David Boaz

In his Election Day tweet attacking Rep. Mark Sanford, President Trump declared that Sanford’s opponent, Katie Arrington, “is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes.” Well, maybe. She doesn’t mention either issue on her campaign website. (In fact, she has nothing but bland buzzwords about any issue.)

This tweet is typical. It seems like very time Trump tweets an endorsement or a criticism of a candidate, he calls the candidate “strong (or weak) on crime.” I count 60 Trump tweets since his inauguration that use the word “crime.” Some complain that he is being investigated for a “made up, phony crime” or charge Hillary Clinton with “many crimes.” But most seem to relate to a candidate: Dan Donovan is “strong on Borders & Crime.” Kevin Cramer of North Dakota is “strong on Crime & Borders.” Doug Jones is “WEAK on Crime.” Adam Laxalt is “tough on crime!” “Chuck and Nancy…are weak on Crime.” Ralph Northam is “weak on crime.” Also “VERY weak on crime!” “Keep our country out of the hands of High Tax, High Crime Nancy Pelosi.” And so on.

It’s not obvious that this makes political sense. Candidates aren’t talking much about crime, perhaps because they recognize the substantial decline in crime rates. In numerous Gallup polls over the past year, only 2 to 4 percent of Americans have identified crime as the country’s most important problem. Though about 50 percent of people say they worry a great deal about crime when asked that question directly.

But here’s the thing. Crime in the United States is in fact way down. 

Here’s a long-term look at the most visible crime, homicide:

Here’s a picture of broader crime rates:

And yet, as the same source illustrated, at the very time when crime rates had fallen steadily and substantially for 20 years, 68 percent of Americans said the national crime rate was getting worse. (Crime rates continued to fall after 2011, though there was an uptick in murders in 2015 and 2016. The rate appears to have fallen in 2017.)

Of course, the president is better informed than average Americans. Surely White House staff have explained the crime statistics to President Trump. So why does he talk about “this American carnage” and pound away at the “crime” issue when endorsing candidates who never talk about it? Perhaps it’s part of his continuing use of racially charged language. Perhaps “crime and borders” is just shorthand for the kinds of social change he thinks his voters fear. Or maybe it reflects the fact that he grew up in New York City during a time of sharply rising crime. We all get ideas in our youth (“American cars aren’t well made”) that may stick with us even us as the facts change.

Whatever the reason, it seems curious that he so often cites “strong and crime” as the reason to support political candidates who haven’t talked about crime.

The reviews of HBO’s “Fahrenheit 451” haven’t been so good, but at least the publicity should lead more people to read a great dystopian novel. Talking about the book many years later, Bradbury said, “I wasn’t worried about freedom, I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV…the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids.” If only he could see our current culture, where TV news agitates viewers into warring tribes.

But he certainly portrayed a society in which an authoritarian government burns books, and most people have seen it as a powerful warning about censorship. Which makes it particularly ironic, and more significant every day, that Fahrenheit 451 itself was censored – trimmed, expurgated, bowdlerized – by people who no doubt thought they had the best of intentions.

When Bradbury discovered what had been done, he wrote this Coda to the 1979 Del Rey edition. It’s worth reading today. What he said then is still true: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run­ning about with lit matches.” Read the Coda, then read the book:

About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.

But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.

In my story, I had described a lighthouse as hav­ing, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”

The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”

Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito—out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch—gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer—lost!

Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been ra­zored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention—shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?

How did I react to all of the above?

By “firing” the whole lot.

By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run­ning about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/ Republican, Mattachine/ Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minori­ties, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.

“Shut the door, they’re coming through the win­dow, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my life-style with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the fu­ture, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedi­cated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.

But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play—it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!

Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!

I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangu­tan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversation­ist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mor­mons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent type-writers. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intel­lectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.

For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laur­ence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer—he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-defiations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whis­per with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.

And no one can help me. Not even you.

In 2005 the Malaysian political leader Anwar Ibrahim visited the Cato Institute. In the photo at right, I’m giving him a copy of my book Libertarianism: A Primer, which he told me he had already read – in prison. What a thing for an author to hear! After becoming leader of the opposition People’s Justice Party, he was again imprisoned on trumped-up charges in 2015. He remains in prison today. But thanks to yesterday’s elections, it now seems that Anwar may soon not only be released from prison but be named prime minister.

It’s a complicated story. Anwar was a youth leader and rising star in UNMO, the party that has ruled Malaysia for six decades since independence. He became finance minister and deputy prime minister under Mahathir Mohamad, who became well known for his defense of “Asian values” against supposedly Western notions of democracy and human rights. But Anwar fell out with Mahathir over the Asian crisis and charges of corruption. In 1998 Anwar was removed from office and then jailed in a trial that was criticized around the world. Amnesty International said that his trial “exposed a pattern of political manipulation of key state institutions including the police, public prosecutor’s office and the judiciary.” He was released in 2004 but banned from participation in politics for five years. After his return to opposition politics, he again angered the ruling party and was sent back to prison. Throughout his travails he was smeared in state-dominated media as homosexual, pro-Israel, and pro-American, the usual sorts of charges that authoritarian governments make against their critics. It should be noted that Anwar is no saint, and he tried to turn some of the same charges back against his persecutors.

Meanwhile, Mahathir retired as the world’s longest-serving elected leader in 2003. He became a sharp critic of his UNMO successors, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and later Najib Razak. This year, at age 92, he became the opposition candidate for prime minister. From jail Anwar supported him. This week Mahathir led his new party to victory and has just been sworn in as prime minister. He has promised to release Anwar from prison and make him prime minister within two years. Observers are hopeful that Anwar’s leadership would mean reform in Malaysia: an end to kleptocracy and corruption and perhaps an economy that is “inclusive, rules-based and competition-oriented with a large, well-funded social safety net,” much like Singapore. According to the Human Freedom Index, Malaysia could use improvement in all areas.

Last year I complained that President Trump was welcoming Anwar’s jailer, Najib Razak, to the White House. Now of course Anwar is joining forces with his original jailer. What a long strange trip it’s been. But hopefully it’s not over.

I wrote last month that new regulations and taxes in California’s legalized marijuana regime are likely to result in a situation in which

a few people are going to get rich in the California marijuana industry, and fewer small growers are going to earn a modest but comfortable income. Just one of the many ways that regulation contributes to inequality.

Now the East Bay Express in Oakland offers a further look at the problem:

Ask the people who grow, manufacture, and sell cannabis about the end of prohibition and you’ll hear two stories. One is that legalization is ushering a multibillion-dollar industry into the light. Opportunities are boundless and green-friendly cities like Oakland are going to benefit enormously. There will be thousands of new jobs, millions in new tax revenue, and a drop in crime and incarceration.

But increasingly you’ll hear another story. The state of California and the city of Oakland blew it. The new state and city cannabis regulations are too complicated, permits are too difficult and time consuming to obtain, taxes are too high, and commercial real estate is scarce and expensive. As a result, many longtime cannabis entrepreneurs are either giving up or they’re burrowing back into the underground economy, out of the taxman’s reach, and unfortunately, further away from the social benefits legal pot was supposed to deliver….

Some longtime farmers, daunted by the regulated market’s heavy expenses, taxes, and low-profit predictions, have shrugged and gone back to the black market where they can continue to grow as they always have: illegally but free of hassle from the state’s new pot bureaucrats armed with pocket protectors and clipboards.

Not all the complaints in the two-part investigation are about taxes and overregulation. Some, especially in part 1, are about “loopholes” in the regulations that allow large corporations to get into the marijuana business and about “dramatic changes to Humboldt County’s cannabis culture, which had an almost pagan worship of a plant that created an alternative lifestyle in the misty hills north of the ‘Redwood Curtain.’”

But there’s plenty of evidence that regulations are more burdensome on newer and smaller companies than on large, established companies. Indeed, regulatory processes are often “captured” by the affected interest groups. The Wall Street Journal confirmed this just yesterday, reporting that “some of the restrictions [in Europe’s GDPR online privacy regulations] are having an unintended consequence: reinforcing the duopoly of Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”

Marc Thiessen, a columnist at the Washington Post, is highly upset that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may not approve President Trump’s nomination of Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State:

For the first time in the history of the republic [since the committee started recording votes in 1925], it appears increasingly likely that a majority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will vote against the president’s nominee for secretary of state. If this happens, it would be a black mark not on Mike Pompeo’s record, but on the reputation of this once-storied committee.

Thiessen seems to think that the role of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and by extension the United States Senate, is to approve a president’s nominees. But of course, the Constitution provides that “The President … shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” The Heritage Foundation’s Guide to the Constitution affirms that “the Senate has complete and final discretion in whether to accept or approve a nomination.” The Foreign Relations Committee is today considering whether to consent to this nomination. The Senate as a whole may choose to reject the negative recommendation and consent to the nomination. (See also the novel and movie Advise and Consent, on TCM this Friday.)

It’s not that members of the committee don’t have legitimate grounds on which to withhold consent. Sen. Rand Paul, a key player as he is likely to be the only Republican on the committee to oppose the nomination, says:

Director Pompeo has not learned the lessons of regime change and wants regime change in Iran….

President Trump sought to break with the foreign policy mistakes of the last two administrations. Yet now he picks for Secretary of State and CIA Director people who embody them, defend them, and, I’m afraid, will repeat them. I will not support their nominations.

One need not agree with that criticism to acknowledge that it’s a reasonable concern on which to reject a nominee.

Thiessen is a former speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, which might give him an executive-branch view of Congress’s role. Before that, however, he served for six years as spokesman and senior policy advisor to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, whose willingness to use his position to block presidential nominees was well known. He mentions Helms’s support of President Clinton’s nomination of Madeleine Albright for Secretary of State, but omits the nominees Helms blocked or tried to block, such as Massachusetts governor William Weld and former senator Carol Moseley-Braun.

Thiessen concludes his excoriation of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with a flourish: Assuming he is confirmed by the Senate, Pompeo “would be more than justified in determining that the State Department is best served by working closely with the appropriators and Senate leadership, and bypassing a committee that can’t make policy, can’t legislate and can’t lead.”

His real complaint, however, is not that the committee can’t lead. It is that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee won’t blindly follow.

At Politico Jeff Greenfield writes about “The Hollywood Hit Movie That Urged FDR to Become a Fascist.” The movie was “Gabriel Over the White House” in 1933 and, Greenfield writes, “it was designed as a clear message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he might need to embrace dictatorial powers to solve the crisis of the Great Depression.” Greenfield assures us that FDR did not become a dictator, but he notes that “the impulse toward strongman rule” often stems from a sense of populist grievance, along with the scapegoating of “subversive enemies undermining the nation.” Depending on the time and the strongman, those subversive enemies can be Jews, capitalists, Wall Street, the 1 percent, the homosexuals, or in some countries the Americans.

Gene Healy wrote about “Gabriel” 10 years ago in The Cult of the Presidency and in this column in 2012:

…many of us still believe in authoritarian powers for the president.

In a November 2011 column, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank offered “A Machiavellian model for Obama” in Jack Kennedy’s “kneecapping” and “mob-style threats” against steel-company executives who’d dared to raise prices.

Despite the obligatory caveat: “President Obama doesn’t need to sic the FBI on his opponents,” Milbank observed that “the price increase was rolled back” only after “subpoenas flew [and] FBI agents marched into steel executives’ offices”: “Sometimes, that’s how it must be. Can Obama understand that?”

Greenfield says “Gabriel” was both a commercial and critical hit, but “faded into obscurity, in large measure because the idea of a “benevolent dictatorship” seemed a lot less attractive after the degradation of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.”

But that wasn’t so obvious in 1933. As I wrote in a review of Three New Deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, there was a lot of enthusiasm in the United States for central planning and “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” Two months after Roosevelt’s inauguration, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.… America today literally asks for orders.”

And Roosevelt was prepared to give those orders. In his inaugural address he proclaimed:

If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army.… I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Fortunately, American institutions did not collapse. The Supreme Court declared some New Deal measures unconstitutional. Some business leaders resisted it. Intellectuals on both the right and the left, some of whom ended up in the early libertarian movement, railed against Roosevelt. Republican politicians (those were the days!) tended to oppose both the flow of power to Washington and the shift to executive authority. But we’re being reminded again, in Washington as well as Moscow and Beijing and Budapest and Istanbul, that liberal institutions are always threatened by populism and authoritarianism and especially the combination of the two.

“Gabriel Over the White House” will air on TCM on April 27.

It’s often been noted that regulations can impose larger relative costs on small businesses and can serve to protect incumbent firms from new competitors. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein noted that new regulations created a “moat” around his firm:

That all industries are being disrupted to some extent by new entrants coming in from technology. We, again, being, you know, technology-oriented ourselves, try to disrupt ourselves and try to figure out what’s the new thing, and come up with new platforms, new forms of distribution, new products. But in some ways, and there are some parts of our business, where it’s very hard for outside entrants to come in, disrupt our business, simply because we’re so regulated. You’ll hear people in our industry talk about the regulation. And they talk about it, you know, with a sigh: Look at the burdens of regulation. But in some cases, the burdensome regulation acts as a bit of a moat around our business.

The Washington Post reports on a new example: the legalized marijuana market in California. Libertarians have long urged the legalization of marijuana and other drugs. Certainly I expect better results from a legal regime where people are not arrested for buying, selling, or using marijuana. But governments can’t just repeal laws and stop arresting people; instead, they prefer to set up a regime of taxes and regulation. And that’s having an effect on the small marijuana growers in the state’s “Emerald Triangle.” As Scott Wilson reports in the Post:

Humboldt County, traditionally shorthand for outlaw culture and the great dope it produces, is facing a harsh reckoning. Every trait that made this strip along California’s wild northwest coast the best place in the world to grow pot is now working against its future as a producer in the state’s $7 billion-a-year marijuana market.

A massive industry never before regulated is being tamed by laws and taxation, characteristically extensive in this state. Nowhere is this process upending a culture and economy more than here in Humboldt, where tens of thousands of people who have been breaking the law for years are being asked to hire accountants, tax lawyers and declare themselves to a government they have famously distrusted. 

Cato adjunct scholar Leland B. Yeager had a long career at the University of Virginia Department of Economics in its golden age and later at Auburn University. He is the author of Foreign Trade and U.S. Policy: The Case for Free International Trade (1976), International Monetary Relations: Theory, History and Policy (1976), and Free Trade: America’s Opportunity (1954). At 93 he is still as insightful and as blunt as ever, and he just published this critique of President Trump’s understanding of trade policy at Liberty magazine under the title “Profound and Destructive.” The whole thing is reprinted below.

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