Columnist.
An idea walks into a bar. She meets another idea. They get together, and nine months later (or maybe it's nine minutes or seconds? It's not clear how it works with ideas), a new idea is born. A baby idea with the best traits of both parents. When this happens a lot, everyone gets smarter and the world gets better. Did you know that ideas have sex? It's a weird concept, but the more I think about it, the more right it seems. I learned it from British journalist Matt Ridley. Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist," says the reason life gets better is that ideas have sex.
As 2011 draws to a close, I wonder: Is freedom winning? Did America become freer this year? Less free? How about the rest of the world? I'm a pessimist. I fear Thomas Jefferson was right when he said, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." That's what's happened. Bush and Obama doubled spending and increased regulation. Government's intrusiveness is always more, never less. The state grows, and freedom declines. But there were bright spots. We don't yet know what will become of what people call the Arab Spring. But this year, for the first time in my life, there was hope that masses of people in the Middle East will embrace liberalism -- in the original sense of people being left alone to pursue their own lives.
President Obama says his health care "reform" will be good for business. Business has learned the truth. Three successful businessmen explained to me how Obamacare is a reason that unemployment stays high. Its length and complexity make businessmen wary of expanding. Mike Whalen, CEO of Heart of America Group, which runs hotels and restaurants, said that when he asked his company's health insurance experts to summarize the impact of Obamacare, "the three of them kind of looked at each other and said, 'We've gone to seminar after seminar, and, Mike, we can't tell you.' I think that just kind of sums up the uncertainty."
Some politicians claim that politicians create jobs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, "My job is to create jobs." What hubris! Government has no money of its own. All it does is take from some people and give to others. That may create some jobs, but only by leaving less money in the private sector for job creation. Actually, it's worse than that. Since government commandeers scarce resources by force and doesn't have to peddle its so-called services on the market to consenting buyers, there's no feedback mechanism to indicate if those services are worth more to people than what they were forced to go without.
America moves steadily toward the cliff. When Greece blew up, its government debt was 126 percent of gross domestic product. Ours is on track to exceed that in about 10 years. If we haven't learned from Greece, might we learn when other countries blow up? That may be about to happen, says Daniel Hannan, author of "The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America." Hannan, a British member of the European Parliament, says, "The consequences of the better part of 40 years of reckless borrowing have caught up with us."
Have you noticed how often government takes sides against the little guy? Street vending has been a path out of poverty for Americans. And like other such paths (say, driving a taxi), this one is increasingly difficult to navigate. Why? Because entrenched interests don't like competition. So they lobby their powerful friends to erect high hurdles to upstarts. It's an old story. Now, growing local governments are crushing street vendors.
We're proud that America is the land of free speech. That right is recognized in the First Amendment, and we usually take it seriously. It wasn't always the case. In John Adams' administration, the Sedition Act made it a crime, punishable by fine and imprisonment, "to write, print, utter or publish ... any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government ... or to excite against (it) the hatred of the people ..." Thankfully, Thomas Jefferson and other libertarians got rid of that law.
"The FDA is responsible for protecting the public health." That's what the Food and Drug Administration tells us on its website. My intuition makes me grateful that the FDA is there to protect me -- to make sure that every drug is proven both safe and effective -- but "protection" kills people. Last week, I discussed how the FDA kills by keeping useful medical devices off the market. Now, we learn the FDA threatens the health of cigarette smokers who want to quit.
It would be nice if politicians and regulators left us alone. But they don't. They always want to do more. Recently, there have been shortages of some medicines. Cancer patients can't get drugs they need. Why not? One reason is that a big drugmaker shut down for a year in part to meet Food and Drug Administration rules. The FDA makes it so expensive and difficult to sell drugs that there isn't an eager pack of companies rushing to the fill the gap. The free market would provide that, but government intervention, such as low Medicare reimbursement, strangles it. So people suffer.
One sign of economic ignorance is the faith that "Buy American" is the path to prosperity. My former employer, ABC News, did a week's worth of stories claiming that "buying American" would put Americans back to work. I'm glad I don't work there anymore. "Buy American" is a dumb idea. It would not only not create prosperity, it would cost jobs and make us all poorer. David R. Henderson, an economist at the Hoover Institution, explained why.
For years, American education from kindergarten through high school has been a virtual government monopoly. Conventional wisdom is that government must run the schools. But government monopolies don't do anything well. They fail because they have no real competition. Yet competition is what gives us better phones, movies, cars -- everything that's good.
What's there to say about Occupy Wall Street? The answer isn't so simple. Some complain about taxpayer bailouts of businesses. Good for them. In a true free market, failing firms would go out of business. They couldn't turn to Washington for help. But many protesters say they're against capitalism. Now things get confusing. What do they mean? If by "capitalism" they mean crony capitalism (let's call it crapitalism), a system in which favored business interests are supported by government, I'm against that, too. But if they mean the free market, then they are fools. When allowed to work, the market has lifted more people out of the mud and misery of poverty than any government, ever.
President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough. "We're the country that built the intercontinental railroad," Obama says. "So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?" Ironic that he mentions the Chinese. Progressives used to complain that to build the railroad, bosses abused Chinese workers -- called them "coolies" and treated them badly. Now this is big success?
Here's my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were "in charge," you'd have more freedom and prosperity. Freedom frightens some people. They say if no one is in charge there would be chaos. That is intuitive, but think about a skating rink. Before rinks were invented, if you proposed an amusement in which people strap blades to their feet and skate around on ice at whatever speeds they wish, you'd have been called crazy. There's got to be speed limits, stoplights, turn signals. But we know that people navigate rinks safely on their own. They create their own order, with only minimal rules.
Politicians say they create jobs, but they really don't. Or rather, they rarely create productive jobs. Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and give them to another. The pharaohs might have claimed they created work when they ordered that pyramids be built, but think how much richer (and freer) the Egyptians would have been if they'd been allowed to pursue their own interests. It's individuals in the marketplace who create real jobs -- when they have the protection of life and property under the rule of law.
School spending has doubled over the past 30 years. Yet what do we get? More buildings and more assistant principals -- but student learning? No improvement. If you graph the numbers, the spending line slopes steeply, while the lines for reading, math and science scores are as flat as a dead man's EKG. Why no improvement? Because K-12 education is a government monopoly, and monopolies don't improve. And yet I'm happy to announce some good news: Cool things are starting to happen in classrooms.
Many people think that when the government takes payroll tax from their paychecks, it goes to something like a savings account. Seniors who collect Social Security think they're just getting back money that they put into their "account." Or they think it's like an insurance policy -- you win if you live long enough to get more than you paid in. Neither is true. Nothing is invested. The money taken from you was spent by government that year. Right away. There's no trust fund. The plan is unsustainable. Medicare is worse.
After 9/11, the U.S. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. America went to war, overtly and covertly, in several countries. Nearly $8 trillion was spent on what is called "security," Chris Hellman of the National Priorities Project estimates. Was it worth it? Yes, in many ways, says author Ann Coulter. No, says Reason magazine editor Matt Welch.
Most so-called liberals are happy about that. Most conservatives are not. As a libertarian, I think all consenting adults who want to commit to a life partner ought to be treated the same way. To air this issue on my Fox Business show, I invited Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage and David Harsanyi, libertarian columnist at The Blaze.
We grow up learning that some things are just bad: child labor, ticket scalping, price gouging, kidney selling, blackmail, etc. But maybe they're not. What I love about economics is that it can show that what seems harmful is actually good for society. It illuminates what common sense overlooks. This is all covered in the eye-opening book "Defending the Undefendable" by economist Walter Block.
