A pointless bit of libertarian purity

They say you can find out if someone is a moderate or hard-core libertarian by telling him you want to cut the top income tax rate to 1 percent. A moderate libertarian will likely be enthusiastic about the tax cut, but he might have a few questions about how exactly you’re going to balance the budget.

A hard-core libertarian will damn you for the one percent.

Here’s what that looks like when you flesh it out a bit:

We all know that Reason Magazine is anti libertarian. Their editor Katherine Mangu-Ward infamously rolled her eyes at even the outside possibility that Ron Paul could become the next president of the U.S. Of course, she was not merely prognosticating; she was actively attempting to undermine his chances. (When commentators talk about the chances of this horse or that one winning the race, they do not at all affect the outcome; matters are very different in these sorts of cases). Did Mangu-Ward get fired for her anti libertarian act? Of course not. But everyone knows about this act of treason against the free society.

Lesser known, perhaps, is a recent foray in public policy analysis (well, not so recent — 3/31/11, but I just ran into it) by Robert W. Poole Jr., director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation. In his “Opposing view: Fast train to nowhere,” which appeared in USA today, he counsels against government investment in high-speed rail lines. All well and good. But he does not do so on the ground that the state should leave all such decisions to the private market. No, instead, he discusses such things as costs, population density, competition from air and automobile traffic, taxes, etc. In other words, this editorial of his which reaches millions of people, doesn’t have a scintilla of libertarianism in it. It could have been written by any mainstream urban analyst. For shame.

This is kind of amusing in a publication that routinely extols the virtues of Ron Paul. Don’t get me wrong, if Ron Paul is on the ballot, I’m going to vote for him, but he’s far from a perfect libertarian. He’s pro-life, for example, when most libertarians are pro-choice. He voted for the border fence, and he wants the government to do a lot more to stop illegal immigration. I think it’s also fair to say that many of his libertarian positions are only with respect to the federal government; he doesn’t mind so much if the states push us around. So if I were a libertarian purist, I might regard Ron Paul as the enemy.

But here’s the thing:  That sort of insistence on libertarian purity will not get you far in this world. Its not as if the next decade in America is going to be defined by a struggle between the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Reason Foundation. We’re in the minority here. There’s plenty of middle ground between us that is much, much better than where the country is now.

Declaration of Independents – Part 3

I guess it’s about time I wrote the final part of my review of Declaration of Independents. Part 1 and Part 2 — covering their respective parts of the book — are already up, but I’ve been holding off on the third and final part of my review, mostly because I held off on reading the third and final part of the book. And that’s because I knew the it would disappoint me.

That’s no reflection on Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s book. It is, rather, the fault of my unrealistic expectations. The first part of the book was about the advantages of freedom, the second part was five good stories of freedom, and the third part, entitled “Operationalize It, Baby!”, is about how to put these great ideas to work to solve our current problems.

But not in the sense that I was hoping for. You see, what I wanted was to be taken to Libertarian World Headquarters. To walk up the ancient marble steps, past the inevitable statues of Ayn Rand and F. A. Hayek, and down the long memorial hall dedicated to victims of the War on Drugs (including the lovely Peter McWilliams memorial zen garden). I’d take the elevator to the basement situation room, where Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch would be standing around a giant tabletop map of the earth. Virginia Postrel and Radley Balko would both be present on giant video screens, as Gary Johnson and Ron Paul chatted quietly in the corner with a shadowy figure who had to be one of the Koch Brothers.

“Mark. Glad you could make it,” Nick would say, looking me in the eye, leather jacket gleaming under the halogen lights. “Now let me tell you how we’re going to win…”

But Declaration of Independents isn’t that kind of book. It’s not really written for people like me–I’m already one of the converted. As Matt Welch recently pointed out, Reason magazine focuses on outreach, and Declaration of Independents is an act of evangelism. So the final section isn’t telling us libertarians how we’re going to win. It’s about how a more libertarian world would be a win for everyone.

The final section is also where the book takes a dark turn into more traditional libertarian writing, starting with a chapter titled “We are So Out Of Money” in which the authors argue that the era of big government will come to an end at least in part because we simply can’t afford it any more.

I’m not convinced.

As Gillespie and Welch themselves discuss in their book, by 2010 the city of Cincinnati had been losing population for years and was millions of dollars in debt, in a state that had the second-worst job loss numbers in the country. So what did the city’s leaders come up with so save it? Did they finally accept their situation and sit down to do the hard work of cutting expenses?

No, of course not. Instead they came up with a crazy plan to revitalize the city by spending $128 million on…wait for it…a streetcar. Somehow the people in charge of saving the city had latched onto the insane idea that a streetcar system would somehow tie the inner city together in a way that would magically generate millions or even billions of dollars in economic development. And since they can get the money to do that without having to do anything productive to earn it, there’s nothing to stop them in their mad scheme.

Cincinnati is hardly the worst example of political leaders who ignore economic reality. I have on my desk a banknote in the amount of $100 trillion dollars. Unfortunately for me, it’s in Zimbabwe dollars. This is even more unfortunate for the entire population of Zimbabwe. When President Robert Mugabe came to power, the Zimbabwean economy was far worse than ours is now. Yet that did not prevent Mugabe from making Zimbabwe a much, much more terrible place. He did not let a little thing like running out of money stop him from doing whatever he wanted to do.

Being so out of money is not part of the solution. It’s part of the problem. The people who run our government don’t have to earn the money they’re spending, not when they can just steal it from us. The have already built a huge standing army of law enforcement officers in the name of fighting wars on drugs and terror. It’s not much of a stretch to think they’ll use this police-state apparatus to enforce grueling levels of taxation. So while I’m sure Gillespie and Welch are right to think that the current situation has to end, it doesn’t have to come to a good end. It could end with us turning into Zimbabwe.

The second chapter is a brief overview of the libertarian solutions to the problems in three extremely important areas of our lives that are totally screwed up: Education, healthcare, and retirement. It’s a somewhat wonkish chapter, and most libertarian readers will already be familiar with the ideas, so I’m not going to try to summarize it. However, attentive readers of my review series will not be surprised to learn that free markets are involved.

The third chapter is called “The Permanent Nongoverning Minority,” and it’s about the way libertarian political movements can arise seemingly out of nowhere. That is, it’s about the Tea Party.

I know, I know, but remember that the Tea Party movement did not arise — as its enemies on the left would have you believe — out of racist hatred of an Obama presidency. The Tea Party actually has its roots in the right-wing reaction to President George W. Bush’s decision to bail out Wall Street. To some extent, by undermining support for McCain — who backed the bailouts — they helped Obama win. Of course, since Obama continued the bailout of banks and followed it up with a bailout for auto makers, Tea Partiers aren’t happy with him either.

Although the Tea Party does have some libertarian leanings (and they helped Rand Paul win, which will probably advance libertarian ideas a little), Gillespie and Welch see the Tea Party as part of a recent trend of substantial political movements that arise out of nowhere in response to a small set of issues. The Ron Paul Revolution in the 2008 election season was another example of this, as was, to some extent, the rapid rise of Barack Obama within the Democratic party.

The original template seems to have been Howard Dean’s sudden and surprising early success in the 2004 election season. Dean was not a favorite of Democratic insiders, but he was able to use the new media of the internet to connect with lots of other people who opposed the war in Iraq. That was a libertarian moment, not just because most libertarians also opposed the war in Iraq, but because to some extent Dean’s candidacy was the result of anti-war Democrats being able to find each other and work together toward a common goal. In a sense, just as we can customize almost everything else these days, they had customized part of the political system.

That’s pretty much the whole book, except for an epilog in which Nick and Matt talk a bit about how they grew up and how they came to believe in a bright libertarian future. And to borrow a line from the X-Files, I want to believe. I’d like to live in a bright libertarian future. But I’ve lived through the same decades as Gillespie and Welch, and they’ve left out an important part of the picture.

In particular, they’ve mostly left out the national security police state. I can remember when getting on an airplane meant passing through a metal detector and that was it. You didn’t even have to show your driver’s license. Nowadays, we may be able to fly on deregulated airlines, but only after the TSA thugs have looked through all our possessions, seen us nude, and fondled our genitalia. Worse than that, the TSA is metastasizing by expanding their operation to the rails and highways. There was a time when you didn’t have to show your papers to fly a plane or buy nasal decongestant. There was a time when banks didn’t have to report every large cash transaction to the government. There was a time when you didn’t have to prove your citizenship to get a job. There was a time when the government did not imprison 1 in every 100 adult Americans.

I’m not wishing for a return to some mythical libertarian America that never existed, but I think that before our libertarian moment is complete, we’re going to have to find a way to end the war on drugs, shut down the surveillance state, and get the government to stand down the army of law enforcement officers that spend way too much effort fighting consensual crimes and suppressing freedoms that are none of their business.

I want that bright future that Nick and Matt are talking about. But lets not forget that the original Declaration of Independence was followed by years of bloody war. I hope that we don’t have to fight so fiercely this time in order to get a world that is “tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting.”

Welcome to the 9/12 world

In the aftermath of 9/11, a lot of people told us we needed to sacrifice our freedoms in order to stay safe. They told us we needed to have the PATRIOT act — the provisions of which had been rejected by saner Congresses in the peaceful months and years before 9/11. They told us we needed to have secret courts and warrentless searches and extraordinary rendition. They told us that air travelers would have to be treated like prisoners.

And whenever those of us who objected spoke up, whenever we suggested that maybe giving up freedom for security was a bad idea, the scaremongers and bootlickers would respond that we had to “wake up to the new reality,” that wanting freedom from a police state was “pre-9/11 thinking” or “9/10 thinking.” They acted as if freedom was old fashioned and based on a reality that didn’t exist anymore.

Well, times have changed. It’s now 9/12.

There have been 9/12’s before, but on this 9/12, the events of 9/11 are ten years behind us.  It’s been ten years since the terrorist attack that killed three thousand people, and in that ten years, we’ve had a rather peaceful time in the United States.  There have been a few other incidents on American soil, but there hasn’t been a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11. There hasn’t even been a terrorist attack on 1/100 the scale of 9/11.

The single largest domestic terrorism incident since 9/11 was the shooting at Fort Hood in 2009 in which 13 people died. The second largest incident was the 2001 anthrax attack, which killed five people. No other domestic attack killed more than 2 people. The full ten-year domestic terrorism death toll is only about 30 people.

(I got these numbers from this post by Ronald Bailey. The count of terrorism deaths will vary depending on how you define terrorism, and if you include Americans killed by terrorist incidents in every hellhole in the world, the number is closer to 20 per yer. Either figure is quite a bit smaller than the number of Americans killed each year by lightning.)

Look at it this way: As of today, the ten-year moving average of domestic terrorism deaths has dropped from 300 to 3. It’s now the fearmongers who are living in the past.

So if a law enforcement advocate says we need sneek-and-peek warrants and a militarized police force, then he’s still living in what we might as well call a “pre-9/12 world.” If the Justice Department wants to monitor every bit of cash that flows through our economy, lest it be used for terrorism, then they need to stop living in the past. If Janet Napolitano thinks we need the TSA to rape and degrade airline passengers, then she’s the one who needs to wake up to a new reality.

9/11 is over. It’s been over for ten years. All this crap — internet monitoring, data mining, new Fourth Amendment exceptions, video cameras everywhere, GPS devices on cars — it’s all a reaction to the way the world used to be, not to the way the world is today.

Actually, since 9/11 has turned out to be something of a singular event, it’s arguable that the world was never that way at all. Granted, it wasn’t clear at the time, but given what we know now, the chance of dying in a terrorist attack on or after September 12, 2001 was not significantly greater than the chance of dying in a terrorist attack on or before September 10, 2001. When it comes to the risk of domestic terrorism, 9/11 didn’t change everything. It changed nothing.

We’ve been living in a pre-9/11 world all along. And now that we’ve had ten years to figure it out, it’s about time we told the scaremongers and power-junkies to get lost. It’s about time we took our freedom back.

Post Office to Renew Combat With ‘A Series of Tubes’

The United States Postal Service is out of money, in large part because of the generous pension entitlements enjoyed by its employees. Trimming the workforce seems like a long shot because of the no-layoffs clause in the postal unions’ contracts (nice work if you can get it, huh?).

What to do? No worries. Congress has just the ticket.

Senators … suggested the postal service develop a national marketing campaign to encourage people to send more letters. “You cannot get money by text message,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo) said, perhaps unaware that Visa is working on a service that lets you do exactly that. “I really think that there is a longing out there right now, especially in these uncertain times, for some of the things that have provided stability over the years.”

Yay stability! Let’s bring back steam engines! Also, rotary phones! Damn Internet, with its essentially free, instantaneous delivery of any information that we care to send.

The demise of the postal service is really our (collective) fault, don’t you know. I mean, when’s the last time you had a declaration of love delivered via a 44-cent stamp? Good thing we have the Senate to remind the American people of their failings.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) chimed in, recommending, “We should be writing more passionate letters to those we love.”

For those with memory spans of less than five years, headline explanation here.

An Expensive Education

A company called Education Management Corporation just got sued by the Justice Department. EDMC operates more than a hundred schools for young designers, photographers, and other creative types. What dastardly misdeeds has EDMC committed? According to Photo District News (PDN),

The government says EDMC violated federal rules against paying recruiters based on the number of students enrolled. Those rules are designed to prevent colleges from recruiting unqualified students just to collect student aid money.

I can appreciate the surface appeal of such rules, although their existence points to a bit of a disconnect between how the government works versus how the real world works. In the real world — in this case, the business world — sales people are given short-term targets and long-term goals by their managers. Cold, hard numbers. The sales folks do well for themselves if they meet those targets and goals, and not so well if they don’t. That kind of quantifiability and personal accountability is largely unknown — and, I’d wager, terribly unpopular — in the government sphere, but it’s pretty much the backbone of corporate America.

 According to former recruiters and photography students contacted by PDN, many Art Institute graduates [Art Institute is one of the EDMC “brands”] leave with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and insufficient professional qualifications or job prospects to pay the money back.

Um…OK… And?

Let’s say the EDMC’s colleges were gung-ho, even aggressive, about pushing their “product.” They dared paint an overall rosy picture of their degrees’ economic usefulness. Shocking! Unconscionable! We ought to sue the bastards!

Except that pushing low- to medium-value degrees is something that law schools — including some of the best in the country — do habitually, every day.  All of higher education does, with no exceptions I’m aware of. When’s the last time you heard college deans advise students to ditch the pursuit of a particular degree, because employers aren’t really looking for more philosophy majors with a specialization in Hegelian hermeneutics? There are pretty stone buildings to keep up, and tenured-faculty salaries to pay. The show must go on.

If you believe that the vast majority of young people with a degree in English or the humanities find a well-paying, satisfying job in their chosen field, I have a lightly used Nikon D1 I’d be willing to sell you for only $10,000 — totally a collector’s item!

When you read the whole PDN piece, it seems clear that the photography students and their parents acted with startling gullibility, and did very little to get informed. Does anyone hold their feet to the fire at all? Maybe we should. Most of them, it seems, didn’t do the loan repayment math beforehand. They didn’t care enough to distinguish between the cost of earning a credit versus the cost of completing a class, and also didn’t bother to question how a medium-sized city can absorb 600 new photographers over just a few years’ time. And so on.

Oh, and in the culpability department, how about we spare a thought for a government that blithely gives away billions in student aid without applying much in the way of checks, balances, or common sense? That’s despite the fact that Goldman freaking Sachs owns a huge chunk of the schools. Hey, if these students’ futures are paved with gold, guaranteed, why not let private industry make the investment in their careers? And if private industry declines to do just that, shouldn’t that tell you something if you’re one of the fine Washington folks disbursing veritable mountains of taxpayer money? You offer a school a lot of cash (OK, you offer it to the students but it clearly ends up in the school’s coffers), you attach few or no strings, impose no oversight to speak of, and then you’re all butthurt after the schools say “thank you so very much” and take your billions?

I’m thinking maybe the Department of Education is run by the same people who ran Freddie and Fannie — almost into the ground.

Admittedly, I don’t know all the facts of the EDMC case beyond what I learned from the lengthy PDN article. Maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye. But if what the piece describes is the extent of the alleged wrongdoing, and if I were on that jury, I’d vote to acquit in about 2.3 seconds.

Irony, Washington style

I haven’t lived in Congresswoman Nita Lowey’s New York district since June of 2005. That’s the month I moved to Maine. Her office knows that I moved, as evidenced by the correct address — in Maine — on the form letters I receive from Lowey Headquarters every so often. Evidently, Ms. Lowey, a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee,  likes to keep me informed of her accomplishments. In her latest missive, she writes,

Dear Friend: I wanted to update you on my efforts to rein in federal spending and the national debt.

Reining in spending is an admirable goal. So I suppose it would be churlish of me to wonder why someone so hellbent on curbing government waste keeps writing to people who are not her constituents, while billing taxpayers for the cost of “preparing, publishing, and mailing” those “Aren’t I awesome” letters.

Declaration of Independents – Part 2

When I wrote part 1 of my review of Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, I ended up quoting a lot from it, which worried me a little because authors sometimes get cranky when you steal their writing without permission. As it turned out, however, Matt Welch had some very nice things to say about my review. Which is why it’s probably a bit rude of me to start this review of Part 2 with another quote from Part 1.

The very last paragraph of Part 1 serves as an introduction to Part 2:

The politicians and the increasingly small-in-number but shrill-in-tone dead-enders  in both parties fail to understand that we are moving far beyond them and their cramped vision of a world in which politics is the limit of human potential. More and more of us understand, to a degree almost never discussed in day-to-day political and policy discourse, that the driving force behind many of the advancements we most enjoy stems from an unsung, three-pronged source: The democratizers, who through sheer crazed determination have brought new tools and possibilities to a broad swath of the public; the enablers, those few heroic men and women in government who identified, then helped remove, obstacles to the democratizers’ progress; and the theoreticians, who dreamed up these possibilities long before sane men thought them possible. Each one of the stories in the next five chapters shows how these unusual trifectas form in nature to produce unalloyed goods, most of which we’re happy to use without the slightest bit of knowledge about the oftentimes brutal fights to make them legal, let alone operational. They provide the source code for what the twenty-first century should be looking like, but so far isn’t.

(As with my previous review, I also have some nit-picking to do. It’s that last sentence: “They provide the source code for what the twenty-first century should be looking like, but so far isn’t.” I don’t know what Nick and Matt think the phrase “source code” means — they seem to be using it as a cyber-hip replacement for “template” or “blueprint.” Maybe it’s picked up a popular meaning I’m unaware of, but I’ve been writing software for thirty years and source code just doesn’t work that way.)

Part 2 of Declaration of Independents is titled “The Democratization of Just About Everything, or Case Studies in Making Life Richer, Weirder, and Better,” and it tells five stories of how people became more free. It’s like reading five long Reason magazine feature articles in a row. If you’re like me, that’s a good thing.

The first chapter tells the story of the revolution that overthrew the communist government of Czechoslovakia in 1989. You see, it all began with Lou Reed. Yeah, that Lou Reed: The former front man for Velvet Underground. There’s a reason the Czhechoslovakian uprising is called the “Velvet Revolution.”

There’s a long and complicated chain of events that led from British punk rock to Czech punk rock to a Czech poet who stood up to the government and became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia. Why is it that we’ve had two recent movies about that murderous thug Che Guevara and nobody has made a movie about about Vaclav Havel and the Velvet Revolution?

The second story of freedom is about Southwest Airlines and the deregulation of the airline industry. You might not realize it now, but when the first commercial jets started flying, the government stepped in to regulate the industry. You know, to protect it and allow it to grow. As often happens, the regulatory regime grew to protect the major airlines from cheaper competition. By the time Southwest Airlines was trying to start up, it was nearly impossible for a new airline to enter the industry. In order to begin flying even a single route, a new airline would have to prove to the government that there was a need, i.e. that it would be flying people who were unable to fly any other way, rather than stealing customers away from another airline by offering cheaper fares. Naturally, the big airlines became fat and lazy.

Somehow this was supposed to protect the flying public from turmoil in the industry or something. I know it sounds stupid now, but just a few years ago I blogged about this very thing because of a pundit who missed the old days when airlines were grand and profitable.

One of the consequences of deregulation is that competition for passengers pushed down the cost of air travel so much that people can now afford to fly three times as much as before deregulation. Now here’s a thought that should haunt you: At about the time this country was deregulating the airlines (and other transportation industries) we started passing new laws that applied the old airline-style regulations to our hospitals. These laws still exist today. Before a new hospital is allowed to open up (or an existing hospital allowed to expand) the operators have to prove that there is a demand for patient care which is not met by the existing facilities. So you’ve got to wonder, if we didn’t have these hospital regulations for the last thirty years, would Americans now be able to afford three times as much hospital-based medical care?

The third tale of revolution in Declaration of Independents is about how our jobs and workspaces have become more dynamic. The comfort of the old ways — thirty years for the same company, then retirement on a pension — is gone, but that was never really as great as nostalgic pundits would like us to think. Such working arrangements were only available in highly regulated and cartelized industries. I.e. those that could afford inefficient employment practices because they were protected from competition and so could squeeze their customers for profits.

I’m pretty much living this story. About ten years ago, I got laid off from a job with a government contractor when the grant we were working on ran out. I looked for full-time work for a while, but I eventually decided to do consulting work from home, in part so I could take care of my parents as they approached their 80’s. They passed away a couple years ago, and now I’m back to full-time work as a software engineer. Except I still work from home, as do all the other developers on the team. It’s not just some fancy Gen-Y job perq either, the team started with a few people working out of their homes, and as they’ve grown, they’ve just never seen a compelling reason to spend the bucks for office space and limit their recruiting to people within commuting distance of an arbitrary and meaningless location.

The fourth chapter is title “Rise of the Mutants” and it’s about the incredible variety of us. The most obvious changes have come from the remarkable advances of African-Americans. I’m not a fan of Barack Obama’s policies, but I was still pleased and proud when millions of white Americans voted for him in 2008. It wasn’t the end of racism, but the forces of racism certainly got their asses kicked.

The traditional dividing lines between races and ethnicities just don’t matter as much as they used to. In part that’s because we’re getting them all mixed up. Consider Tiger Woods, a black superstar in the traditionally somewhat racist game of golf, who’s actually not just black but also Caucasian, Asian, and Native American. There are a lot of people like that these days, with more to come as the rate of interracial marriage keeps increasing.

More than that, however, new communications technologies have made it easier than ever for us to form our own communities, bound together not by random chance of genetics or geography, but by our common interests and concerns. I may live in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Chicago, but I’m not an active member of the Jefferson Park community. My communities are libertarian bloggers, computer programmers, amateur photographers, and science fiction fans.

Many people today are members of entirely virtual communities such as Second Life or massive multi-player online games like World of Warcraft. I sometimes play an MMOG called EVE Online, in which you get to fly spaceships around a world of several thousand solar systems. EVE is one of my communities, but EVE is large enough to have subcommunities within itself. Some players group together to form mining companies, plundering the asteroid belts for minerals. Other players form manufacturing companies that buy those minerals, refine them, and manufacture spaceships and weapons and sensor systems. And some people make their living as pirates, attacking and plundering (or ransoming) other ships foolish enough to leave the more secure areas of space.

I’m a member of EVE University, an educational corporation that teaches new players how to thrive and survive in the harsh world of EVE. At any given time there are between 1500 and 2000 players in E-UNI, mostly students, and we teach them everything from mining to warfare. We’ve got a forum, a wiki, and (because it’s EVE) a list of everyone we’ve killed.

These virtual communities probably seem silly to people who aren’t familiar with them, but to those of us who participate in them, they’re as meaningful as any of the thousands of other communities people have formed, from British gentleman’s clubs to the Shriners to fans of major and minor league sports, not to mention ballroom dancers, rodeo fans, churches and bowling leagues. Remember, it was music fans who started the revolution in Czechoslovakia, and Twitter communities who organized the uprising that began the Arab Spring.

The fifth and final chapter of Part 2 is about the media. And also about beer. (There’s a media angle to the beer story, but I suspect it’s really in this chapter  because Nick and Matt liked it too much to cut it.) The media story is the by-now-familiar one where bloggers and other web media kick the crap out of traditional newspapers. I tend to shy away from blogger triumphalism, but Gillespie and Welch make the argument that traditional media is truly losing this battle, and they are losing it because they suck at reporting the news. And they suck at reporting the news, because people are no longer willing to listen to just the major media corporations’ version of it. In their search for the Big Important Stories, mainstream media tends to miss a lot.

For example, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have a great new book out, and the major media aren’t talking about it at all. To be fair, that’s not big important news to most people. But it matters to me, and it’s probably more important to me than whatever the Chicago Tribune is yammering about today. Which is why I wrote this and why you’re here instead of reading a newspaper.

Update: Part 3 is up.

Declaration of Independents – Part 1

By now, you’ve probably heard that Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch from Reason magazine have a new book out called The Declaration of Independents.

I say you’ve probably heard this already because they’ve engaged in an insane amount of promotion, with daily posts at Hit&Run, appearances on television shows, and a national book tour (I’m going to try to catch this one). They’ve even stooped to sending free review copies of the book to third-rate libertarian bloggers.

(Disclaimer: They sent me a free copy of the book.)

I’ll start right off by saying that I have a problem with the title of the book. Actually, two problems. First, the title Declaration of Independents seems intentionally designed to confuse Google. Go ahead, start typing it in a search box. The first thing you’ll see is that Google keeps trying to auto-complete it to “declaration of independence.”  Next, when you type the whole title, Google first lists the Declaration of Independents site dedicated to independent pro wrestling. It’s like Nick and Matt were trying to hide this thing from the web.

My second issue is with the book’s full title, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America. The problem is the word “politics.” I don’t think politics can fix anything. The word conjures up images of glad-handing candidates trying to appeal to interest groups by promising something for everybody without standing for anything. I believe that much of what’s wrong with this country could be fixed by libertarian policies, but I don’t think much will be fixed by politics. Not even libertarian politics. (And certainly not Libertarian politics!) Politics is how we got here.

Gillespie and Welch seem to agree when they make the point in their prologue that politics is an annoying and unproductive activity, more dedicated to convincing us to take sides in a dirty fight than in improving anybody’s life. That’s why most people aren’t really interested in politics. They are interested in improving their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. The original American Declaration of Independence called this “the pursuit of happiness,” and it’s something we should all be doing. Unfortunately, say the authors, the way things are right now, we’re all probably going to have to tackle some political problems before we get back to working on happiness.

Which brings me to Part 1 of Declaration of Independents, which is titled “The End Of The World As You Know It.” That sounds pretty grim, but Gillespie and Welch mean it in a good way: No matter how bad things seem right now, the world can change. We know this because the world has changed. When I was in school, the standard student complaint about history classes was that they were all about the past and nothing in them mattered anymore. As it turns out, the students were onto something: One of the lessons of history is that history is created pretty fast. Yesterday’s big deal is today’s history factoid.

Remember when AOL Time Warner was a behemoth poised to take over all of media? It broke up into little pieces. Remember when the Japanese industrial system was going to conquer all the world’s markets? Never happened. Remember when the Soviet Union appeared poised to conquer the whole free world? Now there’s no such thing as the Soviet Union.

A particularly instructive example is Kodak, who used to rule the giant market in photographic film. They’re not the top dog any more. But as Nick and Matt remind us, Kodak did not succumb to its biggest competitor, the Japanese manufacturer Fuji. Rather Kodak and Fuji were both overthrown by their own narrow understanding of their market. They built their business as if their customers wanted film, but what their customers wanted was pictures. Kodak and Fuji were forcing them to buy roll after roll of film just to get a few good pictures, and as soon as digital photography made it possible to get good pictures without having to use rolls of film, most of the market for film went away.

Similarly, IBM was the name in business computing at the start of the 1970’s. Perhaps it would eventually have been overthrown by one of its competitors — Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, Honeywell — none of them ever had the chance because in the 1970’s something called a minicomputer entered the market. Built by companies like DEC and Data General (and later Sun), these computers weren’t as powerful as IBM’s mainframes, but they also weren’t nearly as expensive, and they began to eat away at the low end of IBM’s market.

But they didn’t overthrow IBM either, because yet another new kind of computer entered the market: The microcomputer. Built by companies such as Osborne and Commodore and Apple, these computers were so cheap that for the first time ever, computers could be owned and operated by individuals instead of companies. IBM made an influential contribution to this market, but they were swamped by the arrival of many, many competitors.

Just as Kodak learned the hard way that photographers wanted pictures and not film, IBM and its competitors learned that that people didn’t want computers, they wanted software. Any computer would do, as long as it ran the software they wanted. And a little company named Microsoft was willing to write operating systems that helped software run on an incredible variety of computers.

Recent history is filled with these kinds of examples, where market leaders are overthrown in a seeming instant, often taken completely by surprise, and often overthrown in a way that takes out the entire market segment and replaces it with something else. The big-box bookstores are losing to Amazon, and the record industry is losing to digital music. History has seen plenty of examples of the overthrow not just of leaders, but of entire systems.

There is, however, one area of our life that has not shown this level of vibrancy and dynamism, and that’s government. The revolutions that have overtaken books and music and computers have done little to make government more efficient. A Rip van Winkle from the 1970’s would have no trouble understanding a modern Post Office or Department of Motor Vehicles. And Congress is still Congress.

Still, in the first part Declaration of Independents, Gillespie and Welch try to offer us hope by pointing to the rapid fall of so many former communist states and other repressive governments. Their argument is that the leviathan of government may not be as strong as it appears. The government of Czechoslovakia fell very rapidly, for example, once citizens began to communicate freely and everyone discovered that everyone else hated the communist government too.

Democratic governments like ours are less susceptible to such illusions of strength, but things can happen pretty fast here as well. How many people remember that when George W. Bush and a tide of Republicans swept into office in 2000, Republican pundits actually began talking about something called a “permanent Republican majority”? That “permanent” majority was completely replaced by a Democratic majority only eight years later. And that was broken up two years later by something called a “Tea Party.”

This may seem like the familiar Republican/Democrat duopoly, but something else has changed: Fewer and fewer people are identifying themselves with either party.

In 1970, the Harris Poll asked Americans, “Regardless of how you may vote, what do you usually consider yourself — a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or some other party?” Fully 49 percent of respondents chose Democrat, and 31 percent called themselves Republicans. In 2009, those figures were 36 percent for Democrats and 26 percent for Republicans. The only real growth market in politics is voters who decline political affiliation, with independents increasing from 20 percent of respondents to 31 percent. These findings are fully consistent with Gallup surveys as well. In January 2011, Gallup released its latest study on the question of political affiliation and reported that the Democrats were at their lowest point in twenty-two years (31 percent) , while the GOP remained stuck below the one-third mark at 29 percent. The affiliation now with the highest marks? Independent, at 38 percent and growing.

— page 11

That’s an astonishing change, but the authors think they know why it happened. It’s partially because the major parties just suck. Obama came to power on the anti-war vote and promised to reduce executive power, yet not only are we still in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve decided to take on Libya as well. Many people (myself included) hoped that a Democratic president would go easier on social issues, scaling back the drug war and supporting gay rights. Progress on the latter issue has been slow at best, and the War on Drugs is still going strong.

The Republicans haven’t done any better with their small-government agenda when they’ve been in charge. Rumors of deregulation are a myth — see Sarbanes-Oxley for example —  and Bush launched Medicare Part D, one of the largest new entitlement programs in decades.

Despite the programs of the major parties — or perhaps in reaction to them — Americans have been moving the other way. Polls indicate that more and more Americans say they want a smaller government. At the same time, Americans are becoming increasingly comfortable with alternative lifestyles, from pot smoking to gay marriage.

Gillespie and Welch theorize that part of the reason for this divergence is that Americans have become used to the abundant variety of the modern marketplace and they’ve started to expect it in other parts of our lives. We can customize our desktops, our screen savers, our Facebook pages, and our ringtones. We’ve got thirty movies at the shopping mall, a hundred channels on the television, and millions of songs at our fingertips. The grocery store down the block has several types of lettuce, twenty types of meat,  and fifty types of toothpaste. Even 24-hour convenience stores are likely offer a dozen types of soda, fruit juices, beer, wine, milk, cheese, candy, ice cream, magazines, and medication. We can go online to order custom T-shirts or custom suits. There’s every type of porn you can possibly imagine (and many types you never would’ve imagined). You can configure a new computer thousands of ways and have it painted any color you want. You can load thousands of apps to your phone. Why would Americans who have grown used to this level of variety and customization be willing to settle for just two boring political parties?

In a world increasingly characterized by hyperpersonalized service and money-back guarantees, Democrats and Republicans still insist that you sign up for a bundle package that even the most truculent cable operators would be embarrassed to foist on captive customers. Like Kodak and Fujifilm forcing customers to develop twenty-four picture to get the one or two shots they want, the major parties insist that partisans buy the whole megillah. There is no necessary connection between ostensibly Democratic causes such as artistic freedom and higher marginal tax rates or between Republican causes such as free trade and anti-flag-burning amendments. The whole point of party ideology is to make a ragtag bunch of beliefs appear to be seamlessly integrated. Shortly after the 2010 midterms, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) actually said that it was impossible to be “a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative,” which was news to large numbers of gay Republicans who supported tax cuts and opposed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

— page 29

The way Gillespie and Welch see it, all of this is building up to a revolution of sorts, in which the American people get fed up with politics and begin to change the system. As proof that such a revolution is possible, they draw a frightening parallel between the present and the darkest parts of the 1970’s:

A divisive first-term president who drives his political opponents into some dark conspiratorial corners while earning a reputation for running an insular White House faces an emboldened opposition party after the midterm elections. The president’s approval rating six weeks after his party took a “shellacking” (his word) sits near 50 percent, victim in part to a recession that has sent unemployment to its highest level in years. To combat the economic crisis, the president and an activist Democratic Congress push through what is routinely described as the most sweeping new economic intervention since the New Deal. With it goes the broadest and deepest new regulatory push in four decades. Frantic attempts to boost home ownership rates through federalizing housing finance fail to change the reality that two-thirds of American families own their homes. On the foreign front, the public is growing ever more fatigued by a war the president inherited, campaigned against, and then escalated, including new bombing incursions into a neighboring country. A whistle-blower from within the defense establishment helps leak to the press many thousands of pages of classified documents on the war effort, and the administration reacts with furious charges of treason and terrorism against both the leaker and the primary publisher of his documents.

It’s not that Richard Nixon and Barack Obama are similar: Aside from their both being fiercely proud, unapologetically ambitious, self-made lawyers who could write a bit, the personal commonalities really do run out in a hurry. If anything, the opposite is the point. Two men as fundamentally dissimilar as Richard Milhous Nixon and Barack Hussein Obama have, through the responsibility and temptation of power, the reductionism of our modern politics, and the shocking narrowness of what is considered acceptable government action, managed to steer Washington policy through the same well-worn ruts.

— page 43

(Although we’ve seen some seriously anti-free-market economic policies lately — the massive bailout of the banks, the near-nationalization of the Detroit automakers, and whatever’s going on with healthcare reform — neither Bush nor Obama has produced policies that come anywhere near the galactic stupidity of Nixon’s freeze on wages and prices.)

Now, if someone looked you in the eye in the early 1970’s and said, “Man, you know what? We’re about to get a whole lot freer,” you might reasonably have concluded that he had gone mad from taking too much LSD and staring directly into the sun.

— page 45

Yet the revolution had already begun.

Generally increased access to the good things in life, from higher education to consumer electronics to designer clothes, gave the broad middle class the tools and the confidence to experiment with a thousand different lifestyles, giving us everything from gay liberation to encounter groups, from back-to-the-garden communes to back-to-the-old-ways fundamentalist churches, from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to Looking Out for #1. In 1968 the technohippies at the Whole Earth Catalog announced, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

— page 47

Soon enough, the war ended, government regulation of the economy was scaled way back, and people began to enjoy a standard of living better than they ever had before.

Gillespie and Welch argue that this is all about to happen again, that we live on the brink of a “libertarian moment.” They aren’t talking about the Libertarian party, or even the traditional libertarian philosophy of government. They are staking out a claim on nearly everyone who isn’t happy with the current two-party system, and to do that they are defining libertarianism as broadly as possible:

At it’s root, libertarianism is about a default preference for the freedom to peaceably pursue happiness as we define it without interference from government. It’s the belief that the burden of proof should rest not on the individual who wants to sell lemonade, paint his or her house purple, hop on an airplane, ingest intoxicants, or marry someone from the same sex (though preferably not in that order) but on any government seeking to thwart or control such victimless activities. Like the magazine we write for, we agitate for the aspirational goal of “free minds and free markets,” celebrating a world of expanding choice — in lifestyles, identities, goods, work arrangements, and more — and exploring the institutions, policies, and attitudes necessary for maximizing their proliferation. We are happy warriors against busybodies, elites, and gatekeepers who insist on dictating how other people should live their lives. Like John Stuart Mill, we’re big on “experiments in living.” Within the broadest possible parameters, we believe that you should be able to think what you want, live where you want, trade for what you want, eat what you want, smoke what you want, and wed whom you want. You should also be willing to shoulder the responsibilities entailed by your actions. Those general guidelines don’t explain everything, and they certainly don’t mean that there aren’t hard choices to make, but as basic principles, they go a hell of a long way to creating a world that is tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting.

— page 52

That might be the single best description of the libertarian mindset that I have ever read. It’s exactly why I choose to call myself a libertarian. It’s not about Ayn Rand or anti-communism or big business or hard money or even non-coercion. It’s because I want us all to live in a world that is “tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting.”

At least in it’s first part, Declaration of Independents is a different kind of libertarian book. Most libertarian writing is about the evils of a large and intrusive government. Radley Balko writes about bad cops and prosecutors, Jennifer Abel rails against the TSA, and Reason tells daily tails of woe. We do the same here at Nobody’s Business and at our other blogs. Libertarian writing is usually the telling of horror stories.

Yet Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch are doing something different. Instead of writing about horrors of big government, they’re writing about the joys of independence from government and the associated politics. So far, Declaration of Independents appears to be something unusual in libertarian writing. It appears to be hopeful.

Update: Part 2 is up.

More national greatness nonsense

We’re in a bit of a lull here at Nobody’s Business — I think all of us are busy with our day jobs at the same time — and I’ve been trying to find ways to fill it. I was planning a multi-part lecture series about free markets, but fortunately for all of you, I stumbled across a maddening post at HuffPo called “We’re Number 34” in which Benjamin Barber complains about how we’re all too selfish to let the government spend our money on Barber’s pet projects.

American exceptionalism glides complacently into the 21st century on a lie and a prayer. The lie comprises all the flag-waving hyperbole, the exceptionalist claim that “We’re Number One,” when as measured by far too many key indicators we are actually closer to being #10 (social mobility) or maybe #34 (infant mortality) or dead last — pun intended — in the percentage of our population we incarcerate.

Barber is of course picking numbers that make his point, but let’s just stop a minute and think about those rankings. First of all, social mobility is kind of a complex topic, and by many measures, the U.S. is not generally the highest in world, but there may be good reasons for that. For example, first-generation immigrants everywhere in the world have have trouble getting ahead, and the U.S. has a continuous influx of them.

The infant mortality rate is better defined, and our rank is more frightening, but comparisons between countries are still controversial due to differences in rates of premature births and differences in how countries report infant death v.s. stillbirth.

As for the incarceration rates…that’s basically correct, but it kind of undermines his point. I’ll get back to that later.

By the way, given that there are something like 195 countries in the world, being number 34 puts us in the top 20%, which isn’t bad. Sure, we could be doing better, but don’t forget that one of the main reasons we’re not number one is that the rest of the world is doing better. They’re catching up to us. And this improvement in the welfare of hundreds of millions is generally a good thing.

The prayer is the exceptionalists’ hope that no one will notice their swaggering hypocrisy as they set about gutting and privatizing all the magnificent programs on which American greatness depends and downplay default on the national debt like a cynical old bankrupt.

What’s funny is that both of the previous quoted sections are from the same paragraph of Barber’s little screed. Basically, he’s saying that the United States sucks, and but that the people who are “gutting and privatizing” the government that got us to the level of suckitude are somehow the bad guys.

Apparently Barber thinks our greatness (such as it is) comes from magnificent government programs. This ignores the other reasons why America is doing so well, such as our liberal democracy, our natural resources, our isolation from European war-mongers by two great oceans, and the fact that the industrial revolution worked very well in this country, largely because of our relatively free markets.

The latest proof of hypocrisy comes from two closely related American flameouts. We just launched the 135th and last manned flight under the Space Shuttle program — having declared we can no longer afford as a nation to explore the universe in person. And we are about to kill the James Webb telescope, the successor to the famous Hubble Space telescope that opened up the universe to our curiosity and scrutiny and helped animate the manned space program. The last frontier is today a bridge too far and America’s journey to space joins the moribund TV series Star Trek. Space exploration is to be privatized, looking out to the edge of the cosmos to be terminated, and if we ever again want to go where no man has gone before, we will have to hitch a ride on Russian or Chinese rockets.

The Space Shuttles were a cool idea, but they should have been replaced by something cheaper a long time ago. And NASA is still training astronauts for the International Space Station, they’ll just be getting there on some other country’s rockets, at least until one of the commercial systems is man-rated. I don’t understand why that’s such a big deal. And why does Barber keep using “privatize” like it’s a dirty word?

(I’m with Barber on the James Webb telescope, though. That’s the sort of big science that has no immediate commercial payoff but is probably still a good idea. If we’re going to have government-funded science, better that than ethanol fuel research.)

So all those fiscal conservatives and Tea Party complainers who deny the public good and insist government is a wastrel need to make up their minds: do they want the United States to be a third class mini-state with a fourth class public sector?

Yes, if the alternative is that the United States turns into an all-consuming super-state that takes all our wealth and tries to control everything we do.

In which case they can go on pretending a great nation’s budget is just like a family budget to be trimmed and balanced, but stop pretending we’re number one and admit we’re actually a drop-out.

I’m okay with that, actually. Whatever it takes to subdue the leviathan and get our government back to a more reasonable size.

Or they can try to give some substance to their boasting and take steps to maintain our global leadership. In which case they need to be revitalizing and growing the public sector they are currently devastating.

What country is he talking about again? The United States has been in an economic slump for three or four years now, and the public sector is only just recently beginning to experience the unemployment that everyone else has been feeling. The area around Washington D.C. has been booming. The public sector grew under President Bush and President Obama has done nothing to shrink it. Nobody is “devastating” the public sector.

For it is the public sector with its “res publica” (public goods) that alone can undertake those great American projects like the national parks (remember that Republican giant Teddy Roosevelt?), space exploration and world-class K-12 education and health care systems — which entails bold leadership and a willingness by Americans to pool some of our resources to make leadership possible (it’s called “taxes”).

This is the national greatness variation of the roads fallacy. NASA and our national park systems have a combined budget of less than $25 billion, so even if we agree that they are both vital programs, how does this justify the rest of the federal government’s $3.7 trillion in expenses last year?

And where are these “world-class” public schools he’s talking about? I can’t believe he’s complaining about being number 10 in social mobility and then holding up our mediocre schools as an example of the greatness we should be striving for.

By the way, remember Barber’s complaint that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world? Who does he think is responsible for that disgrace? The justice system is a government function, and rightly so, but when we give them plenty of government resources, what do they do? They put us in prison. That’s what a robust and thriving public sector has lead to in this country.

(Christ, you want money to pay for NASA and the national parks? Stop the War on Drugs. And online gambling. And prostitution. It will save us a ton of money and increase tax revenues.)

Millions of immigrants don’t leave their home countries to come here because of our space program or national parks or prisons. They come for our economy and our freedoms. That’s why we’re great.

It’s not that we don’t know how to be number one: in military expenditures we outspend the world, budgeting more for hard power than the next two dozen or so nations on earth including China, France, the U.K., Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, Brazil, South Korea and Canada and another dozen nations put together. If we can do it here, we can do it in health, science, education and social justice.

This is an argument for cutting military expenditures, not raising our other public expenditures to the same high level. But actually, we do spend a lot on health and science — healthcare is the largest sector of our GDP — but much of it is private spending, which apparently doesn’t count in Barber’s world. And our education budget per-pupil is one of the highest in the world, but that doesn’t seem to have helped our schools very much.

What we can’t do is have it both ways — talk number one and behave like number 34.

So shut up about being number one! Admit we’ve got problems and do something useful about them!

Proclaim our superiority and privatize or close down every meaningful public program.

There he goes again. Privatizing public programs is not the same as closing them down. It’s like nothing we do counts with this guy unless it’s government funded.

Strut like a wealthy cosmopolitan but tax ourselves like some parochial back-water bankrupt (about to default on our debts!).

Debt is about income and expenses. We wouldn’t be in so much debt if our government hadn’t been spending the people’s money like a bunch of teenagers who’ve stolen dad’s credit card.

Leadership is a competition in big deeds not big talk. Big deeds cost big bucks and demand from a people confidence and a willingness to sacrifice, as well as a firm sense of how the private and the public intersect and reinforce one another.

Fuck your big deeds, Barber! You have dreams of national greatness? Well the rest of us have dreams too. Personally, I dream of a new car, a new laptop computer, a real house instead of a condo. Sure, there’s nothing spectacular about my dreams, but that’s the point: Everyone in this country wants the mundane stuff of ordinary life. We want refrigerators and microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners and televisions, clothes and computers and cell phones for the kids, nicer cars, bigger houses, a trip to the movies this weekend and trip to Disney next summer.

Those aren’t big gleaming dreams of giant government programs, but they’re our dreams, and they’re important too, and I don’t see why we should sacrifice them so a bunch of political hacks can make a name for themselves in pursuit of “greatness.” Especially since they haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

No nation ever maintained a global role by dismantling its government and refusing to pay its bills.

No nation ever maintained a global role by giving its government control over its entire economy either.

We certainly cannot be number one and turn over leadership in physics to Europe (as we did when we dropped out of the super-collider race and punted to CERN in Switzerland), end our manned space program and defund the Webb telescope, and give up on higher education and public health. Launching Predator drones over Pakistan while we stumble into default won’t cut it.

He’s all over the place in that paragraph. High-energy physics does not justify a government take-over of healthcare or higher education.

In short, we can embrace timidity and go on maiming the public sector, destroying democratic governance and stashing our shrinking wealth (unequally divided) under our mattresses.

Just because I don’t want jackasses like Barber to spend my money on their favorite public programs doesn’t mean I want to stash my money under a mattress. I want to spend it on my own plans and dreams. That’s why I go through the trouble to earn it.

Or we can walk the bold talk and share our common-wealth (well named!) and resume a global leadership rooted in vision, dynamism, equal sacrifice and hard work.

God, what an insufferable ass! I make sacrifices and work hard. I have visions. We all do. We just don’t all want what he wants.

But please, all you “exceptionalists,” all you libertarian and Tea-Party and fiscal conservative hypocrites, stop preening to show off your new clothes when you’re dressed in tatters. Stop telling the world how great we are, and yet telling us how impotent we are to pay for, let alone realize, greatness. Stop shouting “WE’RE NUMBER ONE” when it’s because of you we’re heading for number 35.

What’s great about paying for useless and wasteful government programs? What’s great about screwing up the healthcare sector even worse than it is already? What’s great about paying more per student for public education than ever before and still getting the same crappy scores?

Maybe people would be more willing to pay for Barber’s “greatness” if the folks who run our government had any clue how to achieve it.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

We’ve all heard the claim from moralists, feminists, anti-sex crusaders, well-meaning but ignorant people who lack critical thinking skills, and unquestioning media outlets like CNN:  “There are 100,000-300,000 trafficked child sex slaves in the United States right now, and the average age at which prostitutes enter the profession is 13”.  But though it maybe that, as Huxley put it, “Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth” in the mind of the average person, it has approximately zero effect on physical reality and the actual number of “sex-trafficked children” in the U.S. could fit into the average school auditorium…perhaps even into one classroom.

The original source of both bogus figures was a non-peer reviewed 2001 University of Pennsylvania study by Richard Estes and Neil Weiner which used highly questionable methodology to guesstimate that “as many as 100,000-300,000 children and youth [of both sexes] are at risk for sexual exploitation” of one kind or another.  Note that even if we accept the shaky methodology (e.g., automatically considering all adolescents living within 50 miles of the Canadian or Mexican borders as “at risk”), this guess is for BOTH sexes, for “children and youth” (not just children), and most importantly represents those at risk of some form of “exploitation”, not currently involved in one specific form (sex trafficking).  Estes and Weiner rank types of “exploitation” by frequency, and domestic and international “sex trafficking” are second and third from the bottom.  Even these highly biased and excitable gentlemen believed that “sex trafficking” affected only a tiny part of their “youth at risk”; Estes himself recently stated that “Kids who are kidnapped and sold into slavery—that number would be very small…We’re talking about a few hundred people.”  And that “average age of 13” thing?  It was an estimate of the average age of entry of underage prostitutes, not all prostitutes, and their published figures don’t back it up; the actual figure is 16.  As I explained in a December essay, the true average for all prostitutes is about 24.

One would think that even a gullible person would balk at the idea that over 1% of all American teenage girls were “enslaved”, but no; they just keep repeating it, and get belligerent and defensive if anyone questions their “estimates” and argue that it’s impossible to know the “real number”.  In this sole respect they are correct; as long as prostitution is criminalized there is no way to get an accurate estimate.  But in New Zealand, our trade is no longer criminal and so an accurate study could be made; it found that 210 of the country’s 5932 prostitutes (in other words, 3.54%) were underage.  Assuming that the same percentage of women (0.285%) are prostitutes in both countries (a reasonable enough assumption) we arrive at a figure of 443,323 whores in the U.S., of which 15,694 are underage…a far cry from 300,000.  Is there any supporting evidence for either figure?  As it turns out, there is; the National Taskforce on Prostitution estimates that roughly 15% of all prostitutes are streetwalkers, a number slightly higher than New Zealand’s 11% and similar the 10-20% claimed by a recent Canadian study, plus several others.  So if my estimate is correct, there should be about 66,500 streetwalkers in the country; a long-term study from the ‘90s estimated 70,000, which means my numbers are probably about as close as we’re going to get this side of decriminalization.

So, if there are about 16,000 underage hookers in the U.S., what fraction of those are coerced?  A recent study of underage streetwalkers in New York City by John Jay College found that only 16% of them were coerced in any way; 84% of them had never even met a pimp.  Applying that figure to my estimate gives us about 2500 coerced, underage prostitutes in the United States; about 1% of the figure so beloved by trafficking alarmists, but very much in line with Estes’ “few hundred”, especially when one considers that “trafficked” girls are only a fraction of “coerced” ones.  My math, though based on educated guesses, has a lot more resemblance to reality than that favored by the alarmists and fits in nicely with accepted figures.

Nor am I the only one demolishing these absurd scare stories; on June 29th the Village Voice published an article which examined police records in the 37 largest American cities to find that there were only 8263 arrests for underage prostitution in the past decade…an average of 827 a year.  Furthermore, the article quoted a number of experts who panned the Estes & Weiner study; the University of New Hampshire’s Dr. David Finkelhor said “As far as I’m concerned, [the University of Pennsylvania study] has no scientific credibility to it…That figure was in a report that was never really subjected to any kind of peer review.  It wasn’t published in any scientific journal…Initially, [Estes and Weiner] claimed that [100,000 to 300,000] was the number of children [engaged in prostitution].  It took quite a bit of pressure to get them to add the qualifier [at risk].”  And Professor Steve Doig of Arizona State said the “study cannot be relied upon as authoritative…I do not see the evidence necessary to confirm that there are hundreds of thousands of [child prostitutes].”  He also said, “Many of the numbers and assumptions in these charts are based on earlier, smaller-scale studies done by other researchers, studies which have their own methodological limitations.  I won’t call it ‘garbage in, garbage out.’  But combining various approximations and guesstimates done under a variety of conditions doesn’t magically produce a solid number.  The resulting number is no better than the fuzziest part of the equation.”

Obviously, none of this sinks into the skulls of trafficking fanatics, whose attitude can be summed up by this quote from the “celebrity charity consultant” to trafficking gurus Ashton Kutcher & Demi Moore; she told the Village Voice reporter “I don’t frankly care if the number is 200,000, 500,000, or a million, or 100,000—it needs to be addressed.  While I absolutely agree there’s a need for better data, the people who want to spend all day bitching about the methodologies used I’m not very interested in.”  Presumably it would still “need to be addressed” if the number were 827, so why not just say 827?  Because, of course, that wouldn’t justify pouring millions down police department and NGO toilets instead of spending it on programs to help actual underage prostitutes (as opposed to phantom multitudes of “trafficked children”):  as the article explains, “…though Congress has spent hundreds of millions in tax-generated money to fight human trafficking, it has yet to spend a penny to shelter and counsel those boys and girls in America who are, in fact, underage prostitutes.  In March of this year…[two senators] introduced legislation to fund six shelters with $15 million in grants. The shelters would provide beds, counseling, clothing, case work, and legal services.  If enacted, this legislation would be the first of its kind…[it] has yet to clear the Senate or the House.”

For prostitutes, these lies have another, more direct effect:  by distorting the scale of the problem by at least two orders of magnitude, and by magnifying what is usually a simple, if unfortunate reality of human nature (the tendency for one person to exploit another by means of trickery or manipulation) into an international criminal conspiracy, the prohibitionists succeed in whipping up anti-whore fervor in the name of “rescuing” us…by hunting us down, persecuting our customers, closing down our advertising venues, ruining our lives and painting us as mental defectives who don’t know our own minds and can therefore not be trusted to make our own decisions no matter how old we are.  With “rescuers” like that, who needs pimps?

Linkavaganza

Stuff I can’t write a whole post about:

  • Health insurance price controls: Because health insurance should be as easy to get as a rent-controlled apartment in New York.
  • One of my complaints about government programs for the poor is that they never just give the poor some money so they’ll be less poor. Instead, they use the money to hire middle-class people to provide services to the poor. Unless it gets spent on consultants and lobbyists.
  • Obama finds a middle ground on immigration that turns out to screw things up real bad.
  • How to kill jobs in Nashville in one easy step.
  • Reason produced a video about the attempt by wealth businessmen in D.C. to steal independent taxi drivers’ independence…
  • …and Freddie deBoer over at Balloon Juice completely misses the point.
  • Rogier mentioned this story about a TSA officer accused of stealing from passengers…which is, I guess, an improvement on the usual practice of molesting them.
  • The federal government protects a waitress from alleged sexual harassment by a Palm Beach County deputy…by suing the restaurant for not doing something to stop the deputy. (h/t Balko)
  • Finally, Michelle Bachman signs Family Leader’s “Marriage Vow” pledge to oppose gay marriage by defending the Defense of Marriage Act and passing an Amendment to the Constitution. As part of the vow, she also agreed to require “cooling off” periods for divorces, reject Sharia, and ban pornography. Maybe this will finally put an end to the viscous smear that Bachman is one of us libertarians.