In his much-discussed New Yorker article on the strategy memos that have shaped the Obama administration, Ryan Lizza writes:

Most of Obama’s conservative dinner companions from his evening at George Will’s home now describe him and his Administration in the most caricatured terms. Will declared Obama a “floundering naïf” and someone advancing “Lenin-Socialism.”

Really? Mild-mannered George Will compared President Obama to Lenin? That set off my skepticism meter. So I summoned the vast fact-checking resources of the Cato Institute and Googled the phrase. Which quickly turned up this video:

And as you can clearly hear at 1:30, Will isn’t saying “Lenin socialism.” He’s making the much milder and entirely valid charge of “lemon socialism,” which he described as “transferring wealth from the successful to the unsuccessful.” That’s an old term for the government takeover or bailout of failing firms. On the left it’s often described in terms such as “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” or “privatizing profits and socializing losses.” People on the right deplore the practice of bailing out unsuccessful firms with taxpayers’ dollars.

That’s a point that Will also made in his column, first when the Bush administration started bailing out failing banks and auto companies. And it’s also been made by Charles Krauthammer on the auto bailout and again on the Solyndra deal. And by Cato adjunct scholar Lawrence H. White. And by lots of Cato-at-Liberty bloggers. Even Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.

Where was the skepticism of a New Yorker reporter when he thought he’d found the prudent, mild-mannered George Will comparing the president to Lenin? Where were the famous New Yorker fact-checkers? Some things, I guess, are just too good to check. So to answer the question in the title, Is Barack Obama a Leninist? No, just a lemonist.

Barack Obama, Leninist? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that California’s ban on same-sex marriage — enacted in 2008 in a popular vote on Proposition 8 — violates the constitutional right to equal protection. The court’s decision upheld a 2010 decision by former Judge R. Vaughn Walker, a Reagan-Bush appointee, that found marriage to be a fundamental right protected by the Constitution, and that the proposition “fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.” Proponents of Proposition 8 will likely appeal the decision either to the full Ninth Circuit or directly to the Supreme Court.

The American Foundation for Equal Rights is the sponsor of the case, Perry v. Brown (originally Perry v. Schwarzenegger). Cato Institute chairman Robert A. Levy is co-chairman of AFER’s Advisory Board. He and co-chair John Podesta wrote in the Washington Post in 2010:

Nearly a century after the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man.’ ” That 1967 case, Loving v. Virginia, ended bans on interracial marriage in the 16 states that still had such laws.

Now, 43 years after Loving, the courts are once again grappling with denial of equal marriage rights — this time to gay couples. We believe that a society respectful of individual liberty must end this unequal treatment under the law…. The principle of equality before the law transcends the left-right divide and cuts to the core of our nation’s character. This is not about politics; it’s about an indispensable right vested in all Americans.

Levy and Podesta, along with AFER’s lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies, spoke at this Cato Institute forum. And Levy also wrote about the case in this New York Daily News column.

In this 7-minute video Levy, Podesta, Olson, and Boies make the case for equality in marriage law:

The Circuit Court Ruling on Proposition 8 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the New York Times, Floyd Norris reminds us:

The 1980 presidential election was fought by a Democratic incumbent weakened by a poor economy amid worries that the United States had lost its ability to compete in the world. Gold prices had risen to unprecedented levels as the election approached, and the Republican nominee hinted he might propose a return to a gold standard.

That Republican, Ronald Reagan, won the election and soon appointed a commission to study the role of gold in monetary systems.

And now:

Last month, Newt Gingrich, seeking to widen his support in the days leading up to the South Carolina primary, promised that he would appoint a new gold commission. “Part of our approach ought to be to re-establish something Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and that is to have a commission on gold to look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money,” he said in a speech.

Whatever the likelihood of Gingrich’s ever being in position to appoint a presidential commission, the minority report of the U.S. Gold Commission, by Rep. Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, still makes for worthwhile reading. And conveniently enough, it’s available right here at the Cato Institute. Download a pdf or epub here.

For a more recent analysis, read “Is the Gold Standard Still the Gold Standard among Monetary Systems?” by Lawrence H. White.

The Case for Gold — Again is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

During the congressional redistricting season, you could almost get the idea that members of Congress look at the process this way:

1. I am entitled to be in Congress.

2. I need to figure out which constituents deserve to be represented by me.

There have been lots of stories recently about members of Congress declaring that “home is where the congressional district is.” Here’s the latest:

Tea party firebrand Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) announced Tuesday that he will switch districts and run for reelection in Florida’s new 18th district.

West’s 22nd district, which was already Democratic-leaning, got even tougher under a new GOP redistricting plan released last week. The new district would have gone about 57 percent for President Obama in the 2008 presidential race.

But Rep. Tom Rooney’s (R-Fla.) decision earlier Tuesday to run in the open and Republican-leaning 17th district rather than the swing 18th freed West up to make the switch to the neighboring district, which is just north of his current district, which spans from West Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale.

“Congressman Rooney is a statesman and has been an honorable public servant to the constituents of Florida’s 16th Congressional district,” West said, referring to Rooney’s current district, which is re-numbered from 16 to 18 under the new plan. “It is my goal to continue the success Congressman Rooney has had in Florida’s 16th Congressional district in the newly proposed 18th district.”

Glad that’s working out for everybody. Meanwhile, here are a few other cases:

Pleasanton’s own Rep. Jerry McNerney has looked at the changes coming in California’s soon-to-be-drawn political map and has made a decision: He’s moving east, along with his district, to San Joaquin County.

Where in San Joaquin Co? Uh…..

“When he settles on a place in San Joaquin County we’ll announce the location,” spokesperson Sarah Hersh told us….

“After spending so much time in San Joaquin County, it truly is my home,” McNerney said Thursday. “That’s why I’m planning to move my residence to San Joaquin County and put down even more roots in this community.”

–San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 2011

With Rep. Grace Napolitano’s decision this week to run in the 32nd district east of Los Angeles, fellow California Democratic Rep. Linda Sánchez announced Thursday that she will run in the newly drawn 38th district….

Had Napolitano not switched, Sánchez could have opted to run in the open 47th district based in Long Beach, which mostly lies outside her current district.

–Roll Call, September 1, 2011

 House hopefuls across the country are busy building their 2012 campaigns — hiring staff, raising money and wooing early support. For some, the only thing missing is a seat to run for.

Call it the ghost district phenomenon: The once-a-decade drawing of new congressional maps has thrust some candidates into an awkward limbo, with at least a dozen running for seats that don’t yet exist but that will be crafted in the months to come.

– Politico, September 6, 2011

Home Is Where the Congressional District Is is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Occupy protesters come to Washington and finally notice what the problem is:

Timothy Evans, a D.C. taxicab inspector, . . .  notices too many inside a taxi jerking slowly up Fifth Street NW — not the seven or eight passengers he sometimes sees sardine-stuffed into the Crown Victorias and Town Cars that make up the bulk of the city fleet, but still too many.

He pops on his car’s flashing lights. The cab stops, and out they come, six of them.

While Evans goes to chat with the driver, his partner, Carl Martin, calmly absorbs invective — not from the driver but from the riders, a group of activists from California who are in town for the Occupy Congress protest.

Nadine Hayes, 59, of Camarillo, is none too happy her driver ended up with $50 worth of tickets — $25 for overloading, $25 for an improper manifest. “He was doing us a service and taking us to where we wanted to go,” she said. “I think we’ve got far too many laws. I think the American people are being so oppressed.”

By George, I Think They’ve Got It: ‘Far Too Many Laws’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Some people might have been surprised to read in Sunday’s New York Times magazine that I believed “that all that easy money from China helped make the housing bubble much bigger and last longer, which created a far bigger crisis when the bubble finally burst.” As you might suspect, it was only those two little words “from China” that gave me pause. But I’m very grateful to Adam Davidson and his colleagues at NPR’s Planet Money for giving me a chance to elaborate on their blog. Here’s a brief excerpt:

China was eager to buy our debt, both Treasury bonds and Fannie and Freddie’s debt. But it was Congress that ran the deficits, and the Fed that kept interest rates artificially low. We don’t need to go to Beijing to find the villains in this piece….

Our economy could use plenty of reforms – lower, flatter, simpler taxes; a more stable monetary policy or even a move toward free markets in money; reduced regulatory burdens; the de-monopolization of services from education to mail delivery; and less government spending. In all those cases, the problem and the solution are right here in the USA.

Read it all! And special bonus links: Steve Hanke responds to the argument for a tougher policy toward China at Planet Money. And Adam Davidson talked with me about libertarianism in 2010 (plus a much longer version also featuring Mark Calabria).

Chinese Currency and the U.S. Financial Crisis is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

George Will takes President Obama to task for the theme in his State of the Union Address that America should be more like the army:

War, said James Madison, is “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” Randolph Bourne, the radical essayist killed by the influenza unleashed by World War I, warned, “War is the health of the state.” Hence Barack Obama’s State of the Union hymn: Onward civilian soldiers, marching as to war….

The armed services’ ethos, although noble, is not a template for civilian society, unless the aspiration is to extinguish politics. People marching in serried ranks, fused into a solid mass by the heat of martial ardor, proceeding in lock step, shoulder to shoulder, obedient to orders from a commanding officer — this is a recurring dream of progressives eager to dispense with tiresome persuasion and untidy dissension in a free, tumultuous society.

Progressive presidents use martial language as a way of encouraging Americans to confuse civilian politics with military exertions, thereby circumventing an impediment to progressive aspirations — the Constitution and the patience it demands.

He reminds us that President Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered such rhetoric, and that FDR supporters demonstrated appalling enthusiasm for actual dictatorship:

In his first inaugural address, FDR demanded “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.” He said Americans must “move as a trained and loyal army” with “a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.” …

Commonweal, a magazine for liberal Catholics, said that Roosevelt should have “the powers of a virtual dictatorship to reorganize the government.” Walter Lippmann, then America’s preeminent columnist, said: “A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.”

Ben Friedman deplored this theme in the speech as well:

There is an even bigger problem with this “be like the troops, put aside our differences, stop playing politics, salute and get things done for the common good” mentality. It is authoritarian. Sure, Americans share a government, much culture, and have mutual obligations. But that doesn’t make the United States anything like a military unit, which is designed for coordinated killing and destruction. Americans aren’t going to overcome their political differences by emulating commandos on a killing raid. And that’s a good thing. At least in times of peace, liberal countries should be free of a common purpose, which is anathema to freedom.

As did I, in the first few minutes of this post-speech interview on Stossel. Cato scholars have also quoted that appalling inaugural speech from FDR — asking for “broad executive power” at the head of “a trained and loyal army” — several times. Let’s hope that after George Will’s skewering, Obama will drop this theme. Hierarchy, centralization, common purpose, command, and control are appropriate for an army, not for a free people.

Obama’s Wistful Military Metaphor is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Only days after the president declared, “No more bailouts, no more handouts,” I see that Arlo Guthrie is touring the South in February and March. What’s the connection? If you have the good fortune to see him, be sure to ask for “I’m Changing My Name to Fannie Mae.” That 2008 song was itself a new version of Tom Paxton’s classic song “I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler,” sung here by Arlo: “When they hand a million grand out, I’ll be standing with my hand out….If you’re a corporate titanic and your failure is gigantic, Down in Congress there’s a safety net for you.”

The 2008 version is sung here by Arlo and here by Paxton. Besides the name of the company, they had to make a few other changes in the lyrics, like “When they hand a trillion grand out, I’ll be standing with my hand out.”

But that was October 2008. By the end of December, I was noting that it was a Merry Christmas for GMAC, which learned on Christmas Eve that the Federal Reserve had approved its application to become a bank holding company. That gave GMAC “access to new sources of funding, including a potential infusion of taxpayer dollars from the Treasury Department and loans from the Fed itself,” as the Washington Post explained. GMAC wasn’t the only company that suddenly became a “bank holding company” in order to cash in on the $700 billion financial bailout. Late one night in November, American Express was granted the same privilege, along with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and CIT. Which was why I suggested then that Tom and Arlo needed a new version: “I’m Changing My Name to Bank Holding Company.”

For now, enjoy “I’m Changing My Name to Fannie Mae”:

Arlo Sings Bailouts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times has an interesting graphic, under the heading “Choice Words,” that shows how differently Ron Paul talks about the role of government from all the other candidates. There’s a complete version here, but I’ve excerpted a section. The Times notes that the graphic depicts “selected words used by President Obama in his State of the Union addresses, and by Republican presidential candidates in their debates, television interviews and major speeches since May.”

So what do we see? Ron Paul talks about deficits and debt more than any other candidate. (President Obama seems to have talked about the deficit most in 2009, when it was all Bush’s fault.) He’s virtually the only candidate who talks about war and troops—no doubt in phrases like “bring the troops home” and “troops in 147 countries.” All those folks who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 to end the war may be wondering where the determined young antiwar senator went; now he doesn’t even talk about America’s wars.

It’s no surprise that Ron Paul uses the words “freedom” and “liberty” more than all the other candidates combined. Those words are pretty basic to the American political tradition. Why don’t the other candidates mention them? He’s also the most likely to mention the Constitution, the document that limits the powers the candidates wish to exercise.

What doesn’t he talk about? He hardly mentions jobs, education, and health care. Why? Are those unimportant parts of life? No, but he correctly sees that they’re outside the proper scope of government and that we shouldn’t look to the president to provide them. If the government operates within the Constitution, thus protecting liberty, the people will do a better job than government in providing for human needs, including jobs, education, and health care.

What Ron Paul Talks About is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s an edited version of last night’s special “Stossel” show following the State of the Union Address. Our Cato tape editors have cut right to my opening one-one-one with Stossel, wherein I talk about Obama’s “blueprint” for America and my suggestion for a bumper sticker reading YES YOU DID. Later Matt Welch, Megan McArdle, and Gov. Gary Johnson join the discussion and take on issue of taxes, Iraq, the looming but mostly ignored entitlements crisis, outsourcing, and the president’s audacious claim that his $50 billion bailout of GM and Chrysler had been a good deal. Skip the commercials, watch it here:

The State of the Union on Stossel is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Great article in the Sunday Washington Post by James Grant on the depression of 1920-21 and how after President Warren G. Harding’s response, “the unemployment rate fell from 15.6 percent to 9 percent (on its way to 3.2 percent in 1923), while constant-dollar output leapt by 16 percent. After which the 1920s proverbially roared.”

And how did the administration of Warren G. Harding, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, produce these astonishing results? Why, by raising interest rates, reducing the public debt and balancing the federal budget.

Pundits often accuse Herbert Hoover of “doing nothing” to counter the depression of 1929. Boy, are they wrong. Grant thinks Harding doesn’t get his due:

When he wasn’t presiding over a macroeconomic miracle cure, Harding convened a world disarmament conference and overhauled the creaky machinery of federal budget-making. For his trouble, historians customarily place him last, or next to last, in their rankings of U.S. presidents. Incredibly, they consign him near the bottom even in the subcategory of economic management, about 40 places behind Franklin D. Roosevelt, who inherited a depression that he didn’t actually fix.

The Hoover-Roosevelt-Bush-Obama do-something-anything-everything approach to economic recovery seems to result in elongated depressions. Take a look:

Maybe we should try the Harding do-nothing approach — which isn’t actually do-nothing; he cut taxes and spending and balanced the budget.

Cato scholars have written about how Harding ended a depression here and here.

How to End a Depression is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ron Paul didn’t do as well with Republican voters in South Carolina as he had done in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he’s still the king of Twitter. (And tweeters, of course, are the people who in one day faced down Hollywood and forced leading senators to withdraw their online-piracy bills.) Natalie Jennings of the Washington Post reports:

NBC’s Chuck Todd might have summed up Thursday’s events best with this tweet:

Books about this campaign will have chapters simply titled: “January 19th”

Mitt Romney faced mounting pressure to release his tax returns as reports surfaced Wednesday night he might have assets in bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

The Des Moines Register declared that Rick Santorum actually got more votes than Romney in the Iowa caucuses.

Rick Perry announced he would suspend his campaign in a morning news conference.

Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, said in interviews with ABC and The Washington Post that the former speaker had asked her for an open marriage.

And Gingrich exploded at moderator John King within the first few minutes of the CNN debate that night.

And yet, through it all, Ron Paul maintained his lead on the@MentionMachine leaderboard this week. We measured tweets from Wednesday at 7 p.m. through Friday at 4 p.m.

Lots of Cato commentary on Ron Paul here. Some Mitt Romney analysis here. Some pretty sharp criticisms of Rick Santorum here. Aaaand my colleagues haven’t been too keen on Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama either. What kind of policies would we like to see a presidential candidate propose? Check out the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

Ron Paul, President of Twitter is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of the most famous documents in the history of free-trade literature is Bastiat‘s famous “Candlemakers’ Petition.” In that parody, the French economist and parliamentarian imagined the makers of candles and street lamps petitioning the French Chamber of Deputies for protection from a most dastardly foreign competitor:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity. . . .

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival . . .  is none other than the sun.

For after all, Bastiat’s petitioners noted, how can the makers of candles and lanterns compete with a light source that is totally free?

Thank goodness we wouldn’t fall for such nonsense today. Or would we?

We may be about to find out. Makers of solar panels have petitioned the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission to slap tariffs on imported Chinese panels. Christopher Joyce of NPR reports that Gordon Brinser, CEO of Solar World, complains that U.S. manufacturers can’t compete with cheaper Chinese imports. The Chinese panels aren’t free; but just as Bastiat’s candlemakers complained, the competition is hard to counter.

Perhaps the comparison is unfair. After all, the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing isn’t asking for protection from the sun, only from Chinese panel producers who are allegedly “dumping” panels into the American market “at artificially low prices.”

What’s the difference, though? Any source that supplies solar panels to American consumers and businesses is a competitor of the American industry. And any source that can deliver any product cheaper than American companies is a tough competitor. Domestic producers will no doubt gain by imposing a tariff on their Chinese competitors. But companies that install solar power will lose, by having to pay higher prices for panels.

Businesses would always prefer a world without competitors. If they can’t outcompete their rivals in the marketplace, they may be tempted to ask the government for protection. And our “antidumping” laws actually invite such complaints. But economists agree that consumers, and the businesses that use imported products, lose more on net than producers gain. Protectionism is a bad deal for the American economy. Let’s hope the uncompetitive solar panel manufacturers get told to go build a better mousetrap.

More on “antidumping” laws here.

The Panel Makers’ Petition is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Congratulations to Wikipedia for going dark for a day in protest of the “online piracy” bills being considered in Congress.

But what do we do for information today? You know, we’ve gotten used to being able to find information now. So here’s an idea: Try the original encyclopedia, the one written (in most cases, ahem) by scholars and experts, Britannica.

You could start with their article on libertarianism. Or indeed their article on censorship. And then move on to the columns that I wrote there for most of 2011, on such topics as the debt ceiling crisis, the French Revolution, the founding documents of the United States and the Communist Party of China, the false charge of isolationism, marriage equality in 1967 and 2011,  government waste (“this is the business you have chosen“), the Stonewall protests, the triumph of feminism, and why Keynes threw towels on the floor. Good heavens — that ought to keep you busy on Wednesday.

And then Thursday at noon, as Wikipedia and other sites reopen, you can go down to Capitol Hill at noon to see a panel of experts explain what’s wrong with the bills that the websites are protesting.

Today, at Least, Britannica Rules the Web is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann frets over Ron Paul’s “hostility to government” in an article titled “Enemy of the State.” I wonder if Lemann, who is both a long-time writer at a great magazine and the dean of a great school of journalism, would think “Enemy of the State” was red-baiting or otherwise inappropriate language if it was applied to some other candidate.

But I was especially struck by this comment in Lemann’s lament about all the government programs Paul would repeal:

As for the financial crisis, Paul would have countenanced no regulation that might have prevented it, no government stabilization of the financial system after it happened, and no special help for working people hurt by it. This is where the logic of government-shrinking leads.

The famous New Yorker editing process seems to have broken down here. Here’s how the paragraph should have read:

As for the financial crisis, Paul would have countenanced none of the regulation that helped to cause it, no government creation of cheap money that created the unsustainable boom, and no special help for Wall Street banks when the bubble collapsed. He would have seen that that was where the logic of government-expanding leads.

The New Yorker Misunderstands Ron Paul (Again) is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Sunday Washington papers carried several dire reports about the state of freedom in America. Funny thing is, they didn’t much agree on what kinds of freedoms are being lost.

In the Washington Post, law professor Jonathan Turley warned:

In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves? . . . .

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.

He pointed to such hallmarks of authoritarian states as the official assassination of U.S. citizens, warrantless searches, immunity from judicial review, and continual monitoring of citizens.

Meanwhile, the editorial in the Washington Examiner deplored the rise in regulation and federal spending under President Obama “and the resulting decline in U.S. economic freedom.”

And Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in the Examiner about President Obama’s not-really-recess appointments:

The Framers of the Constitution saw it a different way. When the Senate refuses to confirm a presidential appointee, that person does not take office. When the Senate is not in recess, the president cannot make a recess appointment.

The Framers thought it more important to limit power than for government to act quickly. Obama disagrees.

All good points. The three articles together would make a comprehensive case brief on the loss of freedom under President Obama. And under President Bush, of course. After all, Turley notes that Bush pioneered many of the new powers that Obama now exercises. Bush also increased federal spending dramatically and expanded regulation and economic intervention from Sarbanes-Oxley to TSA to TARP.

Libertarians have long argued that freedom is indivisible, that it is difficult to sustain either political or economic freedom for long without the other. These articles remind us that both economic and civil liberties are threatened today, and thus we need a broad movement to protect and advance liberty and limited government against all these threats.

Freedom Left and Right is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The other day I saw a bumper sticker with an Obama logo and the words YES WE DID. This was hardly a surprise, as Obama got 67 percent of the vote in my neighborhood and 72 percent in my county, home to lobbyists and bureaucrats. And the embattled Republicans don’t flaunt their dissidence on their bumpers. But I began to wonder just what the driver was proud of.

Yes we did increase the national debt by $4 trillion? Yes we did create a national health insurance program passed in such haste that it’s full of gross errors and requires restrictions on telling the media about it? Yes we did continue the wars a lot longer than we promised? Yes we did launch a third war in the Middle East without congressional authorization? Yes we did exercise presidential power more aggressively than George W. Bush? Yes we did laugh at the very idea of not arresting people for smoking pot? Yes we did ratchet up regulatory costs in a weak economy? Yes we did create the slowest recovery in postwar history?

Soon even my Republican neighbors may be sporting bumper stickers reading YES YOU DID.

Yes They Did is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The reviewers warned me — don’t see The Iron Lady, the new movie starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. Kelly Jane Torrance of the Washington Examiner mourns, “The climax of this movie about one of the most important people — not just women, but people — of the 20th century comes when Margaret Thatcher decides to throw out her dead husband’s clothes.” James Verniere of the Boston Herald asks, “Mamma mia! Why would you turn the story of Margaret Thatcher into a tale of a sweet, dotty old lady having a love affair with her beloved late husband?” Virginia Postrel excoriates the filmmakers: “These supposedly feminist filmmakers could have portrayed Thatcher as an ambitious woman who had nothing to feel guilty about. Instead they chose to inject guilt where it did not belong. They obscured Thatcher’s public accomplishments in a fog of private angst. The portrait of dementia isn’t the problem. The way the film uses old age to punish a lifetime of accomplishment is.”

Even the Washington Post, the New York Times (“You are left with the impression of an old woman who can’t quite remember who she used to be and of a movie that is not so sure either.”), and the New Yorker wonder why you would make a movie about one of the most influential and controversial political figures, the first woman to lead a Western country, the woman who arguably saved Great Britain and helped Ronald Reagan win the Cold War, and then spend half the film depicting her as a confused old lady with hallucinations.

Nevertheless, Thatcher is indeed a compelling figure, and the commercials and trailers showed Streep portraying her as a leader of conviction and strength. So I ignored the critics and bought a ticket. And the film was slightly better than I expected. It absolutely wastes about 40 percent of its time on the imagined scenes of a confused old lady. How much more rewarding it would have been to see a great actress play a pioneering political figure rising to power, leading her country, and facing opposition from both friends and enemies. Instead, we get a few vignettes of that, about half the film’s running time. So it wasn’t terrible, just a lost opportunity.

Interestingly, the marketing team at Weinstein Company seems to understand the appeal of a film on Margaret Thatcher far better than the writer and director. They know what the audience wants. Take a look at the trailer:

You’ll notice that there’s not a single shot of the old-lady part of the movie. Instead, it’s two fast minutes of Margaret Thatcher in action. Including a final scene (“Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies”) that harks back to an earlier scene of Thatcher on her way up, dramatizes her uniqueness — and is actually not in the film.

So I have a suggestion: Often the DVD of a film will include the film as released to theaters and also a “Director’s Cut” that reflects the director’s own artistic choices that the studio may have blocked. I recommend that the DVD of The Iron Lady include a “Marketer’s Cut” that omits all the old-lady scenes and just shows us Margaret Thatcher the political figure. And if there’s good material like the “join the ladies” scene left on the cutting-room floor, then the marketers could add that back in. In that case, I’d buy the DVD. In fact, someone should start a Facebook campaign: “Put a Marketer’s Cut of The Iron Lady on the DVD.”

By the way, Mitt Romney should not want Republicans to watch this movie: It will remind them of what it means to be inspired by a political leader.

The Weinstein Marketing Team Understands Margaret Thatcher’s Appeal Better than the Writer and Director of ‘The Iron Lady’ Do is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Washington Examiner ran this Heritage Foundation chart on January 10 under the title (not online) “Defense spending at lowest levels in 60 years”:

Dramatic, eh? It shows defense spending plunging for the past 40 or more years. Except . . . wait a minute . . . has defense spending plunged? This chart from the Cato Institute’s Downsizing Government project sheds some light:

In fact, Pentagon spending in real, inflation-adjusted dollars has roughly doubled since 2000 and is up about 50 percent since 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War. (And note that the recent figures don’t include the cost of the ongoing wars.) So what’s going on? Why the difference in the charts? The Heritage chart, of course, focuses on Pentagon spending as a percentage of the federal budget. And what has happened to the federal budget in the past 40 years? Well, as it happens, another Heritage Foundation chart shows that pretty clearly:

Obviously, the big story in the federal budget over the past 40 years is the dramatic rise in spending on transfer payments. Does the Heritage Foundation really want to suggest that when spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid rises, military spending should rise commensurately? That when President Bush creates a trillion-dollar Medicare prescription drug entitlement, he should also add a trillion dollars to the Pentagon budget to keep “Defense Spending as a Percentage of the Federal Budget” at its previous level?

Cato and Heritage scholars have often differed on U.S. foreign policy and the defense budget that it implies. But surely neither group would actually suggest that U.S. national security should be measured by the relationship of military spending to entitlement spending. Surely we would agree that military spending must be sufficient to ensure U.S. security and not tied to some extraneous factor. So I invite the creators and promoters of the above chart to explain exactly what they think it proves.

By the way, Heritage’s Rob Bluey, in introducing this chart, writes, “The chart also debunks the myth that our Founding Fathers were isolationists.” But again context matters. I’ll leave the debate over foreign policy in the early Republic to another day. But if total federal spending in 1820 was $19.4 million, and 53 percent of it was for defense, what that tells us is that the federal government was wonderfully small in the early years of the Republic. I’m pretty sure that $10 million military budget didn’t pay for two wars, troops in 150 countries, or a million-man standing army.

Misleading Images on Defense Spending is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Claim: “I am not a libertarian.”  

Conclusion: True.

Fact-checking Santorum is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog