David Boaz

The New York Times reports:

For decades, idealistic twenty-somethings have shunned higher-paying and more permanent jobs for the altruism and adrenaline rush of working to get a candidate to the White House. But the staffers who have signed up for the Clinton campaign face a daunting obstacle: the New York City real estate market….

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign prides itself on living on the cheap and keeping salaries low, which is good for its own bottom line, but difficult for those who need to pay New York City rents….

When the campaign’s finance director, Dennis Cheng, reached out to New York donors [to put up staffers in their apartments], some of them seemed concerned with the prospective maze of campaign finance laws and with how providing upscale housing in New York City might be interpreted.

Here are some words that don’t appear in the article: rent control, regulation, zoning. But those are among the reasons that housing is expensive in New York. As a Manhattan Institute report noted in 2002:

• New York City and State have instituted policies that severely distort the dynamics of housing supply and demand. Only 30 percent of the city’s rental units, for instance, are subject to market prices. These distortions—coupled with Rube-Goldbergian environmental and zoning regulations—have denied New York the kind of healthy housing market enjoyed by most other major cities.

And a report by Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko for the Federal Reserve Board of New York Economic Policy Review suggests that “homes are expensive in high-cost areas primarily because of government regulation” that imposes “artificial limits on construction.”

As I’ve said in other contexts: This is the business you have chosen. If you want the government to control rents and impose regulatory costs on the building of housing, then you can expect to see less housing and thus more expensive housing. Welcome to your world, Hillary Clinton staffers.

Yevgeny Primakov, a Soviet apparatchik who made a very successful transition to the post-Soviet era in Russian politics, has died at 85. He served as speaker of the Supreme Soviet, head of the Russian intelligence service, foreign minister, and prime minister. As Andrew Kramer of the New York Times writes, “With hooded eyes and a gravelly voice, Mr. Primakov struck an image of the archetypal Soviet diplomat and intelligence operative.”

I was in Primakov’s presence once, and that’s the way I remember him. In 1990 Cato held a weeklong conference in Moscow titled “Transition to Freedom: The New Soviet Challenge.” The largest gathering of classical-liberal thinkers ever to take place in the Soviet Union, the event included Nobel laureate James Buchanan, Charles Murray, and numerous Russian scholars and members of parliament. “When Cato’s president Edward H. Crane reminded the large audience that ‘the government that governs least governs best’ … hundreds of Russians clapped and cheered wildly,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Only a handful of die-hard Communists sat glum-faced, arms folded.” As shown in the photo above, Crane presented a bust of F. A. Hayek to Primakov, then the chairman of the Council of the Union of the Supreme Soviet, as more than 1,000 Soviet citizens attended their first open forum.

Fourteen years later, at another Cato conference in Moscow, Crane reminisced about his encounter:

And it’s been pointed out on numerous occasions at this conference that for civil society to thrive, the institutions of the rule of law, constitutionally limited government, a strict respect for private property and the sanctity of contract, as well as a free and open private sector media are essential. Indeed, there are no great secrets to achieving economic prosperity and a free society, a thriving civil society.

When I was in Moscow for Cato’s 1990 conference, I made that point when I had the privilege of presenting a bust of the great economist and social philosopher F.A. Hayek to Yevgeny Primakov, then chairman of the Council of the Union of the Supreme Soviet. I concluded my remarks by saying, “It is, therefore, particularly appropriate, here in this lavish hotel built exclusively for the Communist Party Central Committee, to acknowledge through the presentation of this bust that Hayek was right and Marx was wrong.”

“It is the Cato Institute’s sincere hope that this bust of F.A. Hayek will rest in a prominent place in the Kremlin where it will remind Mr. Gorbachev and other leaders of the Soviet Union that there are answers, readily at hand, to the problems that beset the USSR.”

Mr. Primakov was gracious in accepting the award, under the circumstances, and said that when he next visited the United States he would present me with a bust of Lenin and that I put it where ever I wanted. I think I know what he had in mind.  

Justice Anthony Kennedy has been called the most libertarian member of the Supreme Court (though Ilya Shapiro finds his libertarianism “faint-hearted”). So maybe it’s no surprise that in the Lawrence (2003), Windsor (2013), and Obergefell (today!) cases, Kennedy wrote a majority decision finding that gay people had rights to liberty and equal protection of the law.

As I note in The Libertarian Mind and in an article just posted at the venerable gay magazine The Advocate, libertarians and their classical liberal forebears have been ahead of the curve on gay rights for more than two centuries: 

As the Supreme Court prepares for a possibly historic ruling, most of the country now supports gay marriage. Libertarians were there first. Indeed John Podesta, a top adviser to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, noted in 2011 that you probably had to have been a libertarian to have supported gay marriage 15 years earlier.

Just seven years ago, in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton all opposed gay marriage. The Libertarian Party endorsed gay rights with its first platform in 1972 — the same year the Democratic nominee for vice president referred to “queers” in a Chicago speech. In 1976 the Libertarian Party issued a pamphlet calling for an end to antigay laws and endorsing full marriage rights.

That’s no surprise, of course. Libertarians believe in individual rights for all people and equality before the law. Of course they recognized the rights of gay people before socialists, conservatives, or big-government liberals.

In the article, and more so in the book, I talked about some of the history of classical liberal-libertarian thinking on gay rights in earlier centuries, perhaps beginning with the pioneering criminologist and reformer Cesare Beccaria in 1764.

The Declaration of Independence promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to Americans. Of course, not everybody enjoyed those rights at first. But eventually those ideas took root and led to the abolition of slavery and later to civil rights and women’s rights. It took even longer for people to take seriously the idea of homosexual activity as a matter of personal freedom and to recognize gays and lesbians as a group deserving of rights.

It was the classical liberals, the ancestors of libertarians, who first came to that recognition. From Montesquieu and Adam Smith in the 18th century to the Nobel Prize–winning economist F.A. Hayek in 1960, it was libertarians who insisted that (in Hayek’s words) “private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state whose object is to minimize coercion.”

More in The Libertarian Mind and at the Advocate.

As the Supreme Court prepares for a possibly historic ruling, most of the country now supports gay marriage. Libertarians were there first. Indeed John Podesta, a top adviser to Bill Clinton,  Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, noted in 2011 that you probably had to have been a libertarian to have supported gay marriage 15 years earlier.

Just seven years ago, in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton all opposed gay marriage. The Libertarian Party endorsed gay rights with its first platform in 1972 — the same year the Democratic nominee for vice president referred to “queers” in a Chicago speech. In 1976 the Libertarian Party issued a pamphlet calling for an end to antigay laws and endorsing full marriage rights.

That’s no surprise, of course. Libertarians believe in individual rights for all people and equality before the law. Of course they recognized the rights of gay people before socialists, conservatives, or big-government liberals.

“As long as marriage is licensed by government, same-sex couples are entitled to equal legal rights.”

The Declaration of Independence promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to Americans. Of course, not everybody enjoyed those rights at first. But eventually those ideas took root and led the abolition of slavery and later to civil rights and women’s rights. It took even longer for people to take seriously the idea of homosexual activity as a matter of personal freedom and to recognize gays and lesbians as a group deserving of rights.

It was the classical liberals, the ancestors of libertarians, who first came to that recognition. From Montesquieu and Adam Smith in the 18th century to the Nobel Prize–winning economist F.A. Hayek in 1960, it was libertarians who insisted that (in Hayek’s words) “private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state whose object is to minimize coercion.”

Historians have often noted the general danger to minorities of a powerful and expansive government. In his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, the Yale historian John Boswell wrote that “gay people were actually safer under the [Roman] Republic, before the state had the authority or means to control aspects of the citizenry’s personal lives. Any government with the power, desire, and means to control such individual matters as religious belief may also regulate sexuality, and since gay people appear to be always a minority, the chance that their interests will carry great weight is relatively slight.” In Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman noted that a growing commitment to freedom in 18th-century America brought about “an overall decline in state regulation of morality and a shift in concerns from private to public moral transgressions.”

Despite the broad influence of liberalism in the world, governments have continued to meddle in sexuality. As recently as the 1960s, homosexual relations were illegal in almost all states, and 13 states still had such laws on the books until the Supreme Court struck them down in 2003. When these laws were vigorously enforced, they drove gay people underground and created much misery. Gays and lesbians could not be open about their lives. If they were, they risked being fired, being thrown out of their homes, and even being beaten or killed. Once gay people stood up for their rights, social attitudes began to change and governments backed away from enforcing the laws. However, until the court ruling, sodomy laws were still used, for instance, to deny gay parents custody of their children.

Today, Libertarians believe, as John Stuart Mill famously wrote, that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” That applies to gay people and to everyone else. Thus Libertarians continue to oppose laws criminalizing any consensual sexual activity among adults, in the United States and elsewhere.

Many Libertarians argue for the complete privatization of marriage, making marriage a matter of individual contract and — for those who want it — a religious ceremony, thus removing any need for state recognition of marriages. As long as marriage is licensed by government, however, same-sex couples are entitled to equal legal rights. The same rule applies to other government programs, from tax laws to Social Security to adoption. Libertarians would like to get government out of most areas, but as long as government is involved, it must treat citizens equally. The Supreme Court may be about to agree.

In 2010 I blogged about which states have the strongest libertarian constituencies, using some data from political scientist Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project, and also 1980 Libertarian Party results from Bill Westmiller. That column can be found here, complete with graphics.

Now Sorens has updated his results with 2012 data added to 2004 and 2008. As he notes, the results are fairly similar. You still find the most libertarians in the rugged individualist states of the mountain West plus New Hampshire. The mountain states were also best for Ed Clark, the Libertarian nominee back in 1980. As I noted previously, New Hampshire was in the bottom 10 for Clark, but near the top in Sorens’s ranking in 2010 and a bit higher this time. I’m not really sure what caused the change. 

Sorens notes that “Vermont, Maine, Kentucky, and Texas have gained, while Michigan, Idaho, Indiana, and Georgia have fallen” in the later calculations. I pointed out previously that Kentucky, my home state, was dead last for the Libertarian candidate in 1980. And it didn’t do very well in Sorens’s 2010 ranking either. Since June 2010, of course, Kentucky has elected the most libertarian member of the Senate, Rand Paul, and one of the most libertarian House members, Thomas Massie. So it’s about time the state’s voters started moving up the libertarian rankings, albeit only slightly. 

Here’s Sorens’s latest ranking:

state libertarians
Montana 5.504036
New Hampshire 4.163368
Alaska 3.586032
New Mexico 3.319092
Idaho 2.842685
Nevada 2.477748
Texas 1.632528
Washington 1.568113
Oregon 1.180586
Arizona 1.0411
North Dakota 0.7316829
Indiana 0.6056806
California 0.5187439
Vermont 0.4731389
Utah 0.2056809
Colorado 0.1532149
Kansas 0.107657
South Dakota 0.0328709
Maine -0.0850015
Pennsylvania -0.2063729
Iowa -0.3226413
Georgia -0.3296589
Virginia -0.3893113
Maryland -0.4288172
Rhode Island -0.470931
Tennessee -0.4882021
Missouri -0.4912609
Arkansas -0.5384682
Louisiana -0.5897537
Nebraska -0.6350928
Minnesota -0.7662109
Michigan -0.7671053
North Carolina -0.811959
South Carolina -0.8196676
Illinois -0.9103957
Ohio -0.9599612
Delaware -1.057948
Florida -1.072601
District of Columbia -1.091851
New York -1.225912
Kentucky -1.330388
Massachusetts -1.342607
Wisconsin -1.410286
New Jersey -1.431843
Connecticut -1.606663
Alabama -1.863769
Oklahoma -1.93511
West Virginia -2.244921
Mississippi -2.519249

Lots of technical background can be found at Sorens’s post on the Pileus blog. More on the broader libertarian vote here and especially in this ebook.

Two hundred years ago today, on June 18, 1815, the forces of the self-proclaimed Emperor Napoleon were defeated near Waterloo by a multinational European army. The battle ended years of war in Europe and allowed the rising tide of liberalism to produce a century of relative peace and unprecedented economic and technological progress. As I wrote in The Libertarian Mind (do you have your copy?)

In both the United States and Europe, the century after the American Revolution was marked by the spread of liberalism. Written constitutions and bills of rights protected liberty and guaranteed the rule of law. Guilds and monopolies were largely eliminated, with all trades thrown open to competition on the basis of merit. Freedom of the press and of religion was greatly expanded, property rights were made more secure, international trade was freed….

After the turmoil of the French Revolution and the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and with the exception of the Crimean War and the wars of national unification, most of the people of Europe enjoyed a century of relative peace and progress….

This liberation of human creativity unleashed astounding scientific and material progress. The Nation magazine, which was then a truly liberal journal, looking back in 1900, wrote, “Freed from the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their natural task, the bettering of their condition, with the wonderful results which surround us.” The technological advances of the liberal nineteenth century are innumerable: the steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, electricity, the internal combustion engine. Thanks to the accumulation of capital and “the miracle of compound interest,” in Europe and America the great masses of people began to be liberated from the backbreaking toil that had been the natural condition of mankind since time immemorial. Infant mortality fell and life expectancy began to rise to unprecedented levels. A person looking back from 1800 would see a world that for most people had changed little in thousands of years; by 1900, the world was unrecognizable….

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, classical liberalism began to give way to new forms of collectivism and state power….

By the turn of the century the remaining liberals despaired of the future. The Nation editorialized that “material comfort has blinded the eyes of the present generation to the cause which made it possible” and worried that “before [statism] is again repudiated there must be international struggles on a terrific scale.” Herbert Spencer published The Coming Slavery and mourned at his death in 1903 that the world was returning to war and barbarism.

Indeed, as the liberals had feared, the century of European peace that began in 1815 came crashing down in 1914, with the First World War. The replacement of liberalism by statism and nationalism was in large part to blame, and the war itself may have delivered the death blow to liberalism. In the United States and Europe, governments enlarged their scope and power in response to the war. Exorbitant taxation, conscription, censorship, nationalization, and central planning—not to mention the 10 million deaths at Flanders fields and Verdun and elsewhere—signaled that the era of liberalism, which had so recently supplanted the old order, was now itself supplanted by the era of the megastate.

More on libertarian history in The Libertarian Mind. More on the peaceful 19th century from Jim Powell.

Guy Benson, the political editor at the conservative website Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor, had a new book out last week with Mary Katharine Ham: End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun). In a footnote in the book, added at the last minute, Benson reveals for the first time that he’s gay.

The reaction to the revelation, leaked a month early, was interesting. Some gay websites reacted angrily, as with Queerty’s ”the fact that Republicans have been running for decades on homophobia makes us inclined to sweep Benson and his anti-gay apologizing rhetoric out with the rest of the garbage.” And the commenters, as usual, were worse.

On the right, the American Family Association demanded that Benson be fired and barred from conservative conferences. But other conservatives barely seemed to notice. Benson reported that he got positive messages from Karl Rove and Sean Hannity, along with a softball interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox. He and Ham are speaking at the College Republican National Convention, the Reagan Library, the Western Conservative Summit and the Illinois Policy Institute.

“That sound you don’t hear right now, of major Republican candidates making gay marriage a key issue in their campaigns? That’s the sound of social change happening.”

Conservatives clearly aren’t ready to join Benson and Ham in supporting gay marriage. But they don’t seem to be bothered to discover that an articulate young conservative is both gay and a supporter of marriage equality.

And this isn’t the only example of conservatives losing interest in cultural war. Robert Costa and Philip Rucker report in the Washington Post that while conservative talkers like Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh are denouncing Bruce Jenner’s declaration that he is now a woman named Caitlyn – Limbaugh called Jenner a “freak show” — Mike Huckabee was the only Republican presidential candidate to make a critical comment.

Karl Rove wrote this month in the Wall Street Journal that Republicans must find a way to talk about social issues without alienating the growing number of social moderates and liberals in the electorate, noting that support for same-sex marriage has risen from 40% in 2009 to 60% today.

Republicans were already taking that advice, mostly by trying to avoid the issue. Even in 2012 Republicans could see the long-term damage that the anti-gay crusade was doing them. Back in 2004 they thought that social issues, especially gay marriage bans, would help them win the presidential election. It wasn’t really true even then: it turns out George W. Bush’s share of the vote rose just slightly less in the marriage-ban states than in the other states: up 2.6% in the states with marriage bans on the ballot, up 2.9% in the other states.

In 2012, even though President Obama and the Democratic platform endorsed marriage equality, Mitt Romney and the Republicans stayed away from the issue. With good reason. The Washington Post reported that October: ”Voters back gay marriage by 21 points in Florida, 15 points in Ohio and nine in Virginia.”

Republican candidates and their advisers know that opposition to same-sex marriage remains strong in their base, but that more than two-thirds of young voters support it. Campaigning against gay marriage is a good way to make the Democratic advantage among young people permanent.

Sometimes social change happens when people announce a change of heart. Sometimes you know it’s happening when one side tries to change the subject. That sound you don’t hear right now, of major Republican candidates making gay marriage a key issue in their campaigns? That’s the sound of social change happening.