David Boaz

I’m delighted to learn from Eric Boehm at Reason that a $35 million stadium subsidy is “pretty close to dead” after Potomac Nationals owner Art Silber pulled the matter from the Prince William Board of County Supervisors consideration ahead of a planned vote July 18. However, taxpayers in other Northern Virginia counties may still be at risk, as the Nationals search for a less fiscally responsible county board nearby. 

I wrote about the Nationals’ attempt to milk the taxpayers last month:

The county found a consulting firm to produce, as it has done for many governments, an optimistic economic analysis: It suggests that a new stadium would generate 288 jobs, $175 million in economic impact, and $4.9 million in tax revenue over a 30-year lease. Similar studies have proven wildly optimistic in the past. In 2008 the Washington Post reported that Washington Nationals attendance had fallen far short of what a 2005 study predicted. As Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys wrote in a 2004 Cato study criticizing the proposed Nationals stadium subsidy, “The wonder is that anyone finds such figures credible.”…

Silber and the board of supervisors want the taxpayers to know that this time is different; their $35 million bond issue isn’t a government giveaway:

In Prince William, the board of supervisors is considering a proposal in which it would use bond money to build the stadium. The team would then reimburse the county the entire cost over the course of a 30-year lease.

“We’ve all read about certain professional sports teams threatening to leave if a local government doesn’t buy them a new stadium. The exact opposite is happening here,” said Tom Sebastian, a senior vice president with JBG. “The Potomac Nationals have agreed to pay 100 percent of the cost to construct a new stadium so that they can stay in Prince William County.”

I will gladly pay you Tuesday, 30 years from now, for a hamburger today.

Congratulations to Americans for Prosperity, Supervisor Pete Candland and his colleagues, and especially to the taxpayers of Prince William County. 

A couple of news stories about Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.):

In a historic act of protest, Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives refused to observe the regular order of the House, staging a sit-in protest over the lack of legislation on gun control….

In sharp comments pointed directly at House Republicans, Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Cedric Richmond (D-La.) directed blame at the National Rifle Association and the cowardice of GOP members….

“You are doing what you are doing because you don’t have the guts to stand up to the gun lobby,” said Richmond in a speech at the start of the House-floor sit-in, with comments addressing what he viewed as GOP obstruction.

“If you shoot a police officer, you’re going to make the 5, 6 and 10 o’clock news. But if you shoot a congressperson you’re going to make the world news,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.)….

Some lawmakers are carrying firearms or installing security systems at their homes and offices. Some have decided not to hold town hall meetings at all — restricting voters from meeting their elected leaders. Some are demanding that the government pay for a security detail for every member of Congress….

It’s another reason to continue protecting themselves, several said.

“I definitely know where my firearm is at all times,” Richmond said.

So I’m curious: Does Rep. Richmond have a firearm in the District of Columbia? Does he have a valid permit for it, which is extremely difficult to get despite the Supreme Court’s Heller decision? Does he support the proposal by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) to give members of Congress a special exemption from the strict D.C. rules? Does he believe that members of Congress should obey the same laws that apply to everyone else?

Broadway Journal reports that theater professionals are very concerned about the Trump administration’s no-doubt-idle threats to defund the National Endowment for the Arts:

“It’s important money for us,” said Jeffory Lawson, the managing director of the Chelsea-based Atlantic Theater Co. As with any lost funding, replacing those grants would be challenging, he said. And beyond dollars, the NEA confers a stamp of approval for a project, which is appealing to other donors. It’s “a highly competitive grant application,” he said, that’s reviewed and rated largely by theater professionals. “It’s not just a bureaucrat making a decision.” (The NEA claims that $9 in private donations follow every $1 it grants.)

I don’t know why people who prize their independence, and are very proud these days to be defying the government in their plays and public comments, are so eager for a “stamp of approval” from that very government. In fact, I’ve written about that problem before, such as in this 1995 speech to the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts:

Government funding of anything involves government control. That insight, of course, is part of our folk wisdom: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” “Who takes the king’s shilling sings the king’s song.”

Defenders of arts funding seem blithely unaware of this danger when they praise the role of the national endowments as an imprimatur or seal of approval on artists and arts groups. Jane Alexander says, “The Federal role is small but very vital. We are a stimulus for leveraging state, local and private money. We are a linchpin for the puzzle of arts funding, a remarkably efficient way of stimulating private money.” Drama critic Robert Brustein asks, “How could the NEA be ‘privatized’ and still retain its purpose as a funding agency functioning as a stamp of approval for deserving art?”

In 1981, as conservative factions battled for control of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice explained the consequences this way:

The NEH has a ripple effect on university hiring and tenure, and on the kinds of research undertaken by scholars seeking support. Its chairman shapes the bounds of that support. In a broad sense, he sets standards that affect the tenor of textbooks and the content of curricula….Though no chairman of the NEH can single-handedly direct the course of American education, he can nurture the nascent trends and take advantage of informal opportunities to signal department heads and deans. He can “persuade” with the cudgel of federal funding out of sight but hardly out of mind.

I suggest that that is just the kind of power no government in a free society should have….

On NPR this morning, an activist complained …  saying, “My ancestors didn’t fight for the concept of official history in official museums.” But when you have official museums, or a National Endowment for the Arts serving as a “seal of approval” for artists, you get official history and official art—and citizens will fight over just which history and which art should have that imprimatur.

“Stamp of approval,” “ripple effect,” “ ‘persuade’ with the cudgel of federal funding”—all of this is asking the federal government to pick winners, not just in automobile or energy companies, but in art and literature. Is that really a model for independent artists?

Broadway Journal reports that theater professionals are very concerned about the Trump administration’s no-doubt-idle threats to defund the National Endowment for the Arts:

“It’s important money for us,” said Jeffory Lawson, the managing director of the Chelsea-based Atlantic Theater Co. As with any lost funding, replacing those grants would be challenging, he said. And beyond dollars, the NEA confers a stamp of approval for a project, which is appealing to other donors. It’s “a highly competitive grant application,” he said, that’s reviewed and rated largely by theater professionals. “It’s not just a bureaucrat making a decision.” (The NEA claims that $9 in private donations follow every $1 it grants.)

I don’t know why people who prize their independence, and are very proud these days to be defying the government in their plays and public comments, are so eager for a “stamp of approval” from that very government. In fact, I’ve written about that problem before, such as in this 1995 speech to the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts:

Government funding of anything involves government control. That insight, of course, is part of our folk wisdom: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” “Who takes the king’s shilling sings the king’s song.”

Defenders of arts funding seem blithely unaware of this danger when they praise the role of the national endowments as an imprimatur or seal of approval on artists and arts groups. Jane Alexander says, “The Federal role is small but very vital. We are a stimulus for leveraging state, local and private money. We are a linchpin for the puzzle of arts funding, a remarkably efficient way of stimulating private money.” Drama critic Robert Brustein asks, “How could the NEA be ‘privatized’ and still retain its purpose as a funding agency functioning as a stamp of approval for deserving art?”

In 1981, as conservative factions battled for control of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice explained the consequences this way:

The NEH has a ripple effect on university hiring and tenure, and on the kinds of research undertaken by scholars seeking support. Its chairman shapes the bounds of that support. In a broad sense, he sets standards that affect the tenor of textbooks and the content of curricula….Though no chairman of the NEH can single-handedly direct the course of American education, he can nurture the nascent trends and take advantage of informal opportunities to signal department heads and deans. He can “persuade” with the cudgel of federal funding out of sight but hardly out of mind.

I suggest that that is just the kind of power no government in a free society should have….

On NPR this morning, an activist complained …  saying, “My ancestors didn’t fight for the concept of official history in official museums.” But when you have official museums, or a National Endowment for the Arts serving as a “seal of approval” for artists, you get official history and official art—and citizens will fight over just which history and which art should have that imprimatur.

“Stamp of approval,” “ripple effect,” “ ‘persuade’ with the cudgel of federal funding”—all of this is asking the federal government to pick winners, not just in automobile or energy companies, but in art and literature. Is that really a model for independent artists?

Everybody’s finding errors in Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s “work of speculative historical fiction” on Nobel laureate James Buchanan and the libertarian movement, Democracy in Chains. I’d feel left out if I weren’t misquoted, so I’m relieved to find my name on page 211. Here’s what MacLean says about me and some of my purported allies:

Now: Did I actually say that the poor and working class are “intent on exploiting the rich”? Or “that they contribute nothing”? Well, here’s what I wrote on pp. 252-53 of The Libertarian Mind, which is the source MacLean footnotes:

Economists call this process rent-seeking, or transfer-seeking. It’s another illustration of Oppenheimer’s distinction between the economic and the political means. Some individuals and businesses produce wealth. They grow food or build things people want to buy or perform useful services. Others find it easier to go to Washington, a state capital, or a city hall and get a subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors. That’s the political means to wealth, and, sadly, it’s been growing faster than the economic means.

Of course, in the modern world of trillion-dollar governments handing out favors like Santa Claus, it becomes harder to distinguish between the producers and the transfer-seekers, the predators and the prey. The state tries to confuse us, like the three-card monte dealer, by taking our money as quietly as possible and then handing some of it back to us with great ceremony. We all end up railing against taxes but then demanding our Medicare, our subsidized mass transit, our farm programs, our free national parks, and on and on and on. Frederic Bastiat explained it in the nineteenth century: “The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” In the aggregate, we all lose, but it’s hard to know who is a net loser and who is a net winner in the immediate circumstance.

On the preceding pages I introduced James Buchanan and the concept of public choice:

One of the key concepts of Public Choice is concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. That means that the benefits of any government program are concentrated on a few people, while the costs are diffused among many people. Take ADM’s ethanol subsidy, for instance. If ADM makes $200 million a year from it, it costs each American about a dollar. Did you know about it? Probably not. Now that you do, are you going to write your congressman and complain? Probably not. Are you going to fly to Washington, take your senator out to dinner, give him a thousand-dollar contribution, and ask him not to vote for the ethanol subsidy? Of course not. But you can bet that ADM’s corporate officers are doing all that and more. Think about it: How much would you spend to get a $200 million subsidy from the federal government? About $199 million if you had to, I’ll bet. So who will members of Congress listen to? The average Americans who don’t know that they’re paying a dollar each for ADM’s profits? Or ADM, which is making a list and checking it twice to see who’s voting for their subsidy?

I also wrote on page 253 about the “parasite economy,” in which

every group in society comes up with a way for the government to help it or penalize its competitors: businesses seek tariffs, unions call for minimum-wage laws (which make high-priced skilled workers more economical than cheaper, low-skilled workers), postal workers get Congress to outlaw private competition, businesses seek subtle twists in regulations that hurt their competitors more than themselves. 

Let’s be clear: when public choice economists and I talk about “rent seeking” and “concentrated benefits,” and we point to “subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors,” we’re not trying to protect the rich. We’re talking about ways that businesses, unions, and other organized interest groups seek to use government to gain advantages that they couldn’t gain in the marketplace. And when we suggest limiting the power of government to hand out such favors, we are arguing in the interests of workers and consumers.

I do not believe that MacLean’s two very short quotations from The Libertarian Mind and the paragraphs in which she situates them fairly depict my argument in the book. One might even say that she reversed the meaning of “the predators and the prey.” Unfortunately, selective quotation and misrepresentation seem to be MacLean’s M.O., as Steve Horwitz, Phil Magness, Russ Roberts, David Henderson, David Bernstein, Bernstein again, Nick Gillespie, Michael Munger, and others have pointed out.

By the way, Professor MacLean derides me as a writer “subsidized by wealthy donors.” Well, yes, it’s true that the Cato Institute is supported by voluntary contributions, not by tax funding. And donors to organizations – Duke University, NPR, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute – tend to be well-off. But I assure Professor MacLean that I was absorbing the ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, the American Founders, and John Stuart Mill long before I discovered that there might be jobs available to write about such ideas.

Although James Buchanan was not involved in the founding of the Cato Institute, as MacLean writes, we are proud that he chose to write frequently for the Cato Journal, speak at various Cato events, and allow us to count him as a Distinguished Senior Fellow. And we regret that he has been so ill treated by a fellow academic.