blue laws,” most retail stores and virtually all liquor stores were closed on Sundays, presumably so everyone could stay sober and go to church. More profoundly, in 1960 married couples could not legally obtain birth control in Connecticut, mixed-race couples could not marry in Virginia, black kids in Georgia attended underfunded segregated public schools and homosexual sex was against the law.

No free-marketer, Allen leaves out a few other attributes of 1960, like 90 percent income tax rates and rigid regulation of transportation, communications, and finance.

Open the newspaper on any random page, and you can find evidence of the growing tendency to meddle in our lives: seat-belt laws, smoking bans, trans-fat bans, potty parity, and on and on. But are those things worse than the older laws that Allen cites? And if you go back further than she did, you can find worse indignities: established churches, slavery, married women denied property rights. So while we should deplore the deprivations of freedom that Harsanyi explores, we should not necessarily conclude that we’re progressively less free.

Allen also complains that

Readers have to wait until the final pages of this book to learn exactly why Harsanyi thinks the nanny state is a bad thing. The nanny state creates a moral hazard, he claims. “People act more recklessly when (purported) risk is removed.” Plus, “the rigidity of nanny regulations does not allow consumers to practice common sense and protect themselves.”

That’s a good consequentialist reason to oppose the nanny state, but it’s not the best reason. The real reason that we should be free to make our own decisions about seat belts, smoking, and fatty foods is that we’re adults; that we’re endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to be free is to have moral autonomy and personal responsibility.

Still, any author should be thrilled to have the Washington Post recommend that we “read Harsanyi as a 21st-century John Stuart Mill.”

As the House Foreign Affairs Committee passes a resolution to call the mass killings of Armenians that began in 1915 “genocide,” defying all eight living former secretaries of state, who signed a joint letter saying that such a resolution by Congress would seriously harm U.S. relations with Turkey, I recommend the thoughts of a young Armenian-American writer, Garin Hovannisian:

As the great grandson of genocide survivors, the grandson of genocide historians, and the son of Armenian repatriates — though writing, I’m afraid, without the sanction of the generations — I am insulted by that sticker. That Congress “finds” the genocide to be a fact makes the tragedy no more real than its refusal, so far, has made it unreal. Truth does not need a permission slip from the state.

As an heir, moreover, of an American tradition of limited government, I am annoyed that the legislature is poking into a sphere in which it has neither business nor experience: the province of truth. It is bad enough that a committee of aristocrats governs the conventions of politics, economics and human rights. We the citizens scarcely need to sign over the laws of nature, too, lest gravity be repealed and the whole race goes floating about the universe.