Bill De Blasio Is America’s Marxist Mayor

There’s been plenty of talk about the radical right lately, involving both the United States and Europe. This is unfortunately necessary, as ideas we thought we’d left behind — socialism, protectionism even anti-Semitism — are back again.

But let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that the only threat to liberalism is the alt-right. Many forces on the left support some of those old, bad ideas, and they’re not all masked antifa.

Take protectionism, for instance. The Washington Post reports that “rather than jeer Trump’s protectionist positions, Democrats are echoing them and amplifying them.” The Democratic platform in 2016 rebuked President Bill Clinton’s trade deals, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton reversed her support for a trade deal with Asian countries.

And socialism. A democratic socialist who praised Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela came darn near defeating the Democratic party’s anointed presidential candidate. And both Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz were either unable or unwilling to explain “What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat?”

Now comes New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, a favorite among “progressive” Democrats whom New York Democratic voters easily nominated for a second term on Tuesday, to explain to a friendly interviewer that the obstacle to economic progress is private property:

What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development….

Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.

This is mind-boggling. The mayor of the world’s financial center, the hub of American and global capitalism, thinks that the obstacle to progress is private property, the institutional system that has brought billions of people around the world out of back-breaking poverty. Thinks that politicians should determine where building should be built and “who gets to live in it.” Thinks that the people of enterprising New York City have a widespread impulse toward socialism and comprehensive, coercive central planning.

But let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that the only threat to liberalism is the alt-right.

Mayor de Blasio says he’d like to have the power to determine what happens on every piece of land in the city. Other leaders have had such power, in the Soviet Union and China and Venezuela, and those systems did not produce progress. Or even toilet paper.

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism says, “Of the different configurations of property rights, only private property provides a workable basis for a free society, a productive economy and justice.” And, “Private property restricts government power and decentralizes decision making. It confers on an individual the right to use and dispose of some good.”

That’s just what irks Mayor de Blasio: Property rights limit his power and give individuals, not him, the right to decide how to use their property.

Private property is necessary for freedom. It divides and limits power. It allows markets and trade to happen, creating economic growth. It protects freedom of the press because ideas are expressed through property — printing presses, auditoriums, billboards, audio equipment, broadcast frequencies, computer networks, web servers and so on.

Countries that have comprehensively denied private property rights have found themselves without freedom or prosperity — and with plenty of inequality. Mayor de Blasio’s ideas are deeply dangerous, all the more so because he’s not an internet troll or a perennial losing candidate but the mayor of a great city built on the foundation he wants to destroy.

Like the ideas animating the new radical right, the new radical left is embracing ideas that have brought human misery wherever they have been tried.

Posted on September 13, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

In Defense of the Mainstream Media

At a conference recently I defended the mainstream media. And who wouldn’t, really? But I was speaking on the closing panel at FreedomFest (or as my partner put it, I played the big room in Vegas), which is often called a libertarian conference but had plenty of Trumpists this July. So I wasn’t just preaching to the choir. Above, video of my three-minute filibuster. 

On the panel, Steve Forbes said that “the so-called mainstream media is becoming less and less relevant” thanks to new technology and social media, and that they are “ideological frauds” and “totalitarian frauds.” I disagreed with him. I noted first that I do think the mainstream media such as NPR fail to adequately examine the most important fact in modern history—what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Fact, the enormous and continuing increase in human longevity and living standards since the industrial revolution. But I went on to say that the mainstream media are our main source of news about the world. And for all the talk about the rise of conservative media, very few conservative media have reporters on the ground around the country and the world. The major media have “real reporters on the ground all over the world,…and a lot of what the right-wing media does is take potshots at those reporters and their reports, and that’s fine, that’s part of the checking process.” But we should remember that the mainstream media “also serve as a check on overbearing, abusive government in the United States and other places in the world.” 

And that’s why, I said, “it’s really discouraging to me to see a president of the United States constantly denouncing the independent media and the independent judiciary as enemies of the American people, as purveyors of fake news.”

I’ve criticized, here and elsewhere, plenty of examples of what I see as media bias. But I am in sympathy with Thomas Jefferson when he wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. “

The whole FreedomFest panel video is not online but can be purchased.

Posted on September 12, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

President Trump Welcomes Anwar Ibrahim’s Jailer to the White House

Anwar Ibrahim and David Boaz

Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister and finance minister of Malaysia and later leader of the opposition in the parliament, is currently in jail for the second time on trumped-up charges. His jailer, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, will be welcomed to the White House by President Trump on Tuesday.

A Wall Street Journal editorial notes:

A visit to the White House is a diplomatic plum that world leaders covet. So why is President Trump bestowing this honor on Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who jailed an opposition leader and is a suspect in a corruption scandal that spans the globe?

Mr. Najib will visit the White House next week for a presidential photo-op that could help him win the next general election and imperil Malaysia’s democracy. 

From 1981 to 1998 Anwar was a rising star in the UMNO party, which has produced all of Malaysia’s prime ministers since its formation in 1963. In the late 1990s, however, he became a vocal critic of what he described as the widespread culture of nepotism and cronyism within UMNO. This angered Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

They also disagreed on how to respond to the Asian financial crisis, as Wikipedia describes:

[As finance minister, Anwar] also instituted an austerity package that cut government spending by 18%, cut ministerial salaries and deferred major projects. “Mega projects”, despite being a cornerstone of Mahathir’s development strategy, were greatly curtailed.

Although many Malaysian companies faced bankruptcy, Anwar declared: “There is no question of any bailout. The banks will be allowed to protect themselves and the government will not interfere.” Anwar advocated a free-market approach to the crisis, including foreign investment and trade liberalisation. Mahathir blamed currency speculators like George Soros for the crisis, and supported currency controls and tighter regulation of foreign investment.

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.” After his release from jail in 2004 he became leader of an opposition party and then in 2015 was sent back to jail. 

In 2005 Anwar visited the Cato Institute. In the photo above, I’m giving him a copy of my book Libertarianism: A Primer, which he told me had already read – in prison. What a thing for an author to hear! Understandably, the thought of the president of the United States honoring his jailer is especially painful.

When the English Leveller John Lilburne was tried for sedition and treason in 1649, he declared, “I shall leave this Testimony behind me, that I died for the Laws and Liberties of this nation.” American presidents should honor heroes who can make such claims, not their oppressors.

Posted on September 8, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

The Current Budget Crisis Illustrates James Buchanan’s Concerns About Politics

Nobel laureate James Buchanan has been in the news lately, especially because of a book that seeks to link his 7000 pages of economic writing to both Dixiecrat segregationists and Charles Koch’s secret plan “to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people.” The thesis of Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean is that public choice economics is a radical plan to “shackle the people’s power,” “to put democracy in chains.” Oddly, she claims (without evidence), he set out on this project because he resented the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education – which of course used “undemocratic” means to overturn the democratic decisions of legislatures in various states.

Buchanan certainly was concerned with how to achieve justice, efficiency, and “prevention of discrimination against minorities” in the context of majority rule. Throughout his work he explored how to design constitutional rules to bring about optimal outcomes, including a balanced budget requirement, supermajorities, and constitutional protection of individual rights. He worried that both majorities and legislatures would be short-sighted, economically ignorant or inefficient, and indifferent to the imposition of burdens on others.

And today a Washington Post column by Dana Milbank illustrates one of the big problems that Buchanan sought to solve: the temptation of legislatures to spend money with little regard for what two of his students called “deficits, debt, and debasement.” Looking outward from Hurricane Harvey to the upcoming congressional session, Milbank wrings his hands:

Harvey makes landfall in Washington as soon as next week, when President Trump is expected to ask for what could be tens of billions of dollars in storm relief. And paying for storm recovery — probably with few offsetting spending cuts — will be but the first blow to fiscal discipline in what looks to be a particularly active, and calamitous, spending season.

It’s not just disaster relief. The Pentagon is hoping for tens of billions of additional dollars. And Republicans may pivot from “tax reform” to mere tax cuts. It’s easier just to spend money and cut taxes than to reform the flood insurance program, make the tax system more efficient, and focus military spending on actual defense needs, much less to think about the national debt and the next generation.

Trump, who came to power promising to eliminate the $20 trillion debt, or at least to cut it in half, is poised to oversee an exponential increase in that debt. Republicans, who came to power with demands that Washington tackle the debt problem, could wind up doing at least as much damage to the nation’s finances as the Democrats did….

If the red ink rises according to worst-case forecasts, “we’re talking additions to the debt in the trillions,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, tells me. All from actions to be taken in the next few months. “It turns out the Republican-run Congress is not willing to make the hard choices,” she says. “It is a fiscal free-lunch mentality on all sides.”

We’ve heard a lot over the past few years about a “dysfunctional” Congress. Many critics mean that Congress doesn’t pass enough laws. But this is the real dysfunction: a Congress that spends money with little thought to the future. The national debt doubled under President George W. Bush and doubled again under President Barack Obama. President Trump and the Republican Congress are just getting started, but the prospects don’t look good.

Milbank, MacGuineas, and others who worry about the “fiscal free-lunch mentality” should read some Buchanan. As one scholar put it in a reflection on Buchanan’s work, “Perhaps legislatures would do better if supermajorities were required whenever transfers to current recipients will burden future generations.” Perhaps so. And perhaps constitutional guarantees of individual rights, judicial protection of those rights, and limits on the legislature’s free-lunch mentality are all part of what Buchanan called the constitutional political economy of a free society.

Posted on August 31, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

Lobbying in Trump’s Washington: New Names, Old Game

In The New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Confessore writes about the new lobbying stars in Washington. A new president always creates opportunities for new players. When that president is a non-politician without an established Washington entourage, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Who knows the new president? Who knows the people who know the president?

Confessore tells great stories about newly famous Trumpists such as one-time campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and about “Washington backbenchers, B-listers and understudies” who suddenly realized they knew somebody who had been part of the Trump campaign.

USA Today has reported on people close to Vice President Pence who have opened or expanded lobbying businesses this year.

It’s a sordid story of how fixers and their handsome fees survive even in an administration that came in promising to “drain the swamp.” But how much has really changed? As Confessore reviews:

There are about 10,000 registered lobbyists in Washington — roughly 20 for every member of Congress — and thousands more unregistered ones: consultants and ‘‘strategic advisers’’ who are paid to help shape government policy but do not disclose their clients. By whatever name, they are the people companies and countries hire to help roll back regulations, unstick bids, tweak legislation or get meetings. Lobbying is at once Washington’s most maligned, enduring and essential industry. Underpaid young politicos and retiring lawmakers depend on Beltway lobby shops — known as ‘‘K Street’’ after the city boulevard that once housed many of them — for the high-six-figure salaries that will loft them into Washington’s petite aristocracy… .  But the private sector needs lobbyists the most. The modern federal government is so sprawling and complex that it practically demands a specialized class of middlemen and -women.

Over the decades, lobbying has evolved from a niche trade of fixers and gatekeepers to a sleek, vertically integrated, $3-billion-a-year industry.

Total reported spending on lobbying peaked in 2009 and 2010, the first two years of President Barack Obama’s administration, when trillions of dollars were being handed out or moved around by the stimulus package, the omnibus spending bill, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, the Affordable Care Act, and an ultimately unsuccessful 1200-page energy bill stuffed with taxes, regulations, loopholes, and subsidies. The Washington Post found that “more than 90 organizations hired lobbyists to specifically influence provisions of the massive stimulus bill.” Well-connected Democratic lobbyists like former House majority leader Richard Gephardt and Tony Podesta, the brother of Obama transition director John Podesta, did especially well.

And of course it didn’t start with Obama. As federal spending soared under President George W. Bush, the number of registered lobbying firms climbed. In six years the number of companies with Washington lobbyists rose 58 percent. After the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, party leaders created the “K Street Project” to pressure lobbying firms to replace Democrats with Republicans. They made it clear that lobbyists needed to shift their political contributions toward Republican candidates, or lose their access to Republican policymakers. By 2003, the Washington Post reported, the GOP had in fact placed Republicans in a significant number of the most influential positions at trade associations and corporate government affairs offices—and were getting their contributions. 

Every new administration threatens to shake up some policies, and that creates a demand for lobbyists to get a piece of the new action. It also means opportunities for people who are well connected among the new White House and agency staffs. But the biggest reason that lobbying grows is that federal spending and regulation grow.

As Craig Holman of the Ralph Nader-founded Public Citizen told Marketplace Radio after a report on rising lobbying expenditures during the financial crisis, “the amount spent on lobbying … is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”

Marketplace’s Ronni Radbill noted then, “In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say… . With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy [in early 2009], lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time.”

Big government means big lobbying. When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And today’s federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.

The Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek explained the process 70 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.”

That’s the worst aspect of the growth of lobbying: it indicates that decisions in the marketplace are being crowded out by decisions made by lobbyists and politicians, which means a more powerful government, less freedom, and less economic growth. 

Posted on August 31, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

David Boaz discusses The Libertarian Mind on Liberty Talk Radio with Joe Cristiano

Posted on August 30, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

Study the Ideas and History of Liberalism with the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

In these days when liberalism is again under attack from some of its old enemies in new guises, one way to counter authoritarian threats is to educate ourselves on the fundamental ideas of liberalism. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, now available online, offers a wealth of information on the ideas, people, and history of liberalism and libertarianism. Historian David M. Hart, director of the Online Library of Liberty, says that the Encyclopedia “provides an excellent survey of the key movements, individuals, and events in the evolution of the classical liberal movement.” And on his own website he outlines a course of study in classical liberalism that includes a curated list of articles in the Encyclopedia for someone who wants to learn about the ideas, movements, and people of liberalism.

Begin, he says, with the survey article by Steve Davies, “General Introduction” (pp. xxv-xxxvii in the print version). Then read any of the following articles. Or, for a logical and chronological course of study, read these articles in this order:

Key Ideas in the Classical Liberal Tradition

Basic Principles:

Grounds for Belief:

Processes for Creating a Free Society:

Political and Legal Freedoms:

Economic Freedoms:

Social Freedoms:

  • Equality under the Law - “Equality” (of rights)
  • Toleration of different Ideas and Behaviour (see Freedom of Speech & Religion above)
  • Acts between Consenting Adults - “Presumption of Liberty”

Key Movements and People in the Classical Liberal Tradition

 

I might add that Chapter 2 of The Libertarian Mind, “The Roots of Libertarianism,” is a very short guide to many of these movements and people. And The Libertarian Reader collects and curates many of the key texts of liberalism and libertarianism.

Posted on August 29, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

David Boaz discusses disaster relief efforts on FBN’s Kennedy

Posted on August 29, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

Libertarianism, Individualism, and Racism

There’s been some talk this week about a few people who once called themselves libertarians and have now turned up in alt-right circles, at the Charlottesville march or elsewhere. As I told the Daily Beast, “People change ideologies all the time. Some libertarians become conservatives, some become welfarist liberals, a few drift into creepy extremes.” And of course it’s not just libertarians. Hillary Clinton says she was a Goldwater Girl, a lot of ex-communists became the original neoconservatives, and Nobel laureates in economics have tended to move toward classical liberalism (libertarianism). But since the topic has come up, let me just agree with Nick Gillespie that “The alt-right—and Trumpism, too, to the extent that it has any coherence—is an explicit rejection of foundational libertarian beliefs in ‘free trade and free migration’ along with experiments in living that make a mess of rigid categories that appeal to racists, sexists, protectionists, and other reactionaries.” And add my own commentary, excerpted from my 2015 book The Libertarian Mind:

The dignity of the individual under libertarianism is a dignity that enhances social well-being. Libertarianism is good not just for individuals but for societies. The positive basis of libertarian social analysis is methodological individualism, the recognition that only individuals act. The ethical or normative basis of libertarianism is respect for the dignity and worth of every (other) individual. This is expressed in the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s dictum that each person is to be treated not merely as a means but as an end in himself.

Of course, as late as Jefferson’s time and beyond, the concept of the individual with full rights did not include all people. Astute observers noted that problem at the time and began to apply the ringing phrases of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and the Declaration of Independence more fully. The equality and individualism that underlay the emergence of capitalism and republican government naturally led people to start thinking about the rights of women and of slaves, especially African American slaves in the United States. It’s no accident that feminism and abolitionism emerged out of the ferment of the Industrial Revolution and the American and French revolutions. Just as a better understanding of natural rights was developed during the American struggle against specific injustices suffered by the colonies, the feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimké noted in an 1837 letter to Catherine E. Beecher, “I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land—the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other.”

The abolitionist movement grew logically out of the Lockean libertarianism of the American Revolution. How could Americans proclaim that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” without noticing that they themselves were holding other men and women in bondage? They could not, of course, and had they tried, they would have been reminded by people such as the great English scholar Samuel Johnson, who wrote in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The world’s first antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia that same year. Jefferson himself owned slaves, yet he included a passionate condemnation of slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence: “[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him.” The Continental Congress deleted that passage, but Americans lived uneasily with the obvious contradiction between their commitment to individual rights and the institution of slavery.

Although they were intimately connected in American history, slavery and racism are not inherently bound together. In the ancient world the act of enslaving another person did not imply his moral or intellectual inferiority; it was just accepted that conquerors could enslave their captives. Greek slaves were often teachers in Roman households, their intellectual eminence acknowledged and exploited.

In any case, racism in one form or another is an age-old problem, but it clearly clashes with the universal ethics of libertarianism and the equal natural rights of all men and women. As Ayn Rand pointed out in her 1963 essay “Racism,”

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage … which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

In her works Rand emphasized the importance of individual productive achievement to a sense of efficacy and happiness. She argued, “Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).” That is, some people want to feel good about themselves because they have the same skin color as Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Edison, rather than because of their individual achievements; and some want to dismiss the achievements of people who are smarter, more productive, more accomplished than themselves, just by uttering a racist epithet.

And as I wrote when a group of newsletters seemed to connect racist ideas to the libertarian movement:

Libertarians should make it clear that the people who wrote those things are not our comrades, not part of our movement, not part of the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick. Shame on them.

More on libertarianism, individualism and race – and feminism and gay rights – in The Libertarian Mind.

Posted on August 25, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

Is the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism like Wikipedia?

I see that my colleagues are referring to the new online Encyclopedia of Libertarianism as “a Wikipedia for libertarianism.” I suppose that’s sort of true, in that it’s an online encyclopedia. But it’s not exactly Hayekian, as Jimmy Wales describes Wikipedia. That is, it didn’t emerge spontaneously from the actions of hundreds of thousands of contributors. Instead, editors Ronald Hamowy, Jason Kuznicki, and Aaron Steelman drew up a list of topics and sought the best scholars to write on each one – people like Alan Charles Kors, Bryan Caplan, Deirdre McCloskey, George H. Smith, Israel Kirzner, James Buchanan, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Jeremy Shearmur, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Norman Barry, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, and Vernon L. Smith, along with many Cato Institute experts. In that regard it’s more like the Encyclopedia Britannica of libertarianism, a guide to important topics by top scholars in the relevant field.

The Britannica over the years has published articles by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, Leon Trotsky, Harry Houdini, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Milton Friedman, Simon Baron Cohen, and Desmond Tutu. They may have slipped a bit when they published articles by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Lee Iacocca. And particularly when they chose to me to write their entry on libertarianism.

Posted on August 21, 2017  Posted to Cato@Liberty

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