Yes, I suppose that could be just about every subsidy. But farm subsidies looked like they were dead, or at least on life support, when the Freedom to Farm Act was passed a few years ago. Now they are back with a vengeance.

It’s another wonderful example of Dubya the free-marketeer in action. First there were the steel tarriffs, and now farm subsidies. Looks like those anti-globalization protesters were a lot more effective than we thought. To wit:

“This is an appalling signal to the world and the farm bill is very, very bad for international agriculture,” Warren Truss, Australia’s agriculture minister, was quoted as saying on his country’s national radio network. The United States, he said, “is telling other people to lower subsidy levels but not doing the same thing itself.”

Yep. But it will pass with flying colors. God bless agribusiness. Here’s a comprehensive look at the issue by J.D. Tuccille, with lots of helpful links.

Here’s Steve Chapman on Dubya’s “delusions on mental-health treatment.” He lays out the case against mental-health parity very well. Here’s a tasty nugget:

What the advocates fail to explain is why American businesses would refuse to provide something that is so cheap and yet so valuable. Employers don’t have to provide any health insurance at all, and those that do are not acting entirely out of the kindness of their hearts. Most do it because they have to compete to attract and keep good workers. If mental-health coverage were something treasured by employees and easy to afford, you can be sure that businesses would be knocking each other down to provide it.

In fact, companies are not only declining to offer such broad coverage but resisting congressional efforts to force it down their throats. That suggests they don’t believe mental- health “parity” is quite the free lunch it pretends to be.

Why should I even bother with a career in journalism when Steve Chapman‘s already around to do the heavy lifting? I suppose he’ll die someday. Otherwise …

Here’s Chapman on Catholic clergy abuse scandal.

An pro-gun activist’s plan to give away free guns to sympathetic people in Chicago is a bad idea. Then again, it’s not the first bad idea John Birch has had.

Last year there was the plan to have people carry concealed weapons to the Taste of Chicago, a city festival that draws millions every year to downtown. Then there was the suggestion that folks could get around the state’s no conceal-carry law by carrying their gun unloaded in a special fanny pack.

I have no problem with civil disobedience — it’s a healthy tradition. And certainly, it’s no accident that it’s a felony to own a gun in Chicago and 666 homicides were committed last year in the city. But encouraging people to break gun laws gives those in the middle precisely the wrong impression about legal gun owners. They are, by and large, law-abiding and extremely judicious in exercising their constitutional rights.

Yes, the fight against the gun grabbers is frustrating, but this is not the way to go about fighting it. If Birch really wants to help people protect themselves, he should do so without seeking publicity. In the meantime, making a strong case for concealed carry will eventually make a dent. Certainly, these type of stunts just reinforce the perception among the large majority of people who don’t own guns that gun owners are a little nuts.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

The libertarian Cato Institute turned 25 yesterday, which means that it was born only four days before I was. That never occurred to me before. John Fund wrote a nice little tribute. Here’s a nice column from founder Ed Crane on why Sept. 11 calls for us to refocus government on its first priority — defending our borders — and otherwise retreat.

Crane rightly points out Sept. 11 was a grand failure of government to do the one task which is most important. And yet, the CIA and the Justice Department are now dragging their feet in releasing information that will help us find out how the Al Qaeda terrorists were not stopped before they could commit their “evildoings” on Sept. 11.

In the end, I think Cato has done a great job of being both principled and pragmatic in its approach to advancing the libertarian cause in Washington, D.C. Here’s to 25 more years. I’d love to say that in 25 years much of Cato’s agenda will have been accomplished, but I don’t think it will come even close to that in 250 years.

Big shocker: gentrification is good for communites. So says ABC News’ Oliver Libaw. And poor people are, according to a new study, less likely to move away from gentrifying neighborhoods than other kinds of neighborhoods.

What is worse? Being forced out of an up-and-coming neighborhood by increasing housing costs, or being forced out by rising crime rates? Why, after all, do neighborhoods gentrify? Developers see a market for higher-priced housing in a neighborhood, of course, but that market only exists potentially because it’s being underserved elsewhere in the city. That means the city is growing richer on average — that’s not a bad thing. What can get in the way are government regulations making development harder or installing rent controls.

Anyhow, more and more urban poor are able to afford housing in edge cities and exurbs. It’s a good story. Check it out.

What gets missed by those who oppose the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that banning virtual child porn is unconstitutional is the fact that cultural texts examining child sexual abuse will be dragged into the net along with things meant only to arouse prurient interest among pedophiles.

The sexual abuse of children is of course a terribly tragedy, but it is movies like “The Tin Drum” and novels like “Lolita” that will be punished most prominently. Indeed, pedophiles are well known for finding the most innocent photographs of children posing in Sears catalogues or teen stars in “Tiger Beat” arousing. There is no way to control evil thoughts, but we can do a much better job of actually punishing the people who abuse children.

A good start would be letting nonviolent drug users out of prison so that child molesters do the hard, long time that they deserve. Michael Lynch and Steve Chapman both wrote good columns on the subject. Julian Sanchez also has something to say about it, as does Amy Phillips.

Jacob Sullum has written an excellent column on the U.S. Justice Department’s recent attempt to overturn Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act.

Sullum argues that assisted suicide is not medicine, but that the federal government has made it impossible for individuals to control how they die. Sullum writes:

The drug laws reinforce the idea that suicide is a medical issue because they grant physicians exclusive access to the substances that offer a relatively easy and painless way to die. If people could buy barbiturates over the counter, they would not have to beg doctors for a prescription, and the Death With Dignity Act never would have been proposed.

He is absolutely right, as usual. That said, Ashcroft should keep his nose out of it. A state law regarding assisted suicide is not a federal issue.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has got another scheme to protect kids from online porn. Brian Krebs and David McGuire of Newsbytes write:

The measure offered by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., would instruct the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to set up a new domain name — such as “dot-prn” — for pornographic Web sites. Owners of adult sites would have 12 months to move their businesses following the creation of the new domain.

The bill, dubbed the “Family Privacy Protection Act” also would require e-mail advertisements that include explicit content to be clearly labeled as containing sexually oriented material.

Sigh. Same old problems in new packaging. First of all, what’s a pornographic site? If a site has information on safe sex or breast cancer or has sexual information of an academic nature, is it pornographic? Who determines the label? If it’s self-assigned, it loses any chance of working. If it’s assigned by a government agency, it puts a clear chill on free speech, since many users will set up their browsers to block the porn domain name, thus discouraging people from talking about sex or sexual issues.

As for labeling e-mail, I must say that I’ve never had trouble deciphering when an unsolicited e-mail contains pornographic content. It’s usually right there in the subject line. It’s called the delete button — use it.

A lot of people immediately dismiss any claims that a movement for a fat tax is gaining ground. But while it might seem outrageous to have some sort of food industry settlement a la the tobacco deal, or to tax fatty foods as much as we tax cigarettes or liquor, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Many of the same elements which allowed those other sin taxes to come about are in place for fatty foods. First and most importantly is a certain degree of socialized medicine, which buttresses many arguments for why personal decisions must be socialized as well. Without government funding of health care, there would be no argument that what you do with your own body somehow has a burdensome effect on the public at large.

Second there is the reality of the epidemic: according to the government, 36 percent of Americans are overweight and 23 percent are obese. And there is a mountain of evidence showing the relationship between obesity and all sorts of nasty things like heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, etc.

The only element missing is demonization. Yes, there is glorification of thinness and demonization of the chubby or obese on television, in movies or in fashion magazines. But it’s not likely that most people see McDonald’s in the same light they see Phillip Morris. Also, most people feel that, unlike smoking, a cheeseburger, a slice of pizza, or a Krispy Kreme doughnut every now and then can’t hurt. But since nicotine is addictive and it is, of course, impossible to quit, it’s a different story.

But don’t be too sure. Too often today, health advice is only a step short of health coercion. Which is a shame, since it causes people to be even more skeptical of sound health advice and more likely to rebel against it.

While the judge in the Bears case ruled in favor of big government, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Alexander P. White made one of the most spectacular rulings in recent Illinois history by overturning a liquor tax passed by the General Assembly in 1999.

The legislation, which funded Gov. Ryan’s pork-ridden Illinois FIRST program, was rammed through the General Assembly before most members even had the chance to read the bill. Also, the state constitution requires that legislation deal with a single subject, but the liquor tax law didn’t. The Tribune’s Douglas Holt and Ray Long write:

White noted that the law’s title says the liquor funds are to be used for public infrastructure improvements, but then the bill itself says the funds could be tapped to pay everything from judges’ salaries to school aid, mental health grants, community programs, vehicles and equipment.

Even before the licenses for bribes scandal, there were a lot of problems with Gov. Ryan, who made it clear from the very beginning of his 1998 campaign for governor that he was trading pork for political favors. That’s not to mention Ryan-led GOP efforts to shut the Libertarian Party of Illinois‘ candidate out of the process by cracking down really hard on ballot access efforts.

Ryan had the guts to put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, but it’s hard to think of anyone who wouldn’t have, considering how many people on death row were shown to be innocent. He also has tried to encourage trade with Cuba. But that’s where his good points end. He is worse than a big-government Democrat, because there are lots of Republicans who oppose his policies but voted for him just out of habit.

A Republican candidate for the GOP nomination for Alabama’s fifth congressional district wants to put a 1 percent tax on science fiction to fund NASA.

Aside from the obvious constitutional problems, it would seem like a stupid way to about the matter. People who consume science fiction are precisely the people likely to support space exploration. By taxing science fiction, less of it will be produced, less will be consumed, and the push to explore space will be decreased in the end. The whole measure is self-defeating.

Anyhow, it’s far from clear that investing in NASA is the best way of going about encouraging space exploration. NASA, for all its good intentions, is a cold-war relic that is just about as effective as any other government agency — that is to say, not very effective at all.

But you know what? I have a distinct feeling this kook won’t get the nomination.