www.JoeCobb.com

Orange County (CA) Register, November 29:

Superior Court Judge William Nevitt in San Diego has issued a preliminary ruling denying a lawsuit by San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties seeking to overturn Proposition 215, California’s medical marijuana law approved by voters in 1996. The counties had sought to have the law voided because it conflicts with federal law, which does not recognize medical uses for marijuana and prohibits any use or possession of marijuana.

Judge Nevitt ruled that since Prop. 215 does not require residents or officials to do something specifically banned by federal law, it shouldn’t be overturned.

This attempt to overturn a state law approved by voters because of conflict with federal law turns our constitutional system on its head. The founders wrote a Constitution that gave all powers and freedoms not granted exclusively to the central government to the states and to the people. The idea was to make the states “laboratories of democracy” in which different approaches to issues could be tried, tested and refined.

In fact, although it’s doubtful most current courts would agree, there’s a stronger case that the federal drug laws themselves are unconstitutional than that California and 10 other states are forbidden to temper the drug war with sensible compassion toward seriously ill people.

We hope Judge Nevitt sticks to his guns in his final ruling, due in 90 days or so.

Milton Friedman has joined the pantheon of eternal lights to our movement. I knew him at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. He and Rose used to invite us to their home on Dorchester Avenue for evenings of conversation; he was funny, and kind, and more inspiring than I can describe. His book, Capitalism and Freedom, was published the year I entered college at Chicago. His influential Newsweek column started a few years later, and he went on to become more and more involved in popular writing.

He was one of the few most-influential figures in the 20th Century who never held a high government office. Yes, during World War II, he worked as a staff economist at the U.S. Treasury, but it is NOT true that he came up with the idea of the payroll withholding tax (see his autobiography, Two Lucky People [1998], pp. 118-23).

Milton and Rose were a perfect couple; both very, very intellectual and very much in love all their lives. She does not get enough credit from the outside world, but Milton never failed to let you know how she worked with him. If you feel sad about his death, please feel how tragic it is for her now. Their autobiography is a fascinating and very human story of the reassertion of classical liberal ideas from the lowest points in early century to triumph at the conclusion.

I think it is indicative of his passion that the money he received from the Nobel prize was turned into the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing competition and choice into lower education. He is the earliest person, I think, who analyzed the public school model as two issues: how is education financed vs. how education is provided, and identified the second as a government-monopoly problem. If his ideas come to save the world, as I believe they will, it is surely his work to transform basic education that will have the deepest impact.

Friedman will be remembered for his work that overturned the Keynesian model of government-centered manipulation of the economy, but it might be worth knowing it was not his own economic ideas that did it. His own economic ideas were classical macroeconomic theory, and he openly credited his teachers, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, and Jacob Viner at Chicago, and the classical liberals of the 18-19th centuries. Milton Friedman’s triumph happened because he was a brilliant statistician and knew how to use the GDP data the government had been collecting since the mid-1930s. By the mid-1950s, there was enough data actually to prove the government had caused the Great Depression and it always produces most of the instability in the economy.

Knowing this was true, as Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek did, was not enough. Friedman actually proved it to the point where a skeptical (and politically hostile) world had to agree. He always used his splendid technical, mathematical talent to demolish again and again the prejudices of economists who believed the free market was somehow defective.

No, against the slur of opponents, he did not believe “the market solves all problems,” but he did understand how governments distort and destroy markets, causing problems, and how markets require property rights and information, and transaction methods, that government is responsible for.

It was not Friedman who was the main influence in Chile under Pinochet (it was his Chicago colleague, Arnold Harberger, who led all the Chilean graduate students in that right-wing government). Yet, he tells all about it in his autobiography, how his Nobel Prize was almost not awarded due to Marxist influence around the world blaming him.

Any personal significance I have in the libertarian movement is due entirely to the influence Milton Friedman had at the University of Chicago, and the large collection of fellow students he attracted to campus, who became my friends over the 17 years I lived in the campus neighborhood. He wrote in his autobiography how he realized a great university is mostly great because students learn mostly from their fellow students, not from their professors, and I think that is true. The bright light of Milton Friedman and the great students who surrounded him surely attracted the people from whom I learned the most in those years.

It is well known that many Mexican emigrants are from rural areas and come to the United States to work in the fields. It is also well known that American agriculture is obscenely subsidized by the government.

Here is a quote from an L.A. Times article last summer, “1986 Amnesty Frames Immigration Debate” (June 3, 2006)

California farmers, too, hail the Senate proposal for correcting what they say was a key problem of the 1986 amnesty: the widespread exodus of migrant laborers from the fields once they received legal status. The Senate bill requires newly legalized farmworkers to stay in their jobs three to five years before moving to other industries.

[REQUIRE the farmworkers to stay? Indentured?]

“I think the [Senate bill] will work much better for both workers and growers,” said Roy Gabriel, director of labor affairs for the California Farm Bureau. “It will stabilize the workforce and ensure the survival of the agricultural industry.”

I think if the government would stop subsidizing rich farmers, many of them would go out of business. This would be good for the rest of America. It would also stimulate the import of many fruits and vegetables from places like Mexico, where the farm workers already live.

Do you suppose that might have an effect on America’s “illegal immigration” problem?

First, see my message [click here: message below] celebrating the Montana and Missouri Libertarian successes taking voters away from Conrad Burns and Jim Talent. Notice that I say, “taking VOTERS away,” not the more common term - taking votes away. Those were not Burn’s or Talent’s votes; they were individual voters who chose Jones and Gilmour instead of them. I assume it was due to the message Jones and Gilmour were telling people in Montana and Missouri.

But look at this question, from the perspective of Power Politics. Dogmatic Social Conservatives (DSC) have lost the 2006 elections BIG TIME! They have had a good run with Bush and the Republicans for the past 12 years, but it’s all over now. They have shot their wad, and missed.

The Republican Party will become the minority in the House of Representatives.

In the Senate, it will continue to have strong control, because under Senate Rules there must be 60 votes to move anything. Bush won’t have to veto very much, since the Pelosi Democrats won’t really be able to do more than to bluster and pass dead letters about health care, minimum wages, and global warming.

Impotence in the House of Representatives is strongly to be desired. But it will be exciting.

Sadly, the tax cuts of 2001-03 are surely not permanent. As Bruce Bartlet has shown from official data, “Who Pays the Income Tax?”, the rich are already paying almost all the taxes. This burden will only go up in 2009-10 if the Democrats in the House do nothing. What do you expect?

But, cheer three times, the excreable Dogmatic Social Conservatives are in a corner; they should stay there. The income tax cuts are going to move to center stage, particularly as the economic growth we have enjoyed since 2001 begins to slow down in 2007-08. The Democratic Congress will have to accept the accusations that their pro-tax, pro-environmentalist, pro-union policies are responsible for slowing the economy.

John McCain is sitting very high right now because the Republicans, hungry for power and wanting to keep the presidency in 2009, will look more favorably on “moderate” McCain. The DSC will also know their most serious philosophical enemies are in the Democratic Party - but they can’t dominate the Republican Party without destroying its effectiveness. So, the social issues are checkmated.

As of 9:11am EST November 8, 2006, with 99% of the precincts reporting (according to CNN and MSNBC).

Party, Candidate, Voter Percentage (nbr. votes)

Election results, Montana U.S. Senate:

Republican Conrad Burns 48% (193,180)
Democrat Jon Tester 49% (194,916)
Libertarian Stan Jones 3% (10,166)

Election results, Missouri U.S. Senate:

Republican Jim Talent 47.4% (1,001,238)
Democrat Claire McCaskill 49.5% (1,047,049)
Libertarian Frank Gilmour 2.2% (47,504)

Congratulations to Frank Gilmour and Stan Jones! Libertarian candidates are doing what we do best: we force a rotation in office among the arrogant and powerful; retire them; kick them out. Without the participation of Stan Jones in Montana, it is possible Conrad Burns might have obtained 1,737 of the votes from voters favoring lower taxes, property rights, and a smaller government with fewer police powers. In Missouri, Talent needed 45,812 more votes, which went to Frank Gilmour instead. Maybe.

by Edward L. Hudgins

Political success depends on promoting the right ideas at the right time in the right environment. Sometimes, the right ideas are ahead of their time. But true leaders will articulate them even in the face of ridicule or short-term political failure, for if they remain silent, those ideas will never take root in the cultural soil and be ready to spring forth when the climate is right.

For the modern political right, it always begins with Barry Goldwater.

His 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, served as the manifesto that propelled Goldwater to the 1964 Republican nomination for president. Yes, he lost that election, big time. But his ideas gave rise to the activists and think tanks that paved the way for his successor, Ronald Reagan.

Goldwater wrote that “the first thing…[a conservative] has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul.â€? Secondly, “the economic and spiritual aspects of man’s nature are inextricably intertwined. He cannot be economically free…if he is enslaved politically; conversely, man’s political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the state.â€? And finally, “man’s development, in both its material and spiritual aspects, is not something that can be directed by outside forces. Every man, for his individual good and for the good of society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.â€?

These ideas found their way straight into the 1964 Republican Party platform:

1. Every person has the right to govern himself, to fix his own goals, and to make his own way with a minimum of governmental interference.

2. It is for government to foster and maintain an environment of freedom encouraging every individual to develop to the fullest his God-given powers of mind, heart and body; and, beyond this, government should undertake only needful things, rightly of public concern, which the citizen cannot himself accomplish. …

3. Within our Republic the Federal Government should act only in areas where it has Constitutional authority to act, and then only in respect to proven needs where individuals and local or state governments will not or cannot adequately perform.

Despite philosophical imprecision and some implicit contradictions (which were to have dire long-term consequences for his brand of conservatism), Goldwater presented not just a concrete guide for public policy, but a different political vision of a good society. At its center: the individual.

To Goldwater Republicans, individual liberty was the end of political society, and the core purpose of government was to protect the freedom of the individual. This was in keeping with the philosophy of America’s Founders. The Declaration of Independence speaks of individuals, not of collectives or communities, “endowed with certain unalienable rights.�

Goldwater was both behind the times and ahead of them. Most Americans living during that period would no doubt give a nod to those general sentiments. But during the 1960s and early ’70s, many also believed that problems in society—poverty, crime, racism—were caused by alleged free market failures. If governments could just intervene here and there, they could correct those problems and still leave us relatively free and prosperous.

The Johnson-Nixon era of “big government� programs, however, proved to be a practical disaster: they slowed the economy, tied up businesses in regulatory red tape, over-taxed the middle class, and created social problems even worse than those they sought to cure. The time was right for new ideas.

(Ed Hudgins is Executive Director of the Atlas Society / Objectivist Center. This has been quoted from his “The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party,” New Individualist, Vol.9, Nbr. 9-10 [Fall 2006].)

See also Ed Hudgins’ commentary on the election, “Report from the Front: Republican Election Fiasco.” Emailed to his distribution list Nov.8,2006.

by Steve Chapman

It used to be thought that women had no business voting, but when women got the vote, men didn’t suddenly decide their once-exclusive prerogative was worthless. Blacks were once barred from owning property. When the laws changed, whites didn’t suddenly give up buying in favor of renting.

Admitting an excluded group to an institution doesn’t necessarily weaken the institution. When the subject is matrimony, however, self-styled defenders of marriage say that if it isn’t restricted, it will promptly wither and die. They think allowing gays to wed would soon cause heterosexuals to abandon marriage, start propagating offspring out of wedlock and slide into degeneracy.

American treatment of homosexuality has come a long way. Though many people view it as a sin, it’s no longer a crime. Gays and lesbians can live their lives openly now.

Changes such as these were unimaginable 50 years ago, but they haven’t led to a collapse of the social order. Yet we are told that allowing homosexuals to join in legally sanctioned unions will reduce Western civilization to a smoking ruin.

That’s one of the chief rationales for efforts to block same-sex marriage. On Tuesday, eight states are offering ballot initiatives against it, and most if not all are expected to pass.

Supporters of these bans warn that redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would damage it beyond repair. Maggie Gallagher, head of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, writes that gay marriage would grossly shortchange the needs of children “in order to further adult interests in sexual freedom.”

Now, it will come as a shock to heterosexual couples that marriage can further sexual freedom, but never mind that. As it happens, sodomy laws have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Gays are already at liberty to have commitment-free trysts with members of Congress, evangelical pastors and anyone else they choose. Unfettered sex is already abundantly available to gays who want it.

What same-sex marriage offers, by contrast, is a safe harbor for those who prefer responsible monogamy to free love. It’s not a rejection of the values of traditional marriage — it’s an affirmation.

Gallagher and others say conventional marriage serves to reconcile “the erotic, social, sexual and financial needs of men and women with the needs of their partner and their children.” Funny — that’s
also what gay marriage does. It provides a durable framework in which two people can commit themselves to an exclusive sexual relationship while assuring a stable environment for their children.

Gallagher insists that youngsters are better off in a home with both a mother and a father, but thanks in part to liberal divorce laws — which conservatives are not mobilizing to repeal — many
children already are deprived of the model family.

Some kids already are being brought up by same-sex partners. Conservatives think children of straight couples are better off if their parents are married. So how can children of gay couples be better off if their parents are not?

The argument that gay marriage will increase family instability by pushing heterosexuals away from marriage is ingenious but unfounded. In this realm, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, a page of history is worth a volume of logic. Some European countries have allowed gays to enter into registered partnerships (which closely resemble marriage) for years, and the results are reassuring.

M.V. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, looked at the data
from Scandinavia and the Netherlands and found, “Divorce rates have not risen since the passage
of partnership laws, and marriage rates have remained stable or actually increased.” It’s true that out-of-wedlock births have increased, but they were increasing long before this change, and, Badgett reports, they increased just as fast in the countries that don’t sanction same-sex unions.

William Eskridge Jr. and Darren Spedale document the same patterns in their new book, “Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse?” And they note that “children in Denmark and Sweden [and the Netherlands] are much more likely to be raised by their parents than American children.” If banning gay marriage is supposed to help American kids, it isn’t working.

There are lots of things that could be done in this country to encourage marriage, prevent divorce and improve the well-being of children. Keeping same-sex couples from the altar is not one of them.

[Chicago Tribune, November 5, 2006]

While American medicine has become both ground breaking and revolutionary over the past 50 years, concern that our system is failing has never been greater. That anxiety comes largely from a regulatory and insurance system based on outmoded and discredited ideas, says Dr. David Gratzer, author of The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care.

Gratzer outlines some of the current problems of the U.S. health care system. For example:

• Nationally, state spending on Medicaid exceeds state spending on K-12 education.
• Cost outlays for Medicare are projected to consume a third of all federal income tax revenue by 2030.
• The Federal Drug Administration’s (FDA) excessive regulations — since 1964 — have increased the total time required for drug development to more than 15 years.

The system can be improved, says Gratzer, and he outlines a blueprint for revolutionary change:

• America needs to make health care truly individual and portable, mainly through changes in the tax code and trimming of regulations.
• Downsize the FDA and return it to its original mission — judging a drug’s safety, and de-emphasizing “efficacy.”
• Shore up Medicare, in part by allowing today’s workers to save for the health expenses in their elderly years.

The actual costs of health care are invisible to most people who have insurance provided by an employer. For families who have to buy their own coverage, the prices are too expensive because
(1) they are not part of a group, and (2) uninsured patients abandon their costs at the hospital and those who pay for insurance must pick up the deficit, further increasing insurance prices.

The current system is unsustainable. Political demands to make health care “free” (as if it were “a human right” ) only confuse the issue further, leading to a momentum for complete socialization, with all the problems we see in Canada, Japan, and Europe.

For more on Health Issues, see NCPA’s fine archive.

Recommended: David Gratzer, The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care. New York, Encounter Books, October 2006.