Free or Equal on PBS

Posted by David Boaz

In 1980 Milton Friedman made a splash with his 10-part PBS documentary, Free to Choose, which also became a bestselling book. Thirty years later Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg travels in Friedman’s footsteps to see what has actually happened in those places Friedman’s ideas helped transform. From Stockholm to Estonia to India, from New York to Hong Kong to Chile and Washington, D.C., Norberg examines the contemporary relevance of Friedman’s ideas in the 2011 world of globalization and financial crisis. The result is a one-hour documentary, Free or Equal: A Personal View, which is now running on PBS stations across the country.

Visit the Free to Choose Network page to find out more about the documentary. Click on “Carriage Grid” to find showings in your area. Note that it’s arranged by size of media market, so New York is first, then Los Angeles, and so on down through 210 media markets. It’s searchable.

I missed the first Washington showing on Sunday, so check it out today. But note that showings will run into mid-September, so your friends will have many chances to catch the show.

And for a book by Norberg on related issues, check out In Defense of Global Capitalism.

Misunderstanding Nozick, Again

Posted by David Boaz

Someone called Stephen Metcalf writes at Slate of his horror at finding in “an otherwise quite groovy loft” in New York’s SoHo “not one but two copies of something called The Libertarian Reader.” Given that he manages to lump not just Paul Ryan and South Park but Sarah Palin into the libertarian basket, you can appreciate his dismay.

Metcalf puts Robert Nozick at the center of his argument, understandably enough. My colleague Tom Palmer says that academic critics almost always cite one chapter of one book, Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and declare that they have grappled with libertarian ideas. Still, it’s a good book and worth grappling with, and it did have an impact, as Metcalf notes:

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in ’75 [1976], the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

I’ll leave it to my more learned colleagues to analyze how successfully Metcalf actually deals with Nozick’s arguments. I just want to note one thing here. Like many other critics of libertarianism, Metcalf triumphantly announces:

How could a thinker as brilliant as Nozick stay a party to this? The answer is: He didn’t. “The libertarian position I once propounded,” Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late ’80s, “now seems to me seriously inadequate.”

Yes, yes, yes. It gets repeated a lot: “Even Nozick renounced libertarianism.” If it were true, it’s not clear what it would mean. Libertarianism is true, or not, whether or not Paul Krugman or Russell Kirk believes it, and whether or not Robert Nozick believes it. The idea stands or falls on its own. But as it happens, Nozick did “stay a party” to the libertarian idea. Shortly before his death in 2002, young writer Julian Sanchez (now a Cato colleague) interviewed him and had this exchange:

JS: In The Examined Life, you reported that you had come to see the libertarian position that you’d advanced in Anarchy, State and Utopia as “seriously inadequate.” But there are several places in Invariances where you seem to suggest that you consider the view advanced there, broadly speaking, at least, a libertarian one. Would you now, again, self-apply the L-word?

RN: Yes. But I never stopped self-applying. What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the “Core Principle of Ethics.”

So Nozick did not “disavow” libertarianism. Indeed, Tom Palmer adds a point that

David Schmidtz told at a forum about Schmidtz’s book from Cambridge University Press, Robert Nozick, held October 21, 2002 at the Cato Institute. According to David, Nozick told him that his alleged “apostasy” was mainly about rejecting the idea that to have a right is necessarily to have the right to alienate it, a thesis that he had reconsidered, on the basis of which reconsideration he concluded that some rights had to be inalienable. That represents, not a movement away from libertarianism, but a shift toward the mainstream of libertarian thought.

Metcalf’s criticisms of libertarianism will have to stand on their own, as will libertarianism itself. He doesn’t have Nozick on his side. As for Metcalf’s final complaint that advocates of a more expansive state have been “hectored into silence” by the vast libertarian power structure, well, I am, if not hectored, at least stunned into silence.

P.S. Matt Welch notes that if Metcalf doesn’t have Nozick on his side, at least he has Ann Coulter.

40 Years of Drug Prohibition

Posted by Tim Lynch

It was 40 years ago today that President Richard Nixon said the “drug menace” had reached the dimensions of a “national emergency.”  Nixon asked Congress to allocate $155 million to fight drug abuse and requested a new central office in the White House to coordinate governmental efforts on the problem.  Thus began the modern drug war.  It’s true that criminal laws were already in place in many jurisdictions, but it was Nixon’s call for a “new, all-out offensive” that really started to ramp things up.  Each year brought calls for more money–and that  meant more police, more raids, more wiretaps, more arrests, and more prisons.  And more foreign intervention.

The Associated Press ran a good article that examined the 40 year policy and the trillion dollars that went into the policy.   Here’s an excerpt:

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where [all the] money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

— $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

— $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

— $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

— $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

— $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

Read the whole thing.

I hosted a debate this week to mark this unfortunate policy milestone.  Cato senior fellow Jeff Miron squared off against Dr. Robert DuPont, who was one of the key policy staffers in the Nixon White House in 1971.  Dr. DuPont remains convinced that the present policy approach is essentially correct.   Watch the event and decide for yourself.

In my 2000 book, After Prohibition, Milton Friedman noted that America’s drug war policy had dozens of negative consequences.  One consequence that he believed received too little attention was the policy’s effect on other people around the world.  Friedman said the policy was responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started.”   The violence in Mexico confirms Friedman’s analysis.  The Los Angeles Times recently reported that more than 34,000 people have been killed during the government’s crackdown over just the past four years.

Ending the drug war is one of the signature issues for the Cato Institute.  The other think tanks in Washington, DC–Brookings, AEI, and Heritage–support the drug war.  We believe the drug war will eventually be widely recognized as a tragic mistake in much the same way as we presently look back upon the days of alcohol prohibition.

For additional Cato work related to drug policy, go here.

Ben Bernanke: Central Planner

Posted by Mark A. Calabria

There’s a great piece in the spring issue of The Independent Review on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke by San Jose State Professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.  Although a bit long, its well worth the read for anyone wanting to understand both Bernanke’s thinking and his actions during and since the financial crisis.

First, Prof. Hummel discusses the differences between Bernanke’s and Milton Friedman’s explanations for the Great Depression.  Those that debate whether Bernanke’s actions, especially the quantitative easings, would be approved of by Friedman will get a lot out of this discussion.  From this comparison, you get the point that Friedman was concerned about overall credit conditions and liquidity, whereas Bernanke is less focused on the monetary factors than on the impairment of credit intermediation, which explains his support of selective bailouts.

Hummel’s comparison of Greenspan and Bernanke is also insightful, particularly since many (myself included) often lump the two’s policies together.  From the analysis, it is clear that Greenspan falls into the Friedman camp, his “rescues” were of the financial system in general, and not of specific firms.

One might say a bailout is a bailout, so what’s the difference between rescuing the system and rescuing individual firms within the system?  Certainly that’s a view I have some sympathy for.  The “Greenspan put” was as much a contributor to reckless risk-taking as anything else.  Hummel, however, discuses why this difference ultimately matters, and why it shows Bernanke to fit the role of economic central planner.  In short, the facts are presented that during the financial crisis, Bernanke did not actually increase overall liquidity by much, he re-directed it to those firms he deemed most important.  This process of reducing liquidity to some sectors while re-directing it to others, arguably less efficient sectors, goes a considerable distance in explaining some of the decline in both aggregate demand and consumption in 2008.

Again, the piece is one of the more accessible and insightful I’ve read on Bernanke in quite a while.

Wednesday Links

Posted by George Scoville

Thursday Links

Posted by George Scoville

Happy Birthday Walter Williams

Posted by Cato Editors

Today marks the 75th birthday of one of the greatest champions of liberty in American history, Walter E. Williams.  Like his good friend the late Milton Friedman, Williams is a brilliant economist who specializes in making economics understandable to the layperson.  The John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, Williams has long been an adjunct scholar at Cato.  He is the author of nine books, one of which, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism, Cato published in 1989.  No sooner did Williams publish his autobiography this year, Up from the Projects, than he published a terrific new book, out this month, Race & Economics:  How much can be blamed on discrimination?  Like many Cato scholars, he is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

On issues ranging from deregulation of the economy to legalizing drugs, Walter Williams is a passionate, laissez-faire libertarian.  His libertarianism greatly improves The Rush Limbaugh Show where he is a frequent guest host.  Williams rubs elbows with the movers and shakers in America, being a member in good standing of the secretive Bohemian Grove.  Even more secretive is his participation in the influential, Washington, D.C.-based Politically Incorrect Boys Club among whose members are included Cato’s Beloved Founder Ed Crane, and senior fellows Richard Rahn and Dan Mitchell.

All of us at Cato wish our dear friend Walter a very Happy Birthday!

Google under Siege in the Corporate State

Posted by David Boaz

“Google is under siege in Washington like never before,” Politico reports.

In an interview with POLITICO, a Google spokesman argued that a cabal of antitrust lawyers, lobbyists and public relations firms is conspiring against the Internet search giant. The mastermind? Google says it’s Microsoft.

Maybe it’s irony, or maybe it’s payback.

In the 1990s, Microsoft was the tech industry wunderkind that got too big for its britches — and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, then an executive at Sun Microsystems and later Novell, helped knock the software titan down a peg by providing evidence in the government’s antitrust case against it. . . .

But there are also increasing calls from some Silicon Valley competitors and Washington-based public interest groups for the Justice Department to launch a sweeping antitrust probe of Google. The European Union and the state of Texas have reviews under way.

Google says its rivals are fueling the attacks.

You could have read it here first. In the November-December 2010 issue (pdf) of Cato Policy Report, Adam Thierer wrote, “The high-tech policy scene within the Beltway has become a cesspool of backstabbing politics, hypocritical policy positions, shameful PR tactics, and bloated lobbying budgets.” The telcos, the broadcasters, the wireless industry, the entertainment industry — they all want the federal government to crush their competitors. And, he said, “Everybody — and I do mean everybody — wants Google dead, right now. Google currently serves as the Great Satan in this drama — taking over the role Microsoft filled a decade ago — as just about everyone views it with a combination of envy and enmity.” But then:

Of course, in a sense, Google had it coming. The company has been the biggest cheerleader in the push to impose “Net neutrality” regulation on the Internet’s physical infrastructure providers, which would let the FCC toss property rights out the window and regulate broadband networks to their heart’s content.

Meanwhile, along with Skype and others, Google wants the FCC to impose “openness” mandates on wireless networks that would allow the agency to dictate terms of service. It’s no surprise, then, that the cable, telco, and wireless crowd are firing back and now hinting we need “search neutrality” to constrain the search giant’s growing market power. File it under “mutually assured destruction” for the Information Age.

Google had it coming in another sense, having joined the decade-long effort by myriad Silicon Valley actors to hobble Microsoft through incessant antitrust harassment.Google has hammered Microsoft in countless legal and political proceedings here and abroad.

Thierer also noted that you could have predicted all this by reading Cato publications a decade earlier, such as Cypress semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers’s 2000 manifesto, “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.” (pdf). Or indeed Milton Friedman’s 1999 speech on “The Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse“: “You will rue the day when you called in the government. From now on the computer industry, which has been very fortunate in that it has been relatively free of government intrusion, will experience a continuous increase in government regulation.”

You (could have) read it here first.

Ask Not What Frankenstein Can Do for You…

Posted by Michael F. Cannon

Today is the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, where he implored, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”  People are commemorating the anniversary in various ways.  Google is paying tribute to JFK’s address in its logo:

I thought it might be worth reprinting Milton Friedman’s assessment of JFK’s memorable line, taken from the introduction to Friedman’s 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom:

IN A MUCH QUOTED PASSAGE in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

Economic Slack and Inflation

Posted by Mark A. Calabria

While listening to NPR this morning, I was subjected to yet another economist claiming that we cannot have inflation in an environment of such high economic slack.  Setting aside the fact that perhaps this economist missed the 1970s, this is a vital question to examine, because it is the foundation of so much of Bernanke and the Federal Reserve’s current thinking.  That is, the notion that inflation is always and everywhere the result of an over-heating, or excess demand, economy.

One of the measures commonly followed by the Fed, and others of the slack-restrains-inflation school, is the measure of capacity utilization rate.  Setting aside some of the problems with this measure, are increases in capacity utilization associated with increasing inflation, as would be suggested by the slack-restraint school?  It turns out not.  Since 1967, when the data series begins, the correlation between capacity utilization and inflation, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), has been negative.  That is, as more and more industrial and economic resources have been brought into use, inflation has actually fallen, rather than risen (as would be predicted).  A negative correlation also implies that low or falling capacity utilization does not mean low inflation.

Now what is positively correlated with inflation is the growth in the money supply.   The chart below shows annual changes in both CPI and M2.  Even just eye-balling the chart, one can see the positive correlation, which also shows up under statistical analysis. 

Another question one often hears in today’s economic discussions is what would Milton Friedman say?  I won’t claim to be able to channel Milton (or anyone else), but I do think the empirical evidence continues to support the conclusion that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Spain’s Former Drug Czarina Endorses Legalization

Posted by Juan Carlos Hidalgo

Quoting great classical liberal minds such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and Mario Vargas Llosa, Spain’s former drug Czarina Araceli Manjón-Cabeza endorsed drug legalization today in a compelling op-ed [in Spanish] published in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper. Just a week earlier, Felipe González, Spain’s former Primer Minister, also came out in support of drug legalization.

Manjón-Cabeza takes particular aim at the UN International Narcotics Control Board for its criticisms of the different decriminalization and harm-reduction policies implemented in recent years in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Spain, among other countries. She calls the INCB’s views “inadmissible.”

She concluded by calling prohibition a “savage and inefficient instrument that is not the ‘solution’ but instead a big part of the problem.” Manjón-Cabeza says that insisting on prohibitionist policies amounts to “insanity.” Finally, some common sense talk from a former drug czar.

Stossel on Fox News Channel: What’s Great about America

Posted by David Boaz

John Stossel, usually seen on Fox Business Network, will have a special on the Fox News Channel this weekend, well targeted to Independence Day: “What’s Great about America.” He’ll interview Dinesh D’Souza and immigrant businessmen, among others.

Saturday and Sunday, 9 p.m. ET both nights. Fox News is on lots more cable systems than Fox Business, so if you don’t get Fox Business, this is your chance to see Stossel.

Tonight at 9 p.m., I think it’s a rerun of his recent show on Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, featuring . . . me. Along with Johan Norberg, Tom Palmer, and Bob Chitester.

For some of my own thoughts on what’s great about America, see this article.