Columnist.
Protestors demand "social justice." I hate their chant. If I oppose their cause, then I'm for social "injustice"? Nonsense. The protesters usually want to punish capitalism. "Spread those resources," says Hillary Clinton. Even capitalists often make the mistake of talking about "social justice" as if it's the opposite of free markets or a reason to rein in markets with more regulations or redistribution of wealth. But there's nothing "just" about the leftist protesters' claimed solution: more big government. Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and Harry Belafonte praised Venezuela's Hugo Chavez for his socialist revolution. Chavez then proceeded to destroy much of his country.
"Half of today's recent grads work in jobs that don't require degrees."
It's graduation time! Have we learned much? No. College has become a scam. Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don't go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential. But that's not most students. Half today's recent grads work in jobs that don't require degrees. Eighty thousand of America's bartenders have bachelor's degrees.
For years, my scientist brother Tom was the nonpolitical Stossel. I defended free markets on TV, and he studied blood at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Mom asked me when I'd get a "real job" like his. Then the crusade against capitalism reached his world. Medical "journalists" demanded that corporations distance themselves from medical research. They'll bias the results, "put profits before people" and sell dangerous goods. Tom didn't notice this "conflict of interest crusade" until he joined the scientific advisory board of a biotech company and learned how difficult it is to bring medical innovation to market. Now he's furious about what he calls "pharma-phobia."
Charles Murray, already controversial for writing books on how welfare hurts the poor, on ethnic differences in IQ and on (less controversial, but my favorite) happiness and good government, has written a new book that argues that it's time for civil disobedience. Government has become so oppressive, constantly restricting us with new regulations, that our only hope is for some of us to refuse to cooperate. Murray's suggestion — laid out in "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission" — will make some people nervous. He argues that citizens and companies should start openly defying all but the most useful regulations, essentially ones that forbid assault, theft and fraud. He writes, "America is no longer the land of the free. We are still free in the sense that Norwegians, Germans and Italians are free. But that's not what Americans used to mean by freedom."
"This vast right-wing conspiracy," Hillary Clinton said, "has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced." That was the "feminist" first lady's response when her husband was accused of having sex with a 21-year-old. Bill was more lawyerly. He said things like, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is." The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel suggests that the Clintons must have a Scandal Manual: "The standard operating procedure never changes." Forty years ago, Hillary would have us believe that she wasn't just the wife of a man running for Arkansas governor -- she was a lucky or brilliant investor who in less than three weeks doubled her money. No, tripled! No, wait — quadrupled ... no, actually, much more!
I took a camera to Times Square this week and asked people, "What creates jobs?" Most had no answer. One said, "stimulus!" What? Government creates jobs? No! I suppose it's natural that people think government creates jobs because politicians always say that. "We've now created more than 10 million," said President Obama. But that just meant that he took office at the start of the recession, and finally job creation resumed. He didn't cause that. In fact, his taxes and complex regulation *slowed* job creation.
It's not smart to get too enthusiastic about any politician. I've been disappointed often. I believed Bill Clinton when he said, "the era of big government is over." I thought George W. Bush was a "small government guy." And Barack Obama ... Well, never mind. If I want limited government and individual freedom, to whom do I turn? Ted Cruz? I want to like him. He's smart. He's read economists Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, etc. He confronted Obama's attorney general about constitutional limits on killing Americans with drones. He fought hard against Obamacare.
Religious oppression was one reason many of our ancestors came to America. They wanted to escape rulers who demanded that everyone worship their way. In Ireland, Catholics couldn't vote or own a gun. I assumed that because many of America's founders came here to escape such repression, they were eager to allow religious freedom in America. After all, the very First Amendment in the Bill of Rights says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." But I was wrong. On my TV show this week, Chapman University economist Larry Iannaccone explains that many American settlers were just as tyrannical about insisting that everyone follow *their* religion: "In the Northeast, it was Puritanism or Calvinism. In New York and Virginia, Anglicanism, the Church of England. Elsewhere, it was Catholicism."
Bake me a cake, or go to jail! Sadly, that is the new message from "inclusive" America. If you don't want to cater, photograph, preside over, sell pizza at, sell flowers to or otherwise participate in a gay wedding, you will be punished. If you don't want your business to pay for a kind of birth control that you consider murder, you will pay fines until your business is bankrupt. Personally, I think both birth control and homosexuality are just fine, and gay marriage is as valid as straight marriage. But *forcing* everyone to act as if they think that way is just wrong. We have moved from "inclusion" to totalitarianism. The list of people you must treat carefully keeps getting longer. Protected classes now include sex, race, age, disability, nationality, citizenship status, pregnancy, family status and more. I'm in two of those groups. You better treat me well!
They're doing it again! When the last housing bubble burst, politicians blamed "greedy banks." They said mortgage companies lent money recklessly, making loans to people with dubious credit, for down payments as low as 3 percent. "It will work out," said the optimistic bankers. Regulators didn't disagree. Everyone said, "Home prices will keep going up." And home prices did -- until they didn't. The bubble popped in 2007. Lots of people were hurt, and politicians took more of your tax money to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with reckless banks. They also gave the Federal Housing Administration a $2 billion bailout.
No matter what you do, modern liberals will tell you you're wrong. For decades, liberals complained that American society is segregated because rich, white people don't want to live in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Sometimes, liberals had a point. From the 1930s to 1960s, as rich white people moved into New York City, urban planner Robert Moses got city bureaucrats to condemn and destroy busy black neighborhoods. The city called the neighborhoods "blighted" and moved many of the poor into rent-subsidized apartment complexes called "projects." Many quickly became slums.
Rahm Emanuel, current mayor of my old hometown, Chicago, is not a gentle soul. But he's smarter than his big-spending predecessor, Richard M. Daley, and the union pawn, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, who becomes the new mayor if he beats Emanuel in a run-off election April 7. Emanuel was the tough Obama chief of staff who reportedly stabbed a table with a steak knife as he listed political enemies. He relishes conflict and famously said that in politics, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." That comment scared libertarians and conservatives, who know that government usually uses crises as excuses to increase its power. But here's the surprise: Emanuel has been in crisis mode for four years now, and sometimes he made the right decisions as a result.
Donald Trump's kids and Paris Hilton's siblings were born rich. That gave them a big advantage in life. Unfair! Inequality in wealth has grown. Today the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of the assets. That's not fair! But wherever people are free, that's what happens. Some people are luckier, smarter or just better at making money. Often they marry other wealthy, well-connected people. Over time, these advantages compound. Globalization increases the effect. This month's issue of Forbes says the world now has 1,826 billionaires, and some struggle to find enough parking places for their jets.
A new documentary calls colleges like Harvard and Notre Dame "The Hunting Ground," where rapists prey on women. A bipartisan group of senators demand new rules to "curb campus sexual assaults." Apparently, new laws are needed because at colleges, sexual assault is "epidemic." Rape is so common that there is a "rape culture." I hear that a lot. It is utter exaggeration. Fortunately, AEI scholar Christina Hoff Sommers is around to reveal the truth. "This idea of a rape culture was built on false statistics and twisted theories about toxic masculinity," she says.
Lots of people sure hate the Koch brothers. The Kochs get death threats like this: "If I had a chance to murder a Koch brother in cold blood, I would surely take it." Jim Dean doesn't want to kill the Kochs, but he does want new laws to limit their influence. Dean's brother Howard was a Democratic presidential candidate, and Dean chairs a group called Democracy for America. "Get money out of politics," Dean says on my show this week. But Dean's not just unhappy because the Kochs have money to throw around. He doesn't like their politics.
For years, people assumed encyclopedias had to be created by professionals. Then Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales attempted to create an encyclopedia without central planners. That sounded like a terrible idea to the old gatekeepers -- people who hired experts to carefully fact-check and edit every encyclopedia entry. When they heard that Wales would crowdsource an encyclopedia, one Encyclopedia Britannica editor sneered, "The user who visits Wikipedia is a visitor to a public restroom." But today research shows that Wikipedia is as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is now the sixth most visited website, and the hardcover Encyclopedia Britannica no longer exists.
Most of life happens without a central planner. Yet people think we need one. Suppose you'd never seen a skating rink, and I told you that I want to lay down some ice and charge people money to strap sharp blades on their feet. They will zip around on the ice -- young and old, skilled and unskilled. My only rule: Go counter-clockwise. Hillary Clinton would say the rink needs regulation. She calls herself "a government junkie." Government junkies like government plans. Hillary'd probably demand that my rink have an official who tells skaters when to zoom left or right, when to slow down.
Politicians and lawyers pretend that they are important people doing important work. But often they're important because they are parasites. They feed off others, while creating no wealth of their own. We all complain about businesses we don't like, but because business is voluntary, every merchant must offer us something we want in order to get our money. But that's not true for politicians and their businessman cronies. They get to use government force to grab our money. Those people who *take* instead of producing things make up "the parasite economy," says Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz. It's my favorite chapter in his new book, "The Libertarian Mind."
For most of history, people suffered in miserable poverty. Then, in a few hundred years, some new ideas made life hugely better for billions of us -- things like running water, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the Internet. We want people to keep coming up with new and better ideas. But there's a problem: Why would you bother to spend years inventing something if other people can just steal your idea? Who will devote years and millions of dollars to making a big movie? Or a dozen years and billions of dollars to bringing a new drug to market? Almost no one.
