Four years ago the movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was celebrated mostly as a “stoner” movie: smart young Asian guys smoke pot and get the munchies. When I finally got around to watching it, it was funnier than I expected. And very near the end of the movie, after an all-night road trip in which they encountered more obstacles than Odysseus, when Harold finally gives up and says he can’t make the last leg of the epic journey to White Castle, came this wonderful speech from Kumar:

So, you think this is just about the burgers, huh? Let me tell you, it’s about far more than that. Our parents came to this country, escaping persecution, poverty and hunger. Hunger, Harold. They were very, very hungry. They wanted to live in a land that treated them as equals, a land filled with hamburger stands. And not just one type of hamburger, okay? Hundreds of types with different sizes, toppings, and condiments. That land was America! America, Harold! America! Now this is about achieving what our parents set out for. This is about the pursuit of happiness. This night . . . is about the American Dream! Dude, we can stay here, get arrested, and end our hopes of ever going to White Castle. Or, we can take that hang glider and make our leap towards freedom. I leave the decision up to you.

Escaping persecution, poverty and hunger . . . to find ample food and unlimited choices . . . the pursuit of happiness . . . the American Dream. Yes, I think writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were on to something.

And now comes the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. After another improbable road trip, the fugitive youths literally drop in on George W. Bush’s Texas ranch. In the increasingly fantastic plot, the president invites them to join him in hiding from the scary Cheney, shares his pot with them, and then promises to clear up the unfortunate misunderstanding that landed them in Guantanamo Bay. An uninhibited but still skeptical Kumar says, “I’m not sure I trust our government any more, sir.” And President Bush delivers this ringing libertarian declaration:

Hey, I’m in the government, and I don’t even trust it. You don’t have to trust your government to be a patriot. You just have to trust your country.

Harold & Kumar: more wisdom than a month of right-wing talk radio. Hurwitz and Schlossberg get what America is about.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, May 22, 1964, at the University of Michigan:

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization…. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society….

The Great Society … is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community…. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods….

Worst of all, expansion [of the economy]  is eroding the precious and time-honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference….

The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities….

For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation…Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?…There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree….”

David Brooks, May 9, 2008, everywhere:

It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way….

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Nearly two years after its release, David Hyman’s satire Medicare Meets Mephistopheles is still generating reviews — and controversy. 

In the April 2008 issue of the Michigan Law Review, Michigan law professor Jill Horwitz raves:

Hyman is extraordinarily knowledgeable about health care regulation and his exposition is succinct. The book is filled with informative and accurate summaries of Medicare’s complicated program design and related laws. The summaries of fraud and abuse law, for example, make my heart sing. I’ve seldom seen such an accessible and accurate primer.

It would be a stretch, however, to claim that Horwitz and Hyman see eye-to-eye.  Horwitz concludes her 19-page review thus:

Medicare Meets Mephistopheles is a terrific overview of a troubled system, but a missed opportunity to help reform Medicare. Providing health care fairly and efficiently is a complicated process that necessarily involves a heavy dose of government. Libertarian railing against big government, regulation, and all lefty foolishness that market proponents despise doesn’t get one very far in determining how to get health care to 300 million people. In the end Hyman doesn’t offer any realistic alternative to this government-regulated muddle because, God knows, his plans are unacceptable anywhere but in hell.

Ay caramba!

Bill Eilberg, a Club for Growth member who attended Cato University last year, sent this review into the Club blog:

I’m not one who easily sits through lectures, but at Cato University, I can honestly tell you that my attention span was at its highest level, as I listened more intently than I ever had done in college or law school.

I note that Rob McDonald is on the faculty again this year. Rob is one of the most talented speakers one will ever hear. His discussions on American history are positively riveting. I will never forget listening to his poignant account of how George Washington quelled a potential revolt by his officers, taking out his reading glasses to quote from a text (it is a story you may have heard already, but Rob is a master at retelling it). If I had the opportunity, I could listen to him for hours.

Bill is certainly right. Cato University gets rave reviews every year. Once again this July, it will be held at the beautiful Rancho Bernardo Inn near San Diego. Speakers will include Tom Palmer, Peter Van Doren, Gene Healy, and Michael Cannon of Cato. Reporting from around the world will be former Putin adviser Andrei Illarionov, German economist Karen Horn, elcato.org editor Gabriela Calderon, and Zimbabwean opposition leader Rejoice Ngwenya. And reporting from 1776, the aforementioned Professor McDonald.

Sign up now.

Peter Goodman writes in the New York Times that we live in a laissez-faire world created by Milton Friedman and that that wild, unfettered market has led to our current economic problems.  David Henderson, the first editor of Cato Policy Report, begs to differ. David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution, an economics professor in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School, and the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Liberty Fund, 2008). Here’s his critique of the Times article:

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The Virginia Supreme Court “reined in police searches yesterday, overturning convictions in two 2005 drug cases in which the court said police had conducted searches based on vague suspicions.” L. Steven Emmert, a Virginia lawyer-blogger, told the Washington Post he wasn’t surprised: “While Virginia is still one of the law-and-order states, the Supreme Court is very respective of Bill of Rights types of cases.”

I think “while” is the wrong conjunction in that sentence. Maybe it should be “Because Virginia is still one of the law-and-order states, the Supreme Court is very respective of Bill of Rights types of cases.”

“Law and order” is a phrase often used to imply “tough on crime” policies, perhaps suggesting harsh legal penalties harshly applied. Wikipedia notes, “The expression also sometimes carries the implication of arbitrary or unnecessary law enforcement, or excessive use of police powers.”

But law and order are necessary for the flourishing of human life. Advocates of liberty and limited government should not concede the concept of “law and order” to those who engage in “excessive use of police powers.” Those who actually believe in law and order would hold police and prosecutors, as well as criminal suspects, to the rule of law; and that seems to be what the Virginia Supreme Court did. So here’s to justices who understand that “law and order” and “the Bill of Rights” are allies, not enemies.

John McCain courted controversy recently with a new campaign slogan that some saw as a thinly veiled attack on Barack Obama’s eclectic background and upbringing. I don’t know if that interpretation is right, but McCain’s new tagline sounds like something out of Team America or Steven Colbert: “The American President Americans Have Been Waiting For” (And So Can You!).

Less ridiculous, and perhaps more unsettling, are McCain’s repeated appeals to “a cause greater than self-interest,” and his attacks on “cynicism,” which, as a determined cynic, I take very personally.

In his speeches, McCain periodically sneers at American opulence and suggests that leaving Americans alone to pursue their own visions of happiness is a narrow and ignoble goal for government. As I point out in my new book The Cult of the Presidency, that’s a common sentiment among the American intelligentsia, and one that’s been used repeatedly to concentrate power in the executive branch:

Like intellectuals the world over, many American pundits and scholars, right and left, view bourgeois contentment with disdain. Normal people appear to like “normalcy,” Warren Harding’s term for peace and prosperity, just fine. But all too many professional thinkers look out upon 300 million people living their lives by their own design and see something impermissibly hollow in the spectacle.

McCain’s campaign speeches reflect that theme. Here he is in a recent speech at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, telling his audience that if you “sacrifice for a cause greater than yourself, [you’ll] invest your life with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.” Here he is on his campaign webpage, insisting that “each and every one of us has a duty to serve a cause greater than our own self-interest.”

I’m not a Randian, so I’m not inclined to condemn this stuff as whim-worshipping altruism. In the abstract, I agree with the statement that when you turn away from your own self-interest, narrowly construed, and adopt a higher purpose than your own pleasure (which purpose need not, and ought not, have anything to do with service to the state), you’re likely to end up a happier person.  But why is any of this McCain’s business? The president is supposed to be a limited constitutional officer, not a national life coach-cum-self-help guru.

Making the case for “a cause greater” in the Naval Academy speech, McCain declared that

when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee.

Oh my, not “designer coffee”! The reflexive contempt for peace and prosperity McCain displays here is the essence of National Greatness Conservatism, and, as Matt Welch has pointed out in Myth of a Maverick, his devastating critique of the Arizona senator, John McCain is to National Greatness Conservatism as Barry Goldwater was to conservatism proper: the electoral standard bearer for the philosophy.

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Prof. Sherry Glied is chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.  In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, she gives a fair account of the difficulties of forcing people to purchase health insurance via an “individual mandate.”  Glied writes that an individual mandate “may require a degree of intrusiveness and bureaucracy that some will find unpalatable,” and, “The risks associated with individual mandates suggest that they are no panacea.”

Her closing observation, though, is novel and particularly noteworthy:

Perhaps the most important benefit of mandates is symbolic. By mandating the purchase of health insurance, governments signal to their citizens that coverage is critical. For many uninsured people as well as their families, communities, and elected representatives, this public commitment to coverage may lead to a reassessment of priorities. Although making mandates functional will be demanding, just passing a mandate may serve an important purpose by moving health insurance higher on the agendas of all these constituencies.

This illuminates a driving force behind mandates.  Advocates do not merely want to improve health and longevity.  They want to change other people’s values.  They want to make the uninsured value health and longevity more than the things that must be sacrificed to comply with the mandate — things like barhopping, education, starting their own business, etc.  And they are willing to use coercion (or the threat of coercion) to do so.  The debate over mandates is not just about how to reform health care.  It is also about who shapes your values.

No wonder there are so many people in the health care industry who support mandates.

In a recent op-ed I dub the two kinds of enemies of freedom in America “the Hillarys and the Huckabees.” I think it has a nice ring.

Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee are classic examples of two strains of big-government thinking in a country that otherwise prefers small government. Hillary is the quintessential nanny-state liberal who is determined to have the government take care of adult Americans the way parents take care of children. Huckabee wants the government to stamp out sin and make us all do God’s will as he sees it….

But, despite that heritage of freedom, we’ve always got the Hillarys and the Huckabees and the other people who think they could run our lives better than we can. The Huckabees on the right continue to resist the cultural changes of the 1960s, and the Hillarys on the left continue to resist the economic changes of the 1980s.

The “Huckabees” want to censor cable television because they don’t think you can be trusted to decide what your family should watch. They support bans on drugs, pornography, gambling and violent video games because you just don’t know what’s good for you. They want prayer in the schools and sound science out. They want to subsidize heterosexual marriage and ban gay marriage. They want government to take the place of God and stamp out sin on earth. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, a classic Huckabee, complains about “this whole idea of personal autonomy, … this idea that people should be left alone.”

The “Hillarys,” meanwhile, want to raise taxes because they think they can spend your money more wisely than you can. They don’t believe in school choice because you don’t know how to choose a school for your children. They think they can handle your retirement savings and health care better than you can. They think, as Hillary Clinton has advocated, that the government should produce video lectures on how to burp a baby and how to brush your teeth and have them “running continuously in doctors’ offices, clinics, hospitals, motor vehicle offices, or any other place where people gather and have to wait.”

The Huckabees want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. The Hillarys want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in and setting your curfew. But the proper role for the government of a free society is to treat adults as adults, responsible for making their own decisions and accepting the consequences.

Move over Ron Paul, my heart belongs to Jack! How long until we see a “Kevorkian Girl” on You-Tube?

The assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian announced that he was running for Congress as an independent. If elected, he said his main priority would be promoting the Ninth Amendment, which protects rights not explicitly specified elsewhere in the Constitution. Mr. Kevorkian, 79, says he interprets it as protecting a person’s choice to die through assisted suicide or to avoid wearing a seat belt. The Congressional seat in Detroit’s suburbs is now held by Representative Joe Knollenberg, a Republican who is seeking re-election.

Those still a bit uncertain about the wisdom of physician assisted suicide might want to keep in mind the following three words: President Hillary Clinton.

I just came across this letter I wrote to the editor of the Washington Post.  Sadly, the editor declined to publish it.  Since the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments about the D.C. gun ban and the meaning of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller, it remains relevant:

On January 5, we learned that District officials filed a brief with the Supreme Court [”Gun Law Prevents Harm, D.C. Argues,” Jan. 5] defending the city’s gun ban on the grounds that: the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms; the ban “does not deprive the people of reasonable means to defend themselves;” and “less restrictive approaches would not be adequate.”

Fifteen pages later, Colbert I. King [”Outfoxed In the District,” Jan. 5] wrote of the “conditions that threaten the quality of life of all who live in this city: criminals roaming the streets in search of human prey; an apathetic and complacent government workforce; nonproducers ensconced in high places; and elected leaders who fall for snow jobs.”

Draw your own conclusions.

Earlier this week, I participated in a lively debate on individual mandates — i.e., a legal requirement that every American purchase health insurance.  Also on the panel were Prof. Sherry Glied of Columbia University, Bob Moffit of the Heritage Foundation, and Peter Harbage of the New America Foundation. 

The debate can be viewed online at KaiserNetwork.org.

As the debate was sponsored by the National Federation of Independent Business, which has yet to take a position on an individual mandate, it should be of particular interest to small business owners and employees. 

Congressional Quarterly quoted me as saying, “Universal coverage is a bomb that will blow up for small businesses.”  (I meant to say that a policy of universal coverage, and thus an individual mandate, would blow up in their faces.  We’ll have to see what the tape says.)  Also: “Tax reform and deregulation are how to relieve the burden of health benefits for small business, and they have the added benefit of being the right thing to do.”

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason have a great cover story in Politics, the new and livelier update of Campaigns and Elections magazine.  Titled “Tuned Out,” the article says that “politics is a lagging indicator of American society,” so this year’s presidential candidates are “channeling shopworn agendas and tired identities to a body politic desperate for a new political era.”

They predict that today’s individualist, consumer-driven culture will eventually produce a politics to match. “Much of this new activity will be explicitly libertarian, since the decentralization of control and individual empowerment is so deeply embedded in Internet technology and culture…. The Long Tail future of politics just as surely belongs to the president and party that figures out the secret to success is giving away power by letting the voter decide more of what matters.”

We can only hope. The cover illustration for the article, showing a Fountainhead-reading, South Park-watching young voter impervious to the appeals of the two old parties, reminded me of this recent “Zippy the Pinhead” cartoon, which also contrasted two big-government parties with leave-me-alone independents (click for larger version):

For more on libertarian voters, go here and here.

Move over, George Clooney. Libertarianism is the hottest new thing among serious artists. One of our greatest living playwrights, David Mamet, has just announced that he has given up “brain-dead liberalism” for a new appreciation of capitalism and constitutionalism.

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart….

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long….

And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations”—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live…

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow….

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

David Mamet. In the Village Voice. Ouch. Limousine liberals must be crying in their Pellegrino.

But he’s not the only one. Tom Stoppard, another candidate for the title of greatest living playwright, recently admitted to being a “timid libertarian” in an interview with Time:

Stoppard has always stood apart from many other British playwrights of his generation, like David Hare, for avoiding an overtly political (usually left-wing) point of view. He describes his politics as “timid libertarian.” Yet he can rev up a pretty bold rant on Britain’s “highly regulated society,” which he thinks is “betraying the principle of parliamentary democracy.” There was the garden party he threw recently, for example, where because there was a pond on the property, he was required to hire two lifeguards. “The whole notion that we’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that’s all going now. And I don’t even know in whose interest it’s supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It’s in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago.”

This was no surprise to fans–such as the British political theorist Norman Barry–who had seen themes of freedom, responsibility, morality, and anti-communism (he was born in Czechoslovakia, though his family left before the communists replaced the Nazis in power) in his plays.

Poor Hollywood. Still mired in old, outmoded left-liberalism as high culture moves toward an embrace of freedom.

At Freedom Communications, the media company founded by the tenacious libertarian publisher R. C. Hoiles, which is still largely family-owned and freedom-oriented, they had an internal lunch debate on presidential politics the other day. According to Orange County Register columnist Frank Mickadeit, their corporate philosopher Tibor Machan advocated voting for the Libertarian Party. But the company’s CEO, Scott Flanders, had a different view:

But there was a hush as Flanders reasoned that Obama is the best candidate to work on four top libertarian reforms: 1) Iraq withdrawal, 2) restoring the separation of church and state; 3) easing off victimless crimes such as drug use; 4) curtailing the Patriot Act.

As it happens, a few days earlier I had talked to a leading libertarian writer, who told me that he supposed he’d vote for Obama on the basis of the Iraq issue.

Libertarian voters should be up for grabs this year, the Republicans having done such an effective job of pushing them away. But the Democrats don’t seem to be making much of a pitch for them. At the last Democratic debate, Clinton and Obama spent the first 30 minutes proclaiming their devotion to socialized medicine and protectionism. But maybe issues of peace and civil liberties — combined with the Republicans’ loss of credibility on fiscal and economic issues — really will push some libertarians into the arms of the Democrats, especially if the Democratic nominee is not self-proclaimed “government junkie” Hillary Clinton.

We knew it had to happen but still it’s a shock. A classical liberal — and libertarian enabler — in so many ways, William F. Buckley, Jr. was the quintessential public intellectual without whom public intellectual life is now hard to fathom.

Though not a great philosophical influence on me personally — I came around to his writing later even than I started reading National Review (originally finding it, to use both Buckleyesque language and irony, sesquipedalian) — the institution he created and movement he fostered certainly affect my life daily. Before think tanks emerged to counter the left-wing takeover of the academy and public discourse, before cable channels provided alternatives to network news, long before the Reagan Revolution, Buckley famously began standing athwart history yelling stop.

All this while embodying the prolific, polymathic, bon vivant style that appeals to those of us who ever dreamed of inhabiting that realm of ideas between academia and the real world and having great fun doing it. Well played, Mr. Buckley, well played.

Brian Doherty, the author of the magisterial Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, has some generous things to say about my new book The Politics of Freedom in Sunday’s New York Post. I especially like the subtitle in the reason.com version: “sells the libertarian message with sizzle.”

Brian discusses my claims about the extent of libertarianism among American voters and writes:

Whatever the near-term prospects for libertarian political victories, The Politics of Freedom reminds you of the service libertarians provide to public discourse: They can point out the hypocrisy, power grabs, hubris and counterproductive folly issuing from Washington under either political brand name since they are beholden to neither. …

No major political party has fully embraced the implications of the proper role of government that follow from Boaz’s simple limited-government vision. But when expressed that plainly, it’s a moral vision many Americans can cheer.

The Politics of Freedom is available at all fine bookstores, at Amazon, and from the Cato Institute.

The cover story of this week’s Washington Post Magazine offers a fantastic look at how lobbyists make a living by helping some people take from others.  Every citizen should read it.  Casual observers of government may be surprised (and nauseated) to see how elaborate, expensive, and disingenuous such efforts have become.  (Students of public choice economics will not be.)  As author Jeffrey H. Birnbaum notes, it’s usually the wealthy who are trying to do the taking.

The article is about the travel industry trying to force taxpayers to fund the industry’s advertising campaigns.  (Birnbaum includes such gems as: “One thing everyone agreed on: The travel industry did not want to pay for the ads itself.”)  But the story could have been written about nearly any of the countless lobbying shops littering the D.C. landscape:

The explosion in the size of K Street, the locus of the lobbying industry, is an extension of the growth and reach of government. The ballooning federal budget has its tentacles in every aspect of American life and commerce. No serious industry or interest can function without monitoring, and at least trying to manipulate, Washington’s decision makers. The penalty for ignoring the federal government can run into the billions of dollars. Just ask Microsoft. The software giant was hit with an antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department in the late 1990s and, in 2001, agreed to alter the way it packaged its computer operating system. Before then, it had mostly ignored the nation’s capital.

Bad mistake. Chastened by its defeat, Microsoft has built a powerhouse presence in Washington, as have scores of other companies and industries. Lobbyists argue that it’s a relatively cheap investment. The Carmen Group, a mid-size lobbying firm, regularly compares its clients’ costs with the benefits it says they receive from lobbying. In its latest internal assessment, Carmen said it collected $15 million in fees from about 70 clients and delivered $1.5 billion in assistance — measured both in benefits received and in burdens avoided — a return ratio of roughly 1 to 100. Most clients still part with their lobbying dollars grudgingly. But they do part with them, which is why new buildings are going up all the time to accommodate the industry’s growth. Want a former senator to guarantee a meeting with a current senator? No problem. Half the senators who leave Congress for the private sector register to lobby. Need to know the history of a tax law and whom best to ask to change it? Easy. At least half a dozen consulting firms are composed of nothing but former congressional tax aides and Treasury Department officials who know as much as, and probably more than, the current people inside.

And why wouldn’t ex-lawmakers and aides gravitate to K Street? Lobbying jobs pay at least twice and sometimes three times government salaries. Serving in government is now viewed by many on Capitol Hill as a steppingstone to a lucrative career in bending government to the whims of paying clients. In many ways, lobbying now mimics the government it targets. It has become a bureaucracy, with its own language, its own peculiar ways of doing business and, most important, its own instinct to survive.

Indeed, the last thing any lobbyist wants is to win everything his or her client is seeking. That would mean an end to a retainer, the closing of the feedbag. Success for a lobbyist is not outright victory but, rather, just enough progress to justify the creation of an elaborate and well-funded lobbying apparatus. Even outright failure can underscore the need to lobby harder.

Lobbying is Washington’s version of a perpetual motion machine. Once it gets revved up, it rarely stops running. In fact, it tends to grow. 

All of which raises this question: why don’t we see more such stories?  Whatever the reason, Birnbaum deserves kudos for inspecting this small corner of the sausage factory.

Of course, the solution is not to restrict the people’s ability to lobby Congress.  All that sleazy lobbying is nothing more than “petition[ing] the government for a redress of grievances” — a constitutionally protected activity.  The solution, conveniently enough, is to respect the rest of the Constitution too.  Were the People to do that, those sleazy lobbyists wouldn’t get anywhere.

Today’s Washington Post has a story on economic espionage by Chinese interests, most of which have connections to the Chinese government and military. Inexplicably, the headline of the story is “Even Spies Embrace China’s Free Market.”

Government-sponsored economic espionage has little to do with free markets. These are crimes (or at least civil wrongs) sponsored directly or indirectly by over-large governments. Crime and over-large governments are antithetical to free markets, not a part of them.

Evidently, there’s some kind of market failure at the Post. (Note to the economic illiterates at the Post: That’s a joke.)

The New York Times has a fascinating article explaining how bail bondsmen are a uniquely American, quasi-private element of the criminal justice system:

…posting bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee…is all but unknown in the rest of the world. In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant’s bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror — a form of obstruction of justice. …Other countries almost universally reject and condemn Mr. Spath’s trade, in which defendants who are presumed innocent but cannot make bail on their own pay an outsider a nonrefundable fee for their freedom. “It’s a very American invention,” John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. “It’s really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.” …Bail is meant to make sure defendants show up for trial. It has ancient roots in English common law, which relied on sworn promises and on pledges of land or property from the defendants or their relatives to make sure they did not flee. America’s open frontier and entrepreneurial spirit injected an innovation into the process: by the early 1800s, private businesses were allowed to post bail in exchange for payments from the defendants and the promise that they would hunt down the defendants and return them if they failed to appear. …The system costs taxpayers nothing, Mr. Kreins said, and it is exceptionally effective at ensuring that defendants appear for court. …According to the Justice Department and academic studies, the clients of commercial bail bond agencies are more likely to appear for court in the first place and more likely to be captured if they flee than those released under other forms of supervision.

Libertarians sometimes get accused of being utopians because of occasional debates about the degree to which things such as roads, defense, and law enforcement can be handled by the private sector. But this article is a great introduction to a thought experiment: Imagine if America’s private bail system did not exist and one of Cato’s legal experts proposed privatization of whatever system the government had created instead. That proposal doubtlessly would be condemned as utopian, unrealistic, impractical, and unworkable. Fortunately, that impossible idea has been successfully in place for about two hundred years. Just something to keep in mind the next time a statist tells you that something only can be done by government.

John McCain has a campaign finance problem. When his campaign was down and out, he agreed to take public funding for the primaries. Public funding comes with spending limits overall and by state. Also, a candidate who accepts funding cannot raise money from private sources. Now that it is possible he will be the nominee, McCain will want to be free of those fundraising and spending limits, but he cannot withdraw from the public system. Or perhaps he could but only with the approval of the FEC, which is not operating because of a struggle over its nominees. The FEC does not now have a quorum to meet and regulate. (The lack of a quorum was caused by Barack Obama’s hold on a nominee to the FEC, but never mind).

McCain will want out of the public system because he is probably close to hitting the limit, and he could not get more money for his campaign until he received public funding after the GOP convention during the summer.  His “dark period” would thus be a period without campaign funding that would run from spring until after the GOP convention. During that “dark period” Obama or Hillary, both of whom have not accepted public funding for the primaries, would be able to continue spending money; some of that spending would be directed against McCain after Obama or Hillary has secured the party’s nomination.

So McCain needs to get out of the public system and fast. One way would be to refuse public funding for the fall campaign; he could then start raising money privately now; however, he pledged to accept public funding for the general election if his opponent did so. Obama has taken a similar pledge.   Also, McCain would get around some of this by using “outside groups” (527 groups and others ) to fund his effort, but he has been a fierce critic of such groups and tactics.

I have often noticed that people whom you would expect to support campaign finance regulation (e.g. liberal Democrats) often are strident critics of the system if they have had some personal contact with the web of regulation.  McCain is in a mess fostered in part by his own self-righteousness. Somehow I do not expect his personal contact with the system will make him a critic of it in 2009.

See also Mark Schmitt’s concise and informative report.

That’s how Len Nichols of the New America Foundation described market prices for health insurance 41 minutes into this this webcast:

“We stopped child labor.  We stopped slavery.  We ought to stop extreme risk selection, too.”

I imagine more than a few actuaries and twentysomethings would be offended by the comparison.

Thanks to alert viewer Terry Holman for catching what I missed as I sat there listening to Nichols.

That’s what Sherry Glied (Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health), Len Nichols (New America Foundation) and I discuss with Larry Levitt in this Kaiser Family Foundation webcast. 

Atilla Yayla, the courageous leader of the Association for Liberal Thinking in Turkey, who has spoken at the Cato Institute and taken part in Cato conferences and programs, has been found guilty of allegedly insulting the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The 15 month prison sentence was suspended.

Background from my previous blog posts here and here.

The New York Times ran a piece on Friday on the likely direction for freedom of speech in Turkey, “Turkey to Alter Speech Law,” which focuses on Atilla’s case.

Atilla is a brave man and a friend of the liberty of everyone. Please write to the Turkish Ambassador in your country, respectfully (please) requesting that proceedings be undertaken to void the sentence. Here is the info for the Turkish Embassy in the USA.

The scene is Central Europe. It’s 1990-something. After a bicycle tour of the Czech Republic’s Bohemian countryside, Jim Harper and his girlfriend have traveled into Hungary and a town called Eger, two hours by train northeast of the capital.

In a small valley not far out of town, there are dozens of underground wine cellars where vintners store and sell the local wine, Egri Bikaver, also known as “Bull’s Blood.” As the evening winds on and the cellars close, visitors concentrate themselves more and more tightly into the remaining open cellars. The wine and proximity make for good conversation and new friendships.

Late on, this particular evening, as our table edged toward overstaying, one of our group stood up and sang his country’s national anthem. He was Estonian.

It was a very long song. I’d like to say otherwise, but his singing wasn’t all that good. And he was quite overly serious about it. With the song going on so long, and the wine having its full effects, the scene edged toward the comical.

Since that evening, the Bull’s Blood wine and our Estonian friend have provided touches of mirth and memory that interesting travel will. The Estonian singer has been the subject of some affectionate joking, I’ll admit.

That’s a little bit regrettable, because I now know that there’s more to the story. Watch the trailer here.

Estonia’s Mart Laar was the winner of Cato’s Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty in 2006.

Readers may have noticed that the fringes of the blogosphere have been aflame with attacks on the Cato Institute and several of our staff members—and former staff members, and former Board members, and occasional writers, and friends, and people we once met at a cocktail party—all because of our attempt to separate the grand old cause of classical liberalism from racism and bigotry.

Readers may also have noticed that we haven’t responded to any of these attacks. I published one statement setting forth my view that people who write racist newsletters “are not our comrades, not part of our movement.” And that’s been the extent of our response. (Though of course a few of my colleagues who maintain private blogs have written about the current controversy there.)

Indeed, you might note that this blog has never mentioned the name of the proprietor of the website where many of the vicious attacks have appeared, who is also widely reported to be the author of those reprehensible passages that have so embarrassed his political patron. Some people tell us they deplore “libertarian infighting.” Well, I’d make two responses to that: We’re not fighting. And people who defend racist writings (though almost never by actually quoting them, I note) are not what I’d call libertarians.

Let it not be thought that by ignoring these critics we tacitly concede their wild accusations and innuendos. Many of the things that have been written about us are false, or intentionally misleading, or wildly conspiratorial, or frankly nuts. (Of course, a few of the charges are true. I do in fact live near the Orange Line of the Washington Metro, and Reason magazine’s Washington office is on the Red Line, and red is next to orange in the color spectrum.) The reason we’ve refrained from answering these libels stems from a bit of folk wisdom I learned growing up in the South: Never wrestle with a pig; in the first place, you get dirty; and in the second place, the pig likes it. 

Besides, we’d rather take on bigger game. My colleagues and I will continue to spend our time arguing with big-government liberals and big-government conservatives, criticizing the Iraq war and the federal tax code, publishing the ideas of Bastiat, Mises, and Hayek in languages around the world, and skewering wasteful and unconstitutional government programs.

But I’ll take just a moment to repeat what I said a few days ago:

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.