… Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.

Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.

– George F. Will, “Government: The redistributionist behemoth“

Chicagoans’ irrational hatred of Walmart appears to continue unabated, as evidenced by a zoning hearing held Monday regarding a proposed grocery store in the well-to-do Lakeview neighborhood. Among the many misguided or myopic reasons to oppose the mere opening of a Walmart store, perhaps this one reported by the Chicago Tribune’s Dawn Rhodes counts as the dumbest:

“I don’t want them in this neighborhood, and I wish they would hear us saying no,” said Erin Edwards, 27, who works for North Side Anti-Hunger Network. “I’m all for job creation. But it would be wonderful for the people in this neighborhood to have the small stores that can provide fresh produce and to be able to pay their employees well so they wouldn’t have to need our services.”

Guess what, Ms. Edwards? Walmart is an anti-hunger program. The new Walmart grocery store could save shoppers anywhere from 20% to 33%. Walmart, all by itself, accounted for a 10% drop in U.S. food prices from 1985 to 2004, saving individuals nearly $900 a year and households more than $2,300 a year. And Walmart is slashing prices even further to compete with Target, whose prices are slightly lower in Chicago.
So, those people in low-wage jobs who might occasionally take advantage of whatever food pantry services the North Side Anti-Hunger Network provides will benefit far more from vigorous, open competition for grocery shoppers — including Walmart. How many Chicago families could pass on help from a food pantry with a weekly grocery bill that’s 33% cheaper, or an annual savings of $2,300?

Those savings would dwarf the slightly lower wages (perhaps 2%) offered to the few hundred people who will staff the Walmart. That cost-benefit comparison assumes, by the way, that there are hundreds of higher-wage, entry-level jobs that would somehow magically appear if only Walmart could be prevented from opening its store. Are those small stores that supposedly pay so well hiring hundreds of new workers in our still slumbering economy?

Hate Walmart, if you must. Picket. Try to organize their workers, if you want to press your luck. But rest assured that you’re not doing poor folks any favors by denying them a valuable shopping choice.

The world is a lot freer and better off than it was 40 years ago. And we may be even freer and richer 40 years from today. But we are manifestly not experiencing any kind of “Libertarian Moment,” as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch wishfully and lamely argue in the 40th anniversary issue of Reason magazine.

Now, these fellows are not idiots. They read the news. Even when they wrote this thing up before the election, it was clear the way things were headed. Obama and the Democrats were going to win by demonizing the fictional deregulatory bugaboo of the Bush administration even as Hank Paulson & Co. shoveled hundreds of billions toward Wall Street. Jeepers. Sure doesn’t seem like a libertarian moment, does it? The article very well could have been titled “The Libertarian Moment (Except for the Libertarian Part).”

So Gillespie and Welch came up with a clever way around the reality of the moment: Politics doesn’t matter. Specifically, politics is “always a crippled, lagging indicator of social change.” You see, thanks to technological innovation and ever-rising wealth, individuals are (and will only grow increasingly) more in control of their own lives and destinies than ever before. True, perhaps.

But, you know, whatever you might say about conservatives and liberals they don’t usually say they oppose wealth and innovation. True, they have different ideas about how to achieve those ends, but that is why politics matters. Libertarians need to persuade policymakers (and to some extent, the public) about why their distinctive proposals are the best way to encourage economic growth, innovation and social harmony.

Further, the priority that libertarians place on — oh, just to name one thing — liberty is one that the vast majority of people simply do not share, at least to the same radical degree or level of consistency. Gillespie and Welch know all that. They spend every working day chronicling the idiocy of politicians and the manifest number of ways in which the values libertarians care about are treated like dog shit, not to put too fine a point on it. They even discuss the sad state of affairs succinctly in the article.

So to get around the facts of the matter, they made this bogus cultural argument that is so loaded with caveats and weasel words that it amounts to nothing, really. Some of it is profoundly moronic. Just one example:

… social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not structure interaction as much as provide a not-so-temporary autonomous zone to facilitate it. Individual users tailor the experience to their own desires rather than submit to a central authority. The inhabitants of such a world are instinctively soft libertarians, resisting or flouting most nanny-state interference, at least on issues that affect their favorite activities.

Huh? Do you know what a “soft libertarian” is? Yeah, me neither. How can you be instinctively soft about something? I’ve got an instinct to eat and drink regularly to, you know, survive. But I’m pretty hard core about it. I’m not just nitpicking here. These young, Web-native social networkers were the very ones who supposedly helped win the election for Barack Obama — who is a liberal Democrat, which last I checked was distinct from libertarian. But who knows? Perhaps he is one of those soft (flaccid?) libertarians I keep reading about.

Indeed, two-thirds of voters 18-29 went for Obama. This is the guy now pushing for a $500 billion stimulus package courtesy of the Next Century’s Taxpayers Are Good For It Piggy Bank, who OKd warrantless wiretapping and whose first instinct was to name a torture backer to run the CIA.

It is obviously true that people enjoy wealth, and want to have a say in their own lives. In that very superficial sense, there are lot of soft libertarians out there. But the through line between those near universal desires and the understanding of the political elements that best bring those things about is nonexistent or exists in only the most haphazard sense.

It is that gap — the fact that the vast majority of the public and nearly all politicians  either do not buy the libertarian arguments or disagree with libertarian values (at least when rigidly defined) — that is a recipe for something far from the libertarian moment. Indeed, it does not take much imagination to see how we may be at a critical turning point where impending decisions could make the world a lot poorer and less free when the time comes for Gillespie and Welch’s successors to assess the moment in 2048.

Reason is a fine publication, and I get that they wanted a positive hook to hang their 40th anniversary on. But that is no excuse for libertarian triumphalist baloney. The real story is that all that wealth and technology – the yield of the still sheltered sphere of liberty — is under threat now, and is constantly under threat. It’s not a happy story, though. It never is. But it needs to be told, most of all to ourselves.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)

In the aftermath of last night’s Democratic presidential debate, the consensus seems to be that Hillary’s “change you can Xerox” line was an embarassing, disingenuous clunker and that her closing comments were a genuine moment that effectively showed her soft side.

Slate’s John Dickerson seems to capture the CW. He calls the Xerox line “a bad moment,” an unclever remark “cooked up by committee.” He called her closing remarks “her best of the night” because they “showed her heart and a little humanity.” I beg to differ.

Here is what she said (video), in response to the question of how she had been tested in a moment of crisis:

CLINTON: Well, I think everybody here knows I’ve lived through some crises and some challenging moments in my life. And…

(APPLAUSE)

And I am grateful for the support and the prayers of countless Americans.

But people often ask me, “How do you do it?” You know, “How do you keep going?” And I just have to shake my head in wonderment, because with all of the challenges that I’ve had, they are nothing compared to what I see happening in the lives of Americans every single day.

You know, a few months ago, I was honored to be asked, along with Senator McCain, as the only two elected officials, to speak at the opening at the Intrepid Center at Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, a center designed to take care of and provide rehabilitation for our brave young men and women who have been injured in war.

And I remember sitting up there and watching them come in. Those who could walk were walking. Those who had lost limbs were trying with great courage to get themselves in without the help of others. Some were in wheelchairs and some were on gurneys. And the speaker representing these wounded warriors had had most of his face disfigured by the results of fire from a roadside bomb.

You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.

And I resolved at a very young age that I’d been blessed and that I was called by my faith and by my upbringing to do what I could to give others the same opportunities and blessings that I took for granted.

That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s what motivates me in this campaign.

(APPLAUSE)

And, you know, no matter what happens in this contest — and I am honored, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored.

(APPLAUSE)

Whatever happens, we’re going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we’ll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that’s what this election should be about.

First, she for the umpteenth time perversely and unsubtly alludes to and somehow tries to take credit for the fact she chose to stay married to a lying, philandering scumbag for decades in order to advance her political ideas. It’s mind-boggling.

Second, she segues ever-so-crudely into the prefabricated, prescripted heart-tugging anecdote in a transparent effort to demonstrate to voters she is not just an adding machine wearing a blonde wig and an ugly outfit. The moderator could have asked Hillary to explain the quadratic equation and she would have uncorked this manipulative nonsense. I imagine advisers Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson unzipping the back of Hillary’s blouse during one of the commercial breaks and pulling down a flap in the middle of her back to reveal a bunch of circuitry, a la Vicky in “Small Wonder“:

Penn: Where’s the “emote” button on this damn contraption?

Wolfson: Ugh. The male version of this robot was great at emoting. Had trouble controlling the mating function, though.

So it was a prefab, partly borrowed “genuine moment.” So what? In a way, that makes it worse when you parse what she actually said because you realize she spent all day practicing this claptrap and didn’t realize how horrible it was.

She says the par-for-the-course political attacks she’s received thanks to her vaunted 35 years of experience are nothing compared to the struggles of other Americans, especially soldiers who have been crippled in battle. But to whom, exactly, would it even occur to make this comparison? In what galaxy is Hillary a sympathetic or pitiable figure?

Let’s see. She is one of the richest people in the richest country in world history. Win or lose this campaign, she is virtually assured of two or three more decades as one of the 100 most powerful people in the world’s most powerful deliberative body — her incumbency to be perfunctorily interrupted every six years by a campaign against an underfunded, overmatched opponent. Yes, of course, she is “going to be fine.” More than fine. Who would suggest otherwise, except in a bogus attempt to “connect”?

Even Hillary’s vain (in both senses of the word) attempt to acknowledge her incredible good fortune is undercut by her self-serving evocation of wounded soldiers. The ugly truth that sits astride Hillary’s talk of faces disfigured by roadside bombs is that it was her vote, and her vocal support, that helped send those soldiers to the war where they were wounded. She has never even had the simple decency to apologize for the war she realized too late was not just wrong but tragically so, because to do so might weaken her politically.

And now, now, now, now — she has the audacity to use the victims of the war she helped to start as mere decoration for a concocted vignette in a vile effort to aid her own, fast-fading hopes for the presidency!

What kind of a disgusting human being thinks this way, believing not only that this is something short of an admission of callous indifference to her own role in perpetuating human suffering but that it somehow speaks well of her? How upside down is our thinking that people watch such garbage and hail it as demonstrating “humanity”?

Forget it, Jake. It’s campaign season.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of Angry Blog.)

Mitt Romney has, so far, reportedly spent $35 million on his failing campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Just think about it for a moment — $35 million. Inhale deeply, put your pinky finger up to your mouth a la Dr. Evil and say with me: Thirty-five meeeellion dollars!

What else could Romney have done with that money? He could, of course, have plowed it back into his entrepreneurial efforts and made lots of people lots more money — returns four times better than the S&P 500 if the Bain & Co. promotional materials are to be believed.

But apparently he wants to “help” people, not just make them money. Well, with $35 million he could have helped send more than 3,000 low-income children to private school from kindergarten through the 8th grade. The number would actually be higher because the money could be invested and the pot could grow even larger while the kids worked their way through school.

Or, he could have expressed his deep love for the faith of his fathers by giving the dough to the LDS welfare services operation, which assists the victims of disaster all over the globe. Sticking with education, he could have handed the money over to his alma mater, Brigham Young University, on the condition that it go to pay full freight for Mormons from low-income families.

Or, he could have used it to help the National Multiple Sclerosis Society — “the single largest private sponsor of MS research in the world” — fund efforts to find a cure for the disease that his wife Ann has so courageously battled.

Or … whatever. I’m not normally in the habit of telling obscenely rich people how to spend their money, but the truth is that nearly any use of the money would have made more sense, and been more laudable, than the purpose to which it has gone. Not only has Romney wasted $35 million (so far) on a broken political sector that cannot be “transformed” by a single man — yes, even the president — but he has done it in service of ideas that make “garden variety” seem exotic by comparison.

(New Jersey’s Jon Corzine is even guiltier of this offense, spending more than $100 million of his fortune to win a Senate seat and then the governorship. Wow, a liberal Democrat governing New Jersey? There hadn’t been one of those since … the guy who immediately preceded him!)

One could argue that a rich man pouring money into a political candidacy in service of an idea that otherwise won’t get a fair hearing — Steve Forbes pushing a flat tax, Ross Perot stressing fiscal discipline — is doing something to, in an inchoate fashion, nudge the national debate in a different direction. I’m not sure political campaigns are the best way of promoting out-of-the-box ideas, but at least a plausible case could be made.

But the hallmark of Romney’s campaign has been his painfully awkward lurches to grab hold of the most widely shared and worst ideas the Republican Party has to offer — everything from doubling the size of our illegal detention camp in Guantanamo Bay to impeding promising scientific research to building a wall in a vain effort to stop peaceful people from crossing an imaginary line to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Thirty-five million dollars. What an enormous waste of scarce resources, and done in the name of helping people. That amount could supply 2,500 pumps to bring clean drinking water to African children, one of whom dies every 15 seconds from a water-related disease. Instead, Romney spent $35 million to buy TV ads to tell voters why he has recently come to support the National Review’s line on the issues.

No, it is worse than that. Because the truth is that the differences between Romney and McCain are not significant. Both support a war without end in Iraq. Both (now) support building a wall on our border without doing anything to make legal the freely exchanged labor of people without the proper government permission slips. He has steadfastly refused to criticize the spectacularly terrible Dubya & Co. except in superficial, technocratic terms. So, what excuse does Romney have left to explain why he wasted $35 million on politics when it could have been put to manifestly nobler ends?

The answer: ego. Mitt Romney is apparently the kind of man who looks at the $3 trillion federal budget and says, “The only thing wrong with this mess is that someone else is in charge of it.”

The notion that what the country needs is the same old government-centric approach to solving problems but someone just a little bit smarter to implement it is profoundly and tragically misguided, but Romney’s delusions of grandeur are especially laughable given his mediocre record in political office.

After all, the signature achievement of his governorship in Massachusetts is that he helped give a tax, spend (and spend again!), mandate and regulate approach to health care a Republican imprimatur.

Whether Romney’s decision to waste $35 million (so far) on politics is driven more by a disturbing distrust of civil society, a naive faith in the power of government, or a truly alarming and totally unjustified messianism is unclear. I do know this much: He could have bought a lot of magic underwear and hair gel with that money. It would have been money much better spent.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of Angry Blog.)

Apparently, it’s “Don’t be evil afraid to use the threat of government prosecution to intimidate the competition.” I guess it replaces their most recent slogan, “Don’t be evil showing Chinese users how their government is censoring the Internet.”

After Microsoft announced its $41 billion offer for Yahoo! in a bid to remain relevant online, Google was quick to send its top lawyer to the blogosphere to man the barricades. And so we get this entreaty for politicians across the globe to please stop Microsoft from grabbing a truly frightening 30 percent share of the search market. Unfortunately, some Congress critters are only too happy to oblige.

Here is Google, which every day is pointing the way toward a Web-based form of computing that could render the operating system obsolete, engaging the same tired Microsoft scaremongering that was demolished 10 years ago.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz recently lamented Google’s opening a lobby shop in D.C., complaining of “how the government lured Google into the political sector of the economy.” Looks to me like they’re taking to politics like a fish takes to water.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)

The only way for a libertarian who is also a political junkie to get through a presidential campaign is to develop some kind of rooting interest. This usually involves rooting against the most odious person in the race.

The libertarian side of me is constantly making mental calculations about the leading presidential contenders and how their election might affect the perennial struggle between individual liberty and government power. Picking between the Democrat and the Republican on this basis is sort of like trying to choose between a turtle and a snail about who will add the most to your track team. Both will be terribly lousy, so it’s just a matter of degree.

With only minimal policy differences to differentiate the contenders, my political junkie side, the human side, develops very superficial opinions about who I simply won’t be able to stomach watching on my TV for at least the next four years.

Since becoming a libertarian in 1994, these interests have usually coincided. It was easy to root for Dole against Clinton in 1996, as Dole had both the policy and personality advantages going for him.

You’ll recall that Dole, while always a moderate, was proposing major tax reform and was set to work with a GOP Congress which at that point had not completely sold out its limited-government ideals. In fact, they’d just shut down the government in a bruising budget battle with Clinton. Dole’s wicked sense of humor, curmudgeonly personality and constant references to himself in the third person made him easy to like on a personal level.

He certainly was not as smarmy, self-satisfied, duplicitous and odious as Bill Clinton, who was fresh from likening those who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building to Republicans who favored slowing the growth of spending on Medicare. He also had passed an entirely symbolic semiautomatic gun ban, raised taxes, and attempted to have the government “manage competition” in the health insurance industry. By election time, he was running on supporting school uniforms.

In 2000, it was a very tough call. Bush was clearly running away from the ideas of free markets and smaller government, while Gore was running on obnoxious “people vs. the powerful” theme. He was a liberal technocrat’s wet dream, and on the personal level I still held against him his despicable 1996 Democratic convention speech where he used his sister’s lung-cancer death to score political points. His obnoxious debate performances only confirmed how insufferable he would be to have as president for four years.

Bush, with his frequent malapropisms, would make excellent fodder for the late-night comics, I thought. So I gave him the very, very slight edge.

By 2004, Bush had already established himself as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history for self-evident reasons. His awfulness on policy filled me with so much rage that I could hardly generate a chuckle at his occasionally stupid and embarrassing remarks.

Kerry was no prize on personality, and you’ll recall that on the war he argued not that it should be ended but that he could fight it better. I suspected, though, that he would be much more likely to pull out were he elected. And indeed, he’s since come to favor withdrawing from Iraq. More than anything, I hoped a Kerry victory would be seen as a rebuke of the idea of pre-emptive war. In the time since, the course of the war itself has become such a rebuke.

And how about now? Normally, I’d be rooting for a Republican under the assumption that the Democrats will retain Congress and it’s best to aim for divided government and gridlock. But it seems likely the GOP nominee will remain committed to a forever war in Iraq and that the Democrats won’t be able to get a veto-proof majority to stop it. And the war is sort of a binary issue, and one the president will determine. So that means I’ve to root for a Democrat.

Also, I think George Will is right to note that it is almost certain that a Democrat will win the presidency this year:

Today, all the usual indicators are dismal for Republicans. If that broad assertion seems counterintuitive, produce a counterexample. The adverse indicators include: shifts in voters’ identifications with the two parties (Democrats now 50 percent, Republicans 36 percent); the tendency of independents (they favored Democratic candidates by 18 points in 2006); the fact that Democrats hold a majority of congressional seats in states with 303 electoral votes; the Democrats’ strength and the Republicans’ relative weakness in fundraising; the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the “wrong track”; the Republicans’ enthusiasm deficit relative to Democrats’ embrace of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, one of whom will be nominated.

So which one should I root for? Which one should libertarians root for?

First, the policy argument. Barack Obama was right on the war, and I believe he is more likely to follow through with his promise to end it. While Obama’s far from a noninterventionist, he is not the hawk that Hillary’s proven herself to be over time (remember the Kosovo war she got Bill to start as a price for standing by him after the Lewinsky fiasco?).

Both Hillary and Obama are terribly liberal, and both want to dramatically increase government control of health care. But I think that tactically, Hillary may be far preferable on policy. Obama — a magnetic, likeable and fresh face — could very will win a sweeping victory that goes all the way down the ticket, giving Democrats a much larger margin in Congress.

The Republicans are clearly flummoxed about how they could attack him. Their only hope would be a major foreign-policy crisis that they could use to highlight his allegedly slim resume (which is relative, I say; he has more foreign-policy experience than most governors or mayors).

Hillary, on the other hand, is deeply hated by Republicans and not much liked by independents. The trends would still carry her to victory, but it would be a much smaller victory. And once in office, I believe it would be much harder for her to marshal support for the many, many, many grandiose schemes she has in mind. Her mandate will be minimal, compared to the 55% or even better popular vote I think Obama could easily win.

Then again, I cannot stand the woman. Her voice irritates me. Her disdainful attitude toward those who disagree with her is disgusting. She literally cries, “Woe is me.” She shares all of her husband’s flaws and none of his charm. Once she is endowed with the terrible and expansive powers of the modern presidency (for which she’s expressed an alarming fondness), I’m quite sure my hatred for her will grow even stronger.

But, given the likely and frightening alternative of a popular, effective liberal president such as Obama, I guess this grinch may be rooting for Hillary after all.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of Angry Blog.)

Thus spake Ron Paul, in today’s surprisingly fair piece in The New York Times. I don’t agree with Paul about everything, and reporter Christopher Caldwell is certainly right to note that he attracts a lot of nuts.

But if you don’t like nuts, stop being a libertarian now because it’s just part of the package.

I like the guy. Note that whenever Paul is asked about why he’s getting so much attention, he says something along the lines of, “People are interested in the freedom message.” It’s always about the message, not about him.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)