www.JoeCobb.com

by Amity Shales
Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal
June 5, 2008; Page A21

People these days fear inflation. We also fear changing rates of inflation. And most of the tools we might use to protect ourselves, such as the Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities bond or gold stocks, are imperfect. TIPS are, after all, based on an inflation-measure whose accuracy is itself controversial – the Consumer Price Index.

So it’s worth remembering that, 75 years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt destroyed an inflation hedge that was literally as good as gold: the so-called “gold clause.” This helped prolong the Depression and has been causing damage ever since.

Consider an investor in the gold standard era. An ounce of gold was worth $20.67 and you could, at least in theory, trade your greenbacks for gold at the bank. The gold standard checked a government’s willingness to inflate, since it started losing gold when it did so. Those who traded bonds knew a confidence we can never know.

Washington, like all governments, could occasionally cheat on the gold standard – suspend it, limit the ability of citizens to convert paper into gold, and so on. But investors could protect themselves by writing a gold clause into their contracts. Such a clause promised a borrower that he could be repaid “in gold coin of the United States of America of or equal to the present standard of weight and fineness.” The gold clause fostered economic growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by making it easier for young industries to raise capital. Since investors protected by these clauses knew they would get their money back, interest rates were lower. To finance World War I, Washington even inserted gold clauses into Liberty Loans.

The powerful deflation of the early 1930s gave Roosevelt the excuse to end the gold standard. Dirt-low commodity prices, starving farmers, bank seizures of homes, 20% unemployment: All these miseries shouted, “looser money now!” The agricultural community, including eccentric Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, viewed the end of the gold standard as the ultimate revenge of the farmers punishing Wall Street for its 1920s prosperity.

One night in April, 1933, FDR surprised a bunch of advisers, saying “Congratulate me.” He’d taken the country off the gold standard, and now planned to personally manage the dollar’s exchange rate and price levels. Hearing the news, colleagues “began to scold Mr. Roosevelt as though he were a perverse and particularly backward schoolboy,” recalled Ray Moley. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the great free trader, “looked as though he had been stabbed in the back. FDR took out a ten-dollar bill, examined it and said ‘Ha! . . . How do I know it’s any good? Only the fact that I think it is makes it so.’”

Congress then drafted a joint resolution declaring gold clauses – protection against any damage Roosevelt might do – to be “against public policy.” Roosevelt couldn’t wait to see the resolution become law. Henry Wallace wrote that Roosevelt “looked up at the clock and put down 4:40 p.m., June 5, 1933 and signed his name.”

Randall Kroszner, a governor at the Federal Reserve Board, has studied this period and has noted that the price went up on most stocks and bonds, even gold-clause bonds, when the Supreme Court eventually validated FDR’s action. Mr. Kroszner and others argue that the abrogation of the gold clause had some virtue because it reduced the cost and inconvenience of debt renegotiation in a period of credit crisis.

But you can also argue that those price movements were more an expression of relief that a futile battle was over rather than a vote of approval. In my own review of the period I found evidence that snatching away from investors the perfect inflation hedge hurt the economy.

The market rally in the spring of 1933 slowed as investors watched FDR fiddle with the dollar and commodities over the course of the fall. In 1934, FDR thought better of it all and fixed the dollar to gold again, albeit now at $35 dollars an ounce. But the abrogation of the gold clause suggested that Washington had no regard for property rights. The general uncertainty generated by government economic policies did not abate. Capital went on strike. The Great Depression endured to the end of the decade. The positive transparency that the Securities and Exchange Commission or the creation of deposit insurance brought to markets was offset by losses like that of the gold clause.

And from then on, the federal government enjoyed wider license to inflate. Without the gold-clause option, citizens tried out other hedges – today a line about the CPI may stand where the old gold line once stood. In the 1970s, Sen. Jesse Helms pushed for repeal of the old abrogation, and eventually, with the support of Treasury Secretary William Simon, he won. But the average investor never used the clause to the same extent.

Today, as in the last days of the gold clause, officials like Mr. Kroszner of the Fed’s Board of Governors are weighing a difficult choice between efficient crisis management and property rights. People don’t talk more about the damage of monetary uncertainty because that damage is so spread out – harder to discern than, say, a single giant event like the implosion of Bear Stearns. But the old gold clause footnote explains why we may see yet more angst over the Consumer Price Index, the TIPS bond, or even LIBOR, the London Interbank rate. We have lost our bearings and our confidence in money generally.

After a majority of the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the gold clause abrogation, Justice James McReynolds read the dissent. Today McReynolds is generally regarded as an irrelevant reactionary, a footnote himself. But his rueful words ring true for those trying to reckon the dollar’s future. It was, he said, “impossible to estimate the result of what has been done.”

Miss Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” out in paperback this week (Harper Perennial).

by Cliff Kinkaid

A nice-sounding bill called the “Global Poverty Act,” sponsored by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama, is up for a Senate vote on Thursday [Feb.28] and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.

Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he was rushing Obama’s “Global Poverty Act” (S.2433) through his committee. The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.

The bill, which is item number four on the committee’s business meeting agenda, passed the House by a voice vote last year because most members didn’t realize what was in it. Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require. According to the website of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, no hearings have been held on the Obama bill in that body.

A release from the Obama Senate office about the bill declares, “In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015. We are halfway towards this deadline, and it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day.”

The legislation itself requires the President “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

The bill defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” as the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).

The U.N. says that “The commitment to provide 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance was first made 35 years ago in a General Assembly resolution, but it has been reaffirmed repeatedly over the years, including at the 2002 global Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico. However, in 2004, total aid from the industrialized countries totaled just $78.6 billion-or about 0.25% of their collective GNP.”

In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as “the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.”

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.’s “Millennium Project,” says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.’s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the “Millennium Development Goals,” this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Obama’s bill has only six co-sponsors. They are Senators Maria Cantwell, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Lugar, Richard Durbin, Chuck Hagel and Robert Menendez. But it appears that Biden and Obama see passage of this bill as a way to highlight Democratic Party priorities in the Senate.

The House version (H.R. 1302), sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), had only 84 co-sponsors before it was suddenly brought up on the House floor last September 25 and was passed by voice vote. House Republicans were caught off-guard, unaware that the pro-U.N. measure committed the U.S. to spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

It appears the Senate version is being pushed not only by Biden and Obama, a member of the committee, but also by Lugar, the ranking Republican member.

Lugar has worked with Obama in the past to promote more foreign aid for Russia, supposedly to stem nuclear proliferation, and has become Obama’s mentor. Like Biden, Lugar is a globalist. They have both promoted passage of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty, for example.

The so-called “Lugar-Obama initiative” was modeled after the Nunn-Lugar program, also known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, which was designed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. But one defense analyst, Rich Kelly, noted evidence that “CTR funds have eased the Russian military’s budgetary woes, freeing resources for such initiatives as the war in Chechnya and defense modernization.” He recommended that Congress “eliminate CTR funding so that it does not finance additional, perhaps more threatening, programs in the former Soviet Union.” However, over $6 billion has already been spent on the program.

Another program modeled on Nunn-Lugar, the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP), was recently exposed as having funded nuclear projects in Iran through Russia.

* * * * * *
[The bill calls for a massive increase in foreign aid spending]

Even these increases, however, will not be enough to satisfy the requirements of the Obama bill. A global tax will clearly be necessary to force American taxpayers to provide the money.

Americans who would like their senators to know what they are voting on can contact them through information at this official Senate site.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. He is a columnist for Accuracy in Media. This “AIM Column” was published February 22, 2008.

by Tibor Machan

Over the years, since I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, I have supported libertarian candidates and ballot measures, few of whom or which had any chance of winning. Often my more pragmatic, realistic friends tell me that I am throwing away my vote, and I should stop this if I want to be serious about giving concrete support to my political convictions. They sometimes even suggest that it is irresponsible to keep up this practice of hopeless voting.

I disagree. The reason is that political campaigns are very effective ways of taking to the media topics that would otherwise be mostly ignored. Consider just recently how many stories appeared about Ron Paul even though almost all of them also advised that Paul’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential nominee are nil.

So if there is a libertarian candidate or ballot measure, however little chance there is for victory, libertarians and their critics will likely be asked to appear on radio, TV, and in other forums of discussion. Arguably, then, they will be able to keep the dim flame of liberty from being extinguished. They may even give the flame a bit of strength over time.

Moreover, it doesn’t appear to me to be a good idea to give additional credibility to the candidacies of people who really have no interest in furthering the cause of liberty. In the current presidential race there is no viable candidate who seems to care one tiny bit about whether this country is loyal to the ideas of the founders, to the effective protection of the unalienable individual rights of all. It just seems to be an act of betrayal to vote for a person with no interest in human liberty, one who has fully bought into the currently fashionable politics of special interests and entitlements.

The only sensible alternative, barring a full-scale revolution, is to educate the electorate. And here is where a bit of optimism can also be justified. After all, it is no secret that the ideals and ideas of a fully free society are radical, novel, hardly explored by most people in the country and around the world. What John Locke and the founders proposed had only been considered by very few thinkers, and most of them paid attention only to certain limited aspects of the political philosophy that the founder’s sketched in the Declaration of Independence.

Yes, there had been talk of limiting the power of government, of restraining absolutism, of abolishing serfdom and slavery, or of freeing the press and even markets. But very few influential thinkers came out in favor of a totally free society, one in which government exists only to secure the basic rights of citizens.

So it makes sense to suppose that one good way of giving this radical political idea a good college try is to keep discussing it over and over again. As I have stressed many times, bad habits are not easy to get rid of even when one knows them to be bad. But in the case of statism – the belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of government – most people who embrace it are self-deceived into thinking that government really is the answer to most of our problems. Even in these United States it is nearly a knee-jerk response to any problem that some level or branch of government must be called upon in order to solve it. The self-deception is powerful enough to resist all the evidence staring us in the face of its futility.

All too many people also think in what can be called a fantastic fashion. They believe that if government might be of help, it will be of help. Of course, “might� is something for which no good argument is necessary; no history need support it. It need only be a matter of imagination, of speculation, of unsupported hypotheses.

Then if you combine this notion with the famous insight of the 19th century French economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat – namely that what isn’t seen is often completely ignored in assessing the merits of policies – you can figure out pretty well how difficult it is to make progress on the path to liberty.

So, to those who claim that supporting libertarian candidates or measures amounts to being totally ineffectual in the field of politics, I answer, “Not in the long run.� Moreover, the career of the free society actually is more a matter of the future than of the past. So focusing on the constitution of that future seems to make sense, at least for some of us.

Published in the Orange County (CA) Register, February 18, 2008, as an “Orange Grove” opinion essay.

Here is an article Peter Brimelow published in Forbes magazine in 1988 about competition in currency and free market innovations in the monetary payments system. And, yes of course, he mentions me in the article.
- Joe Cobb

[Link to article] Peter Brimelow’s Absolutely Definitive Account of This Weird Competing Currencies Idea Ron Paul Keeps Talking About [link here]

My own work with Ron Paul as his staff aide on the Banking Committee of the House of Representatives, 1983-85, led to the introduction of legislation that became Public Law 99-185 on December 17, 1985 (99 Stat. 1177), the “Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985.”

Our original plan was to introduce an American legal tender gold coinage denominated only in units of weight (troy ounce or gram of gold). This idea was promoted by Ron Paul when he served on the U.S. Gold Commission. The Gold Commission was established by Congress in 1978, and members were appointed by Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan in 1981. My own private group at that time was named the “U.S. Choice in Currency Commission.” We lobbied the members of the Gold Commission in favor of F.A. Hayek’s idea of competition in currencies, with gold bullion-weight coins as our centerpiece.

Ron Paul was converted from the classical gold standard ideas of Murray Rothbard - who wanted to fix the price of gold in terms of U.S. dollars, as it had been from 1792 until 1971. For an argument how Rothbard’s idea is bad, see Milton Friedman, “Real and Pseudo Gold Standards,” Journal of Law and Economics, vol.4 (1961).

For more discussion of how “parallel currencies” work, successfully, see the work of Prof. Roland Vaubel, University of Mannheim, Germany.
http://snipurl.com/Vaubel

Ron Paul adopted my proposal - and Milton Friedman’s - to have gold monetary units denominated by bullion weight, which is a natural measurement in the market, instead of being denominated in artificial “units of account” such as the dollar, mark, franc, pound sterling, yen, et al. Although we got the law passed to create the bullion coins (tangible things to concretely represent the Units-of-Bookkeeping, which are the main thing in any monetary system today), we did not achieve our main goal - to create a parallel currency in the United States.

This gold-weight-denominated alternative currency would have been a private, competitive alternative to the Federal Reserve monopoly over “dollars.”

Unfortunately, unlike the classic prototype of this kind of coinage and accounting system, the South African Krugerrand (which is not denominated in the paper “rand” currency units of that government), the Congress passed Public Law 99-185 with fictional “face value” amounts. They claimed this was necessary to make the bullion coinage legal tender. Of course, the South Africans had no problem making the Krugerrand legal tender without a fictional face value in paper rands; but we lost that debate.

It is good to see Peter Brimelow reviving publication of this old article [link here] from Forbes magazine. It is an idea whose time will be coming later in the 21st century.

Joe Cobb
Glendale, Arizona

by Jim Babka and Perry Willis

“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations . . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. — John Adams, (1735-1826), Founding Father and 2nd U.S. President, February 13, 1818

A man strings together long chains of poetic but meaningless phrases, such as “the audacity of hope” and “the urgency of now.” He speaks constantly of change, but the nature of this change remains undefined. His words are full of “sound and fury,” but “signify nothing.” Nevertheless, he is hailed not merely as a man, nor as a candidate, but as a movement.

A woman almost cries. It is a tiny expression of emotion born of a wounded ego. She fears the loss of the chance to control the lives of millions, and to bend them to her highly personal vision of what they need. Beyond this the tears say nothing, and mean nothing, but thousands swoon and she is rewarded with victory.

Another man states a willingness to keep American troops in Iraq for 100 years — a policy that will inflame the patriotic and religious emotions of a billion Muslims. And yet, he is hailed as a sober man, perhaps uniquely qualified to protect you from the very forces he promises to incite. Many members of the media freely admit that this man’s main constituency is the media itself. After all, he has no money, because no one cares to give him any, but the media’s cheer-leading is enough to lift him to victory.

Meanwhile, another man is largely ignored by the media. He is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the “Audacious Hoper,” the “Tearful Egotist,” or the “100-year spiller of other people’s blood.” And yet, he has many millions of dollars, because hundreds of thousands of people cared to give it to him. This man has run for president before. He was ignored by everyone then, but he is supported by many now. The difference is the label he runs under. Only that, and little more. His positions remain mostly the same. Only the label has changed.

Look around. Take notice. People vote for reasons having nothing to do with issues, beliefs, philosophy, or ideology. They vote because of poetry, tears, media cheer-leading, and labels. This happens because people do not care for their votes, which cost them little, in the same way that they care for their money. They may not give a man who favors a hundred year war their cash, but they will give him their vote, even when they oppose his war.

Votes are treated like bets. They are like cheers at a sports arena. The evidence for this is very clear. And yet, so many of us act as if changing how people vote will change the world.

No, changing minds is what will change the world.

Invest your time and money attempting to win votes, and no matter how much ground you think you’re gaining, at the last minute you will lose your entire investment to poetic sounds, egotistical tears, empty labels, or the sports cheers of the media. And many of the minds you may have changed in the process will snap back to their old positions, because you lost the vote.

But invest your time and money to change minds directly, and you will gain the world. The votes may even follow. But be under no illusions, the votes will merely follow, they will never lead. Electoral success will be the last thing that happens in the process of change, not the first. Grasp this fact, or you will groan forever in futile effort and constant despair.

This is our manifesto.

For centuries African-Americans had to enter buildings through side doors, but now it is possible that an African American will enter the White House itself, through the front door. This didn’t happen because people were specifically elected to make it happen. It happened because minds were changed, and the votes followed.

For long years a woman’s place was in the kitchen, but now her place is anywhere and everywhere she chooses, perhaps even the Oval Office. This didn’t happen because anyone was elected to make it happen. It happened because minds were changed.

Martin Luther King didn’t run candidates and elect them to office. He, and the brave men and women who suffered under the fire hoses and the biting dogs, changed minds through the example of their courage and peaceful suffering.

Gandhi didn’t elect a slate of candidates to vote the British out of India. Ghandi changed minds, including the minds of the British, and then the British left.

The Berlin Wall, and the communist governments of eastern Europe, didn’t fall because new legislatures were elected to make them fall. The change happened because minds changed, including the minds of soldiers who decided to no longer obey orders.

We don’t have cheap air travel and shipping today because someone was specifically elected to make those things happen, we have them because the people in power became intellectually convinced that it would be good to deregulate trucking and air travel.

Congressman Walter Jones, a man who supported the Iraq war so passionately that he wanted to change the name of French Fries to Freedom Fries, didn’t switch to opposing the war because his conservative constituents re-elected him for that purpose. His policy changed because his mind changed in the face of the evidence.

In the long run, people hit only what they aim at. As long as we aim mainly at votes our arrows will constantly pass through a cloud of smoke — a cloud that is blown this way and that by the gusts from media windbags. But if we aim at changing minds, our arrows will begin to hit home, and cause real, lasting change.

This is our aim. And we hope to make it your aim too. We want to change people’s minds about what is needed strategically, in order to more effectively cause a change in people’s philosophy of government.

To change minds we must make the case for small government seen and heard by everyone, everywhere, every day. It really is that simple.

What would it take in terms of time and money to convince the people of the need for things like the “Read the Bills Act,” and the “One Subject at a Time Act?” What would it take to convince people to not be afraid of terrorism? The answer to these questions provides the target we need to hit.

In this regard we want to bring to your attention the fact that the British government has decided to no longer talk about a “war on terror.” This hardly represents a fundamental change in government policy, but it does reflect a change in the beliefs of British leaders. It is a step in the direction of our “I am not afraid” campaign. We need to convince our own leaders to take the same first step.

You can push for this to happen by sending your elected representatives an “I am not afraid” message. Use your personal comments to point out that the British government has dropped the “war on terror” rhetoric. Urge your government to do the same thing. You can send your message here.

You can also help us to grow to the point where we can make our message heard by everyone, everywhere, every day. You can do that by making a contribution here [link].

Jim Babka and Perry Willis are the President and Communications Director of Downsize DC, a public internet lobbying organization to bombard members of Congress with emails about issues of concern to libertarians and to all good Americans who prize freedom.

by Marc Guttman

Pundits are speculating about the reasons behind the vast support for Ron Paul’s campaign for the U.S. presidency. Deductions I’ve read about the campaign’s impressive $4.3 million dollar online fundraising by donations from 38,000 Americans in a 24-hour period, seem to miss the obvious point. It’s more than just widespread disapproval of our current government and the Iraq War. There have been “protest candidates” before, but few have had Paul’s success. It’s the man and his message. And many who have heard it are convinced.

First, consider that Paul’s average donation on Nov. 5 was $103, more than twice as high as his average donation, and that the “money bomb” event was organized independently from his campaign. Paul’s supporters are individuals. They are not the weapons industry, corporations, special-interest groups, or anyone else seeking favor or privilege.

Paul’s supporters want honesty, openness, fairness, equality, prosperity and peace, not to mention our inalienable individual rights back. And they want America to stop meddling in the affairs of other peoples. This a bottom-up, grass-roots movement. And, it is coming on like gangbusters, a fact that concerns those who love power and authority.

Ron Paul was a flight surgeon in the Air Force, before becoming an obstetrician-gynecologist. The people who know him best have sent him 10 times to represent them in Congress, where he has consistently upheld his oath to defend the Constitution and has unwaveringly defended individual liberty for everyone.

Paul has never taken a government-paid junket. He has not participated in the lucrative congressional pension program. It is well known that lobbyists do not bother knocking on his door. He has never voted for a congressional pay raise, an unbalanced budget or to raise our taxes. He voted against the Iraq War Resolution, the Patriot Act, the Real ID Act, the Military Commissions Act, and any funding for the Iraq War. It is often said about him that “what he says is what he believes, not what he thinks you want to hear.”

He is likely the most principled and reluctant presidential candidate since George Washington.

The message

This candidate does little self-adulation. For Paul, it’s all about the message, which he argues, unlike himself, “has no short-comings.” His is the liberty message and is likely the true
reason for his support among so many. As liberty is moral, practical, peaceful and universally beneficial, it makes sense to libertarians, like me, that his message is popular.

Paul is a champion of the U.S. Constitution. He has spent his limited amount of on-air media time explaining this, but has not had the opportunity, other than through his writings and speeches, to explain why adhering strictly to the Constitution is beneficial. So, let me.

The Constitution was not written for the new Americans ratifying it, but for the new federal government. It is a document that describes very clearly the few powers enumerated to the federal government by the people and states, and ensures that the government cannot initiate force against us or infringe upon our rights or property.

In our often well-intentioned attempt to solve more quickly the few problems suffered by any free society, we have created wider-spread, deeper-rooted and longer-standing ones by expanding government’s power and reach.

Consequences of breaking law

This disregard for the rule of law has allowed our government to lead us into overseas conflicts that go beyond matters of defense, to infringe on our civil rights, to confiscate our property, to take close to 50 percent of our incomes, to impede improvements in quality and affordability of health care and education, to make it more difficult for people to provide for their families, to allow connected businesses unfair leverage, thus driving out competition
and harming consumers, to infringe on our rights to self-ownership and choosing potential medical therapies for ourselves, to allow private banks to print unbacked money causing harmful inflation, to harm the environment, to discourage ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, the ingredients of self-satisfaction and economic development.

Most often the legislation of politicians harms us, harms the least well off of us the most and harms those it aims to help. Many believe we can make our lives on this planet more peaceful, fairer, greener and more prosperous by returning to a society based on individual rights and by establishing a truly free-market economy, free trade and a foreign policy of nonintervention.

Marc Guttman is an emergency physician and vice chairman of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut. He lives in East Lyme. This op-ed Perspective column was published in The Day (New London, Conn.), November 18, 2007. [ link ]

By Bryan Ochalla

Britain’s Mr. Bean is waging war against proposed legislation that could make cracking jokes about gay people illegal.

According to a report at telegraph.co.uk, Rowan Atkinson recently sent a letter to British newspapers accusing the country’s leaders of wasting their time on measures that have “serious implications for freedom of speech, humour and creative expression.�

The legislation that has the Blackadder star seeing red is known as the Criminal Justice Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament and if passed could put people in prison for up to seven years for “stirring up hatred against homosexuals.”

In his letter, Atkinson said the legislation seems to be “infinitely extendable.â€?

“Witness the fact that the government has invited two additional groups—the disabled and transsexuals—to ‘make the case’ for the proposed legislation to be extended to them,” he added.

“I am sure that they could make a very good case, as indeed could all those who can claim that they cannot help being the way they are,” Atkinson said. “Men, for example, or women. Or people with big ears.

“The devil, as always, will be in the detail, but the casual ease which some people move from finding something offensive to wishing to declare it criminal—and are then able to find factions within government to aid their ambitions—is truly depressing,” he finished.

This isn’t the first time the comedian has gotten serious about protecting freedom of speech. In 2004 he mounted a successful campaign to water down legislation aimed at criminalizing expressions of religious hatred.

November 8, 2007

Link to original: http:/ Britain’s Mr. Bean Comes Out Against Legislation That Could Make Gay Jokes Illegal
© 2007 GayWired.com; All Rights Reserved.

by Michael Kinsley

The party that reels in these voters will dominate the future of American politics.

To oversimplify: Democrats are for Big Government; Republicans are against it.

To oversimplify somewhat less, Democrats aren’t always for Big Government, and Republicans aren’t always against it. Democrats treasure civil liberties, whereas Republicans are more tolerant of government censorship to protect children from pornography, or of wiretapping to catch a criminal, or of torture in the war against terrorism. War in general and Iraq in particular–certainly Big Government exercises–are projects Republicans tend to be more enthusiastic about. Likewise the criminal process: Republicans tend to want to make more things illegal and to send more people to jail for longer. Republicans also consider themselves more concerned about the moral tone of the country, and they are more disposed toward using the government in trying to improve it. In particular, Republicans think religion needs more help from society, through the government, while Democrats are touchier about the separation of church and state.

Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big Government or you don’t. And if you don’t, you call yourself a libertarian. Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe “foreign entanglements,” and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America’s help. They don’t care–or at least they don’t think the government should care–about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The relationship of these two ways of thinking to the two established parties is peculiar. Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it’s the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

Libertarians and communitarians (to continue this unjustified generalizing) are different character types. Communitarians tend to be bossy, boring and self-important, if they’re not being oversweetened and touchy-feely. Libertarians, by contrast, are not the selfish monsters you might expect. They are earnest and impractical–eager to corner you with their plan for using old refrigerators to reverse global warming or solving the traffic mess by privatizing stoplights. And if you disagree, they’re fine with that. It’s a free country.

The chance of the two political parties realigning so conveniently is slim. But the party that does well in the future will be the one that makes the better guess about where to place its bets. My money’s on the libertarians. People were shocked a couple of weeks ago when Ron Paul–one of those mysterious Republicans who seem to be running for President because everyone needs a hobby–raised $5 million from July through September, mostly on the Internet. Paul is a libertarian. In fact, he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988. The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don’t need society–nor should anyone else. They are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.

Reprinted from Time magazine, October 18, 2007

By David Kelley

Fifty years ago today [Oct.10] Ayn Rand published her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. It’s an enduringly popular novel - all 1,168 pages of it - with some 150,000 new copies still sold each year in bookstores alone. And it’s always had a special appeal for people in business. The reasons, at least on the surface, are obvious enough.

Businessmen are favorite villains in popular media, routinely featured as polluters, crooks and murderers in network TV dramas and first-run movies, not to mention novels. Oil company CEOs are hauled before congressional committees whenever fuel prices rise, to be harangued and publicly shamed for the sin of high profits. Genuine cases of wrongdoing like Enron set off witch hunts that drag in prominent achievers like Frank Quattrone and Martha Stewart.

By contrast, the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are businessmen - and women. Rand imbues them with heroic, larger-than-life stature in the Romantic mold, for their courage, integrity and ability to create wealth.

They are not the exploiters but the exploited: victims of parasites and predators who want to wrap the producers in regulatory chains and expropriate their wealth.

Rand’s perspective is a welcome relief to people who more often see themselves portrayed as the bad guys, and so it is no wonder it has such enthusiastic fans in the upper echelons of business as Ed Snider (Comcast Spectacor, Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers), Fred Smith (Federal Express), John Mackey (Whole Foods), John A. Allison (BB&T), and Kevin O’Connor (DoubleClick) - not to mention thousands of others who pursue careers at every level in the private sector.

Yet the deeper reasons why the novel has proved so enduringly popular have to do with Rand’s moral defense of business and capitalism. Rejecting the centuries-old, and still conventional, piety that production and trade are just “materialistic,” she eloquently portrayed the spiritual heart of wealth creation through the lives of the characters now well known to many millions of readers.

Hank Rearden, the innovator resented and opposed by the others in his field, has not created a new type of music, like Mozart; rather he struggled for 10 years to perfect a revolutionary metal alloy that he hoped would make him a great deal of money. Dagny Taggart is a gifted and courageous woman who leads a campaign - not to defend France from England on the battlefield, like Joan of Arc - but to manage a transcontinental railroad and, against impossible odds, to build a new branch line critical for the survival of her corporation. Francisco d’Anconia, the enormously talented heir to an international copper company, poses as an idle, worthless playboy to cover up his secret operations - not to rescue people from the French Revolution, like the Scarlet Pimpernel - but to rescue industrialists from exploitation by ruthless Washington kleptocrats.

Economists have known for a long time that profits are an external measure of the value created by business enterprise. Rand portrayed the process of creating value from the inside, in the heroes’ vision and courage, their rational exuberance in meeting the challenges of production. Her point was stated by one of the minor characters of “Atlas,” a musical composer: “Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes. … That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels - what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discovered how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor?”

As for the charge, from egalitarian left and religious right alike, that the profit motive is selfish, Rand agreed. She was notorious as the advocate of “the virtue of selfishness,” as she titled a later work. Her moral defense of the pursuit of self-interest, and her critique of self-sacrifice as a moral standard, is at the heart of the novel. At the same time, she provides a scathing portrait of what she calls “the aristocracy of pull”: businessmen who scheme, lie and bribe to win favors from government.

Economists have also known for a long time that trade is a positive sum game, yet most defenders of capitalism still wrestle with the “paradox” posed in the 18th century by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith: how private vice can produce public good, how the pursuit of self-interest yields benefits for all. Rand cut that Gordian knot in the novel by denying that the pursuit of self-interest is a vice. Precisely because trade is not a zero-sum game, Rand challenges the age-old moral view that one must be either a giver or a taker.

The central action of Atlas is the strike of the producers, their withdrawal from a society that depends on them to sustain itself and yet denounces them as morally inferior. Very well, says their leader, John Galt, we will not burden you further with what you see as our immoral and exploitative actions. The strike is of course a literary device; Rand herself described it as “a fantastic premise.” But it has a real and vital implication.

While it is true enough that free production and exchange serve “the public interest” (if that phrase has any real meaning), Rand argues that capitalism cannot be defended primarily on that ground. Capitalism is inherently a system of individualism, a system that regards every individual as an end in himself. That includes the right to live for himself, a right that does not depend on benefits to others, not even the mutual benefits that occur in trade.

This is the lesson that most people in business have yet to learn from Atlas, no matter how much they may love its portrayal of the passion and the glory possible in business enterprise. At a crucial point in the novel, the industrialist Hank Rearden is on trial for violating an arbitrary economic regulation.

Instead of apologizing for his pursuit of profit or seeking mercy on the basis of philanthropy, he says, “I work for nothing but my own profit - which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage - and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner…”

We will know the lesson of Atlas Shrugged has been learned when business people, facing accusers in Congress or the media, stand up like Rearden for their right to produce and trade freely, when they take pride in their profits and stop apologizing for creating wealth.

Mr. Kelley, author of “A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State” (Cato Institute, 1998), is the founder of The Atlas Society.

Published in The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2007, page A21. Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Comments sent to the Orange County (Ca.) Register’s
Opinion editor for publication:

Mark Steyn (“There were two creeps in the men’s room,” Sept.1) is correct that police officer Sgt. Dave Karsnia is the truly creepy man. Like the reputedly closeted J.Edgar Hoover, the fascination of some strong male personalities with homosexuality, particularly in repressing and persecuting it, is very strange behavior indeed.

Former Congressman Bob Barr has made a new career after losing his re-election a few years ago. He was best known for his role in the Clinton Senate impeachment trial. He also was able to ban the District of Columbia from counting the votes in favor of medical marijuana (a vote count a year later showed the referendum passed). Now Bob Barr is on the Board of the Marijuana Policy Project and a national committeeman of the Libertarian Party.

Senator Larry Craig is a very intelligant man. I worked with him in the 1980s in Congress. He was elected to Congress as a social conservative, so he had to play that role to get re-elected. Term limits might have helped him discover his libertarian principles, which he seems to have practiced in private.

Larry Craig, you can make big money and become a genuine new leader if you follow Bob Barr and become an outspoken advocate of freedom and privacy. Cut government spending on salaries for men’s room police patrol and send Sgt. Karsnia out to write traffic tickets instead.