David Boaz

Back in 1993, in the pre-internet days, I reviewed the 16th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for Liberty magazine. I've just gotten around to tracking down that article and getting it posted. One of my complaints then was that

The dozen years since the fifteenth edition have been marked by a worldwide turn toward markets, from Reagan and Thatcher to the New Zealand Labor Party's free-market reforms to the fall of Soviet communism.  This historical trend seems to have escaped editor [Justin] Kaplan, of Cambridge, Mass., who has given us more quotations from Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Robert Heilbroner, while virtually eliminating F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, the intellectual gurus of the free-market revolution.  A bust of Hayek now sits in the Kremlin, but Cambridge is holding out against the tide. . . . 

One might assume that these curiosities don't represent any conscious bias on Kaplan's part, just a blindness to the political and economic changes going on in the world.  Dictionaries of quotations are perforce behind the times; they represent the distilled wisdom, or at least memorabilia, of centuries.  As market liberalism sweeps the world in the 21st century, its architects will get their due.  Still, it's disappointing to see a 1992 edition offering fewer selections from thinkers such as Friedman and Hayek.

As I went over the old article, I decided to check my prediction. Results were mixed. Reagan now gets 10 citations instead of 3, including at least two of the three quotations I suggested. And instead of my "ant heap of totalitarianism" from his 1964 speech, they used "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history" from 1982. Thatcher is up from 3 to 4. Barry Goldwater has now been included, with three of his best-known lines:

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." [as I recommended]

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . .  moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

"You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."

But John F. Kennedy leads recent presidents with 26 citations, down from 28. Bill and Hillary Clinton have appeared, with 12 quotations between them, few of them the sorts of lines they dreamed of being remembered for. Sadly, they omitted both "basket of deplorables" and "open borders." Barack Obama has 12 all by himself, most of them long paragraphs unlike the great majority of pithy lines in the book. One wonders if the editors felt they needed to include him, even though he didn't actually say anything memorable, and his most memorable line was probably the unfortunate "cling to guns and religion." No Trump yet--maybe in the next edition.

Hayek is still at 2, Friedman still at 3. Ludwig von Mises is up from 2 to 4, Ayn Rand from 3 to 5. William F. Buckley, Jr., omitted in the 16th edition, is now represented with possibly his two most famous quotations. And yet, as Marxism is left behind in, well, "the ash heap of history," Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) is up from 18 to 20. 

Among the youngest contributors in the book are J. K. Rowling, Sarah Palin, Todd Beamer of "Let's roll," and the very last chronological entry, Justin Timberlake. 

It does seem, though, that Cambridge/Boston, the home of the publisher, and Manhattan, the home of the new editor, are still holding out against those ideas that changed the world in the 1980s and beyond.

Back in 1993, in the pre-internet days, I reviewed the 16th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations for Liberty magazine. I’ve just gotten around to tracking down that article and getting it posted. One of my complaints then was that

The dozen years since the fifteenth edition have been marked by a worldwide turn toward markets, from Reagan and Thatcher to the New Zealand Labor Party’s free-market reforms to the fall of Soviet communism.  This historical trend seems to have escaped editor [Justin] Kaplan, of Cambridge, Mass., who has given us more quotations from Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Robert Heilbroner, while virtually eliminating F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, the intellectual gurus of the free-market revolution.  A bust of Hayek now sits in the Kremlin, but Cambridge is holding out against the tide… . 

One might assume that these curiosities don’t represent any conscious bias on Kaplan’s part, just a blindness to the political and economic changes going on in the world.  Dictionaries of quotations are perforce behind the times; they represent the distilled wisdom, or at least memorabilia, of centuries.  As market liberalism sweeps the world in the 21st century, its architects will get their due.  Still, it’s disappointing to see a 1992 edition offering fewer selections from thinkers such as Friedman and Hayek.

As I went over the old article, I decided to check my prediction. Results were mixed. Reagan now gets 10 citations instead of 3, including at least two of the three quotations I suggested. And instead of my “ant heap of totalitarianism” from his 1964 speech, they used “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history” from 1982. Thatcher is up from 3 to 4. Barry Goldwater has now been included, with three of his best-known lines:

“A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.” [as I recommended]

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And …  moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

“You don’t need to be ‘straight’ to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”

But John F. Kennedy leads recent presidents with 26 citations, down from 28. Bill and Hillary Clinton have appeared, with 12 quotations between them, few of them the sorts of lines they dreamed of being remembered for. Sadly, they omitted both “basket of deplorables” and “open borders.” Barack Obama has 12 all by himself, most of them long paragraphs unlike the great majority of pithy lines in the book. One wonders if the editors felt they needed to include him, even though he didn’t actually say anything memorable, and his most memorable line was probably the unfortunate “cling to guns and religion.” No Trump yet–maybe in the next edition.

Hayek is still at 2, Friedman still at 3. Ludwig von Mises is up from 2 to 4, Ayn Rand from 3 to 5. William F. Buckley, Jr., omitted in the 16th edition, is now represented with possibly his two most famous quotations. And yet, as Marxism is left behind in, well, “the ash heap of history,” Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) is up from 18 to 20. 

Among the youngest contributors in the book are J. K. Rowling, Sarah Palin, Todd Beamer of “Let’s roll,” and the very last chronological entry, Justin Timberlake. 

It does seem, though, that Cambridge/Boston, the home of the publisher, and Manhattan, the home of the new editor, are still holding out against those ideas that changed the world in the 1980s and beyond.

Possibly good news on the front page of the Washington Post today. A headline reads:

Trump
aims to cut
spending
after 2020

The article begins:

President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for sweeping budget cuts if he wins a second term in the White House, five people briefed on the discussions said, a move that would dramatically reverse the big-spending approach he adopted during his first 30 months in office....

[But for now] Trump is advocating swiftly lifting the federal debt ceiling, which would allow for more spending and borrowing.

And that's what we've gotten in Trump's first two and a half years, including two years with full Republican control of government. Federal revenue has been rising strongly, about to hit $4 trillion. But spending is rising even faster, so that the deficit is going to hit $1 trillion this year and then stay there. That's why the national debt has kept on growing under a Republican administration, now over $22 trillion.

We've heard this song before -- spend now, raise the debt ceiling now, and then we'll cut spending later. Back in 2012 it was reported that President Obama planned to propose spending cuts in his next budget. But under both George W. Bush and Obama, spending kept on rising (except for a brief hiatus created by the Budget Control Act of 2011, a product of divided government).

That’s why fiscal conservatives have become very skeptical of bills that promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next ten years. As the White Queen said to Alice, “Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years and cuts after the next election—but never cuts today.

Possibly good news on the front page of the Washington Post today. A headline reads:

Trump
aims to cut
spending
after 2020

The article begins:

President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for sweeping budget cuts if he wins a second term in the White House, five people briefed on the discussions said, a move that would dramatically reverse the big-spending approach he adopted during his first 30 months in office....

[But for now] Trump is advocating swiftly lifting the federal debt ceiling, which would allow for more spending and borrowing.

And that's what we've gotten in Trump's first two and a half years, including two years with full Republican control of government. Federal revenue has been rising strongly, about to hit $4 trillion. But spending is rising even faster, so that the deficit is going to hit $1 trillion this year and then stay there. That's why the national debt has kept on growing under a Republican administration, now over $22 trillion.

We've heard this song before -- spend now, raise the debt ceiling now, and then we'll cut spending later. Back in 2012 it was reported that President Obama planned to propose spending cuts in his next budget. But under both George W. Bush and Obama, spending kept on rising (except for a brief hiatus created by the Budget Control Act of 2011, a product of divided government).

That’s why fiscal conservatives have become very skeptical of bills that promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next ten years. As the White Queen said to Alice, “Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years and cuts after the next election—but never cuts today.

 

Writing in the Washington Post, Kate Cohen says, Let the extreme right have the "Betsy Ross flag," and "the left wing can just take back that boring ordinary flag we all use every day." Why would anyone want the Betsy Ross flag, she asks:

I mean, honestly, if you’re into the Betsy Ross flag, I assume it’s because America was great back in 1777, when only white male landowners could vote and slavery was legal in all 13 colonies.

Well, I can't speak for the extreme right. But speaking as an American history major and a lover of America's libertarian roots, that's not how I see it. I think the flag with 13 stars and 13 stripes represents the people who launched the first great national liberation movement to throw off their distant imperial overlords and did so with the argument that all men were created equal, endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. True, that promise was very imperfectly realized, and is still imperfect, but we've made progress in ensuring that all people are equal in the eyes of the law, with their rights guaranteed and protected. And that Declaration served as a guidestar for that progress. As Andy Craig wrote last week on July 4, those words were used by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to challenge the nation to make good on its promissory note. And by the feminists at Seneca Falls to insist that "all men" must include women, too. And he could have added, by the advocates of equal liberty for gay people.

That's not a flag that liberals -- people who believe that the role of government is to protect everyone's rights and freedom -- should give up.

And by the way, people who don't believe that all people are created equal? They shouldn't fly the flag of the American Revolution. There are plenty of flags of monarchic, theocratic, ethnic, fascist, or communist states to choose from.

 

Writing in the Washington Post, Kate Cohen says, Let the extreme right have the "Betsy Ross flag," and "the left wing can just take back that boring ordinary flag we all use every day." Why would anyone want the Betsy Ross flag, she asks:

I mean, honestly, if you’re into the Betsy Ross flag, I assume it’s because America was great back in 1777, when only white male landowners could vote and slavery was legal in all 13 colonies.

Well, I can't speak for the extreme right. But speaking as an American history major and a lover of America's libertarian roots, that's not how I see it. I think the flag with 13 stars and 13 stripes represents the people who launched the first great national liberation movement to throw off their distant imperial overlords and did so with the argument that all men were created equal, endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. True, that promise was very imperfectly realized, and is still imperfect, but we've made progress in ensuring that all people are equal in the eyes of the law, with their rights guaranteed and protected. And that Declaration served as a guidestar for that progress. As Andy Craig wrote last week on July 4, those words were used by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to challenge the nation to make good on its promissory note. And by the feminists at Seneca Falls to insist that "all men" must include women, too. And he could have added, by the advocates of equal liberty for gay people.

That's not a flag that liberals -- people who believe that the role of government is to protect everyone's rights and freedom -- should give up.

And by the way, people who don't believe that all people are created equal? They shouldn't fly the flag of the American Revolution. There are plenty of flags of monarchic, theocratic, ethnic, fascist, or communist states to choose from.

Ross Perot, the billionaire entrepreneur who in 1992 became the most successful independent or third-party presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, has died at 89.

Many people say that Perot, running on an anti-deficit platform, cost President George H. W. Bush reelection. I don't think so. The most impressive political prediction I ever made was around June 1992, when I saw a poll that showed Bill Clinton running third behind Perot and Bush (it was probably the Gallup Poll shown here, with Perot 39, Bush 31, and Clinton 25). I told colleagues then, "This poll shows that Clinton will win, because third-party candidates always fade and the most important number in this poll is that only 31 percent of voters want to reelect the president." Clinton would have won a majority if voters hadn't had a third option.

Perot has some obvious similarities with President Trump -- a businessman with no political experience, who opposed free trade and the recent Gulf War, promised to go to Washington to “take out the trash and clean out the barn," had a predilection for conspiracy theories, and was enough of a celebrity to announce his candidacy on Larry King's popular CNN show. However, his big issue was the $4 trillion national debt -- those were the good old days! -- and the deficits being run up by both parties. And instead of insulting tweets and ranting speeches, Perot's stock in trade was 30-minute television ads full of charts and graphs, backed up by a 50-page economic plan promising cuts in domestic spending and tax hikes on high incomes and gasoline.

Perot was reported to have spent $65 million of his own money on his campaign (the Democratic and Republican candidates got $55 million each in taxpayer money in exchange for pledges by the candidates to limit direct campaign contributions, but they still managed to raise about $60 million each in "soft money"). In one sense, Perot's campaign was a perverse result of federal campaign finance regulations. The Federal Election Campaign Act severely restricted how much money one could contribute to a campaign -- unless you were the candidate. You could spend as much of your own money on your own campaign as you wanted. So the only way that Perot could spend $65 million (he tossed around suggestions of spending $100 million) was to run for president himself. But maybe the country would have been better off if he had been able to donate that money to, say, the well-respected Sen. Warren Rudman of Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act fame. Similarly, maybe it would have made more sense for Steve Forbes to donate $38 million to supply-side evangelist Rep. Jack Kemp in 1996 rather than to run himself. 

Ross Perot did have one positive impact on American politics. He made spending, deficits, and debt a real political issue, and that surely played a role -- along with the booming economy -- in bringing down deficits during the Clinton administration.

Perot also demonstrated that it's extremely difficult to run an even modestly successful presidential campaign outside the two major parties unless you are both a billionaire and a celebrity.

Ross Perot, the billionaire entrepreneur who in 1992 became the most successful independent or third-party presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, has died at 89.

Many people say that Perot, running on an anti-deficit platform, cost President George H. W. Bush reelection. I don’t think so. The most impressive political prediction I ever made was around June 1992, when I saw a poll that showed Bill Clinton running third behind Perot and Bush (it was probably the Gallup Poll shown here, with Perot 39, Bush 31, and Clinton 25). I told colleagues then, “This poll shows that Clinton will win, because third-party candidates always fade and the most important number in this poll is that only 31 percent of voters want to reelect the president.” Clinton would have won a majority if voters hadn’t had a third option.

Perot has some obvious similarities with President Trump – a businessman with no political experience, who opposed free trade and the recent Gulf War, promised to go to Washington to “take out the trash and clean out the barn,” had a predilection for conspiracy theories, and was enough of a celebrity to announce his candidacy on Larry King’s popular CNN show. However, his big issue was the $4 trillion national debt – those were the good old days! – and the deficits being run up by both parties. And instead of insulting tweets and ranting speeches, Perot’s stock in trade was 30-minute television ads full of charts and graphs, backed up by a 50-page economic plan promising cuts in domestic spending and tax hikes on high incomes and gasoline.

Perot was reported to have spent $65 million of his own money on his campaign (the Democratic and Republican candidates got $55 million each in taxpayer money in exchange for pledges by the candidates to limit direct campaign contributions, but they still managed to raise about $60 million each in “soft money”). In one sense, Perot’s campaign was a perverse result of federal campaign finance regulations. The Federal Election Campaign Act severely restricted how much money one could contribute to a campaign – unless you were the candidate. You could spend as much of your own money on your own campaign as you wanted. So the only way that Perot could spend $65 million (he tossed around suggestions of spending $100 million) was to run for president himself. But maybe the country would have been better off if he had been able to donate that money to, say, the well-respected Sen. Warren Rudman of Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act fame. Similarly, maybe it would have made more sense for Steve Forbes to donate $38 million to supply-side evangelist Rep. Jack Kemp in 1996 rather than to run himself. 

Ross Perot did have one positive impact on American politics. He made spending, deficits, and debt a real political issue, and that surely played a role – along with the booming economy – in bringing down deficits during the Clinton administration.

Perot also demonstrated that it’s extremely difficult to run an even modestly successful presidential campaign outside the two major parties unless you are both a billionaire and a celebrity.