From the Archives: Libertarian reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces

Libertarian reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces
May 2, 2011 9:25 AM MST

In response to a request for a comment from the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner, retired U.S. Air Force colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who is challenging incumbent Representative Bob Goodlatte for the 2012 Republican nomination in Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District, said with regard to the killing of Osama bin Laden this weekend:

“I tend to share the views of former President George W. Bush, recalling Bush's March 13, 2002, press conference, where he acknowledged that we hadn't heard a lot from Osama bin Laden (even nine years ago) and that the US does not believe bin Laden is ‘at the center of any command structure.’"

‘Bring the troops home’
Dr. Kwiatkowski, who has been a popular speaker on the libertarian lecture circuit, added that “it was interesting that late Sunday night President Obama indicated we had the body, and then by Monday morning we hear that the body was buried at sea. I expect that this sudden lack of a viewable corpse will be a point of debate for both those who support the Bush/Obama policy in the region, and for those who oppose it. I encourage the President and the Congress to use the published death of Osama bin Laden as a real opportunity to bring the troops home from both Afghanistan and Iraq, and to use those billions and billions of tax dollars to truly defend our borders, and to balance our budget at home.”

Kwiatkowski was one of several prominent libertarians who have reacted to the news of the al-Qaeda founder’s death in Pakistan. Here is a sampling of their opinions from around the World Wide Web.

Wayne Allyn Root, currently the chairman of the Libertarian National Congressional Committee and the Libertarian Party’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate, issued a brief statement late Sunday that said, in part (emphasis in original):

“I want to congratulate the Navy Seal Team that tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden. I feel blessed for their courage.

“Congratulations are due for all American military and intelligence on their RELENTLESS decade long battle to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

“Tonight there is no politics, or partisan divide. This was a victory for America and all Americans.”

‘Establishing more liberal societies’

Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote on the Institute’s blog, Cato@Liberty:

“Bin Laden’s death does not end the threat posed by al Qaeda and its affiliates, but it goes a long way toward delivering justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and al Qaeda’s other acts of terrorism. Importantly, the operation appears to bear resemblance to earlier operations that captured the 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. The details should remind us that some of the most effective counterterrorism techniques do not rely on tens of thousands of troops stationed indefinitely in distant lands.”

Preble’s Cato colleague, director of information studies Jim Harper, argued in a separate blog post:

“Osama bin Laden failed to reach any of his geopolitical goals. He did not topple any Middle East dictator toward the end of establishing a Muslim caliphate. Indeed, the people of the Middle East have begun toppling their own dictators toward the end (we earnestly hope) of establishing more liberal societies.”

U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said simply in a news release:

"I commend our troops, the intelligence community, and the military leaders involved in both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama for their perseverance and courage in pursuit of this most grievous enemy of the United States of America."


‘Rethink our foreign policy’
Dave Nalle, national chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, wrote on BlogCritics.org:

“Even though it's basically meaningless, let's all pretend that killing bin Laden makes all the difference and puts the specter of 9/11 to rest. Let's say ‘mission accomplished’ and move on the way we should have when Bush first made that declaration. This shouldn't be a milestone in the War on Terror, it should be the gravestone which marks the end of that ill-conceived venture which has been as bungled by this administration as it was by the previous one.

“Let's call it a turning point and an opportunity to rethink our foreign policy and what our objectives ought to be. This might be the time to return to a model of foreign policy which doesn't rely on the failed Wilsonian vision of being everyone's big sister and forcing obedience where we can't buy affection. We've tried that approach and we can no longer afford to try to out-tyrant the tyrants and out terrorize the terrorists. That's a game which no one wins.”

‘Intelligence gathering’
Writing at the Nolan Chart, libertarian blogger Evan Mazur noted:

“Yes, America finally killed bin Laden and that's something everyone can be grateful for, but his death was not due to the presence of tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, but from intelligence gathering and a surgical strike in Pakistan that reportedly involved no civilian casualties. Such a focused strike was exactly the plan former Congressman and 2008 Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr had in mind. Congressman Ron Paul, who originally voted in favor of the use of force in Afghanistan on the condition that troops would be used to focus on the terrorists, came to regret that decision because the nature of the mission changed from that of terrorist hunting to nation building. Like Barr, he wanted to focus not on conducting a war in Afghanistan but on Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cohorts.”

Finally, Jeff Frazee, chairman of Young Americans for Liberty, pointed out in a widely-quoted Facebook status update:

"Only government can fail for 10 years and spend trillions of [your] dollars over budget and still be cheered and celebrated after it finally accomplishes what it originally set out to do."

As this article went to press, neither of the two libertarian-identified candidates for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination – Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson – had commented publicly on the death of Osama bin Laden.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on May 2, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Guest Post: The Freedoms at Stake in the Gay Wedding Cake Case

by Marian L. Tupy

On December 5, 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It’s a case that raises important questions about freedom of speech and of association that even the most fervent supporters of equality for gay people ought to take to heart.

In July 2012, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, a same-sex couple, visited Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver to order a custom wedding cake to celebrate their nuptials. Jack Phillips, the shop’s owner and a practicing Christian, was happy to sell the couple any of the goods in the store, but he refused to create a bespoke cake for a gay wedding, arguing that it would contravene his religious beliefs.

Craig and Mullins bought their wedding cake from a different bakery and went ahead with their happy event. The couple also filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that oversees the enforcement of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act – a law prohibiting businesses open to the public from discriminating against their customers on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

A lower court ruling decided in favor of the plaintiffs. The bakery was ordered to provide cakes for same-sex marriages and to “change its company policies, provide ‘comprehensive staff training’ regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers”.

The Cato Institute, where I work, has been at the forefront of the fight for gay equality, submitting amici curiae briefs in favor of the gay community in such ground-breaking cases as Lawrence v Texas, which decriminalized sodomy in the United States in 2003, and Obergefell v Hodges, which legalised gay marriage throughout the country in 2015. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, we have taken Phillips’s side.

There is no inconsistency here. Just as we would support a gay baker’s right to decline to convey a homophobic message, we support this Christian baker’s right to decline to celebrate a same-sex wedding. That is because Masterpiece isn’t really about religious liberty – apart from claims that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission itself treats the religious and nonreligious differently, something that concerned the swing Justice Anthony Kennedy at oral argument – but about freedom of speech.

As my learned colleagues wrote, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held “that what the First Amendment protects is a ‘freedom of the individual mind’, which the government violates whenever it tells a person what she must or must not say. Forcing a baker to create a unique piece of art violates that freedom of mind…

“Although making cakes may not initially appear to be speech to some, it is a form of artistic expression and therefore constitutionally protected… Indeed, the Supreme Court has long recognized that the First Amendment protects artistic as well as verbal expression, and that protection should likewise extend to this sort of baking – even if it’s not ideological and even if done to make money.”

No matter which side wins, the final decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission is likely to reverberate for many years to come. That’s because the case does not deal with government discrimination, which everyone abhors, but with private discrimination, which is, in some fashion, unavoidable. Each day, all of us discriminate against things (which car to buy), actions (where to eat) and people (who to go out with).

The law says that private discrimination is fine so long as it does not involve a business, which ought to be open to everyone. That’s a perfectly fine legal distinction, but not a logical or moral one. Consider the following scenario:

Suppose that you operate a private dining club – such as the one described by Dana Bate in her superb 2013 book Girls’ Guide to Love and Supper Clubs. You rent a space where you can indulge your passion for cooking and choose from a list of paying gourmands in accordance with your preference for, exempli gratia, straight people. Is that discrimination? No court has ruled so. Yet, Bate’s supper club is basically a business, except for incorporation. Were you to incorporate, you would be guilty of discrimination. Without it, you are free to do as you please.

So, private discrimination is not cut and dried. As one of the pioneers of gay marriage, the British-born writer Andrew Sullivan, noted, advocates of gay equality ought to acquire some perspective. “I think it was a prudential mistake to sue the baker,” he wrote. “Live and let live would have been a far better response.” That’s where Cato stands as well.

Reprinted from CapX.

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Attacks on free speech provoke author Jonathan Rauch to defend 'liberal science'

Attacks on free speech provoke author Jonathan Rauch to defend 'liberal science'
November 30, 2013 10:17 PM MST


Twenty years after it was first published, a new, expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought is now available as an ebook, with an ink-and-paper edition coming out in March 2014.

Jonathan Rauch, the author of Kindly Inquisitors and other books (including Demosclerosis and his 2013 memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul), spoke recently with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner following a panel discussion on freedom of speech at the Cato Institute. He explained what inspired him to write the book in the first place.

When, in the late 1980s, “Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and received a fatwa (essentially a death sentence) from Ayatollah Khomeini,” he said, “I thought that the West did not know how to respond to that. It could defend the laws of free speech but it wasn't defending the ideas of free speech. People were saying things like, 'Well, a death sentence on Rushdie is certainly offensive and wrong but Rushdie himself was offensive to Muslims,' and so forth. And I realized that a lot of people didn't understand why we have this idea of letting people say offensive stuff.”

What is 'liberal science'?
One of the concepts Rauch introduces in Kindly Inquisitors is what he calls “liberal science.”

He explained that “most discussions of free thought and speech start and end with the U.S Constitution” but he tries “to go a little deeper and look at society's method for producing knowledge and adjudicating disputes about fact, which is in some ways the most important thing we do” – for instance, disagreements about whether Christianity or Islam is “the right religion.”

Historically, he said, the method of “settling disputes like that was war.”

By contrast, “liberal science substitutes an open-ended, rule-based, social process in which everybody throws out ideas all the time and we subject them to criticism. We kill our hypotheses rather than each other. This turns out both to be spectacularly good at mobilizing intellectual talent to find and promote good ideas and spectacularly good at defusing what otherwise would be political, often violent, conflicts.”

Liberal science, he said, is the term he coined “for the whole intellectual network we have that seeks truth in Western liberal cultures.”

He compares it to two other major social institutions for “allocating resources and adjudicating social conflicts.”

In economics, he said, “market systems are in the business of allocating resources and they use open-ended rules of exchange to do that.”

In politics, he noted, “democracies are in the business of allocating coercive political power and they use the exchange of votes and compromise to do that.”

Parallel to those two systems, he added, “liberal science is in the business of adjudicating questions about who's right and wrong and they use the exchange of criticism.”

These three systems, Rauch explained, “all have in common that it shouldn't matter who you are. Anyone can participate, there's no special authority, and no one gets the final say. No one can stand outside the system and say, 'Here's the final result.'”

The result is “always subject to change. It's a big rolling social consensus.”

Retreat of the ideologues
Since Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, there has been a major, positive change in the intellectual environment, Rauch said.

“In the last twenty years there's been a retreat by active ideologues who favored censorship and speech controls,” he said. Those views have “been replaced with a more refined case that focuses more specifically on how minorities can be hurt when hate speech rises to a certain level of prevalence in society. It's called the 'hostile environment doctrine.'”

In preparing the new edition of his book, Rauch “decided to take a really hard look at that because I think it's right now the biggest and most serious challenge to people like me who advocate very robust freedom of speech.”

He wanted to find out, “from a minority point of view, which is better: a wide open system where people are free to say hateful things about me and often do, or a more controlled system where you've got some people in charge trying to protect me from that?”

His conclusion, “based on the history of the last twenty years for gay rights” is that “there's no contest. We're much better off as minorities when our speech and the other side's speech are [both] protected because we win those arguments, and we're worse off when that process is interfered with.”

The expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors includes a new foreword by syndicated columnist George F. Will and a new afterword by Jonathan Rauch. It is available now in both Nook and Kindle formats and a print version will be released next year by the University of Chicago Press.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 30, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives: Author Brian Doherty explains Ron Paul’s ambivalence on gay issues

Publisher's note: This article is part of a series to mark June as Gay Pride Month. It was originally published on Examiner.com on May 18, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Author Brian Doherty explains Ron Paul’s ambivalence on gay issues
May 18, 2012 10:13 PM MST

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has a record on gay-rights issues that can best be described as mixed.

For instance, Dr. Paul was one of only four Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote in favor of repealing the ban on openly gay personnel in the armed forces known as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

Paul also opposes a federal constitutional amendment that would prohibit same-sex marriage across the United States, yet he is the sponsor of legislation that would remove from federal courts the jurisdiction to hear and rule upon challenges to laws that ban gay marriage.


‘Voluntary and consensual agreements’
In his 2011 book, Liberty Defined, Paul suggests there should be a separation of marriage and state, just like there is separation of church and state.

In his chapter on marriage, he argues that “[if] the government was not involved, there would be no discussion or controversy over the definition of marriage. Why should the government give permission to two individuals for them to call themselves married? In a free society, something that we do not truly enjoy, all voluntary and consensual agreements would be recognized. If disputes arose, the courts could be involved as in any other civil dispute.”

This reference to the courts as protectors of contracts seems to be at odds with the bill he introduced to take marriage laws out of the jurisdiction of the federal courts.


‘One man and one woman’

While Paul seems to be tepidly endorsing the idea that same-sex couples could wed, he has said on several occasions that he thinks marriage should be limited to one man and one woman.

While campaigning in Iowa earlier this year, he said that he believes “that marriage is between one man and one woman and must be protected. I supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress’ constitutional authority to define what other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a same sex marriage license issued in another state.”

Journalist Brian Doherty has covered Ron Paul since 1999. He is the author of a new book, Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired. After a panel discussion about his book this week at the Cato Institute, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner asked Doherty about what appears to be Ron Paul’s “uncharacteristically studied ambivalence” about gay rights issues, particularly with regard to marriage equality.

Something ‘weird’
Paying a compliment to his interviewer, Doherty replied that “It is likely that you know every twist and turn of his thoughts on this issue better than me,” but he did go on to offer a partial explanation for Paul’s positions.

“I remember where he’s come to at this point, where I think he reliably will give the ‘get government out of marriage entirely’ answer, but I know his history with things like DOMA is more complicated than that. I’ve honestly forgotten every twist and turn of it.”

At bottom, Doherty explained, Paul’s inconsistent positions on gay rights issues can be explained by the fact that “he’s a 77-year-old American man who’s lived in Texas. There probably is a personally rooted, religiously rooted sense” – and here Doherty spoke sotto voce – “that there’s something a little ‘weird’ about homosexuality that maybe he’s not entirely comfortable with.”

‘Bruno-esque’
At the same time, Doherty noted, “I’m pretty sure both from watching him and knowing some of his associates, that that doesn’t come out in person, except possibly in a Bruno-esque situation” -- referring to a bizarre episode in the 2009 film Bruno in which actor Sacha Baron Cohen makes a pass at Ron Paul in a dimly-lit hotel room – “which I think is understandable.”

But, Doherty added, “circumstances and time had to probably open his mind a little on that question and I don’t personally fault him for it too much.”

In the end, he said, the answer to the gay-rights question that Ron Paul has come to embrace “seems to me about the correct libertarian-qua-libertarian answer.”

Complete audio of this interview with Brian Doherty can be heard as a podcast through Bearing Drift.

Additional excerpts from this interview focus on a post-Ron Paul political future and the decentralized nature of the Ron Paul phenomenon.

From the Archives: Attorneys Ted Olson, David Boies discuss Proposition 8 and gay marriage at Cato

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on May 18, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Attorneys Ted Olson, David Boies discuss Proposition 8 and gay marriage at Cato
May 18, 2011 2:40 PM MST

Two veteran Supreme Court litigators – former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson and David Boies (twice named Lawyer of the Year by the National Law Journal) – spoke at the Cato Institute on May 18. Their topic was not the National Football League’s labor dispute, in which they are each representing opposing sides, but rather a case on which they serve on the same team.

In May 2009, Olson and Boies – who had earlier represented opposite sides in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 presidential election case, Bush v. Gore – together filed suit in the state of California to challenge Proposition 8, a ballot measure from the previous November that prohibited same-sex marriage in that state. In August 2010, federal district judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Prop 8 was unconstitutional; its proponents have appealed the decision.

Observers immediately dubbed the two lawyers an “odd couple,” since it seemed unlikely, on its face, that a conservative Republican like Olson (who had served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) would join forces with a Democrat like Boies (who represented Al Gore and worked for the late Senator Edward Kennedy on Capitol Hill) to uphold the rights of gay and lesbian individuals to marry.


‘History of discrimination’

It became clear during the panel discussion at the Cato Institute that both Olson and Boies are equally passionate about this issue. Olson noted that the “history of discrimination [against gay people] is quite unpleasant to reflect on,” and that denying individuals the right to marry on the basis of sexual orientation is akin to granting a person all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship but, by dint of his nationality, denying him the right to call himself a citizen.

Ted Olson

He pointed out that in the pre-Civil War slave era, slaves were prohibited from marrying because marriage would be a symbol of their independence, and that when emancipation came, slaves rushed to be married because it was a way of asserting their new freedom.

Similarly, Boies asserted that “we all have an interest in protecting individual rights against government discrimination.” He pointed out that his clients and the proponents of Prop 8 both agree that marriage is a fundamental right that has been confirmed 14 times by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Boies said that depriving gay and lesbian citizens of the right to marry seriously harms them and the children they are raising. And, he pointed out, there is no benefit to other people from depriving gay men and lesbians of the right to marry.

After the panel discussion – which also included comments from former White House chief of staff John Podesta and Cato Institute chairman Robert Levy – Ted Olson spoke briefly with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the case, which was originally designated Perry v. Schwarzenegger but is now called Perry v. Brown because of the change in governors in California.


Overwhelming evidence

With regard to the prospects for the case, which is now stalled in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals while some peripheral matters are being litigated, Olson said, “We hope that we’ll get ultimately to the Supreme Court and have the Supreme Court affirm the rights of gay and lesbian individuals to be treated equally and with decency and dignity, not just in the state of California but everywhere else. The badge of discrimination that’s engraved in the California constitution has to be eliminated.”

He added that the most surprising thing he encountered during the trial was the power of his team’s case.

“We were overwhelmed by the strength of our own case,” Olson said.

“Just to listen to the expert witnesses and to hear the evidence was overwhelming,” he explained. “We had strong convictions about our arguments but the fact that the evidence was so compelling beyond our expectations was very gratifying.”

Boies and Olson predicted that a ruling from the Ninth Circuit will come late this year or in early 2012, and that if the U.S. Supreme Court chooses to hear a further appeal, the high court’s decision is not likely for at least two years.

From the Archives: 30 years on, Swedish scholar revisits Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose’ in new film

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 30, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

30 years on, Swedish scholar revisits Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose’ in new film
April 30, 2011 10:54 PM MST

Beginning in August, PBS television stations around the country will have the opportunity to broadcast a new documentary film, Free or Equal, presented by Swedish free-lance writer and Cato Institute senior fellow Johan Norberg.

Free or Equal revisits and distills some of the ideas found in Milton Friedman’s 10-part documentary series, Free to Choose, originally produced in 1980, focusing on the Nobel laureate’s views about the struggle between freedom and equality. Its release also coincides with a yearlong run-up to the centenary of Friedman’s birth.

In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on Friday, April 29, after a special preview screening of Free or Equal at the Cato Institute's Hayek Auditorium, Norberg said that “I was an admirer of the [Free to Choose] series. When I was developing my own ideas on some different subjects, I was quite impressed by this.”


Still relevant after 30 years
As the 30-year anniversary approached, Norberg explained, “we thought, ‘How can we update this and show that these ideas are extremely relevant to the kind of discussion that we’re having [today] about spending, taxation, debts, bailouts, stimulus packages, all those things?'”

Compressing the ten hours of Friedman’s original series into the sixty minutes of Free or Equal required some creativity on the part of Norberg and the producers.

“I really had to skip most of our ideas to be able to do that, but we figured that it’s important to just get it out there and try to touch upon those important principles,” he explained. “Then if people are interested, we’re doing other things and a lot of other people are doing great things on expanding these ideas and getting them out there.”

This documentary, he added, is "in a way, a teaser.”

Vantage points
Norberg and his crew traveled to three continents and several different countries both to do research and to film on location, sometimes from the same vantage points that Friedman used in Free to Choose three decades ago.

“The most important stops along the way,” Norberg said, were the United States, Sweden, and Hong Kong, “because we thought that we should pick some sort of extremes in the way we’re thinking of political/economic alternatives.”

Free or Equal is not Johan Norberg’s first film.

“I have made films before,” he noted, “but mostly they’re based on my books. I’ve written a book on globalization and I made a documentary about that [Globalisation Is Good]. I wrote a book on the financial crisis, and I made a documentary about that [Overdose].”

It is a challenge, Norberg added, to make a documentary film, which requires a different sort of process than writing a book does.

“The processes are different,” he explained, because "what you’re doing when you’re writing is constantly expanding on your subjects and finding different things that you have to explain. Then you write a chapter about that, you do more research and so on.”

In contrast, "it’s really the opposite when you’re doing a documentary,” Norberg continued. “You have the ideas and then you’re trying to narrow it down, you’re trying to simplify it as much as possible, and make sure that you try to cover as much as [you can] in very, very little time.”

There is, he said, “almost nothing left of a book when it’s on the screen for an hour.”

Teenage anarchy
Norberg came to libertarian ideas after a period as an adolescent anarchist in his native Sweden.

“I started out as an anarchist in high school, neither left nor right, just generally opposed to authority and big things, big government, and big business,” he said.

He chuckled and explained:

“What made me more interested in classical liberal and libertarian ideas was my meetings with other anarchists and realizing that a lot of them really thought that, ‘Yeah, we want freedom for everything but not if people really start a factory or employ people because then we’re going to go over there and punch them.’”

At that point, he thought, “'Hmm, that’s not really according to my principles.'”

He was reaching for other ideas and, in a time before the World Wide Web and the Internet, he found them in the library.

He first discovered “the Manchester liberals -- Cobden and Bright -- and Adam Smith,” and then he found “modern libertarians” like Friedman and Nozick, as well as Ayn Rand, “slowly and steadily realizing that I probably agree more with them.”


Ask PBS
In the months between now and August, when Free or Equal hits people’s homes, Norberg will be lecturing about the ideas in the film and about Milton Friedman himself, and also will be releasing clips from the movie and “sending them around the world.”

While Free or Equal has been made available for PBS stations to broadcast, “it’s up to individual stations around the country” to choose to use it, Norberg explained.

If people are interested in seeing the film on TV, he said, they should call or email their local PBS program directors and request that they schedule Free or Equal for broadcast in their communities.

“That will help to get it out,” Norberg said.


Suggested Links

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Revisiting a libertarian classic - Charles Murray's 'In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government'
After Microsoft and Google, is Apple next in line for a parasitical government shakedown?
'Deep doo-doo': Virginia author Jim Bacon warns of coming financial crisis in 'Boomergeddon'

From the Archives: A look back at efforts to put the brakes on government growth since 1980

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 28, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

A look back at efforts to put the brakes on government growth since 1980
April 28, 2010 3:13 PM MST

John Samples is the director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of a new book published this month called The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History.

Samples spoke about his book at a Cato briefing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, April 28, on a panel with Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

After the panel discussion – which was recorded by C-SPAN for future broadcast – ended, Samples responded to a few brief questions from the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

Limiting Government

Summing up his book, Samples said that it “looks at the effort to limit the federal government and, in some ways, to roll it back, after 1980. To understand what happened in that period, I look back to the 1930s and forward to the 2006 election.

“It’s really the story,” he said, “of trying to bring about some limits on the federal government, how it succeeded, how it failed, and why.”

During the Capitol Hill briefing, Samples mentioned the Tea Party movement and the effect it might – or might not – have on politics and elections. Are the roots of the Tea Party movement libertarian? Yes and no, Samples explained.

Spontaneous Tea Parties
Any kind of spontaneous movement in the way the Tea Party has been, he said, “is going to have a number of different people with a number of different views.”

However, he added, “because it arose specifically in response to an expansion of the federal government in the summer of 2009 … I think the core of this movement is a great dissatisfaction with that basic change – a big change – in the scope of American government.”

In other words, although various issues might be brought up at any given Tea Party gathering, Samples said, “the core is basically a concern about what’s going to happen in the United States with a large federal government.”

Comparing the election year of 2010 with the two years he examines in his book, 1980 and 1994, Samples found both similarities and differences.

1980, 1994, 2010
“In 1994 the economy was not too bad. In 1980 the whole modern movement came to power in the person of Ronald Reagan, because the 1970s had been very poor economically.”

That suggests, he said, because we’ve had rough economic times since late 2007 or early 2008, “that we’re in a similar period and that sooner or later we may see a strong revival” in which “America goes back to its roots, in many ways, and one of its roots is a kind of limited government,” particularly with regard to the economy.

So I think all things considered, we may be something like that now – more like 1980 than ’94.

One difference with 1994, he added, was that that year also manifested itself in “a crisis of governing. You had a lot of corruption. A surprising number of Members of Congress had either been thrown out or were under investigation.”

Moreover, Samples said, “you also had a sense in ’94 that this dominant majority that had been in power for 40 years was so entrenched that you couldn’t actually vote them out.”

That, he said, contrasts with 2010:

“I think that doesn’t exist now. We may see huge swings in House membership in 2006, 2008, and again in 2010.” The electorate, he said, “can really make a difference in a way that they were frustrated in ’92 and 1990.”

Trifecta
Regardless of what happens in 2010, however, Congressman Sensenbrenner warned at the beginning of the panel discussion that in order to put the brakes on spending, “we are going to have to dance the dance again,” and that will require a “trifecta in 2012” – that is, an election that results in Republican control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

From the Archives: Two views on breaking the free-trade policy logjam

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 22, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Two views on breaking the free-trade policy logjam
April 22, 2010 6:35 PM MST

There are three major free-trade agreements pending in Congress: one each with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.

Congressional approval is necessary to implement the agreements, which are intended to reduce tariffs and quotas and smooth the way for the United States to increase its exports to those countries while also allowing the three trading partners to export more products to the United States.

Brink Lindsey, now vice president for research at the Cato Institute in Washington, formerly served as director of that organization’s Center for Trade Policy Studies. He is the author of The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture and, with Daniel Ikenson, Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Law.

Trade Policy in the Mud
Lindsey spoke about the prospect of ratification for the three free-trade agreements when he was in Charlottesville on April 15. He told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner that “they are all stuck in the mud for the foreseeable future.”

In order to get them out of the mud, Lindsey said, “we would need President Obama to see that his credentials as a multilateralist would be burnished by getting these bills through Congress.” At the moment, he continued, Obama is “not putting pressure on Congress.”

Moreover, Democratic control of Congress “means they are very sensitive to the interests of organized labor, it doesn’t want to move on them. That logjam has to be broken.”

Breaking the Logjam
Lindsey went on to say that “it’s possible now that [since] Obama is well to the left of public opinion and is suffering in the polls as a result,” the president will be “looking for things to make him seem more moderate, make him seem more pro-business, more pro-market”

In other words, Lindsey suggests that “this is one possibility for him to buck the interest groups in his party and push sound trade policy. It’s possible, [but] I’m not holding my breath.”

Would any one of the agreements be more likely than the others to be approved first? Lindsey thinks not. “They’ll all rise or fall together,” he said.

A Candidate’s View
GOP congressional candidate Matthew Berry explained the importance of free trade policy during an interview on April 17.

“We need free trade agreements for two reasons,” Berry said. First, “more American exports mean more American jobs… a billion dollars worth of exports creates about 15,000 American jobs.”

Second, he said, “Trade increases competition, which means lower prices for American consumers, so your dollar goes farther.”

Obama’s Willing Partners
To break the logjam that Lindsey identified, Berry argued that if Republican candidates do well in 2010, President Obama will have “more willing partners in Congress” because even though the President says that he favors ratification, “he hasn’t been willing to expend any political capital to get them ratified.”

Berry concluded that, “if the Republicans could retake Congress, it will be easier for President Obama to put these on the table and [get them] passed.”

From the Archives - Examiner.com exclusive - Randal O'Toole on Virginia high-speed rail

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 9, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

This was my fifth article published on Examiner.com. Eventually I wrote about 500 articles that appeared on the now defunct news site over the six years between April 2010 and June 2016. This is the one-hundredth from that archive to be republished here.

Examiner.com exclusive - Randal O'Toole on Virginia high-speed rail
April 9, 2010 5:10 PM MST


According to an article in the Richmond Time-Dispatch by Eugene Trani, former president of Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia has received more than $75 million in federal stimulus money to spend on high-speed rail between Richmond and Washington, D.C. The money will go toward improvements on 11.5 miles of track north of Fredericksburg. An additional $10 million will be used to improve a railroad bypass on the outskirts of Richmond.

The question of whether money used toward high-speed rail is well-spent was one of the topics addressed at a Cato Institute briefing on Capitol Hill on April 9, where transportation experts Randal O’Toole (a senior fellow at Cato) and Ronald Utt (a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation) spoke.

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and other federal sources, the cost per passenger mile for air travel is 13 cents, of which one-tenth of a cent is paid through federal subsidy. For automobiles, the cost per passenger mile is 23 cents, of which one-half of a cent is paid through taxpayer subsidy. For Amtrak, the cost per passenger mile is 56 cents, of which 22 cents is subsidized by taxpayers. For transit (e.g., light rail or subways), the cost per passenger mile is 85 cents, with 61 cents coming from tax funding.

After the program ended, O’Toole answered a few questions about the prospects for high-speed rail in Virginia.

He said that what the government wants to do is “to spend a lot of money running trains a little faster than they run today. We’re not talking about bullet trains. We’re talking about running trains at a top speed of 110 miles an hour, which means an average speed of about 70 miles an hour.”

Continuing, O’Toole noted, “That’s not going to get a lot of people out of their cars, but it is going to cost taxpayers a lot of money. We’re talking about spending a lot of money to get very little benefit for anybody.”

With regard to how best to spend federal stimulus money to improve transportation in Virginia, O’Toole said:

“I think the way to spend the money would be to give loans to states and local areas that would be repaid out of user fees. Because if a transportation project can be repaid out of user fees, we know it’s worthwhile, we know that users want it. But if it requires huge subsidies that the users are never going to come close to paying for, then we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

O’Toole, author of the 2010 book, Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It, recommended that people interested in more information about high-speed rail and related topics should visit his blog, The Anti-Planner, and the web site of the American Dream Coalition.

From the Archives: Will the U.S. Supreme Court uphold freedom of expressive association?

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 7, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

This was my second article published on Examiner.com. Eventually I wrote about 500 articles that appeared on the now defunct news site over the six years between April 2010 and June 2016.

Will the U.S. Supreme Court uphold freedom of expressive association?
April 7, 2010 3:22 AM MST

On April 19, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. At issue is whether the University of California’s Hastings School of Law can force a student organization (the Christian Legal Society, or CLS) to accept members who do not share its core values.

The case resulted from the CLS’s preference to reserve membership to evangelical Christians who sign a statement affirming their religious and moral code, which includes a belief that sex outside of marriage is sinful and that homosexuality is also wrong.

Gay and lesbian students at Hastings objected to the CLS membership requirements, arguing that they were being excluded on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Adam Kissel Speaks at UVa
Last week at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Students for Individual Liberty and the Liberty Coalition jointly hosted a presentation by Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based group that defends the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, of the press, and of association on college campuses across the United States.

Kissel was asked about the CLS case. (See the accompanying video, below, for his full response.)

The rules at the Hastings School of Law, Kissel explained, say that “every student organization has to accept all comers … even if you completely disagree with the mission, even if you are joining it simply in order to thwart what it does and vote against all its policies … and vote in all your friends as leaders, it doesn’t matter.”

This has ramifications even for political organizations, he said, noting that the president of the college Democrats received a letter that said “she had to let anybody into her group, including campus Republicans, to be a voting member or a leader of her group, and she couldn’t have in her constitution” a provision saying that “only Democrats can be campus Democrats.”

Turning to the UVa students in the audience, Kissel said: “That sounds pretty ludicrous to you, I hope.”

Who Complained?
Kissel explained that the gay and lesbian group at Hastings, called “Outlaw,” filed a complaint against CLS, “saying ‘this group is discriminating against us’ and that kind of makes sense from a discrimination point of view. Only people who believe in discriminatory policy are allowed to be voting members. Not only that, there’s a whole category of people who are very, very unlikely to be self-hating so that, even though you’re saying it’s a matter of belief, it’s kind of also a matter of status."

Kissel illustriated his point by suggesting a fictional “Anti-Semitic Appreciation Society [that], if you’re Jewish, you’re very unlikely to be anti-semitic, so you’re kind of automatically excluded.”

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals accepted the argument of Outlaw and the Hastings administration and ruled that CLS had to accept gay and lesbian members, even if those people do not share the core values of CLS.

How did this get to the U.S. Supreme Court? Kissel explained that “the Seventh Circuit disagrees. Fourteen Attorneys General, including the Attorney General of Virginia, disagree.”

The Supreme Court took the case because there is divided opinion at lower judicial levels. What’s more, both sides can make a compelling case.

“So you have a very strong First Amendment group on one side,” Kissel said, “and you have a very strong anti-discrimination group on the other side. Both sides have reasonable arguments.”

The FIRE has submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in CLS v. Martinez, because the organization foresees broad and deep ramifications if the Supreme Court rules against CLS.

What Is at Stake?
“My feeling is,” said Kissel, “if the Supreme Court lets this rule through, it’s going to apply not just to universities having what I call ‘unconstitutional conditions’ (which is what the Attorneys General call it), but it means any city or state could have a non-discrimination rule that applies to every fraternal organization, every organization in the country. Basically, your First Amendment right to freedom of expressive association is thrown out the window.”

He went on to say that if CLS does not prevail, it “means that any other ‘content-neutral’ rule is going to also be accepted, if it’s furthering some kind of government interest. Government has lots of interests. So I’m pretty hopeful that the Supreme Court is going to do the right thing on this one.”

Further reading:

Amicus curiae brief of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Amicus curiae brief of the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute
Amicus curiae brief of the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute
Amicus curiae brief of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL)
Amicus curiae brief of 14 state attorneys general (including Virginia’s)