• New research suggests that there has been more monetary and macroeconomic instability since the Federal Reserve’s inception than in the decades preceding it.
• New thinking about the usefulness of government programs will help us from restore fiscal balance and economic well-being in America.
• New geopolitical circumstances should make us wonder: why are we still a part of NATO?
• New Deal-era jurisprudence may soon be overturned as challenges to the Affordable Care Act reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
• New means of funding public roads will increase efficiency by confronting drivers with the costs of using them, and reducing congestion:

• Reminder: If you’re in the DC area, please join us this Friday at 4:00 p.m. Eastern for a special sneak preview of Free or Equal and Q&A with Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg.

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The latest canard offered for keeping taxpayers on the hook for mortgage risk is that, without such, homeownership would limited to the wealthy.  Sarah Rosen Wartell of the Center for American Progress stated before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, “The high cost, limited availability, and high volatility of pre-New Deal mortgage finance meant that homeownership was effectively limited to the wealthy.”  Congressman Al Green repeated the point.  As I’ve generally found Sarah to be one of the more reasonable CAP employees, and that this is fundamentally an empirical question, I would have expected her to offer some evidence to support such a claim.  Alas, she did not.  So I will.

According to the US Census Bureau, at the turn of the century in 1900, the US homeownership rate was 46.5%.  I’m pretty sure that even Sarah wouldn’t claim that close to half of US households in 1900 were “wealthy.”  Interestingly enough, homeownership after the first 10 years of the New Deal was lower than before the New Deal.

While 46.5% is about 20 percentage points below the current rate, the population in 1900 was considerably younger, and one thing we do know is that homeownership is positively correlated with age.  In 1900, 54% of the US population was under the age of 25, a reasonable cut-off for homeownership.  Today, that number is 35%.  I don’t think it would be a stretch to say the greatest driver behind the homeownership rate over the last 100 years has been the aging of the US population, probably followed by the increase in household incomes (homeownership and income are also closely correlated).

Hopefully this will put to rest the myth that FDR and the New Deal gave homeownership to the masses.  The fact is that homeownership was fairly widespread long before the New Deal.  I await the next myth from the Fannie Mae apologists.   If they are wise, they will try one that isn’t so easily falsified.

Homeownership Before the New Deal is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

NPR reports on rising food prices across the world. They may have played some role in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, and if so, those wouldn’t be the first revolutions sparked by inflation. NPR reporter Marilyn Geewax mentioned several reasons that food prices are rising — droughts, floods, oil prices, financial speculation – but not the obvious one: the continuing creation of unbacked money by central banks around the world. As Milton Friedman said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” And as Jerry O’Driscoll wrote just two weeks ago, about rising food prices, “Inflation is here.” But that point isn’t yet universally understood, at least not at our government radio network.

Anyway, I turned off the radio and turned on the television, where TCM was just broadcasting the 1942 MGM propaganda film “Inflation” (made at the request of the Office of War Information but then never released because it was too anti-capitalist even for wartime propaganda). Edward Arnold plays the Devil, in league with Hitler and posing as a businessman who who encourages people to buy more, evade price controls, stockpile goods, and use the black market. (The film was made by Cy Endfield, who had been a member of the Young Communist League at Yale and went on to make such films as Zulu and Universal Soldier.) The film features what appears to be President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s April 28, 1942, radio speech, “Total War and Total Effort.” As the young couple in the film go to buy a new radio, the shopkeeper turns on the radio and they hear FDR say:

You do not have to be a professor of mathematics or economics to see that if people with plenty of cash start bidding against each other for scarce goods, the price of those goods (them) goes up.

Yesterday I submitted to the Congress of the United states a seven-point program, a program of general principles which taken together could be called the national economic policy for attaining the great objective of keeping the cost of living down. I repeat them now to you in substance:

First. we must, through heavier taxes, keep personal and corporate profits at a low reasonable rate.
Second. We must fix ceilings on prices and rents.
Third. We must stabilize wages.
Fourth. We must stabilize farm prices.
Fifth. We must put more billions into War Bonds.
Sixth. We must ration all essential commodities which are scarce.
Seventh. We must discourage installment buying, and encourage paying off debts and mortgages.

As it happens, I have a 1942 OWI poster with that same message hanging in my kitchen:

In fact, of course, price inflation was the natural result of a substantial increase in the money supply before and during the war. All of FDR’s policies — cartels, destruction of crops, wage and price controls, rationing — were misguided attempts to deal with the consequences of monetary manipulation and other bad policies.

By the way, FDR famously said, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Which might explain another propaganda film produced by MGM, this one in 1933, that extolled the virtues of FDR’s policy of inflation, utilizing the argument that is variously called “stimulus” or “the broken window fallacy.” The film cited the successful results of Civil War inflation. “What inflation has done before it will do again! . . . What a man! And what a leader! Yowzer! Happy days are here again!” Yeah, that went well. And by 1942 MGM was back on board, making a government propaganda film opposing inflation.

For background on inflation, read Cato adjunct scholar Lawrence H. White at the Concise Encylopedia of Economics.

Misunderstanding Inflation through the Years is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

In light of today’s reading of the Constitution in the new House, what misinterpretations of the Constitution do you regularly see in American politics? And are House Republicans implying that the previous Democratic majority did not have a firm grasp of the government’s founding document?

My response:

Thanks to the Tea Party, as I wrote in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Congress seems to be rediscovering the Constitution — or at least many House Republicans seem to be. When members read the document aloud today, apparently for the first time in the nation’s history, they’ll be throwing down a marker: “We take the Constitution seriously, and intend to abide by its principles.” If true, how refreshing.

This is not a partisan matter. As many Republicans have said — albeit, some only after November’s elections — both parties for years have ignored the Constitution’s limits on political power. To confirm that, we need look no further than to James Madison, the principal author of the document, who assured skeptical ratifiers in Federalist 45 that the powers authorized by the Constitution were “few and defined.” That hardly describes today’s federal behemoth.

Thus, the main “misinterpretation” has been over the very idea of constitutional limits — particularly as inherent in the doctrine of enumerated powers, the principle that “We the People” gave Congress only 18 enumerated powers. The Commerce Clause, for example, was written mainly to ensure interstate commerce unfettered by state interference, not to enable Congress to regulate every aspect of life. And the General Welfare Clause was meant to limit Congress’s taxing power pursuant to its enumerated ends to objects of national, not particular, concern: it wasn’t meant to enable Congress to redistribute private wealth at will.

The great change came during the New Deal, of course, after FDR’s infamous Court packing threat, when a cowed Court began turning the Constitution on its head. But don’t take my word for that constitutional legerdemain. Here’s Roosevelt, writing to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1935: “I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.” And here’s Rexford Tugwell, one of the principal architects of the New Deal, reflecting on his handiwork some 30 years later: “To the extent that these new social virtues [i.e., New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document [i.e., the Constitution] intended to prevent them.” They knew exactly what they were doing.

So when today’s liberals tell us the Constitution authorizes the vast federal programs that now reduce so many Americans to government dependents, they reveal their historical ignorance — or their political ambition. And they’re reduced to the silliness we saw in Tuesday’s New York Times, where the Times editorialists ranted against today’s constitutional reading as “a theatrical production of unusual pomposity.” Illustrating their own penchant for pomposity, they then dug into their bag of adjectives and let loose: “a self-important flourish,” “their Beltway insider ritual of self-glorification,” “a presumptuous and self-righteous act,” “an air of vacuous fundamentalism,” ”all of this simply eyewash,” “a ghastly waste of time.” They must have been emotionally drained when they finished their screed.

The Constitution is not a blank slate, details to follow, as decided by transient majorities. Were it that, it never would have been ratified. After all, we fought a revolution to rid ourselves of overweening government, and fought a Civil War to institute at last the grand principles of the Declaration of Independence. Nor will those principles be restored in a day. But today’s reading will start a debate that is sorely needed, at the end of which one can hope for restoration.

Toward Restoring Constitutional Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Will President Obama’s campaign finance attacks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others resonate with voters over the next three weeks?

My response:

With so many senior advisors leaving the White House so early in the term, you have to wonder who’s left to advise the president except, well — the president. And judging from his attacks on corporate campaign spending generally and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in particular, you’re inclined to believe that that’s the case. After all, the attacks are perfectly consistent with the president’s larger agenda.

As others here at the Arena have noted, not since the New Deal have we seen so sustained an anti-business political agenda as has come from this president. Under such an assault, is it any wonder that businesses have created so few jobs, or that they’re fighting back? Yet for that, the president is criticizing them — with campaign finance claims that not even the New York Times finds credible.

This campaign finance angle has an especially unseemly air about it, however – see the Wall Street Journal’s editorial this morning about Democrats unleashing the IRS and Justice on donors to their political opponents. The effort to restrict the speech that campaign finance represents — promoted by the political establishment, especially Democrats — has always been at bottom about incumbency protection, not “good government.” We didn’t hear complaints when Obama abandoned the public financing system in 2008, for example, as “unconscionable” amounts of private money poured into his campaign. Obama may be barking now that the shoe’s on the other foot, but his bark rings as hollow as his agenda, which is why it’s not resonating with the voters, and is not likely to in the three weeks ahead.

Obama’s Attack on the Chamber of Commerce: Perfectly Consistent is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Recall the unionists’ siege of the Maryland banker’s home the other day? Perhaps it was inspired in part by this screed on the world financial crisis that appeared a little while back on the blog New Deal 2.0, published by the left-leaning Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Other advice in the same piece on how to handle execs from Goldman Sachs and similar investment banks: “Build some Guantanamo-like facility to hold these enemy financial combatants until they can be tried, convicted, and properly punished.” And: “Post the names of all managers and traders on Interpol. Arrest anyone who tries to board a plane, train, or boat; confiscate their passports; revoke their visas and work permits; and put a hold on their bank accounts until culpability can be assessed.”

Tongue in cheek-ism, evidence of a genuine impulse to dispense with the rule of law, or some of both? Well, judge for yourself, bearing in mind what sorts of rhetoric serve in accusing, say, the Tea Party movement of extremism and worse. The “braintrusters” roster of the Roosevelt Institute, incidentally, boasts such respectables as Jonathan Alter, Hendrik Hertzberg, appeals court nominee Goodwin Liu, Joseph Stiglitz and Sean Wilentz.

As part of a symposium the other day, the recently launched blog Think Tanked asked me to help define what a think tank is and what it should do. My advice on the latter was to “let ‘em rip” — the scholars and thinkers, that is — but maybe in the case of the Roosevelt Institute I’d advise making an exception.

‘Make Wall Street traders and CEOs fear for their lives, or at least for their freedom to travel.’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Recently I wrote an article arguing that there never was a golden age of liberty and that in particular libertarians should not hail 19th-century America as a small-government paradise, at least not without grappling with the massive problem of slavery. Jacob Hornberger, author of an article that I criticized, responded in Reason, and I then responded here. Meanwhile, an interesting discussion took place on a email list of libertarian scholars, and I’m pleased to have gotten the permission of several participants to include some of that discussion here:

Aeon J. Skoble: The ideals of freedom which led to the tangible improvements [Boaz] mentions – I’m concerned that those ideals are eroding/have eroded.  Example: say you have a robust theory of rights, but your society denies rights to women.  That’s a contradiction, and the strength of your rights theory contains the foundation for protesting the injustice and remedying it.  But if you don’t even have a robust rights theory in the first place, there’s no foundation for complaining about lost liberty.  So my concern is that, all the good progress notwithstanding, liberty as an ideal is weaker than it once was.  One thing that’s widespread, e.g., is the constant conflation of positive rights and negative rights.  And at the same time that positive rights are being accorded the status of negative rights, negative rights are increasingly being viewed as encroachable.

David Mayer: In terms of economic liberty and property rights, Americans today are certainly far less free than they were a century ago, or even two centuries ago.  What was once a vast realm of human activity that American law left to individuals’ freedom of contract (the whole realm of business activity as well as personal life, in terms of what substances individuals may choose to ingest in their own bodies, the wages and hours they can work, whom they can hire or fire, to whom they can sell their property or refuse to sell their property, etc., etc.), has now been almost wholly subjected to the dictates of government, thanks to the rise of the 20th century regulatory / welfare state.  Business owners today (to pick one obvious category of Americans – arguably, the most important category, if as I do, you agree with Calvin Cooolidge’s maxim, “The business of America is business”) are certainly far less free today than they were 100 years ago (before the “Progressive” era), or 70 years ago (before the “New Deal revolution”), or 50 years ago (before the “Civil Rights movement” and the various federal anti-discrimination laws), or 20 years ago (before, say, enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act) – or even a year ago (before enactment of the Democrats’ health insurance nationalization law).

Glenn Reynolds: I think that David’s piece is useful in another way:  If your narrative is one in which freedoms are always shrinking, and government always growing, it may tend to discourage people from working to make things better.  I see a lot of that kind of thing from people on the Right, and it irritates me no end.  I remember when the passage of the assault weapons ban was presented as just another downward ratchet in freedom, and yet now the gun issue is such that even lefty Dems are for the most part unwilling to touch it.  That, it seems to me, is an example of how freedom can expand even in the comparatively short term.

Steve Horwitz: The way I see this is that we’re trying to answer the question “Are we more free?”  To do so, we need to address both the “we” and the “free” pieces.  I read David as making two points:  1) We need to think carefully about the “we” and recognize, as we all have noted, the major gains in freedom for non-white, non-males (and maybe non-Christians too).  2) But he was also saying there are more freedoms in the calculus than the economic.  Even white men are freer along a number of dimensions than they were in the 19th century, when one takes the social realm seriously.  Some folks have noted those.

My own view is that one can look at this in the economist’s old tool:  the 2 x 2 matrix:

economic freedoms        social freedoms

White men           notable losses            good-sized gains

Others                       huge gains                    huge gains

I think by any accounting, the NW quadrant is smaller than the sum of the others.  We can debate over how much smaller, but if we could somehow aggregate these freedoms, I think there’s no question the total amount of freedom per capita is bigger today than “before.”

Mark LeBar: Speaking for myself, I don’t think it’s a matter of economic vs. other freedoms. If I were to put my finger on what I would say seems to me most significant in thinking the losses in NW swamp whatever gains there are elsewhere, I would say it has to do with the loss of respect for contract. That’s not to say there are no gains: as others have pointed out, 2 centuries ago I could not have contracted with women, or Africans, and to the extent non-whites and non-males have been accepted to the relevant moral community, that is indeed an expansion of my liberty as well as theirs. But, as I noted earlier, my authority to bind myself in ways that are not subject to veto by the state is a shadow of what it once was. I won’t enumerate the list again. But not only is that list much smaller, the rightfulness of the state to determine just how much smaller it may be continues to expand virtually without pause, as those on this list will need no reminder. I would say there has been a sea-change from the idea (however imperfectly implemented) that the flow of authority goes from individuals to the state, to just about exactly the opposite. And that is simply a catastrophic loss to liberty, not just for white males, but for everybody. It’s hard for me to see that there can be good reasons for rejecting either the claim that the authority relation is now generally seen as running the other way, or that that amounts to a massive loss of liberty. And I don’t see imminent prospects for broad change in those attitudes. Hence the pessimism.

David Olson: I think that perhaps I am missing something. In reading today’s exchange, I thought that people were working toward a consensus that had largely been reached and summarized by Steven’s email. But now Mark writes that liberty gains to everyone but straight white Christian males are swamped by the liberty losses to white males (and to hypothetical non-whites and females compared to the liberty they might have enjoyed if they’d had full equality 200 + years ago).

I’m very surprised by this statement. The logic of this would seem to lead to the proposition that it would be better if things were still as they were 200 years ago. Would anyone actually make that statement? If not, is there some value in addition to freedom that people are focusing on in deciding the question? (And let’s take medical and dental care advances out of the question to avoid skewing the answer.)

John Hasnas: I suspect that no one on the list would disagree with the assertion that between the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the present, the political and legal commitment to a government of limited, enumerated powers has greatly declined. I also suspect that no one on the list would disagree with the assertion that a vastly greater proportion of the population enjoys freedom from illegitimate political and legal restrictions and disabilities than was the case at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Out of this universal agreement, we have managed to manufacture disagreement by asking a vague question that equivocates on the meaning of the word freedom; to wit, “Are we more free?”

It seems pretty obvious that to the extent that we are free, that freedom is much more widely distributed than in the past. It also seems pretty obvious that to the extent that there is less legal protection against the interference of the federal government with our activities, there is less freedom. Beyond this, the value of determining whether we are more “free” in some unspecified sense escapes me.

Aeon Skoble: Actually, I wasn’t asking “Are we more free?” – I conceded David’s claim that we were.  I was expressing some concern over whether the trend will continue positively or negatively, given that the positive and negative senses of freedom are so frequently conflated (not by members of this list, but in general, both in the academy and among the general public), and that in many quarters the very concept of freedom is in disfavor, and the idea that all rights are subject to encroachment by the state, which is more and more thought of as having limitless power.

Steve Horwitz: I agree with Aeon’s concerns.  One way to put it is, as I think Mark LeBar did earlier, even if it’s true that we are collectively (per capita) more free, those gains have come at the weakening of the sacredness of certain principles that affect everyone’s freedom, especially in the long run.  I too share the concern that the last two years have accelerated that process in very problematic ways.

Stephen Davies: There’s actually general agreement here with the broad argument David made but some mild disagreement over the (probably unanswerable) question of whether the aggregate of total freedom is greater or larger. That wasn’t the main thrust of David’s piece as I read it though, he was talking about the implications and consequences of the (clearly wrong imho) line that for liberty it’s been downhill all the way since the later 18th century. This is a common line as we all know and I think its really problematic. As David says it means you come over as indifferent to the undoubted gains made in some areas by various groups and so as only concerned with the position of one subgroup. This may well be wrong but impressions matter. This line also shows a deeply conservative sensibility and mindset. If you are libertarian in the sense of not liking large or expansive government but deeply conservative in other ways (e.g on questions of social hierarchy or relations between the sexes or family organisation) then you will feel that it’s been downhill for a long time. …

I think the real problem though with the approach David criticises is the way it leads you to behave with regard to current events. Basically you are going to see yourself as playing defence all the time and probably as fighting a losing battle against an inexorable tide of rising coercive statism. This means you will come over as angry, negative, and despondent, which are not attractive qualities. Also you will let the other side set the agenda and then respond to them rather than taking the initiative. This means you spend all your time criticising and attacking proposals that are liberty hostile instead of spending most of your time advocating positive liberty enhancing changes. …

Finally, if I could put my historian’s hat on for a minute. We need to distinguish between two different measurements – the size of government (as shown by its share of GDP) and it’s extent or range (as shown by the number of activities or areas of life that are considered to be its concern). In the first case there’s a clear growth (we’ve all seen the graph). Even there there’s Tyler Cowen’s argument that a 40% share of a really big GDP is less bad than a 15% share of a much smaller pie. In the second case there’s been considerable gains as well as losses. Religious belief, observance etc was once seen as the central concern of government. Now it’s a private matter. Governments used to concern themselves with things such as dress, diet and public interactions (under sumptuary laws) and intimate details of people’s sexual behaviour (through both church and secular courts). This is no longer true. OTOH there are clearly areas where there’s been a shift in the wrong direction such as mood altering substances and firearms or where there’s a danger of a bad movement (diet for example).

The following comments are prompted by Jacob Hornberger’s response in Reason.

Brad Smith: Hornberger notes that the concept of what it meant to be free was much broader in the 19th century (something Aeon also touched on).  True, some people were not free – but for those who were, the concept had much more meaning.  That’s why I think one can agree with both perspectives, that freedom has both gained and lost ground in important ways.

Implicitly, Hornberger notes the extent to which government was simply not a presence in the lives of most people.  The average free man could go days, weeks, or even months with no direct contact whatsoever with the government. Hornberger might also have noted that a free man didn’t need a passport to travel, or an operator’s license to drive his wagon, or a license plate for his horse.  In most cases, he didn’t need a building permit to add to his home.   Even laws that might be on the books (but were perhaps not so ubiquitous as many think) laid lightly on people – laws against prostitution, sodomy, polygamy and such.  A gay man in the 19th century might fear great social sanction if his predilections or activities became known, but the idea that the government would interfere with his activities was not really an issue at all, whatever the state code might say.  In the 19th century, one certainly didn’t need to license one’s pets, and one was never harangued by government sponsored advertising to properly cook your eggs or spend time with your children.  Today, for white men and for women and minorities, government permeates every aspect of our lives, essentially 24/7/365.

Even as we have expanded the blessings of freedom to more people, society’s concept of freedom seems to have narrowed tremendously, to where even many self described libertarians seem to think a 39% income tax bracket is pretty darn acceptable.  The boundaries of what it means to be free seem to have retreated, and to have retreated enormously.  Thus, even as more people have benefited from freedom, the long term outlook for freedom seems in many ways much more grim.

Keith E. Whittington: The overseer or master exercised lawful, violent coercive force over the slave on a daily basis and did so with the full support and backing, if necessary, of the government.  Moreover, “the government” (such as slave patrols) often consisted precisely of ad hoc groupings of armed civilians operating under the titular direction of a government official.  And the government wasn’t always willing to stand ready protect people from coercive private groups who wanted to enforce social conformity.  So, on the one hand, some prostitutes might be tolerated if they kept to themselves in the wrong part of town, but on the other hand abolitionist newspapers editors could have their houses burned down and Catholics and Protestants could find themselves becoming armed gangs and rioting to secure their respective neighborhoods.  No level of government had an expansive police force in the 19th century, but that just means that social order was generally maintained by other mechanisms.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that people were free from social order.

Mark LeBar: David is certainly right that slavery and the legal subordination of women are blights on the very institutions that were modeling liberty, and especially for those directly affected it is a gross mistake not to recognize what those changes in law and society mean in gains in liberty. But that is an observation that pretty much any decent person, libertarian or not, can be expected to make. There is a distinctiveness to the point of insisting, as Hornberger and Brad do, that the very liberty that is reaching to more people is radically constrained in many ways. We can grant, it seems to me, that many people are freer in significant ways than they once were, while insisting that the point of liberty itself is in danger of getting lost in the process. That, it seems to me, is a case that libertarians are uniquely in position to make.

Eugene Volokh: Prof. LeBar writes, that “what it means to be free is a shadow of its former self.”  But is that right, even as to white males?  Economic regulation, including of a sort that libertarians much oppose, is not a novel matter.  Neither is taxation (which, to be sure, is at a much higher rate than in the past, but I’m not sure that the precise rate is that much a part of “what it means to be free”).  Neither is regulation of trade.  Neither is restriction on freedom of association.  Neither is regulation of guns.  Neither is regulation of personal behavior; alcohol prohibition first emerged in the U.S., for instance, in the mid-1800s, and of course the regulation of sexual behavior was far greater in the past tan today.

What’s more, all these were favored, I think, by people who believed in freedom, which meant to them (as it does to many lovers of freedom today) freedom subject to at least some constraints aimed at protecting the freedom of others and at protecting the well-being of society.  Liberty has long been respected and fought for by Americans; but that the late 1700s and late 1800s were liberty-loving times doesn’t mean that the legal systems of that era were particularly libertarian as we libertarians would want them to be.  “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”  I don’t think there’s been a past Golden Age of Liberty, in which freedom was generally accepted as meaning something far deeper and broader than what it means today, even for white men.

Steve Horwitz: I do think part of what’s going on here are two cross-cutting conversations.  Or at least two distinct claims.

1.  “Americans, on the whole, are freer than they were, say, 150 years ago.”

2.  “Government is more obtrusive in a moment-to-moment or day-to-day way than 150 years ago.”

I actually think both of these are true.  The enormous restrictions on the freedom of blacks and women (and others) of 150 years ago, though ultimately backed by the force of the state, did not require the state to be, as it were, “in their faces” on a moment-to-moment basis, as slavery and the second-class status of women were simply part of the institutional furniture (and often policed “privately” as Keith noted and as I noted about domestic violence in my earlier comments).

So it seems to me 1 and 2 are both true if one accepts that slavery and patriarchy don’t require the kind of constant and widespread, if small on each margin, government intervention we have in our own time.

We are collectively more free, I would argue, even though the underlying principles that assured the freedom of those who had such freedom 150 years ago have broken down significantly.

Keith Whittington: There is no doubt that you can run through statutes, court decisions and executive actions in the mid-19th century and compare the total to the mid-20th century and conclude that there is more overall government regulation in the latter than the former.  The latter is more voluminous and more detailed.  My only qualification/concern on this would be to note that while the 19th century regulation is less detailed it could be extremely intrusive (Sunday laws literally shut down all commercial, social and transportation activity in large parts of several states during parts of the 19th century) and that formal government activity was supplemented with informal private activity that was equally stultifying.  Without a robust vision of individual self-ownership, to borrow from Mark, that combination of social and governmental regulation could be extremely restrictive of anything we would want to recognize as individual liberty.  The battle for the idea of individual liberty, as well as the legal and social reality of it, was an on-going one throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and I’m not confident how you net out the debits and credits.

Glen Whitman: Might it be helpful to ask why so many libertarians and conservatives want to say that America used to be more free than it is now?

Aside from sheer misplaced patriotism (which I’m sure is a big piece of the story), I think it comes from the desire to have an answer to the question, so often posed by statists, “When has a laissez-faire system ever worked?”  Rather than saying, “I’m advocating an untested idea,” we’d like to be able to say, “Yes, laissez-faire has indeed worked.”

And is that really wrong to say?  I think that with respect to specific issues, we can say that (a) the U.S. was freer before, and (b) somehow the country didn’t go to hell in a handbasket.  We can say, for instance, that drugs used to be largely legal and we didn’t become a nation of useless addicts.  We can say that labor markets functioned without extensive regulation.  (Of course, blacks and women were often excluded from those markets — but I’d say the markets functioned *despite* their exclusion, not because of it.)  We can say that there wasn’t a welfare state, and private charities and mutual aid societies did a fine job of helping those who fell on hard times.

None of which refutes David’s point.  Some groups were markedly less free, and everyone was less free in certain ways.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t sometimes point to history as a guide, which I suspect is what we really want.

Stephen Davies: I think Glen makes an important point here. Quite apart from the argument about how to quantify or compare different restrictions on liberty at different times and in different areas of lie is the question of rhetoric. Why present the story of liberty in the US as one of a decline from a golden age rather than as a story of slow growth in a positive direction or (my own favourite) one of decline in some areas and growth in others? Apart from the reason he gives I think one reason is the dominance of the jeremiad as a form of political argument. This isn’t confined to libertarians of course, in fact it seems sometimes that every political persuasion thinks things are going to the dogs. I think it’s a bad strategy however as well as being questionable.

I do think Mark and Aeon are on to something however in saying that there’s been a decline in the ideal of self-government or at least in the degree to which it’s articulated and the extent to which it’s understood as a complex idea rather than just a matter of doing your own thing. It was a much thicker concept in times past partly because it was associated with lots of other ideas of psychology (the notion of character) and sociology for example – there was a strongly held idea that you couldn’t be fully self-governing or independent if you were not economically self supporting and so the idea of freedom was tied in with all sorts of other ideas.

If you look outside the US, Dicey made the argument towards the end of the nineteenth century that there’d actually been a movement away from intrusive paternalistic regulation in the earlier nineteenth century followed by the growth of a new kind of intrusive state action after the later 1880s. He ralated this to public opinion which for him meant widely held but often unarticulated notions, beliefs and understandings on the part of the population at large or at least the politically active part of it. This kind of account makes more sense to me, particularly if you combine it with an approach that says that while freedom may have increased for some groups it declined for others and that at any one time it was growing in some areas of life while being in recession elsewhere. Complicated and messy but that’s history for you.

Loren Lomasky: To the extent that a consensus emerges in preceding comments it’s that the losses of liberty to white males over the past century or two are juxtaposed against liberty gains for people of color, women, some marginalized others.  Enjoying somewhat less than a genuinely full consensus is the proposition that on the liberty ledger the minuses of the former class are outweighed by the pluses of the latter.

Because the balance seemed so patent to me, I’ve said nothing previously.  I now wish to add, though, that it is far from obvious that even establishment white males suffered a liberty deficit over this period, and that not just because of gains with regard to social freedom but even with regard to core economic liberty.  Each of the following is an enormous gain for liberty:

1) The capacity to pursue one’s ends with willing others by forming corporations without any need of special legislative grants;

2) Rights of workers to associate freely with each other in pursuit of economic advancement  (unions, etc.)

3) Military services now performed by paid professionals who volunteer for the job rather than via a draft.

I could go on, but these themselves are not trivial.  Each is orders of magnitude more significant on the plus side than, say, Obamacare is on the negative.  An enormous number of state actions piss me off, but not to the extent that they blind me to the evident truth that the history of the United States since 1776 is a history of liberty in ascendance.

David Mayer: Albert Venn Dicey’s Law and Public Opinion in England in the Nineteenth Century does indeed identify a “golden age” for liberty, in (roughly) the middle third of the 19th century, when (according to Dicey’s analysis) classical liberal ideas were the dominant opinion (in terms of public policy).  That was a “golden age,” in Britain, because it was sandwiched in between (again, according to Dicey’s analysis) a period of “Old Tory” paternalism (the early 19th-century, continuing from the 18th century) and a period of “collectivism,” or socialism (with the rise of the late-Victorian-era welfare state in Britain, in the last third of the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century).

U.S. history is quite different.  We were founded as, essentially, a classical liberal nation:  the American Revolution was based on “radical Whig” ideas – the same ideas that so influenced British public policy during its classical liberal reform period (for example, many of the mid-18th-century radical Whigs who were friends of American independence – men like John Cartwright – were also leaders in the Parliamentary reform movement, culminating in the Reform Act of 1832).  But, as I have written elsewhere (see my essay on “Completing the American Revolution” (my Atlas Shrugged 50th anniversary essay) in Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Spring 2008) the American “liberal” revolution of 1776 was far from complete.  Sure, we founded government explicitly on the protection of individual rights, and we instituted written constitutions to help limit the power of government (a huge advance in the history of world “political science”).  But, of course, as David and other participants in this discussion have noted, we did not consistently implement the “new science of politics” implied by the principles of 1776:  not only did we retain the institution of slavery and denied full legal equality to women but, in many ways, we retained in the law (mostly in the English common law as received and only slightly modified in American law) much of the older, paternalistic role of government that England had had for centuries and that had been brought over to the English colonies in America.  (One simple example:  the notion that government may regulate prices of businesses “affected with a public interest” – a concept from English law (one that in the early 17th century was used by apologists for royal absolutism to justify various kinds of economic regulations by the King’s government) not only survived in early American law but was used by the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1877 decision in Munn v. Illinois, to justify government fixing of maximum rates for certain businesses – and ultimately, in the 20th century, to justify all sorts of needless government licensing and other restrictions on businesses.)

So, it’s quite true (as several participants in the discussion have noted) that there’s not been really any single “golden age” for liberty in the history of the United States.  Depending on how you measure it (by the size of government, the magnitude of taxes and spending, or the variety of forms of “legal paternalism,” for example), or what aspect you’re focused on (“economic” liberty versus “personal” liberty, for example, notwithstanding the artificiality of that distinction), or whose liberty you’re focusing on (business owners versus workers and/or consumers, men vs. women, whites vs. blacks, native-born Americans vs. immigrants, etc.), there’s no clear pattern:  liberty (as a whole) is at once on the ascendance, on the decline, and staying about even, in the American “mixed bag” of freedom/paternalism.  But (if I might be permitted to return to the main point of my original post) there’s little doubt that government regulation of business – government interference with the free market – at all levels, and especially at the national level, has been steeply rising, and thus a very important aspect of liberty (economic freedom) has been steeply falling, since the rise of the “progressive” regulatory/ welfare state in the early 20th century.  That part of American history (the past century or so) most closely resembles the age of “collectivism,” or socialism, that Dicey identified in Britain in the latter third of the 19th century.

Was There a Libertarian Golden Age? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ezra Klein defends an individual healthcare mandate against charges that it’s unconstitutional, and what’s striking to me is that the argument seems awfully wobbly even if you’re on board with a lot of the post–New Deal jurisprudence about the scope of federal power.  Sez Ez:

The summary is that you can look at the individual mandate as a tax, which is constitutional, or as a regulation forcing private actors to engage in a certain transaction, much like the minimum wage, which is also constitutional. I’ve also heard scholars mention auto insurance, which is an obvious analogue, and the Americans With Disabilities Act, which proved that the government can order businesses to install ramps, despite the fact that the constitution doesn’t explicitly give the federal government jurisdiction over entryways.

This doesn’t seem like the right level of analysis. Some taxes and regulations are within the ambit of federal powers; that doesn’t mean anything capable of being so described is. Some things not explicitly and specifically mentioned in Article I are nevertheless necessarily implicit in the enumerated powers; that doesn’t mean anything is. Auto insurance seems like a poor analogue because it’s a condition of access to government-maintained roadways. Ezra also mentions Massachusetts’ individual mandate, which seems rather beside the point in a discussion of the scope of Congress’ Article I powers. But bracket that. Even if you think the federal commerce power legitimately extends to legislation like the ADA, there’s intuitively a world of difference between saying that a commercial enterprise providing services to the public must provide them in such-and-such a fashion and insisting that private persons have to engage in a specified type of transaction just by dint of being alive. I don’t think the best reading of the Commerce Clause encompasses either, but it’s not that hard to conceive a reading that extends to the former but not the latter. I stress this just because I don’t think you have to be a libertarian or have a very restrictive view of the legitimate scope of federal power to believe there’s a genuine question here. The real form of the argument here looks an awful lot like: “Look, we’ve stretched commerce…between the several states so absurdly already, why are we even pretending it might be found to exclude anything?”

The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a profile of Virginia Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Creigh Deeds, the Washington Post tells us about the grandfather from whom he got his unusual first name — and his interest in political power:

Creigh Tyree mattered. While serving as chairman of the Bath County Democrats, during the Depression, Tyree’s house was the first private home in the county to receive electricity from the federal Rural Electrification Act, proof of the power of government, he told his grandson.

Or at least proof of the practice of government. And that is in fact the lesson that young Creigh learned:

Watching the elderly man work the circuit of county shops and farms, the boy saw the power of political maneuvering, the influence it brought a man, the way it enabled the well-connected to pick up a phone and get something previously ungettable. Young Deeds started telling elementary school teachers that he wanted to be, would be, governor someday, and then president.

Using political connections to get things other people can’t get — that’s the lesson young Creigh Deeds learned from his granddad’s experience with the New Deal.

In a story earlier this week, the Post made it clear that that’s still the way politics works:

Sen. Thad Cochran’s most recent reelection campaign collected more than $10,000 from University of Southern Mississippi professors and staff members, including three who work at the school’s center for research on polymers. To a defense spending bill slated to be on the Senate floor Tuesday, the Mississippi Republican has added $10.8 million in military grants earmarked for the school’s polymer research.

Cochran, the ranking Republican on the Appropriations subcommittee on defense, also added $12 million in earmarked spending for Raytheon Corp., whose officials have contributed $10,000 to his campaign since 2007. He earmarked nearly $6 million in military funding for Circadence Corp., whose officers — including a former Cochran campaign aide — contributed $10,000 in the same period.

In total, the spending bill for 2010 includes $132 million for Cochran’s campaign donors, helping to make him the sponsor of more earmarked military spending than any other senator this year, according to an analysis by the nonprofit group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Cochran says his proposals are based only on “national security interests,” not campaign cash. But in providing money for projects that the Defense Department says it did not request and does not want, he has joined a host of other senators on both sides of the aisle. The proposed $636 billion Senate bill includes $2.65 billion in earmarks….

The bill, however, would add $1.7 billion for an extra destroyer the Defense Department did not request and $2.5 billion for 10 C-17 cargo planes it did not want, at the behest of lawmakers representing the states where those items would be built. Although the White House said the administration “strongly objects” to the extra C-17s and to the Senate’s proposed shift of more than $3 billion from operations and maintenance accounts to projects the Pentagon did not request, no veto was threatened over those provisions….

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, ran a close second to Cochran’s $212 million in earmarks this year, having added 37 earmarks of his own worth $208 million, according to the tally by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Almost all of Inouye’s earmarks are for programs in his home state, and 18 of the provisions — totaling $68 million — are for entities that have donated $340,000 to his campaign since 2007. His earmarks included $24 million for a Hawaiian health-care network, $20 million for Boeing’s operation of the Maui Space Surveillance System and $20 million for a civic education center named after the late senator Edward M. Kennedy….

In Cochran’s case, the proposed earmarks would benefit at least two entities that hired his former aides.

Folks, this is the way government works. If you think the programs of the New Deal or the stimulus bill or federal highway programs are necessary, fine — and certainly a defense bill is necessary — but understand that all such government programs involve taking money by force from people who didn’t offer it up voluntarily and then distributing it to others, in many cases to people with more political clout. People in the reality-based community should recognize this reality.

For more on this, see chapter 9 of Libertarianism: A Primer, “What Big Government Is All About.”

How Government Really Works is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times has a story on some of the more controversial ways in which state and local government are using so-called federal “stimulus” dollars.  If anything, it provides some interesting background on the history of the word boondoggle (not surprisingly, it entered the American lexicon during the New Deal).  The gist of the piece is that one person’s boondoggle is another person’s…turtle crossing…skateboard park…or airport for an island in Alaska with 170 people on it.  One New Dealer found this out decades ago:

Robert D. Leighninger Jr., a sociologist who wrote “Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal” (South Carolina University Press, 2007), recounted the story of a Works Progress Administration official in Arizona who went off in search of boondoggles, and discovered that the towns he visited seemed to like their own projects but questioned those of their neighbors.  “I’ve been hunting all over the state for one, but everywhere I go I’m told it’s in the next county,” the official was quoted as saying in a 1936 newspaper article. “So far I haven’t been able to catch up with a real, live one.”

Naturally, that attitude is alive and well today.  I know more than a few folks in central Pennsylvania who thought Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” was a waste of their federal taxpayer dollars but the “Road to Nowhere” in their own backyard was other people’s money well spent.  Of course the folks in central Pennsylvania don’t like being taxed by the federal government to pay for a bridge in Alaska — they don’t benefit, but bear a portion of the cost.  And that’s a fundamental problem with federal subsidization of activities that are — at most — the proper domain of state and local government.

Set aside the fact that the Constitution never intended for the federal government to make such expenditures.  While any of these controversial parochial projects will technically have benefits, sound economic decision-making would seek to optimize those benefits versus the costs.  In the politicized world of the congressional sausage factory, costs scarcely factor into the equation given that the burden is borne by million of taxpayers spread out across the country.  Therefore, I think the few in Congress who crusade against these perceived boondoggles should spend more time trying to educate their colleagues (don’t laugh) and the public on the need to limit the federal government’s ability to spend the money in the first place.

For more on the problems with the federal subsidization of state and local government, please see this Cato Policy Analysis from my colleague Chris Edwards.

Stimulus and Boondoggles is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There has been much recent debate about whether or not President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies increased the nation’s economic pain during the Great Depression or led to its end. In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Regulation Magazine managing editor Thomas A. Firey reveals why erroneous stories about the effects of the New Deal survive despite decades of economic research that tell a different, more nuanced story:

Listening to the fight today among commentators on the left and the right talking about the New Deal and making various claims about it, as far as a stimulus—they’re almost all wrong, and what’s most disturbing to me as an economic historian is this is actually pretty well-plowed ground, so I don’t know how they can be wrong and how no one’s calling them out on it….

…The two stylized stories, the one that nothing got better and the other that the New Deal miraculously fixed everything—both are very clearly wrong when you look at the numbers. But no one wants to tell the real story, because, first of all, it doesn’t fall nicely in an ideological story on either side, and, second of all, it requires work. You have to read stuff and do research and care about the facts, and, let’s be honest, in this political environment, very few people do those things or care about the facts.

More from Firey on the effects of the New Deal.

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What Did the New Deal Do? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog