Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

It Is Self-Evident That No Person Is By Nature The Ruler Of Other People.

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Why does the Declaration of Independence proclaim “We hold these truths to be self-evident” instead of simply stating that “We believe it is true”?

This is actually a good question.  Answering it can teach us a lot about the Founding.

When we recall what the world was like in the Founders’ time, the answer becomes clear. The world in those days operated on the basis of utter inequality. Whether the ruler was a king who claimed to rule by divine right or an emperor who claimed the mandate of Heaven, society was essentially the same everywhere, consisting of monarchs and their subjects, rulers and the ruled. This was simply accepted as the way of things.

The Declaration offered the world a new vision. The Founders did not limit themselves to declaring that Americans no longer wanted or needed a king to rule over them. That alone would have been a radical challenge to monarchs everywhere. The Founders went much, much further. They did not merely claim they believed all men, all people, are created equal; they claimed it is self-evidently true that all are created equal. They declared the truth of equality in a world that believed in inequality.  America was not simply choosing to opt out of the belief system that sustained monarchs everywhere; the Founders were declaring that the world-system was based on a false belief.

Make no mistake, the Founders understood America’s significance for all humankind. Here is how Thomas Jefferson put it, near the end of his life:

“All eyes are open to or opening to…the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

At the time of the Founding, people everywhere were operating according to the belief that God had put saddles on their backs and rulers in the saddle. Jefferson declared the beginning of the end of the hereditary monarch propped up by an official state religion.

The Declaration’s statement that “We hold these truths to be self-evident” goes to the heart of the teaching mission of the Founders. By stating that these were self-evident truths, the Founders staked out a position far in advance of the way people were thinking in their time. By declaring those truths to be self-evident, they gave the rest of the world the opportunity to realize the truths they were announcing to the world. In the meantime, and until the world caught up with them, they would hold to the truths they were proclaiming.

That is what discoverers do. The American Revolution, like the Copernican Revolution, changed how people everywhere understood the world—but not overnight. A great revolution in thought begins with a few who declare what they have discovered and then stand by the truth of what they have discovered until the world learns to think anew. At first, only a few embraced the idea that the Earth orbited our sun and that the apparent motion of our sun was the result of the Earth’s rotation on its axis. Copernicus published his model in 1543; the Copernican Revolution was not complete until the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, and not accepted by everyone even then.

Just as Copernicus put the belief that our sun orbited the Earth on the road to extinction, the Founders put the world of royals and subjects on the road to extinction. Foreign observers confidently predicted America would fail without a king, but that is not how it turned out. Today, except in a handful of Islamic countries, monarchs are gone or reduced to mere ceremonial figures, made illegitimate by America’s shining example.

Because the Founders’ idea of government by, for, and of the people is so deeply ingrained in our imaginations, it is difficult for us to conceive of human life as it once was. The belief that the person called the king or queen or emperor is the State, and the descendants of that person will be the State in perpetuity strikes us today as odd. In the time of the Founders, the idea that no one was born to rule and no one born to be ruled, was odder still.

Even the people of the thirteen colonies needed help to break free of the idea that they were royal subjects. As Gordon Wood writes in The American Revolution:

“Since the king, in the words of the English jurist William Blackstone, was the ‘pater familias of the nation,’ to be a subject was in fact to be a kind of child…[The people] had to be held together from above, by the power of kings who created trains of dependencies and inequalities, supported by standing armies, strong religious establishments, and a dazzling array of titles, rituals, and ceremonies.”

Tom Paine’s world-changing book Common Sense helped Americans learn to think like citizens instead of subjects. In America, sovereign citizens replaced the royal sovereign. Politics was no longer about the king’s will and the king’s glory, but the well-being of the citizens. Citizens talking to their neighbors, reading newspapers, and considering the proposals of their fellow citizens who were running for political office replaced royals conferring with their courtiers.

As powerful as the old paradigm once was, it is easy for you and for me to see through it today.  For us, the Founders’ paradigm seems simply obvious. Here is how Harry Jaffa states it in his book A New Birth of Freedom:

“The queen bee is marked out by nature for her function in the hive.  Human queens (or kings) are not so marked.  Their rule is conventional, not natural.  As we have seen Jefferson say, human beings are not born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them.  These are facts accessible to everyone.  They are truths that are self-evident.”

Obvious to us now, and self-evident all along. It is self-evident that no person is by nature the ruler of other people in the way that people are by nature the rulers of their horses and their cattle. It is, as the Founders proclaimed, a self-evident truth.

In the Founders’ day, declaring the self-evident truth that all men are created equal was a rebuke to monarchs everywhere. Today, America’s founding truth is a rebuke to tyrants everywhere, in China, in Iran, and everywhere rulers oppress their people and crush dissent. It is also a rebuke to Americans on the Left who are keen to tear down the system of governance that is the magnificent gift of the Founders—and a reminder that we must follow the Founders’ example in our time by holding to those self-evident truths and resisting those who would return us to the world of rulers and ruled.

Robert Curry serves on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea

The Left Will Not Practice Civility, Much Less Adhere To Any Moral System That Would Require It.

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Politicians And Bureaucrats Have Created A Simmering Distrust In Our Institutions. Maybe It’s Coming To A Boil.

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Amid the dueling claims and information chaos in the wake of Election Day 2020, we’re seeing the consequence of the loss of faith in our basic institutions by at least half of the American public. These Americans have seen stark, specific examples in recent years of how justice is not equally applied.

They have watched as some federal agents and officials of the intelligence community, who should be helping to protect us and to uphold the laws, instead have embarked upon propaganda campaigns and operations that involved committing shocking violations and potential crimes, such as conducting illegal spying, filing improper wiretap applications, unmasking the protected names of innocent U.S. citizens, engaging in illegal leaks of confidential or classified information, and destroying evidence and documents. These lapses didn’t just happen during the 2016 presidential election; there is evidence they have been going on for years, unmitigated.

These Americans have watched, too, as those within our institutions, who are in a position to hold the guilty parties accountable, have failed to do so even as the evidence poured in and as the weeks, months and years have dragged on.

They have witnessed many of the institutions encompassing the nation’s media, social media and the internet getting away with increasingly offensive, restrictive censorship of certain people and certain thoughts — making sure that we don’t see some information and views while forcing other views down our throats, including one-sided false narratives and claims.

And these Americans have seen some of our courts co-opted and used as tools to stop certain politicians and policies.

It should be of little surprise, then, that this loss of faith in our basic institutions now extends to our election system. Americans know that the key to finding the truth lies in the hands of the very players who have proven to be so conflicted, incompetent and, at times, dishonest in the recent past.

The same pundits, analysts and news outlets that got 2016 so wrong and then followed a one-dimensional, biased path down the road to supposed Russia collusion only to be proven wildly wrong — the same folks who never apologized or self-corrected for their egregious errors then — are now reporting on the 2020 presidential election. We’re counting on them to do journalistic investigations and to find the facts.

The Department of Justice is relied upon to help identify and prosecute election fraud. We turn to the courts to arbitrate disputes over ballots and counts. We use the internet to find facts and information about all of it.

In short, the sources we now rely on most under the current scenario are some of the same ones who have spent the better part of the past four years apparently breaking rules and sometimes committing crimes to try to oust President Trump. Whatever turns out to be the case in the end, to suggest that it’s crazy or off-base to suspect any sort of conspiracy against Donald Trump is, itself, the irrational thought. People wouldn’t be thinking logically if they didn’t at least explore the possibility that there might be those willing to cross lines to keep Trump from getting reelected. 

Those who are suspicious are not the ones to blame for their lack of confidence in all of the institutions involved. They’re simply learning from experience.

Sharyl Attkisson is an Emmy-winning investigative journalist, author of the upcoming “Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism,”

Individualism

It’s A Better World When We Talk About People As Individuals, Not Undifferentiated Masses.

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Is it wrong to feel good about a nasty, ugly, horrible election that isn’t even officially over yet? I hope not, because I feel a hell of a lot better at the end of this week than at its start, when I looked at images of boarded-up buildings in cities from Los Angeles to New York, Seattle to Miami and pondered, for the first time in my long life, the possibility of Election Night rioting and street violence.

At virtually every level of contest, I’m happy to report that the results underscore just how out of step the two major parties are with the plurality of Americans who call ourselves independent. The Democrats were favored to win a solid majority in the Senate and expand their control of the House. They still might gain a razor-thin majority in the upper chamber early next year, when a couple of run-offs will be held, but the Dems lost seats in the House and liberals are still waiting for a “Blue Wave That Never Came.” The race for the White House will take a while to fully suss out, but we know enough to conclude that apparent winner Joe Biden could barely eke out a victory against an opponent whose approval rating is a dozen points below the historical average. The upshot is that neither party can pretend it has a mandate, which just might mean people in Washington will trim their ambitions for the next few years.

As Robby Soave has noted, socialism didn’t do well at the polls this year and its kissing cousin, wokeism, also fared poorly. Donald Trump “is on track to have the GOP’s best showing among minorities in decades,” notes Soave, an outcome that has driven some progressives absolutely nuts. New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, for instance, responded with anger and incredulity that “the percentage of LGBT voting for Trump doubled from 2016” and that “the percentage of Latinos and Asians voting for Trump INCREASED from 2016, according to exit polls. Yet more evidence that we can’t depend on the ‘browning of America’ to dismantle white supremacy and erase anti-blackness.”

But it’s a good thing that individuals cannot simply be defined by or reduced to their racial and ethnic identities, or their sexual orientation. And so it’s good to see another Times Opinion section staffer, Isvett Verde, explicitly challenging crude identity politics:

The reason the “Latino vote” befuddles is because it doesn’t exist, nor do “Latino issues.” If we want to understand how Latinos vote, we should start by retiring the word “Latino” entirely — and maybe “Hispanic,” too, a term first used by the United States government in the 1970 census that is based solely on the language native to the European settlers who conquered the Americas. These labels have served only to reduce us to a two-dimensional caricature: poor brown immigrants who always vote Democrat.

It’s a better world when we’re talking about people as individuals rather than undifferentiated masses. That’s also true of behavior on the state level, too, where voters can also surprise. California is about the deepest blue state in the country, and its voters overwhelmingly picked Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Yet as former ReasonEditor Virginia Postrel notes, “Democratic dominance doesn’t mean that Californians endorse the hopes and dreams of the cultural and economic left. Results of Tuesday’s many state ballot initiatives provide a more centrist picture.” Among the good outcomes were resounding defeats of referenda that would have allowed rent control, added union-backed regulations to dialysis clinics, and forced “app-based delivery and ride-sharing companies to classify drivers as independent contractors.” Proposition 16, which would have repealed a 24-year-old ban on affirmative action at public universities and state agencies, also got voted down, despite spending 20 times as much as the opposition. Perhaps the fact that minorities have thrived in California in the years since the ban on affirmative action passed in 1996 convinced voters that they no longer have to sanction such policies.

Then there was the clean sweep of various initiatives to legalize medical and recreational weed in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota. Washington, D.C. voters, writes Reason‘s Regan Taylor, “opted by a margin of 3 to 1 to make the use, possession, and cultivation of entheogenic plants and fungi, such as psilocybin mushrooms, law enforcers’ lowest priority.” And Oregon, a state that has been in the news this year mostly for horrible wildfires and endless protests in Portland, passed initiatives to legalize psilocybin and to eliminate the possibility of jail time for possessing small amounts of narcotics including heroin and cocaine. This is bold stuff, and not because it simply allows more people to get high legally in different ways. “These actions by voters represent a long-overdue attempt to change the course of how we deal with adult-use of drugs and the problems of drug abuse in America,” says Adrian Moore, a vice president of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.

Who would have thought we’d be having an adult conversation about intoxicants in a year as awful as 2020 has been—and at the end of a horrible election season that really was the ugliest I can recall (perhaps not uncoincidentally, this election is breaking 100-year-old records for participation)? There are many horrible, horrible things all around us: lockdowns are continuing, the economy is in medically induced coma, most of federal spending continues whether Congress and the president lift a finger. But 2020’s mixed election results show that we the people are pushing back and refusing to recite the scripts written for us.

The Twelve Evidentiary Fields Of Chicanery That Could End Our Faith In Democracy.

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Statists try to put a pro-individualism spin on democracy – “one person, one vote” – in order to justify the most anti-individualist implementation: majority rule, or what James Madison called mob rule. What if it was revealed that the entire election process is manipulated and untrustworthy? That seems to be what is happening in 2020, and it should end whatever residual faith there may be in the democracy charade. 

This election doesn’t pass the smell test. I participated in an eight-hour podcast from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Election Night and noted a number of anomalies at the time, none of which makes any sense in retrospect unless you entertain the possibility of massive chicanery.

This essay is only in the nature of exploratory questioning, because I’m sure many more oddities will come to light in the coming days, so I’ll focus mostly on the strange contradictions that occurred to me on Election Night, even if they didn’t fully register then, and why the official media narrative doesn’t pass muster.

That evening I was convinced Trump had won easily, as were so many other observers, overperforming in such a way that a Biden victory in the late stages seemed inconceivable. But then in the early morning hours, we had the surprising new narrative of a miraculous Biden comeback to contend with.

1)  Discussion of exit polls has disappeared from the media. Exit polls should roughly match final results, but when they don’t they’re usually sidelined from scrutiny after the early going. We heard that voters around the country mostly dismissed the virus narrative and chose the economy as the primary concern, on which Trump scored much better than Biden—but we are asked to believe they went for Biden anyway? Down-ballot results suggest a massive repudiation of liberal messaging, as the electorate failed to be swayed by the hysterical propaganda, yet the result at the top appears at odds with this clear refusal.

2)  In the early states that reported, particularly Florida, Trump made big gains among Latinos, African Americans, and Asians. Some of these gains would appear to have been of an historic nature. This should have translated to other states, and ruled out Arizona, Nevada, and Texas for Biden. But while this did happen in Texas, apparently Latinos in Arizona and Nevada went their own way. If African Americans, particularly males, were so resistant to Biden in the early states that were reported, how could they approve of him in such overwhelming numbers in the decisive cities of Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Atlanta?

3)  In every election, early patterns suggest trends to follow, as one should be able to extrapolate from baseline results to overarching conclusions. Behavior that occurs in one landscape should replicate in similar landscapes when similar parties are involved. But none of this seems to have happened on election night, at least after a certain point when the “pivot” occurred. As my podcast host Keaton Weiss noted throughout the night, he wasn’t seeing any overall trend, just state-by-state results, as though each state were voting in an independent election and following its own peculiar logic. National elections typically don’t unfold that way.

4)  The benign interpretation of the Biden comeback would be the “Red Mirage” effect we have been warned about so extensively. We are asked to “be patient as all the votes are counted,” and as we get used to accepting elections that are not concluded on the same day but last indefinitely. So we must believe that the urban vote in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Phoenix would be so overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor that it would swamp Trump’s stupendous early leads in each of the last seven disputed states. But all night long, as my host kept crunching the numbers from Biden-leaning counties, it didn’t seem credible that the compensation in Democratic counties would be able to overcome the already announced results.

5.  The New York Times needle showed North Carolina leaning toward Trump at 95 percent most of the night, and likewise Georgia at around 87 percent, until the latter started tilting back toward Biden very late. The needle is supposed to be an accurate reflection of all the available data, yet North Carolina was not called despite most of the vote having come in.

6)  Apart from a handful of outlets such as this one, there has been little acknowledgment of the unprecedented yearlong polling discrepancy, which dwarfs the “error” of 2016 by a large magnitude. This was clear to anyone following the election on the ground, comparing the vast size of Trump’s rallies versus Biden’s anemic turnouts, or the wild enthusiasm among Trump voters versus the limited allure of Biden among the technocratic liberal class. These ridiculous pre-election polls were meant to rationalize Biden’s win, providing room for any kind of maneuver that would help procure the desired result in the end.

7)  For months we seem to have been subjected to unrelenting psychological warfare warning us that there would be an illusory “Red Mirage,” that Trump would try to steal the election and that he would turn out his crazy followers on the streets in a display of fascistic violence if the results didn’t go his way. This single-minded focus on one side actually seems to have been paving the way for precisely such actions on the other side—minus, of course, the street action, because it doesn’t seem to have been necessary.

8)  The DNC openly stole the primaries from Bernie Sanders, starting with stopping the vote count in Iowa (courtesy of Pete Buttigieg’s friends in intelligence, the same Pete “the cheat” who has been all over the media justifying the delayed vote-counting), to orchestrating phantom primaries in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona (three of the same states that have been at the center of the general election outcome).

Inexplicable exit poll anomalies occurred on Super Tuesday, accompanied by insane Biden turnout in states from Virginia to Minnesota, exceeding even the enthusiasm of African Americans for Barack Obama. I documented all this minutely in an early April essay, and openly wondered at the time if it was a dry run for what was to come in the general election and whether Sanders’ greatest disservice to the nation, out of all the fictions and manipulations he has embodied, was to justify an illegitimate Democratic primary in order to normalize all of its disturbing elements for the general election.

9)  One of the most egregious anomalies in the Democratic primary was Maricopa County, where despite most polling stations being closed, and very thin turnout being reported during the day, by the end of the day such thin numbers were predictably reported as having turned into record turnout. Michigan was the state where Bernie made his last stand, but lost surprisingly poorly, after which he quit except in name only. Wisconsin held a phantom primary during the pandemic, without any GOTV effort on Sanders’s part, again a pattern replicated in the general election when Biden essentially stopped campaigning for the year except very sporadically in the last few weeks.

10)  When Trump won Ohio by a huge margin (8 percent), the three of us on the podcast felt that it bode very poorly for Biden in Pennsylvania and the rest of the industrial Midwest. Indeed, in any rational election, this should have held true. Yet the final results are completely at odds with the early direction.

11)  Likewise, we felt that with Trump increasing his margin in Florida from 2016, and doing so well among Latinos and African Americans, Georgia and North Carolina should be out of reach for Biden. But in this election apparently there are no bellwether states, just state by state independent results.

12)  The Democrats suffered substantial losses in the House, and apparently failed to win the Senate, which we were assured by the pollsters they had all but sealed. In an election with such an expanded viable map for Biden (with Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona in play), how is it possible that at the same time the Democrats would do so abysmally in the House and Senate races despite spending enormous sums of money? Indeed, as in Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) case, the margin of difference for some of the most ballyhooed races is mind-boggling. But, again, it didn’t translate to the national race, as it should have done.

Trump’s reelection would have posed an existential threat to the liberal elites, and their entire institutional cover-up, from which it would have been very difficult to recover. Their propaganda empire did its best to hold the fort from 2015 until the 2020 election, but to overcome a second, and even more ringing, validation of Trump’s oppositional ideology at the polls would have been too much even for this shameless deep state. There would have been a revolution on the Left (a real one, not led by a feckless Sanders) to correspond with the populism on the Right.

The liberal elites don’t want populism of any kind—Left or Right—so both had to be crushed in equal measure, and by almost parallel nefarious means, one in the Democratic primary, the other in the general election.

Perhaps most worrisome of all is that a reign of blatant censorship has been in effect in the liberal media since March, as Big Tech appropriates more and more of the burdens of open propagation of deep state aims. The way in which Trump’s tweets since the election have been censored is a very bad sign indeed, and soon we can expect any questioning of election results to be entirely banned in the name of protecting readers from disinformation.

I hope Trump doesn’t concede as long as he is in office, and uses his remaining time to expose the potential for fraud in great detail, putting it all on record while he has the chance to do so. He should pursue every constitutional and legal means to dispute these funny results and take it all the way to Congress.

It likely won’t be long before Twitter and social media, and the media in general, ban him and anyone showing any signs of the illness known as “Trumpism” from an open platform, all in the name of protecting the public from misinformation.

The past four years represent a rolling coup d’etat against Trump’s truth-telling politics, starting from criminal investigations based on fantasy to the final insult of an election at odds with public opinion sneering at official propaganda. As with the rest of his presidency, we have seen two elections take place, one unfolding in real-time, the other playing out on the media’s timescale.

The role of a visionary leader is to expose precisely such fissures between reality and fantasy, which Trump has attempted with gusto at every turn. I found no moment of his presidency as touching as Thursday’s White House briefing when he lashed out at the establishment where it hurts the most, questioning the sacred mythology of American democratic machinery. Trump is guilty of committing the unpardonable crime of reviving politics, removing it from the bipartisan rhetoric that normalizes consensual inhumanity. For this deplorable trespass, the election needed to be overturned and banished to the fog of silence.

 

 

Economics Is Truth And Light, Beauty And Awe, Hope And Compassion.

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As we survey the damage done by politics, pitting one half of Amerca against the other in a fight over the allocation of what the economy produces, it is instructive to switch attention to another field: economics. His studies in the Austrian school of economics led economist Sanford Ikeda to identify four categories in the teaching of economics: Truth And Light; Beauty And Awe; Hope: and Compassion. Peter J. Boettke summarizes them in his book, The Four Pillars Of Economic Understanding.

Truth And Light

Scarcity is a basic concept in economics. No-one in the world can have everything they want. Boettke writes:

There is certain shock value when you are first taught this idea and the notion that in our world we are constantly confronted with trade-offs.

Learning economics is learning about the consistent application of opportunity cost reasoning to all human affairs. This is where economics brings truth and light, piercing through the fog to make sense of all human endeavors. Trade-offs represent the logic and the underlying governing dynamics of the world around us.

Beauty And Awe

Adam Smith, in The Wealth Of Nations, asks us to contemplate that we depend for our very survival on the co-operation of a great multitude of individuals, whom we will never meet or have the opportunity to make friends with. Therefore we can not rely on their benevolence to help us. We must appeal to their “self-love” as Smith put it. They help us only if doing so helps themselves.

The economy is a system in which individuals generate knowledge, communicate it and utilize it in a complex web of interrelationships and interactions among economic actors near and far. It’s a marvel, as F.A. Hayek put it. Or as Boettke summarizes:

Prices guide us, profits lure us, losses discipline us in our decisions, and property rights provide the institutional infrastructure required for all this to take place.

It’s important for us to appreciate the spontaneous order of the market, which arises through independent but interrelated decision-making. There is beauty and awe in the mundane.

Hope

Economics teaches us that, through the expansion of trade, refinements in the division of labor and the division of knowledge, technological innovations, and adoption of the rules of the economic game that cultivates these developments, humanity was able to escape crushing poverty and raise standards of living all over the planet. Economics teaches us hope in the betterment of the human condition.

Entrepreneurs in the private sector are the economic actors who constantly seek mutual gains for them and their customers, are constantly on the lookout for new technologies to increase productivity or lower costs, and to improve the delivery to consumers of new and better goods and services, thereby better satisfying consumer needs. Hope is in the form of improved living conditions that result from entrepreneurs betting on ideas and bringing those ideas to market.

Compassion

Economics teaches – and demonstrates – that economic progress doesn’t result in gains only for the wealthy, but lifts the least advantaged from their previously precarious situation through material betterment. The goal is to help all economic actors, and economists examine the logic of choice, the structure of incentives and the flow of knowledge to assess and improve the ability of the system to produce the desired results. Economics teaches us great compassion for the least fortunate and focuses energy on institutional remedies to open up opportunities and eradicate barriers. Economic theories co-evolved with the institutions of private property, freedom and the rule of law. Economics recognizes the rights of all.

Morality

The critics of capitalism often claim that markets corrupt our morals. The opposite is the case. Economic society provides the foundation for more learning and improvements in our social relationships with one another.

The Austrian school of economics shines a bright light to illuminate the true subject of the field: the flourishing of human beings and the structure of societies that allow for experimentation, innovation and the emergence of the social order that is possible only via individual liberty.

 

The Many Ways in Which Freedom Won the Election.

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It is usually hard for many people to find any silver lining around the results of any election headlined by a contest between two presidential candidates who are usually indistinguishable from each other in their hostility to liberty and markets. Indeed, big government was on the ballot and big government won big. However, if you look beyond the presidential horse race,we can find a few reasons for good cheer.

For one thing, I enjoyed watching voters deliver a solid slap in the face to the peddlers of wokeness and hardcore progressivism – that is, to much of today’s Democratic agenda. It was delivered while getting rid of President Trump, which for many is a benefit. I have to admit that I didn’t see those two outcomes coming simultaneously. AIER’s Phil Magness puts it best:

“A complete moron with historically high unpopularity ratings basically fought this election to a draw (or near-draw depending on whatever happens in the counts), and did so facing the most aggressively one-sided media coverage skew against a major party candidate in US electoral history…. The ‘blue wave’ that was touted as a near-certainty by the same media and pollsters less than 24 hours ago didn’t materialize. … Whoever emerges victorious will do so without an electoral mandate, with a divided congress, and with nearly half of the country openly skeptical about the legitimacy of their win.”

Divided government is probably the best thing that could have happened to us this week, especially compared to the alternative of a unified Democratic government. This division, if it materialized, doesn’t mean that no big government policies will get through. Divided government during the Obama presidency resulted in several shameless Paul Ryan/Patty Murray budget deals.

Also, most people welcome bipartisanship but in reality, it is often synonymous with big government policies. So it will be this time around too as I predict the bipartisan enactment of many bad policies. Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already signaled that yet another gargantuan Covid relief bill will get through, in spite of the improved economic conditions. Adding insult to injury, it will contain idiotic provisions such as bailouts for state governments.

Still, we can take comfort in the realization that court packing, the Green New Deal, and other radically statist items on the Biden-Harris-Sanders agenda are, at least for now, off the table. Indeed, we should also celebrate the fact that there is now unlikely to be – at least not through the legislative process – a repeal of Trump’s corporate tax cut. Democrats are now quite unhappy at this unexpected failure of their dreams to materialize.

But the very best news came from the down ballots. Here are a few things deserving loud cheers.

First, in 2020 the war on drugs was finally won – by drugs. Reason’s Jacob Sullum explains here why that is. But I like how CEI’s Ryan Young sums it up: “Oregon decriminalized possession of hard drugs. Five other states legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use, including socially conservative Mississippi. Oregon and the District of Columbia also decriminalized hallucinogenic mushrooms. These are important libertarian victories, and not in the snickering libertine sense. These are victories for the rule of law.”

Second, Illinois voters said no by a 55-45 percent margin to a progressive income-tax scheme. The so-called “Fair Tax Amendment” would have amended the state constitution to replace the flat income tax with a progressive one.

Third, California’s progressives and big-government lovers got kicked in the butt quite forcefully. Proposition 22 passed, thus defeating an effort to reclassify independent contractors who work for platform-economy companies as full-time employees. Rather than overturn the whole provision, platform companies promised to come up with a compromise. Kevin Williamson at National Review explains that

“The new arrangement will keep ride-share drivers as independent contractors but give them wage guarantees for time spent in the car and make them eligible for health-care subsidies.” This compromise is still a big defeat for California’s progressives who believe that the government should be in charge of every single aspect of our lives, including our freedom to work and contract.

Then there’s the defeat of Proposition 16. The epitome of wokeness, this initiative would have reintroduced overt discrimination into government and public institutions by allowing “preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.”

Over at the Grumpy Economist Blog, John Cochrane lists more of the initiatives that were defeated or passed that should please libertarian types. Here are some:

“Prop. 15: Raise property taxes on business. Loses. Prop. 17: Parolees may vote. Wins. Prop. 18: 17 year olds may vote. Loses. Prop. 19: Property tax reduction. Wins. Note, it allows people who have multi-million dollar houses to keep the low property tax base when they move, and pass it on to heirs. So much for “tax the rich.” Prop. 20: Complicated. Stricter parole, crime classification. Loses. Prop. 21: Allows cities to impose rent control. Loses dramatically. (Per Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, “…rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”) Prop. 23: Requires onsite physician at kidney dialysis centers. (Pushed by SEIU union.) Loses. Prop. 25: Eliminate cash bail. Loses.”

Will progressives in California learn any lessons from these results? Probably not immediately.The media and the elites learned nothing from the 2016 election. But for now, some pretty awful policies were defeated.

To end on a hopeful note, I will say this: May the utter disaster and election mismanagement unfolding before our eyes in many states right now lead a few people to wonder why on earth they should believe that a government that can’t do something as basic as running an election should possibly be in charge of the rest of our lives.

Veronique de Rugy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Ballot Counting

Government Can’t Count Ballots. How Can It Possibly Manage a Pandemic or Our Health Care?

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Elections are a nasty business, but sometimes they can be clarifying.

We don’t yet know who won the US presidential election, and we may not for days or weeks to come. This stems largely from the ineptitude Americans witnessed on Election Tuesday.

It wasn’t just the fact that pollsters once again failed disastrously, or that networks fumbled their election coverage.

The bigger issue is that America’s governing bodies look incapable of managing something as simple as a vote, something Americans have managed to do efficiently for centuries without the benefit of computers, digital communication, and mass transportation.

As an American, I find this a tad embarrassing. As the journalist Glenn Greenwald observed Wednesday, countries with far fewer resources and less advanced technology regularly manage to hold speedy, efficient elections. This is something the US failed to do on Tuesday, Greenwald noted.

The richest and most powerful country on earth — whether due to ineptitude, choice or some combination of both — has no ability to perform the simple task of counting votes in a minimally efficient or confidence-inspiring manner. As a result, the credibility of the voting process is severely impaired, and any residual authority the U.S. claims to “spread” democracy to lucky recipients of its benevolence around the world is close to obliterated.

At 7:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, the day after the 2020 presidential elections, the results of the presidential race, as well as control of the Senate, are very much in doubt and in chaos. Watched by [the] rest of the world — deeply affected by who rules the still-imperialist superpower — the U.S. struggles and stumbles and staggers to engage in a simple task mastered by countless other less powerful and poorer countries: counting votes. Some states are not expected to [finish] their vote-counting until the end of this week or beyond.

This, to be blunt, is unacceptable.

The most prosperous country in the world cannot manage to do something as simple as collect and count ballots. Think about that for just a moment.

Unfortunately, this incompetence carries consequences that are quite real. Americans are beginning to lose faith in the integrity of elections. I’m not just talking about voters in the fever swamps of Twitter.

Many impressive journalists, thinkers, and students of various political stripes have expressed alarm at what they witnessed in the last 24 hours.

Many readers can probably relate to some of these concerns.

The reality is, the inability of election authorities to do something as simple as gather and count votes is undermining Americans’ faith in the constitutional system. As Greenwald notes, this is dangerous; but it’s also rational.

Because of the power and breadth of the federal government, there is a great deal at stake in presidential elections—too much at stake. Americans sense this, and when they see mail-in ballots missing, precincts that can’t get votes counted, voting delays, errors in data feeds, and other problems it naturally creates a feeling of uncertainty. Uncertainty in turn breeds distrust.

One could argue that this year’s election was unique. Turnout was unprecedented (at least in raw numbers), perhaps in part because of the coronavirus pandemic and the record number of mail-in ballots.

Perhaps that’s true. But the fact remains: how hard is it to collect and count ballots? I don’t wish to disparage the people working these elections. The process is probably far more complicated than many Americans realize. But this is true of most systems, which brings me to a key point.

Is collecting and counting ballots more difficult than running a vast health care system that involves pricing, insurance, medication, billing, and the very lives of individuals? The answer is no.

Is collecting and counting ballots more difficult than attempting to manage the spread of an invisible virus without ruining the livelihoods, spirits, educations, and very lives of hundreds of millions of people? Again, the answer is no.

In some ways, we should not be surprised to see governing bodies fail to manage something as elementary as an election. For decades we’ve watched the United States Post Office bungle something as simple as collecting and delivering mail. The USPS bleeds billions of dollars every year doing something a private company would make a profit doing, while delivering substandard service. (This is why libertarians have been arguing for more than a century that the Post Office should be subjected to competition.)

It’s no coincidence that the election debacle of 2020 happened in the year the Post Office played its largest role ever. It was bound to happen.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises observed in his 1944 book Bureaucracy, government agencies can never be anywhere near as efficient as private businesses. The competitive market compels entrepreneurs and their employees to competently and efficiently serve the buying public or go out of business. And profit-and-loss accounting enables them to figure out exactly what’s working and what’s not. In contrast, as Mises wrote:

“Public administration, the handling of the government apparatus of coercion and compulsion, must necessarily be formalistic and bureaucratic. No reform can remove the bureaucratic features of the government’s bureaus. It is useless to blame them for their slowness and slackness. It is vain to lament over the fact that the assiduity, carefulness, and painstaking work of the average bureau clerk are, as a rule, below those of the average worker in private business. (…) In the absence of an unquestionable yardstick of success and failure it is almost impossible for the vast majority of men to find that incentive to utmost exertion that the money calculus of profit-seeking business easily provides. It is of no use to criticize the bureaucrat’s pedantic observance of rigid rules and regulations. (…)

All such deficiencies are inherent in the performance of services which cannot be checked by money statements of profit and loss.”

That isn’t to say that bureaucracy is inherently evil. Mises clarified that, “bureaucracy in itself is neither good nor bad.”

“There is a field,” he continued, “namely, the handling of the apparatus of government, in which bureaucratic methods are required by necessity.”

Elections, for example, are necessarily a bureaucratic affair, even if that means they often get bungled.

The big problem is when governments bureaucratize things that don’t need to be bureaucratic. The evil lies in, as Mises said, “the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied.”

For example, health care does not need to be bureaucratic. It can and has been provided through the market. To the extent that it has been, market forces and signals have made it better.

But if health care were to be socialized—as in a single-payer scheme—it would have to be managed bureaucratically and would inevitably suffer all the deficiencies of a bureaucracy: ineptitude, slowness, neglect, etc.

Just imagine having to depend on the DMV or the USPS for your medical treatment. (If you’ve ever had to deal with the Veterans Administration, perhaps you don’t have to imagine.)

One may object that our health care system already suffers from those failings and is already quite bureaucratic. But that is because the government is already so heavily involved in it. As Mises wrote, “Every kind of government meddling… breeds bureaucratism.”

It is the absence of market forces and signals that makes governments inefficient. The normal mechanisms in markets that lead to efficiency, productivity, and prosperity simply cannot be replicated in a government system. Ever.

This is not to say some government systems cannot be managed more effectively than others. Naturally, they can. Just as many countries manage to hold elections and quickly get reliable results instead of the fiasco Americans witnessed this week.

The point is bureaucracy is inefficient by nature. We saw that Tuesday night.

And we should all be asking ourselves an important question: If government cannot manage something as simple as an election, how can it possibly make rational decisions about health care and pandemics that affect hundreds of millions of people?

 

Democracy Proves To Be The Death Of The Constitution.

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Sadly for the American experiment in liberty, democracy has corrupted the original ideas to the point of destroying them. Our most recent Presidential election has ended in a tie (thus undermining the basic – although hateful – democratic concept of majority rule) because both sides are equally anti-freedom.

Is the U.S. Constitution the biggest roadkill on the 2020 campaign trail? Is faith in “American exceptionalism” blinding people to a death spiral of American democracy?

According to much of the media, this is a single-issue election: “It’s the pandemic, stupid,” as a Politico headline blared. Unfortunately, the media was not smart or honest enough to recognize the real issue this year: “It’s the Constitution, stupid.”

Surging Covid caseloads earlier this year led to a domino-like collapse on restraints on politicians across the land. In April, President Donald Trump proclaimed, “The federal government has absolute power. It has the power. As to whether or not I’ll use that power, we’ll see.” The Justice Department asked Congress for authorization to suspend habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic but was rebuffed. In September, the Centers for Disease Control somehow acquired the power to suspend tens of millions of rental contracts and prohibit any evictions of tenants who ceased paying rent until after the end of December.

But these decrees could be child’s play compared to what could follow after the election.

The Constitution was intended to place politicians under “house arrest” – to strictly limit their power over private citizens in perpetuity. But in 2020, “house arrest” has been the default decree of many governors, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he may impose a national lockdown if more people test positive for Covid. Biden says he changed his mind and won’t shut down the economy. But his rhetorical reversal could be as nonbinding as were campaign promises to keep the nation out of war by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Biden has run one of the most brazen fear-based presidential campaigns in modern memory. He routinely exaggerates Covid death tolls by a hundred- or a thousand-fold and talks as if every American family has lost a member or two from this plague. The more fears that politicians fan, the easier it becomes to seize boundless power.

Covid shutdown advocates flaunt claims of “science and data” like righteous priests invoking God and the Bible to sanctify scourging enemies. In the same way that local health czars felt entitled to shut down all private and public schools if the Covid positivity rate exceeded 0.000008% of the population, so the next president may feel entitled to nullify the Constitution if more than a statistically insignificant number of people nationwide test positive. And it won’t matter that the tests are wildly inaccurate or that WHO overestimated the Covid fatality rate by 50-fold. Bogus Covid test results will be sufficient to euthanize bonafide constitutional rights.

Attorney General William Barr said that imposing a “national lockdown” would be “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history” except for slavery. But the dictatorial issues raised by lockdowns received as much attention from the media as the batting averages for the Amarillo Sod Poodles minor league baseball team.

Trump, to his credit, is now an outspoken opponent of lockdowns. But many Trump opponents are not opposed to dictators per se; they simply want different dictates. The passion for near-absolute power spurs the hostility increasingly shown towards the Constitution by many liberals, leftists, and violent protestors.

If a national lockdown is imposed, it won’t matter that it fails to keep people safe. So many individuals and agencies will benefit from the boundless power that they will always find a pretext to perpetuate restrictions. Health czars will respond to failure with the same type of ever greater force that characterized floundering socialist economies (brilliantly captured in John Jewkes’ 1948 masterpiece, Ordeal by Planning).

This year’s political developments have illustrated how easily politicians can nullify Americans’ rights merely by promising to play King Canute and magically sweep away a virus. Federal judge William Stickman IV ruled in September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But the response to the dictatorial governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen

Whitmer and New York’s Andrew Cuomo reveals that tens of millions of Americans will happily sacrifice anything and everything for promises of a risk-free life.

Can Americans read their future in the fetters proliferating in other English-speaking nations? Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced another national lockdown – 30 days of unmitigated misery, shutting down all “nonessential businesses” and confining people to their homes unless they have a few specific reasons to step out into the cold, cruel world. A senior cabinet member said yesterday that Britain’s shutdown may be extended beyond one month because “we will always be driven by what the data shows.” In New Zealand, the government last week announced it was creating “quarantine centers” for anyone who tests positive and refuses to obey government orders. One Twitter wag scoffed, “New Zealand went from gun bans to concentration camps in less than a year.”

If Americans could be confident that either Trump or Biden would be leashed by the law, there would be less dread about who wins. But elections nowadays are becoming simply coronations via vote counts. The president will take an oath of office on Inauguration Day but then can do as he or she pleases. Instead of vox populi, vox dei – “The voice of the people is the voice of God’ – we have “Damned Rascal Democracy.”

No one is entitled to the amount of power that the winner of this presidential election will commandeer over the American people. As Thomas Jefferson warned in 1799, “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Either the Constitution leashes the rulers, or the rulers leash the people. There is no middle way: there is no such thing as provisional legal inferiority to officialdom. If citizens trust rulers who blatantly violate the Constitution, they place themselves on the political chopping block.

Americans need to recognize the profound weaknesses revealed this year in democratic governments at every level. A strict adherence to the Bill of Rights is the surest way to reduce post-Election Day perils. If freedom is to survive, Americans must become far better informed of the dangers from government — regardless of who wins the Presidency.

James Bovard via aier.org.

Capitalism Eliminates Poverty, Despite These 4 Common Misperceptions.

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Equality is the wrong thing to worry about and the wrong outcome to pursue, because it’s both unnatural and unattainable. The elimination of poverty and the elevation of all is the better goal, and free-market capitalism is making tremendous progress.

You might have heard the phrase, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

Yes, it’s true that the rich (tend to) get richer, but the poor get richer too—especially if we look at a time span of decades or longer, and if we focus our attention on people living in countries where governments adhere to a basic respect for the rule of law and property rights.

Consider: Even those who would be called “poor” in today’s Europe or the United States have a standard of living that would astonish the nobles entertained in the Court of Versailles of Louis XIV (who lived from 1638-1715). Forget about private jets, air conditioning, television, wifi, or automatic elevators: the guests of the famous Sun King didn’t even have flushing toilets, which reportedly caused serious problems at heavily attended parties. Nutrition and medical care wasn’t the best back then, either: Of the six children Louis XIV had with his first wife, only one survived to adulthood, and even he died (at age 49) before his father, such that (because of other early deaths) the crown passed to Louis XIV’s five-year-old great-grandson upon his own death.

“Okay, sure,” you might hear. “Inventors make discoveries every now and then, so over the course of centuries that piles up and even average people end up richer. That’s just the operation of science and technology. But I’m talking about the economic process under unregulated capitalism, which is characterized by stagnation for most participants.”

Actually, that summary gets things backwards. For most of recorded history, humans had very slowly rising living standards, but then material progress suddenly exploded:

Source: American Enterprise Institute

As the chart makes clear, our current living standards vis-a-vis the nobles at the Palace of Versailles is not merely due to routine technological inventions; the progress in the last few centuries is literally unprecedented. In a 2016 New York Times column, economic historian Deirdre McCloskey explains the astonishing surge in economic growth in this way:

[A] mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.

“Yes,” you might hear, “we know socialism doesn’t work, and that the modern capitalist approach gives people an incentive to build and keep great fortunes. But those ‘per capita’ figures hide the massive inequalities in a largely unregulated system. Capitalism is great at producing but not at distributing fairly.”

Again, this misreads the historical record. It was precisely the “lower classes” who benefited the most from the economic progress unleashed in the so-called Industrial Revolution and beyond. Yes, the “captains of industry” personally became quite rich, but the rise of big business primarily benefited the working class. After all, the titans of industry engaged in “mass production” in order to sell products to… the masses.

For example, in the United States during the “Roaring ’20s”—and under the laissez-faire administration of Calvin Coolidge—regular American households saw a fantastic improvement in their quality of living. Gene Smiley explains: “A key to much of this growth was the spreading use of commercially generated electricity,” which in turn allowed average consumers to obtain “refrigerators, phonographs, electric irons, electric fans, electric lighting, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and other household appliances.” (Gene Smiley, Rethinking the Great Depression (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp. 5-6.)

“Fair enough, there may have been some low-hanging fruit when regular households didn’t have the things we now take for granted. But in more recent history, the forces of unrestrained liberalism are actually hurting the most vulnerable. Maybe not in the United States and other advanced countries, but certainly in poorer countries that are often exploited in international affairs.”

On the contrary, this too gets the facts backwards. As the World Bank reports, the global rate of “extreme poverty” (defined as people living on less than $1.90 per day) was cut in half from 1990 to 2010. Back in 1990, 1.85 billion people lived in extreme poverty, but by 2013, the figure had dropped to 767 million—meaning the number of those living on less than $1.90 per day had fallen by more than a billion people.

The following chart summarizes the overall progress of humanity in shrinking the problem of extreme poverty:

Of course, there is more work to be done on this front, but the spread of market institutions (sometimes disparaged as “neo-liberalism” and “globalization”) have gone hand-in-hand with rapid and unprecedented increases in human welfare, even for the poorest among us.

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