From the Archives: Bob Marshall on Virginia’s response to NDAA, why he aims for the Senate

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 10, 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.

Bob Marshall on Virginia’s response to NDAA, why he aims for the Senate
April 10, 2012 7:16 PM MST

Delegate Bob Marshall is one of four candidates seeking the Republican nomination to succeed Senator Jim Webb in a primary election on June 12. In the 2008 U.S. Senate race, Marshall came within a few votes of defeating former Governor Jim Gilmore at a state GOP nominating convention.

Marshall is the author of HB 1160, a bill written in response to the passage last year of provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that permit the president to detain indefinitely, without trial, American citizens suspected of ties to terrorism. HB 1160 passed both chambers of the General Assembly with large majorities.

After the legislator spoke to a group of conservative political activists in Richmond on April 10, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner asked Marshall about the significance of that bill, which is likely to get the General Assembly’s final approval later this month after it considers a few minor amendments from Governor Bob McDonnell.

Freedom or serfdom

“It’s the significance of being a free citizen and being a serf,” Marshall said.

“I introduced House Bill 1160, which was a response to a statute that Congress passed [NDAA] that basically said the President (or any president) can take American citizens off the streets, not charge them with anything, not give them opportunity for counsel, not go to trial, not face their accuser – this is unprecedented in American history and the ostensible reason was, ‘Well, there are people committing treason out here for al-Qaeda.’”

Rick Sincere and Bob Marshall

That reasoning, to Marshall, was insufficient justification for giving the President this new authority.

“The Constitution has a specific provision for how Congress is supposed to treat Americans charged with treason,” he explained, noting that James Madison in the Federalist Papers had “said Congress was limited in how it prosecuted treason because treason in England was a recipe for going after your political enemies.”

The Framers, he continued, wanted to restrict the authority of Congress with regard to treason.

“There is a constitutional remedy for treason,” Marshall said.

The NDAA provisions were passed by Congress despite reported objections by the Obama administration although, Marshall said, President Obama is “on both sides of this issue,” because while “he wanted any provision in there that prevented him from detaining people taken out,” when he signed the bill he said, “‘Well, I won’t use this power you’ve just given me.’ That’s hard to fathom.”

Why run for Senate?

With regard to his decision to run for the U.S. Senate this year, Marshall said that “the fact that I ran in 2008 and came so close was an incentive for me to consider it but I really couldn’t do it until after I ran the House of Delegates race” in 2011, where he was running in a district that was at half new to him.

In that campaign, he said, “I had to introduce myself to voters. I do this at the ground level, knocking on doors, and I didn’t want them to think that I’m just doing this as a stepping stone” to higher office.

Although Marshall had been in elected office for 20 years, many of his new constituents “didn’t know that,” so he postponed a decision about the Senate race until after he had secured his re-election to the House of Delegates.

After last year’s election, he added, “I called around the state to see” whether there would “be support for a candidate like myself. When I found out there was, I decided to enter it.”

In part two of this interview, Bob Marshall explains how he intends to earn the votes of libertarians and talks about political figures he admires.

Suggested Links

Libertarian Party praises Virginia legislators for anti-NDAA bill
Environmental activist David Rothbard says 'lift up people and nature together'
Virginia 5th District candidate John Douglass calls for ‘new policies’
Senate hopeful E.W. Jackson claims libertarian backing, unique qualities
Presidential hopeful Gary Johnson on health care, marriage, and Colbert

From the Archives: Environmental activist David Rothbard says 'lift up people and nature together'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 10, 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.

Environmental activist David Rothbard says 'lift up people and nature together'
April 10, 2012 6:00 AM MST

Since 1985, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has tried “to promote market-based and technological solutions to issues relating to environment and development,” according to its cofounder and president, David Rothbard.

Rothbard recently spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about CFACT, its mission, and its recent activities, including its outreach to college students across the United States.

CFACT’s offshoot organization, Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, is actually a return to the parent group’s roots.

Rothbard and his colleague, executive director Craig Rucker, started CFACT in the 1980s as a community organizing project on college and university campuses.

Battling Nader

“We actually got our start battling Ralph Nader on the college campuses,” Rothbard explained, with its specific goal to counteract “the negative check-off of mandatory fees that Nader was collecting" from students.

"We helped stop that [practice] in a lot of states but then, in some of the states, they said, ‘Look, we’re going to continue funding Ralph Nader but if you want to have a separate organization that can compete in the marketplace of ideas, go ahead.’”

The eventual result was Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, which began in 2001 and now has chapters on just over campuses in about 20 states. The group, Rothbard said, is “bringing a conservative message about environment and development to students across the country.”

The biggest issue on CFACT’s agenda for 2012 is energy, he said.

“There are those who would try to deprive us of the energy that supplies the most abundant, affordable energy for America,” Rothbard explained. “Things like coal and oil.”

CFACT supports renewable energy, he said.


“We think if it can compete in the marketplace, that’s great. If people can find ways to use solar and wind and other things, that’s great -- but the problem is when they’re trying to add on these costs to the most affordable, plentiful energy supply that we have in the name of science when there’s no good science to back it up. A lot of people will pay for that and that will not be good for our economy.”

Global warming

Another issue CFACT is addressing is climate change, although it does not resonate as it did a few years ago.

“Global warming has kind of faded a little bit,” Rothbard explained. “We’ve been in the midst of that battle now for, I guess, more than 20 years but as global warming’s faded, the agenda’s remained the same, which is energy suppression, but [that is] going under a different name, which is the promotion of green jobs and green energy.”

Asked what issue may be taking center stage 18 months from now, Rothbard did not hesitate to name sustainable development as “an issue that’s growing.”

He noted that grassroots groups are “beginning to hear about this thing called Agenda 21,” which is a plan supported by the United Nations and “major international environmental groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.”

Agenda 21, he explained, “came out of the Rio Earth Summit that took place in Brazil in 1992. This June will be the 20th anniversary of that earth summit, taking place again in Rio.”

Along with Agenda 21, he said, “we’re starting to see this international push toward so-called sustainable development impacting local communities. It’s being pushed at the international level and that’s going to be an issue that’s growing in the coming 18 months.”

‘Make a difference’

Despite having run CFACT for more than a quarter century, Rothbard’s enthusiasm for the group’s activities is apparent when he describes plans for the near future.

“One of the reasons that we’re so excited about having a lot of students involved is,” he explained, that “we appreciate the fact that a lot of people care about the environment. They care about poverty, they care about public health, but we think it’s not enough just to care about it.”

Instead, he added, “we think you really need to be able to make a difference.”

Working with a board of scientific advisors, CFACT has been “able to promote positive, constructive solutions to these things.”

Moreover, he said, “we’re able to attract students from both sides, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, because if you’re really interested in helping people, if you’re really interested in helping protect the earth, then what you [need] to do is promote prosperity for people,” and advocate policies “that will lift up people and nature together.”

Suggested Links

Charlottesville writer Christopher Horner examines environmental ‘Power Grab’
Questions for the President on the State of the Union
‘Big Roads’ author Earl Swift brings interstate story to Charlottesville
Grover Norquist discusses congressional government and GOP candidates
Belafonte criticizes Barack Obama on civil liberties in Charlottesville

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: Five reasons to be a libertarian

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 8, 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 fourth 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.

Five reasons to be a libertarian
April 8, 2010 9:15 PM MST

What does it mean to be a libertarian?

Members of the Jefferson Area Libertarians, who are active in and around Charlottesville, Virginia, meet monthly for a happy hour at West Main restaurant, to discuss current affairs and other topics.

At their meeting on April 8, several JAL members answered the questions: What does it mean to be a libertarian? What is the essence of libertarianism?

Here are five of their responses.

Personal and Economic Freedom

John Munchmeyer, chairman of the Jefferson Area Libertarians, explained how he discovered libertarian thought.

“I was reading a book by Harry Browne, Why Government Doesn’t Work, sitting at Dulles Airport, waiting for a flight, when I got to the part about health care and it was like a light bulb went on in my head. It was like, “oh my gosh, government can never solve the problems in health care because it caused them in the first place.”

The essence of libertarianism to Munchmeyer? “Libertarianism is when you believe in personal freedom and economic freedom.”

Respect for True Human Rights
James Curtis is treasurer of the Libertarian Party of Virginia. He said he thinks the essence of libertarianism is “respect for true human rights, recognition that each of us owns our self, that we have the right to do as we choose, that government exists (when we choose to form governments) to protect those rights.”

Liberty and responsibility
Jim Lark, secretary of the Jefferson Area Libertarians and former national chairman of the Libertarian Party, said that libertarianism “means that you believe in individual liberty, that individuals have rights, that they have the right to acquire property, that they have the right to the fruits of their labors. They cannot, however, violate the like rights of others and they must be held responsible for their actions.”

Non-Initiation of Force
Steve LaBianca, an alternate member of the Libertarian National Committee, said that libertarianism “is a political philosophy characterized by the absence of the initiation of physical violence, physical coercion, [or] physical force.” What that means personally, he said, is “to practice not coercing anybody for any reason whatsoever. Obviously, that means I can exert force in defense of myself, if I choose to (not necessarily required).”

He added: “In a political sense, it means institutions which also do not do that, which means governments specifically should not engage in the initiation of force, as well.

‘Leave Me Alone’
Albemarle County resident Tim Hulsey, who is not affiliated with any political party but who attends JAL happy hours for the intelligent conversation, summed things up in few words:

“I hate politics. I hate the way politics always comes around to bite me in the ass, and I want politics to be less important in my life.”

The Jefferson Area Libertarians meet on the second Tuesday of each month from 4:30 p.m to 6:30 p.m. at West Main Restaurant, 333 W. Main Street, in Charlottesville. For more information, visit www.4JAL.org.

From the Archives: Is 'income inequality' a serious problem?

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 third 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.

Is 'income inequality' a serious problem?
April 7, 2010 6:02 PM MST

One doesn’t expect The Sabre, a web site devoted to sports at the University of Virginia, to be a place to find long discussion threads about political and economic issues. Yet on March 30, a lively exchange of ideas ensued when one of its contributors posted a quotation from former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan: “Income inequality is where the capitalistic system is most vulnerable."

In his 1996 book, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, legal scholar and economist David Friedman wrote:

“When a psychiatrist wants to get his audience’s attention, he talks about sex. Economists talk about the income distribution. In both cases the audience’s interest is prurient (what are other people doing?), puritanical (that they shouldn’t be?), and personal (how am I doing?). In both, there is the thrill of violating taboo; although sex is gradually becoming an accepted topic of conversation, asking how much money someone makes is still beyond the pale.”

Though asking about someone’s income is still not permitted in polite conversation, it is not forbidden in political discourse. Members of Congress and political candidates talk about it all the time, sparking the question: Is “income inequality” something that should worry us?

George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen put the question in perspective in the New York Times. “What matters most is how well people are doing in absolute terms,” he wrote. “We should continue to improve opportunities for lower-income people, but inequality as a major and chronic American problem has been overstated.”

Fears about income inequality stem from a pre-modern understanding of economics, in which because some people “have,” others “have not.” In the pre-industrial, pre-capitalist world, this was largely true. If Midas had a lot of gold, it meant he was taking it from his subjects, who had no gold.

But the fabled Midas hoarded his gold; he neither spent it nor invested it. Today’s affluent people both spend and invest their earned incomes. They don’t hide it under their mattresses. As a consequence, they create products that fulfill our needs and wants, hire workers, and make other people wealthy in the process – or at least more wealthy than they would have been in the absence of spending and investment.

In his magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote:

“The inequality of incomes and wealth is an inherent feature of the market economy. Its elimination would entirely destroy the market economy.

“What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume. In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does not suggest a curtailment of his own income for the benefit of those 95 per cent of the earth’s population whose income is lower than his.”

In other words, “more wealth for me, but not for thee” is the principle at play.

Redistributing unequally distributed wealth would require one of two things:

One option is passing laws that forbid businesses from paying their employees – including high-level management, rock stars, and Oscar-winning actors and actresses – what they (the businesses) and the market think they are worth. That is, set ceilings on earnings.

The other option is to establish a system of confiscatory taxation that would take earnings from the person who earned it, in order to bring their income beneath an arbitrary ceiling, and give it to the government, which in turn will spend it on goods and services provided by other rich individuals and the companies they own. That is, rob Peter to pay Paul.

Commenting on the “economic consequences of confiscatory policies,” Mises wrote that “in the long run such policies must result not only in slowing down or totally checking the further accumulation of capital, but also in the consumption of capital accumulated in previous days. They would not only arrest further progress toward more material prosperity, but even reverse the trend and bring about a tendency toward progressing poverty.”

Put more simply, by constricting the capacity of the rich to create jobs and buy things, one ends up creating more unemployment and ultimately punishing the poor and middle classes.

In a PBS documentary film about his life, The Power of Choice, the late Milton Friedman said, “The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.”

That is a lesson well-learned by policymakers in Washington and in Richmond.

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)

From the Archives: Concerns about the affordability of 'affordable housing' in Charlottesville

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 6, 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 first 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.

Concerns about the affordability of 'affordable housing' in Charlottesville
April 6, 2010 3:15 PM MST


According to a recent report in the Daily Progress, Charlottesville “has adopted a goal of making 15 percent of the city’s housing stock affordable for those making less than 80 percent of the area median income.”

An earlier Daily Progress article noted that raising Charlottesville’s affordable housing percentage from 10 percent to 15 percent “would require the city to commit an average of $1.7 million each year until 2025, or a total of roughly $25.7 million. This would be needed to add and preserve 2,350 affordable housing units.”

Charlottesville suffers many of the same problems that communities across the United States do.

Housing policy expert William Tucker once explained that "researchers estimate that zoning delays and building- code requirements add some $15,000 to $30,000 to the price a new home in many parts of the country. ‘Starter homes' -- simple, no-frills structures that first-time home buyers can afford -- are almost impossible to build in exclusive suburbs. Apartments are fought everywhere. . . . Then people wonder why we have an 'affordable housing problem.'"

We need to reframe the debate by removing the term "affordable housing" from our lexicon. "Affordable housing" is a weasel word that confuses more than it assists us in discussing housing policy. All housing is affordable to somebody. We should rather talk about low-income or moderate-income housing. That's the real issue.

Circulation of Housing

Over time, housing built for affluent people deteriorates and loses its value for the original owners. It then becomes available to lower-income groups. This scenario has been played out across the country. In cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Richmond, houses that were once mansions owned by rich people have been subdivided into apartments for low-income tenants.

Mayor Dave Norris and others would like to see a greater emphasis placed on low-rent units today, so that 10 percent of the county's housing stock falls into that category. Can you imagine what low-rent units built for 2010 will look like in 50 years? They will decay so rapidly that by 2060, they will be mere shells, inviting disintegration, grime, and crime. Such decay may happen even sooner.

The flexible and adaptable housing market provides better long-term prospects. Whenever a developer builds a rental unit for a middle- or upper- income tenant, he frees up a unit that tenant formerly occupied for a lower- income resident to move into. That resident's former apartment then becomes available for someone from an even lower income group.

Hazards of Government Intervention

When government intervention -- whether in the form of subsidies or rent control -- takes place, the housing cycle becomes disrupted. The supply of housing does not circulate fully or smoothly, driving prices up. This makes rents and mortgage payments higher for everyone.

"Affordable housing" by design has to be cheap or low-quality housing. If it isn't, the builder has to lose money on it (in the absence of a subsidy from taxpayers).

Government intrusion in the marketplace interrupts the circulation of housing that makes older units "affordable" (relatively less expensive) and brings new, higher-quality units onto the market. It may seem paradoxical, but if we want "affordable" housing in the future, we should be building "unaffordable" housing today.

Mayor Norris and his fellow council members are well-intentioned. It is good to make home ownership available to as many people as possible (provided that they can legitimately qualify for mortgage financing) and also to prevent homelessness.

Intervening in the housing market through subsidies and regulation of housing providers, however, will do little more than shift the problem either from one taxpayer to another or from one jurisdiction to another. After all, the housing market of the City of Charlottesville is not self-contained; it is integrated with the markets of Albemarle, Fluvanna, and Nelson counties. Other areas beyond those boundaries are affected, too.

From the Archives: LP ballot-access expert Bill Redpath talks about petition gathering

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 6, 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.

LP ballot-access expert Bill Redpath talks about petition gathering
April 6, 2012 1:06 PM MST

Bill Redpath has been a candidate for Virginia Governor (2001), the U.S. Senate (2008), and the U.S. House of Representatives (10th District, 2010). He is also national treasurer of the Libertarian Party and a veteran of more than two decades as a ballot-access coordinator and collector of petition signatures.

At a Northern Virginia fundraising event this week for Gary Johnson, a candidate for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner caught up with Redpath to ask him questions about ballot-access laws, the challenge faced by third-party and independent candidates to put their names on the ballot, and his own experience as a petitioner.

To put the LP’s presidential ticket on the ballot in 2012, Redpath said, will take “a lot of petitioning,” ranging from about 1,500 signatures in Iowa that can be collected by volunteers to as many as “51,739 valid signatures on a new party petition” in Oklahoma, where the Libertarian effort fell short and the party has turned to litigation to challenge the state’s ballot-access requirements.

’50 states and D.C.’
Despite these challenges and setbacks, Redpath explained, “we’re still hopeful that we’ll have our presidential ticket on the ballot in all 50 states and D.C.,” although the “Libertarian National Committee is probably going to spend about a quarter of a million dollars on ballot access,” in addition to expenditures for that purpose by individual state parties and the presidential campaign.

Ballot access, said Redpath, “is a major undertaking.”

Virginia’s ballot-access laws came to national attention recently when only two candidates, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, were able to qualify for the Republican presidential primary ballot. Redpath has some suggestions for fixing Virginia’s requirements.

Until about 1968, he explained, Virginia required only 1,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot for president and other statewide offices.

Virginia reforms
Redpath suggests that “it would be good to reduce the number of signatures to get on the ballot for a given office to one-tenth of one percent of the number of registered voters for that office.”

For statewide office in Virginia, in that case, he calculated, “we’re probably talking about 3,000 signatures to get on the ballot.”

Redpath considers one-tenth of one percent to be “a sufficiently high hurdle that people have to go out and work” to get their candidates on the ballot. It is, he added, “a hurdle that is fair” because it is “not overly taxing but at the same time it will be enough of a deterrent to keep completely frivolous candidates off the ballot.”

Worst and best
Asked to name the best and the worst states for ballot-access requirement, Redpath immediately responded that Colorado is among the easiest because “there is just paperwork that needs to be filed.”

Florida, he noted, “used to be one of the hardest, now it’s one of the easiest.”

Ballot access requirements, he continued, have “improved over the last 20 to 25 years.”

There are still “bad states,” however, and one of them is Wyoming.

While the Libertarian Party currently has ballot status in Wyoming “because we get, time and again, over two percent for U.S. House so we can remain on the ballot,” other third-party and independent candidates need to get 8,000 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot in Wyoming and, as Redpath pointed out, “that’s a lot of sigs in Wyoming!”

Another difficult state is Oklahoma, which Redpath identified as “about the worst. To get on the ballot as an independent presidential candidate takes about 45,000 signatures in Oklahoma.”

North Carolina is also difficult for presidential ballot access, but Redpath also pointed to states where “it’s tougher to get on the ballot for U.S. House or for non-statewide offices.”

He noted that in general elections in Georgia, that state has only “had one non-R, non-D candidate for U.S. House in several decades.”

That has also been the case in North Carolina, where it is “extremely difficult to get on the ballot for U.S. House as a third-party candidate or independent.”

Petitioning experience
Ironically, North Carolina proved to be the place where Redpath has had some of his most successful efforts at collecting signatures.

He estimates that, over the years, he has collected more than 10,000 signatures, but his personal best one-day effort was at the North Carolina State University precinct in Raleigh on election day in 1996.

“I hold the record for the most number of signatures gathered in a single day,” he explained.

“It was an extremely fortunate situation where they had a polling place that was too small for the horde of college students that descended on it,” he said, “and a theater line formed outside that didn’t go away for hours. The acceptance rate was 80 or 90 percent. I got 1,179 [signatures] in one day.”

Redpath said that the reactions he gets from members of the public when he is out petitioning are generally good.

“Overall,” he said, “people are pretty nice when it comes to petitioning. Some people actually thank me for being out there. I think people know how few people will actually go out and solicit signatures from strangers and [that not] very many people want to do that [so] they appreciate it when somebody is out there. Even some people who refuse to sign actually thank me for being there.”

He singled out Giant Foods for its civic-mindedness in allowing petitioners to stand in front of their stores to collect signatures (with advance permission). Giant customers, he said, “appreciate it.”

From the Archives: Kennedy Center chief Michael Kaiser touts economic benefits of arts education

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 5, 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.

Kennedy Center chief Michael Kaiser touts economic benefits of arts education
April 5, 2011 8:47 PM MST

Michael Kaiser

Academy Award®-winning actor Kevin Spacey set off a minor stir in the Twittersphere on April 5 when he Tweeted “Return on investment of 1 billion of arts funding (from base of 167 mil from National Endowment) is 29 billion for local & State coffers.”

Someone must have objected to his assertion, because he later followed that up with “For those who [question] the stats I have Tweeted about return on arts funding, I am getting proof u require & will Tweet it soon.”

By the time this article went to press, however, he had not provided the statistics to back up his claim.

Spacey is not alone in thinking that government funding for the arts has concomitant benefits.

Different emphasis
One who takes that position, with a slightly different emphasis, is Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Last month, at a luncheon following the annual season announcement at the Kennedy Center, Kaiser responded to a question posed by the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the message he takes to policymakers – such as Members of Congress – when he meets them in the course of his job.

Kaiser first pointed out, as a disclaimer, that he is not allowed to lobby Congress on behalf of the Kennedy Center -- a condition of its congressional charter -- so he talks to legislators “about the arts, in general, almost exclusively.”

More particularly, Kaiser said, he focuses on “arts education more than I do on performances or exhibitions because, frankly, the money they can provide for arts education [and] the leadership they can provide is more important.”

Changing economy
Kaiser gave an overview of the 21st century American economy to explain why arts education deserves more attention.

The United States, he said, “is not a manufacturing economy anymore” – although, as Richard Lorenc pointed out in The Daily Caller on April 4, “U.S. manufacturing output grew 120 percent from 1970-2009 and 10 percent in the past ten years. American manufacturing output totaled about $2.1 trillion in 2009 compared to China’s manufacturing output of around $1.5 trillion.”

As a result of what he claimed is a decline in manufacturing, Kaiser said, “we need a different kind of work force.”

This has ramifications for politics, too, Kaiser argued.

“I believe all the political anger we see,” he said, has to do with “the fact that there’s a whole part of America that used to have their whole family income came from manufacturing, from working an assembly line, where you didn’t have to be particularly educated, but you made a very good living.”

At that time, Kaiser went on, “fathers had that living and their sons had that living and that’s gone. That part of America, that part of the economy is gone. Those people who were part of that don’t know what to do and they’re mad. I really think that’s where so much of the political anger comes from.”

The point, Kaiser continued, is that we have “to train people to participate in the creative economy,” which requires that students “exercise their creative muscles in schools" through arts education programs.

That, he said, is “something we can do very inexpensively. To save a few bucks here and there per student and to cut out everything that doesn’t allow them, I think, to become fully functioning members of our economy, I think is really crazy.”

Budget cuts
That is the message Kaiser takes to Members of Congress and other policymakers.

The new, Republican-controlled House of Representatives is making cuts in arts education that Kaiser thinks are ill-advised.

“The big area that we’re worried about specifically is arts education and VSA” (Very Special Arts, a program aimed at the disabled), he said. “In the first version of the budget came out, we lost $16 million.”

Kaiser said that he and his colleagues are “hopeful, not optimistic,” that some of that money will be reinstated “but it’s very scary.”

Congressmen, he said, “don’t even know what they’re cutting. I talk to members of the legislature and say, you know you’ve cut this and they say, ‘We did?’ And I say, yeah.”

The arts education funds are “embedded in other things,” Kaiser explained, so Congress is “cutting in big chunks and they don’t really know. It’s a scary time for us.”

Scary topic
Kaiser is not really worried about the Kennedy Center itself.

“This is a building that they own. They can’t let it fall apart.”

That is why, he said, “I’m mostly scared for the education of our children, much more than I’m scared for the Kennedy Center.”

Kaiser noted that “everyone says we want to cut the deficit in order not to saddle our children with the deficit. I would rather also give them an education and give them a chance to earn and be productive members of an economy. That’s a big concern I have. We’ll see.”

He concluded, ominously, “It’s a scary topic.”

Video Proof: Congressman Tom Garrett's Charlottesville Town Hall

Over at Bearing Drift, I have a brief report on U.S. Representative Tom Garrett's town hall meeting, which was held last week at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. (Coincidentally, the meeting took place in a classroom in the Batten School's Garrett Hall.) The town hall was scheduled for 90 minutes but extended to two hours. It was moderated by Dean Allan Stam, who noted that the previous week he had hosted a similar discussion by one of Garrett's predecessors as the representative for the Fifth Congressional District of Virginia, Tom Perriello, who this year is running for governor. (Other predecessors include James Madison, Virgil Goode, and Robert Hurt.)

I noted some of the issues covered in the wide-ranging conversation:

There were many other topics discussed during the town hall: health care, immigration, energy, climate change, presidential tax returns, rescheduling marijuana, gas pipelines and eminent domain, the federal budget and its impact on the University of Virginia. Originally scheduled to last 90 minutes, Garrett agreed to extend it another half hour and promised to seek a larger venue the next time he holds a town hall meeting in Charlottesville. (According to another news release from his office, dated April 3, “Garrett’s next radio town hall is scheduled for April 13 from 7-9 pm with Joe Thomas on WCHV 107.5 and in person on May 9 in Moneta, Virginia.”)

I also was able to capture the entire discussion on video, now posted to YouTube, in four easily digestible segments of unequal length. Watch them below.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

For a special bonus, here is an excerpt of the interruption early in the town hall, staged by protesters who chanted: "Hey hey, ho ho, white supremacy's got to go!" (To which Garrett replied, "We agree.")

After the forum, I had an exclusive interview with Congressman Garrett about foreign policy issues, particularly those that concern him as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organization. You can read an article based on that interview at Sub-Saharan Monitor.

Guest Post: Good News About Civil Asset Forfeiture

by Daniel J. Mitchell

Some types of theft are legal in America.

But there’s a catch. You can only legally steal if you work for the government. It’s a process called “civil asset forfeiture” and it enables government officials to confiscate your property even if you have not been convicted of a crime. Or even charged with a crime.



I’m not joking. This isn’t a snarky reference to the tax system. Nor am I implying that bureaucrats can figuratively steal your property. We’re talking about literal theft by the state.

And it can happen if some government official decides – without any legal proceeding – that the property somehow may have been involved in criminal activity. Or maybe just because you have the wrong skin color.


What Happened to Due Process?
A column in the Wall Street Journal explains this grotesque injustice.

…thousands of Americans have had their assets taken without ever being charged with a crime, let alone convicted. Russ Caswell almost lost his Massachusetts motel, which had been run by his family for more than 50 years, because of 15 “drug-related incidents” there from 1994-2008, a period through which he rented out nearly 200,000 rooms. Maryland dairy farmer Randy Sowers had his entire bank account—roughly $60,000—seized by the IRS, which accused him of running afoul of reporting requirements for cash deposits. …A manager of a Christian rock band had $53,000 in cash—profits from concerts and donations intended for an orphanage in Thailand—seized in Oklahoma after being stopped for a broken taillight. All of the property in these outrageous cases was eventually returned, but only after an arduous process."

These abuses happen in large part because cops are given bad incentives.

Any property they steal from citizens can be used to pad the budgets of police bureaucracies.

Today more than 40 states and the federal government permit law-enforcement agencies to retain anywhere from 45% to 100% of forfeiture proceeds. As a result, forfeiture has practically become an industry."

And real money is involved.

…data on asset forfeiture across 14 states, including California, Texas and New York. Between 2002 and 2013, the revenue from forfeiture more than doubled, from $107 million to $250 million. Federal confiscations have risen even faster. In 1986 the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund collected $93.7 million. In 2014 the number was $4.5 billion."

In other words, there’s a huge incentive for cops to misbehave. It’s called “policing for profit.”


Hope on the Horizon
Fortunately, there is a move for reform at the state level.

Since 2014 nearly 20 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws limiting asset forfeiture or increasing transparency. Nearly 20 other states are considering similar legislation. …lawmakers in Alaska, Connecticut, North Dakota and Texas have sponsored legislation that would send confiscated proceeds directly to the general fund of the state or county. Similar measures in Arizona and Hawaii would restrict forfeiture proceeds to being used to compensate crime victims and their families. …Last fall California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that, in most cases, requires a criminal conviction before any California agency can receive equitable-sharing proceeds. In January Ohio Gov. John Kasich approved legislation to ban his state’s police and prosecutors from transferring seized property to federal agencies unless its value is more than $100,000. Similar reforms have been introduced in Colorado, New Hampshire and a handful of other states."

Legislative reforms are good, though judicial action would be even better.

And, sooner or later, that may happen.

America’s best (but not quite perfect) Supreme Court Justice is justly outraged by these examples of legalized theft. First, some background.

…the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case filed by a Texas woman who says that her due process rights were violated when the police seized over $200,000 in cash from her family despite the fact that no one has been convicted of any underlying crime associated with the money. Unfortunately, thanks to the state’s sweeping civil asset forfeiture laws, the authorities were permitted to take the money of this innocent woman. The Supreme Court offered no explanation today for its refusal to hear the case."

But Justice Thomas is not happy that government officials are allowed to randomly steal property.

Justice Clarence Thomas made it clear that he believes the current state of civil asset forfeiture law is fundamentally unconstitutional. “This system—where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use—has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses,” Thomas declared. Furthermore, he wrote, the Supreme Court’s previous rulings on the matter are starkly at odds with the Constitution, which “presumably would require the Court to align its distinct doctrine governing civil forfeiture with its doctrines governing other forms of punitive state action and property deprivation.” Those other doctrines, Thomas noted, impose significant checks on the government, such as heightened standards of proof, various procedural protections, and the right to a trial by jury. Civil asset forfeiture proceedings, by contrast, offer no such constitutional safeguards for the rights of person or property."

The article continues to explain that Thomas could be signaling that the Supreme Court will address these issues in the future, even though it didn’t choose to address the case filed by the Texas woman.



Let’s hope so. It’s heartening that there’s been a bit of good news at the state level (I even wrote that reform of asset forfeiture was one of the best developments of 2015), but it would be nice if the Supreme Court ultimately decided to prohibit civil asset forfeiture altogether.

But that might be years in the future, so let’s close with a very fresh example of a good state-based reform.


Reform in Mississippi
The Wall Street Journal favorably opined yesterday about reforms that have been enacted in Mississippi.

…it’s worth highlighting a civil forfeiture reform backed by the ACLU that Mississippi GOP Governor Phil Bryant signed last week with bipartisan legislative support."

The editorial reminds us why asset forfeiture is wrong.

…civil forfeiture laws…allow law enforcement agencies to seize property they suspect to be related to a crime without actually having to obtain a conviction or even submit charges. Police and prosecutors can auction off the property and keep the proceeds to pad their budgets. …Perverse incentives…create a huge potential for abuse."

Here’s what Mississippi did.

Mississippi’s reforms, which were pushed by the Institute for Justice and had nearly unanimous support in the legislature, would curb the most egregious abuses. Law enforcers would have to obtain a seizure warrant within 72 hours and prosecute within 30 days, so they couldn’t take property while trying to formulate a case. Agencies would also be required to publish a description of the seized property along with its value and petitions contesting the forfeiture to an online public database. …the public will finally be able to police misconduct by law enforcement in criminal raids. That’s something even liberals can cheer."

It’s nice that there’s been reform at the state level, and the Mississippi example is quite encouraging.

That’s the good news.

But the bad news is that there may not be much reason to expect progress from the White House since both President Trump and his Attorney General support these arbitrary and unfair confiscations of property.

Which is a shame since they both took oaths to protect Americans from the kind of horrible abuse that the Dehko family experienced. Or the mistreatment of Carole Hinders. Or the ransacking of Joseph Rivers. Or the brutalization of Thomas Williams.

However, if the first two directors of the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture office can change their minds and urge repeal of these unfair laws, maybe there’s hope for Trump and Sessions.


Reprinted from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

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