Peter Wallsten of the Wall Street Journal writes, “Libertarianism is enjoying a recent renaissance in the Republican Party.” He cites Ron Paul’s winning the presidential straw poll earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Rand Paul’s upset victory in the Kentucky senatorial primary, and former governor Gary Johnson’s evident interest in a libertarian-leaning presidential campaign. Johnson tells Wallsten in an interview that he’ll campaign on spending cuts — including military spending, on entitlements reform, and on a rational approach to drug policy.

Meanwhile, on the same day, Rand Paul had a major op-ed in USA Today discussing whether he’s a libertarian. Not quite, he says. But sort of:

In my mind, the word “libertarian” has become an emotionally charged, and often misunderstood, word in our current political climate. But, I would argue very strongly that the vast coalition of Americans — including independents, moderates, Republicans, conservatives and “Tea Party” activists — share many libertarian points of view, as do I.

I choose to use a different phrase to describe my beliefs — I consider myself a constitutional conservative, which I take to mean a conservative who actually believes in smaller government and more individual freedom. The libertarian principles of limited government, self-reliance and respect for the Constitution are embedded within my constitutional conservatism, and in the views of countless Americans from across the political spectrum.

Our Founding Fathers were clearly libertarians, and constructed a Republic with strict limits on government power designed to protect the rights and freedom of the citizens above all else.

And he appeals to the authority of Ronald Reagan:

Liberty is our heritage; it’s the thing constitutional conservatives like myself wish to preserve, which is why Ronald Reagan declared in 1975, “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”

Reagan said that several times, including in a Reason magazine interview and in a 1975 speech at Vanderbilt University that I attended. A lot of libertarians complained that he should stop confusing libertarianism and conservatism. And once he began his presidential campaign that fall, he doesn’t seem to have used the term any more.

You can see in both the Paul op-ed and the Johnson interview that major-party politicians are nervous about being tagged with a label that seems to imply a rigorous and radical platform covering a wide range of issues. But if you can call yourself a conservative without necessarily endorsing everything that William F. Buckley Jr. and the Heritage Foundation — or Jerry Falwell and Mike Huckabee — believe, then a politician should be able to be a moderate libertarian or a libertarian-leaning candidate. I wrote a book outlining the full libertarian perspective. But I’ve also coauthored studies on libertarian voters, in which I assume that you’re a libertarian voter if you favor free enterprise and social tolerance, even if you don’t embrace the full libertarian philosophy. At any rate, it’s good to see major officials, candidates, and newspapers talking about libertarian ideas and their relevance to our current problems.

Libertarian Politics in the Media is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I should have posted this earlier, but if anyone interested in legal issues — should be everyone given that most things coming out of Washington these days have constitutional defects — hasn’t yet read Damon Root’s cover story in the July issue of Reason magazine, drop what you’re doing now and do so.

While not a J.D. — or perhaps because he isn’t — Damon paints a completely accurate picture on the differences between conservative and libertarian approaches to constitutional interpretation and judicial philosophy.  And I don’t mean a rehash of debates on social issues except in legalese; there are real subtleties involved, particularly when most people adhering to either of these camps call themselves “originalists” of one stripe or another.  Damon’s article is both deep and wide, surveying the landscape of relevant legal thinkers and explaining to non-lawyers why all this is so, so important.  (And no, I personally am not featured.)

What is more, you can now also watch Damon discussing his article and reporting in this area:

This is groundbreaking and important journalism.

Conservatives vs. Libertarians on Judicial Activism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Prepare for a national debate over devoting more federal aid to Yemen.

• Reason Magazine: Why is Washington spending so much on the military?

• An update on the ongoing tension between mainland China and Taiwan.

• Top experts will meet at Cato next week to discuss the Obama administration’s  counterrorism record after one year in office.

• Podcast: “Indefinitely Confining the ‘Sexually Dangerous‘” featuring Ilya Shapiro.

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

We own three iPods at my house, including a recently purchased iPod Touch. Since many of the iPod parts are made abroad, is my family guilty of allowing our consumer spending to “leak” abroad, depriving the American economy of the consumer stimulus we are told it so desperately needs? If you believe the “Buy American” lectures and legislation coming out of Washington, the answer must be yes.

Our friends at ReasonTV have just posted a brilliant video short, “Is Your iPod Unpatriotic?” With government requiring its contractors to buy American-made steel, iron, and manufactured products, is it only a matter of time before the iPod—“Assembled in China,” of all places—comes under scrutiny? You can view the video here:

In my upcoming Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, I talk about how American companies are moving to the upper regions of the “smiley curve.” The smiley curve is a way of thinking about global supply chains where Americans reap the most value at the beginning and the end of the production process while China and other low-wage countries perform the low-value assembly in the middle. In the book, I hold up our family’s iPods as an example of the unappreciated benefits of a more globalized American economy:

The lesson of the smiley curve was brought home to me after a recent Christmas when I was admiring my two teen-age sons’ new iPod Nanos. Inscribed on the back was the telling label, “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” To the skeptics of trade, an imported Nano only adds to our disturbingly large bilateral trade deficit with China in “advanced technology products,” but here in the palm of a teenager’s hand was a perfect symbol of the win-win nature of our trade with China.

Assembling iPods obviously creates jobs for Chinese workers, jobs that probably pay higher-than-average wages in that country even though they labor in the lowest regions of the smiley curve. But Americans benefit even more from the deal. A team of economists from the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California-Irvine applied the smiley curve to a typical $299 iPod and found just what you might suspect: Americans reap most of the value from its production. Although assembled in China, an American company supplies the processing chips, a Korean company the memory chip, and Japanese companies the hard drive and display screen. According to the authors, “The value added to the product through assembly in China is probably a few dollars at most.”

The biggest winner? Apple and its distributors. Standing atop the value chain, Apple reaps $80 in profit for each unit sold—an amount higher than the cost of any single component. Its distributors, on the opposite high end of the smiley curve, make another $75. And of course, American owners of the more than 100 million iPods sold since 2001—my teen-age sons included—pocket far more enjoyment from the devices than the Chinese workers who assembled them.

To learn a whole lot more about how American middle-class families benefit from trade and globalization, you can now pre-order the book at Amazon.com.

Is Buying an iPod Un-American? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for a large-scale study on the question of  whether to legalize marijuana.  Arnold wants the study to include international comparisons to show the possible impact of such a change.  Cato just released such a study concerning Portugal.

Our friends at NORML are running ads like this in some markets.

Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum takes a look at national Zogby poll numbers, which shows that a majority of voters support marijuana legalization.

Time to End the War on Drugs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That’s the title of an alarming, but informative, video over at Reason TV.  The video contains lots of eye-popping comparisons between amounts being spent on bailouts/”stimulus” and previous big-ticket government expenditures like the World War II and the New Deal.

And if you haven’t done so already, check out my colleague Dan Mitchell’s videos on the fallacies of Keynesian economics and the folly of so-called fiscal “stimulus” packages.

Stop Spending Our Future is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog