Lazy Sunday Links
- Families Against Mandatory Minimums thank Rand Paul
- The Case Against Network Neutrality Regulations
- Gary Johnson: I will end the war in Afghanistan and bring our troops home now
- An Introduction to Rent Seeking
- Will Wilkinson on Free Will and Negotiating Fairness
- The latest news out of Afghanistan on opium is quite old
- Glenn Greenwald on Deliberate Media Propaganda
- LA Bans The Plastic Bag and Kennedy isn’t happy about it:
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Classic Rock for Classical Liberals: Spirits In The Material World
“Spirits” is the opening track on The Police’s 1981 album Ghost in the Machine. Easily my favorite moment:
Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail you
They subjugate the meek
But it’s the rhetoric of failure
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Ask Gallup To Include Gary Johnson In Their Polling
PPP and Zogby are on board with giving American voters a third option. Let’s add Gallup to that list. Just click here to drop them a brief message, like the one I just sent:
Gallup,
Please include former two-term New Mexico Governor and Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson in your polling along with President Obama and Gov. Romney.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Craig Schlesinger
Let Gallup hear your voice, and do your part to help reverse the Gary Johnson Rule!
Our complete Gary Johnson archive is also available here.
Image via Gallup.com
LearnLiberty on Low Interest Rates
The cost of borrowing money is at a record low. Low interest rates and cheap credit encourage people to spend more, and to save less. Is this good or bad?
Many argue that we need low interest rates to encourage spending. But low interest rates don’t actually encourage people to spend more money. Low interest rates simply encourage people to spend more money now, and less in the future. The opposite is true for high interest rates.
So what interest rate is best overall? Professor Davies says the best interest rate is the one that comes about naturally, without government intervention. Individuals know better than the Federal Reserve how and when to spend their money. Decisions on whether to consume more or save more is best left to individuals, not government officials.
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Like this:
Cop: “Your First Amendment rights can be terminated…”
WOW! MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan wrote about the video this morning at Redtape Chronicle:
“Your First Amendment rights can be terminated,” yells the Chicago police officer, caught on video right before arresting two journalists outside a Chicago hospital. One, an NBC News photographer, was led away in handcuffs essentially for taking pictures in a public place. He was released only minutes later, but the damage was done. Chicago cops suffered an embarrassing “caught on tape” moment, and civil rights experts who say cops are unfairly cracking down on citizens with cameras had their iconic moment.
Image via Reason.com
Like this:
Money in Politics is a Public Choice Problem, Not an Electoral One
Over at Reason, Ed Krayewski offers up some great thoughts on money in politics in the midst of reporting on Gov. Buddy Roemer (R-LA) suspending his “quixotic” presidential campaign. Roemer, a Republican turned Americans Elect candidate, ran on a platform of capping donations at $100 and not accepting any PAC money – hence the relevancy:
Politicians don’t need money to corrupt them, they can do that fine all by themselves; members of Congress can spend their entire careers enriching themselves on the taxpayer dime and not run afoul of a single law. No corporation forced former Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson to hide cash in a freezer and no corporation held a gun to any member of Congress that used their ever broadening powers to legislate and regulate commercial affairs to personally enrich themselves.
For all the talk of getting money out of politics, corporations often seem to be the diversionary scapegoat while the politicians try to get at the money. The idea that free of the influence of money politicians will suddenly lose their appetite for power, control and self-aggrandizement is delusional. It has no basis in human history, in psychology or, frankly, in common sense. Money in politics, as I noted after President Obama announced his “evolution” on gay marriage, is a good thing. Politicians are interested in self-preservation, not because corporations made it so, but because it’s in the nature of a politician. The influence of money in politics, be it corporate money, small donors, big donors or advocacy groups, serves to diversify the voices that reach government and provides a necessary check and balance to any politician’s tendency to self-enrichment.
Money is no resource to shun on the quest for the White House; there’s no reason money can’t lubricate a free market in politics the way it makes the everyday exchange of goods and services so smooth and efficient, when government’s not getting in the way.
Rather than imposing limits on campaign contributions, we need to remove the perverted incentives that invite an influx of money to Washington and distort free markets.
A good place to start is by scrapping the entire federal tax code – where individuals, groups, and corporations are constantly looking to curry favor and gain preferential treatment.
Next up are all the frivolous regulations that perpetuate the corporatist (crony-capitalist) machine. Regulators themselves often lack a sophisticated level of familiarity regarding the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. Lobbyists end up flocking to Washington each time a new regulatory board is created, salivating like Pavlov’s dog over the opportunity to write the regulations for their own industry rather than those actually tasked to regulate. Through regulatory capture and cartelization of industry, large incumbent corporations are able to suppress competition in their particular market.
This type of behavior is textbook rent seeking. Public choice explains how the phenomenon occurs:
In modeling the behavior of individuals as driven by the goal of utility maximization … economists do not deny that people care about their families, friends, and community. But public choice, like the economic model of rational behavior on which it rests, assumes that people are guided chiefly by their own self-interests and, more important, that the motivations of people in the political process are no different from those of people in the steak, housing, or car market. They are the same human beings, after all. As such, voters “vote their pocketbooks,” supporting candidates and ballot propositions they think will make them personally better off; bureaucrats strive to advance their own careers; and politicians seek election or reelection to office. Public choice, in other words, simply transfers the rational actor model of economic theory to the realm of politics.
Moreover, the idea that regulation is necessary to protect people is muted by the fact that basic protections for producers, consumers, and non-actors alike already exist in common law principles: fraud, collusion, nuisance, unconscionable bargain, duress, and undue influence. Rather than focusing time and energy on the futile exercise of trying to limit money from electoral politics, we should focus on eliminating policies that create conditions in which free markets get taken hostage.
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Brad R. Schlesinger
Craig D. Schlesinger
