Daily Archives: July 7, 2021

Its happening. After several attempts to trigger a recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom since 2019, Californians now have a set date for deciding whether to remove the governor from office. Last week, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis announced the recall election would be held on Sept. 14.

Will Gov. Newsom face the same fate as Gov. Gray Davis did in 2003?

Will a prominent Democrat enter the race?

Will Democratic voters rally to Newsoms defense?

Will Newsom benefit from a relatively early recall election?

For these questions and more, well find out soon enough.

As of this writing, the pro-recall campaign seems to face an uphill battle.

In May, the Public Policy Institute of California reported that nearly six in 10 likely California voters would vote to oppose the recall.

Likewise, the Institute of Governmental Studies based at UC Berkeley reported five months ago that 36% of Californians said they would vote to remove the governor.

Months later, recall support remained stagnant.

Perhaps these favorable figures for the governor are a function of polling. Perhaps there are many more Californians willing to back the recall than could be reflected in surveys. Again, time will tell.

Obviously, Californias Democratic establishment believes an earlier than anticipated election will benefit Newsom.

But there are risks.

Wildfires, power outages, the impacts of drought and any sudden return of lockdown policies could aid the efforts of recall supporters.

Either way, expect a lot of money to be raised and spent by special interests on both sides regardless of what successes and failures occur.

Then theres the matter of candidates.

In 2003, there were 135 candidates on the ballot. This time, along with some outliers, theres a whos-who of California Republican and Libertarian alternatives in the running.

From celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner to former elected officials like Doug Ose and Kevin Faulconer to elected officials Republican Assemblyman Kevin Kiley and Libertarian Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Hewitt, there are plenty of significant names.

But will they be able to energize voters in the way Arnold Schwarzenegger? Will they need to? That all remains to be seen.

One thing is clear. The recall is a legitimate tool from the state constitution empowering the public to keep elected officials in check. Now that a large number of Californians worked to trigger a recall, its time to pay attention to the arguments for and against recalling Gov. Newsom.

Over the next two months ahead, thats what we intend to do.

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Get ready for the Sept. 14 recall election - San Bernardino County Sun

Once again, the Internet comes through with another silly list that is fun to argue about precisely because it is pointless to do so.

Indiana, we are told by the website WalletHub, is the sixth-worst state in the union for the independence of its citizens, better only than the awful quintet of Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina and Alaska.

Using a set of metrics including the states dependence on federal money, individuals bad habits (such as opioid abuse and social media addiction) and the rates of bankruptcy and foreclosure, the site says we Hoosiers are just not a self-sufficient lot.

Utah, the same survey said, is the most self-sufficient state, which struck me as odd. Just this morning, that states governor was on TV, boasting to a smarmy news reader about how proud she was of the states COVID-19 rules compliance and long-range plan to fight climate change.

That sounds like sucking up both to Washington and the whole world at the same time.

Outraged on behalf of my beloved Hoosier state, I went looking for other rankings.

According to cheatsheet.com, which considers only the percentage of a states general revenue that comes from the federal government, North Dakota is the most independent state at 16.8%. Indiana doesnt do so well on that list, either, ranking 10th worst at 38%.

Perhaps Gov. Eric Holcomb will keep that in mind the next time hes inclined to gripe about federal interference. Strings, Governor, strings.

At thetopten.com, a different criterion is used: How would a state do if cut off from the rest of the country? Texas, with a robust economy, diverse and energetic population and a National Guard that could defeat many countries armies, came out on top, followed closely by California and New York.

Makes sense. Bigger is better, no matter how much their current politics might be screwed up.

Both intrigued and puzzled, I then sought the ranking of states on libertarianism.

The Cato Institute says the most libertarian state, based on the degree of personal and economic freedom its citizens enjoy, is Florida, followed by New Hampshire and hooray for us! Indiana. On the Mises Institute list, Florida and New Hampshire are first and second, but Indiana falls to 10th, still not bad.

How can Indiana be both one of the least independent states and one of the most libertarian?

Because, remember silly and pointless. Self-reliance is, by definition, something possessed by or lacking in individuals, not a quality that can easily be applied in the aggregate to a whole people.

And its a state of mind. Most of the things that give most of us a sense of independence are, ironically, things that also connect us to others, such as our cars and the ubiquitous smartphone.

Because my parents had to buy so much on credit, I feel naked without a certain amount of cash in my pocket, never mind that my debit card is almost universally accepted.

But what if we were suddenly cut off from everybody like, well, like Texas or California adrift from the union?

My brother has the right idea. He has several weeks worth of water and emergency food supplies laid in, and hed probably lose his mind if somebody spirited it away.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency recommends we all have at least a three-day disaster kit at home, including food and water and everything from a flashlight and battery-operated radio to a First-Aid kit and garbage bags.

How many of us do? How about an emergency kit for the car in case it breaks down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter?

Show me that list of who is emergency ready and who isnt and Ill tell you whether the state is independent or not, silly though it may be.

And remember, there is a fine line between self-reliant and self-defeating. In other words, if I may refer to an old Twilight Zone episode, if you dont have a fallout shelter, you really ought to be friends with a neighbor who does.

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Leo Morris column: Indiana - an independent state it its own way - The Herald Bulletin

Since a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto first created bitcoin after the 2008 financial crash, cryptocurrencies have multiplied. There are now thousands of coins in circulation, with names that sound like jettisoned intergalactic missions: Libra, Ethereum, Stellar, Auroracoin. Though they differ in branding, almost all cryptocurrencies share a common fantasy: to remove the money supply from the hands of politicians and sidestep the financial institutions that govern the movement of cash across the Earth. But its recently become obvious that cryptocurrencies can escape neither of these things.

Indeed, the libertarian dream shared by their early proponents appears to be dying at the very moment cryptocurrencies have broken through to the mainstream. Stablecoins are pegged to the value of national currencies, while the US Federal Reserve is developing its own digital currency. Elsewhere the Bank for International Settlements recently lent its support to central bank digital currencies for the first time. These developments turn the original purpose of stateless money on its head. Even El Salvadors recognition of bitcoin as legal tender is being criticised by true believers for forcing consumers to accept the cryptocurrency, thus undermining the very principle of choice.

Despite cryptos futuristic branding, its intellectual origin story is more mundane. The idea of a stateless money supply first arose in debates over a common European currency. While the 1992 Maastricht treaty paved the way for the introduction of the euro in 1999, this wasnt the only currency model on the table at the time. A lesser-known idea, proposed by the German economist Herbert Giersch in 1975, imagined a parallel currency called the europa that would circulate alongside and compete with national currencies rather than replacing them. Along with fellow economist members of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society, Giersch thought what he called currency competition in the title of a 1978 book would gradually draw people away from their lira, francs and drachmas.

Gierschs student Roland Vaubel, who would help found the Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD) party nearly four decades later, was drafted by the European Commission to explore the idea. Meanwhile, in 1976, Friedrich Hayek, who was in regular contact with Giersch and Vaubel, published two pamphlets with the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs. Hayeks essays one on choice in currency, the other on the denationalisation of money became touchstones for those who wanted to bring stateless money into existence.

But once it was clear that the euro had beaten out the europa, libertarians began to look elsewhere for places to experiment. By the second half of the 1990s, the internet seemed to offer a space that lay beyond national sovereignty and earthly territory. In 1996, the internet activist John Perry Barlow proclaimed that legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply online. Some libertarians went further than Barlow and pragmatically observed that the old laws of property might be more secure than ever in cyberspace, where users could escape the reach of national governments and taxes. In 1998, the runner-up for the Mont Pelerin Societys Hayek prize forecast that the internet would undermine the monopoly supply of money by governments and allow people to choose between different private money suppliers.

This vision of money without states was captured in a 1997 libertarian manifesto written by the investment adviser James Dale Davidson and former Times editor William Rees-Mogg (father of the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg). Disguised as an airport paperback, The Sovereign Individual: How to survive and thrive during the collapse of the welfare state predicted that the internet would denationalise money. People could forgo reliance on the legal tender approved by governments and instead use immaterial cybercash, which the authors imagined as encrypted sequences of multihundred-digit prime numbers. Cybercash, they argued, will bring Hayeks logic vividly to life.

Their book proved popular with a little-known venture capitalist in San Franciscos Bay Area. The young Peter Thiel was enthused by Davidson and Rees-Moggs vision for a nationless digital currency, and in 1999 he launched PayPal, bringing their prophecy closer to reality. Thiels company was just the beginning of what would later become a proliferation of different digital currencies. But in recent months, a less starry-eyed future for crypto has come into focus. The first flaw in the bitcoin model used by the majority of cryptocurrencies is, ironically, a consequence of its own success. Solving the equations to acquire new bitcoins (referred to as mining) requires large volumes of computer hardware that frequently overheats and is extremely energy intensive. Estimates put the annual energy usage of bitcoin mining between that of Sweden and Malaysia.

And as these mines multiply, their operations begin to stretch and even overwhelm national power grids. Iran banned bitcoin mining last month after it led to blackouts and possibly the shutdown of a nuclear reactor. Multiple provinces in China, one of the worlds biggest producers of bitcoin, banned mining too, leading to reports of miners relocating their hardware to sites of more traditional underground extraction in Canada, South Dakota and Texas.

Chinese crackdowns are extending to holdings in crypto too, sending the value of bitcoin tumbling. South Korea recently seized tens of millions of dollars of crypto assets from its wealthy citizens in a clampdown on tax avoidance precisely what the techno-libertarians hoped digital cash would make impossible. And earlier this month, the US Justice Department announced it had managed to track down and recover most of the ransom paid in bitcoin to hackers of the Colonial Pipeline. The traceless currency leaves a trail after all.

Chained to the Earth by cables and wire, crypto is more likely to live on as an extension of the nation state than as a means of escaping it. Like goldbugs before them, crypto fans may have to acclimatise to their hobby horse being, at best, a volatile new asset class for high-risk hedging rather than a truly alternative global currency (though even on this, opinions differ). Most travellers to the crypto craze since its initial spike in late 2017 seem to be drawn not by the possibility of bringing Hayeks vision to life, but by a willingness to take risks for speculative payoffs. Indeed, the future for crypto now looks less like a techno-utopian dream or libertarian fantasy, and more like subordination to the very thing it was designed to overthrow: the nation states monopoly over the money supply.

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Cryptocurrencies dream of escaping the global financial system is crumbling - The Guardian

Floridas Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill to protect against indoctrination in the states colleges and universities. The new law, which went into effect on July 1, requires Floridas public colleges and universities to conduct an annual survey measuring intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity on their campuses. The laws goal is to assess the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented and how free students, faculty, and staff feel to express their beliefs and viewpoints.

The Florida law does not specify what will be done with the survey results, but Gov. DeSantis suggested that budget cuts could result if universities and colleges are found to be indoctrinating students. It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where youd be exposed to a lot of different ideas, DeSantis said. Unfortunately, now the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments.

DeSantis is currently a frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Indeed, he edged former President Donald Trump in a recent straw poll taken at the Western Conservative Summit. The problem DeSantis has identified is not unique to Florida Indianas Republican governor signed a similar bill last month and it traces directly to the political biases of the processes by which faculty are hired. Many of the same colleges and universities that tout tenure as a way to encourage free thought censor it by not allowing conservative and libertarian faculty candidates who think freely to get in the door.

I once suggested on the ConLawProf group email list that law schools need to hire more conservative and libertarian candidates (with more meaning, at a minimum, at least one). The reaction? One law professor posted that I was nuts to suggest such a thing. Libertarian law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz quipped at a Federalist Society conference on intellectual diversity in the legal academy that his leftist colleagues at Georgetown felt that three conservatives on a law faculty of 120 was plenty and perhaps even one or two too many.

Anecdotes aside, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren has published detailed statistical surveys that document that Republicans and Christians are the groups most under-represented in the law professoriate. If the small handful of right-leaning and Christian law schools is excluded from the dataset, the problem is actually worse. Additional studies demonstrate that lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty extends campus-wide. For example, according to research conducted last year by the National Association of Scholars, Democratic professors outnumber their Republican colleagues by a ratio of 8.5 to 1 on top college campuses.

Research since World War II has consistently found overwhelmingly left-oriented political attitudes and ideological self-identification among college and university faculty the report notes. The report also found that the most drastic differences in the ratio were among professors of English, at 26.8 to 1, sociology, at 27 to 1, and anthropology, 42.2 to 1. Less subjective majors such as mathematics (5.5 to 1), chemistry (4.6 to 1), and economics (3 to 1) were less politically biased.

Not surprisingly, DeSantis critics are throwing fits. Nikki Fried, the Florida agriculture commissioner who is challenging DeSantis for governor next year, compared the governors actions to what authoritarian regimes do. Charles P. Pierce wrote in Esquire that DeSantis is a wingnut who is as full of crap as the Christmas goose. Steven Benen toned it down a bit for MSNBC by merely opining that the new law is absurd.

What DeSantis critics fail to appreciate is that truth is most likely to emerge from the clash of ideas. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously referred to it as the marketplace of ideas, while John Stuart Mill expressed this same view in his classic book On Liberty. The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, Mill wrote. Posterity as well as the existing generation those who dissent from the opinion, still more those who hold it.

Gov. DeSantis received his undergraduate degree from Yale and his law degree from Harvard. He should be commended for recognizing that faculty need to start behaving like professors again.

Scott Douglas Gerber is a law professor at Ohio Northern University and an associated scholar at Brown Universitys Political Theory Project.

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Gov. DeSantis and the need for viewpoint diversity in higher education | Column - Tampa Bay Times

Leland Jenson recently wrote a letter insulting his political opponents and spewing leftist buzzwords. He jumps all over the place trying to connect unrelated topics from completely different political camps. For example, he said, Our national democratic institutions are being undermined by Tea Party extremists (Vanilla Isis), trying to lump the Tea Party movement in with the January 6th capital riot. To understand how stupid this is, one must first understand what the Tea Party movement was.

Despite what the media would have you believe, Republicans and Libertarians dont actually get along very well. The Tea Party movement was an attempt to form a coalition between Libertarians and Republicans to focus on one single issue: government spending. The movement did manage to get a few hardline fiscal hawks elected to Congress, but it failed to give Ron Paul (now retired) the presidency.

For those who dont know, Ron Paul can be thought of as the libertarian version of Bernie Sanders. His son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is one of the last remaining remnants of the Tea Party. The movement that got Trump elected in 2016 was completely different and unrelated. That movement was all about national populism, not government spending.

The Tea Party movement was very short lived and it functionally died after the 2012 election. The modern Republican party today arguably does not care about the national debt and how much of the annual budget goes to simply paying interest.

Secondly, Im at a loss for words at Jenson calling the tea party vanilla isis. ISIS is a theocratic movement whose goal is to create a Sunni Islamic state. The Shia muslims were treated just as badly as non-muslims, sometimes worse; they could either convert or be killed. The Sunni muslims under ISIS control were forced to follow the strictest Islamic protocols (sharia law), such as men not shaving their beards and women being forced to cover themselves; thats putting it lightly. Failure to comply could result in barbaric thousand-year-old styles of executions such as crucifixions and stoning, including women and children.

Jenson is concerned about bigotry, misogyny and equality or whatever. When the Tea Party was active, the gay marriage debate was in full swing; the Supreme Court did not settle that discussion until 2015, long after the Tea Party ended. Libertarians are generally supportive of gay marriage, Republicans were not. The coalition required them to put their differences aside. Similarly, Libertarians are generally far less religious than Republicans; even the ones that are religious arent authoritarian about it. You wouldnt find the Tea Party pushing for prayer in schools or the Ten Commandments in front of courthouses. Comparing the Tea Party to ISIS doesnt even make sense, not even as a vanilla version. The Tea Party was less theocratic than Republicans in general at the time.

In conclusion, Jenson doesnt know what hes talking about. The Tea Party was not conservative republican extremism.

P. S. Trickle-down economics is not a real thing. The only time you hear those words are when Democrats are attacking a strawman. You wont find academic proponents of it.

William Smith lives in Fargo.

This letter does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.

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Letter: Writer doesn't know what the Tea Party was - INFORUM

There are virtually no defenders of capitalism in the world, yours truly and a handful of others being the rare exceptions. Capitalism endures because it works and its basic principles accurately describe the physical universe, not because of any significant cultural pressure to believe in it. Nonetheless, you hear claims that market fundamentalists abound, as if the world is full of maniacs consistently bashing government and praising property rights.

Even I shouldnt properly be called a market fundamentalist, if that slur is meant to imply an allegiance to an overall pattern of market activity for its own sake regardless of the consequences for the human participants involveda position that may be held by no one. At a fundamental level, in fact, Im a utilitarian, wanting the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number over the lifetime of the universe. I dont really understand what else would or should morally motivate anyone. And I think the greatest happiness is made possible by secure property rights.

Unfortunately, as Lenin wisely predicted, most practicing capitalistsbusinesspeoplefeel so little loyalty to the principles underlying the system that created them that theyll sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

The billionaire investor vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, for example, praises the power and decisiveness of the Chinese Communist Party, currently the worlds most influential engine of non-capitalist central planning, and says he wishes the U.S. were as tough in crushing its business mavericks as China has been in slapping down Jack Mas ideas for more free-market-oriented banking options.

The commies arent capitalisms only adversaries these days, though, not by a long shot. This month brings a conference in Alexandria, Virginia that shows how useless the long arc of conservative thinking has proven to be in making the case for capitalism.

Populist-leaning figures including Sen. Marco Rubio (now de-emphasizing his long history of sugar industry subsidies), Senate candidate and author J.D. Vance (now rapidly deleting his old anti-Trump, pro-Evan McMullin tweets), and new National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru, under the auspices of the Catholic-inclined Intercollegiate Studies Institute, will talk about topics such as capitalism being anti-family and the need for economic thought to be transformed in the wake of (largely imaginary) decades of social devastation wrought by global markets. This may at least help clarify some of the grievous miscommunications between libertarians and conservatives over the past decade.

Before people of any political stripe wish for the taming of purportedly heartless market institutions, its worth noting that those institutions are often at their worst when they are least market-like. It seems like only yesterdaythe 1990sthat increasingly customized, personalized services were the direction markets were headed. Our biggest complaints about them now seem to be generated by the handful of aberrant, still somewhat novel, large companies that presume to behave like governments.

Big Tech and the Trump Organization alike have their critics, but isnt each adjacent to government, and prone to behave like government, to a degree that few of the worlds millions of other companies are? more commercial and less governmentalless authoritarianbehavior is needed, even within the private sector. Do you really want either Big Tech or the Trump Organization becoming more entangled with the actual government, constantly mingling with regulators? Enforcing simple laws that ensure Big Tech and the like do not become Big Fraud would be enough to keep capitalism coloring inside the lines.

Instead, each political faction in its own way seems lately to flee from entrepreneurs and into the arms of regulators. The right now wants God or populist government to smash chaotic markets. The left always disliked capitalism. The liberals want every inch of it regulated and its participants guilt-tripped any time they interact with each other (and then liberals want to be rewarded for their vandalism with praise for their tolerance and compassion). Even many libertarians, though pro-capitalist in principle, find economics confusing or embarrassing and would rather talk about something ostensibly separate and more popular: sex, radar scanners, constitutional law, medicinal marijuana, you name it, anything that keeps them from sounding like stock-trading fuddy-duddies.

Give capitalism a chance, thoughnot just in the world but within your own perceptions. Even when you see some ostensibly non-governmental civil society institutions screw up, note the high frequency with which the screw-up ensued from a brush with government or mimicry of government. Its sad the Boy Scouts just had to pay $1 billion in settlements for overlooking child molestation incidents, but before you try pinning that one on predatory capitalism, notice the Boy Scouts, always a bit paramilitary in tone, have in recent decades had both a past CIA director and a future Secretary of State as their president. Maybe if Boy Scouts spent more time buying and selling and less time following leaders orders in darkened woods like good soldiers, theyd be a billion richer right now.

A libertarian architect friend of minealso a solid family man and pillar of his community, rest assuredpoints out to me the release this week of Anthony Fontenots book Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market, an argument that the best things in architecture and urban design in recent decades have happened when planners were held at bay and the spontaneous order of the marketplace was allowed to play out. Such observations were growing more common back in the 1990s, in the wake of Communisms catastrophic failure and the reduced perceived necessity for the U.S.s own military-industrial complex, not to mention the welfare state.

Lets rekindle the playful courage to see what markets can do, and this time lets be more explicit about it. Non-libertarian political thinkers constantly claim they have the courage to do whats necessaryalways meaning the courage to use force against their various enemies (or at least recommend someone else use force on their behalf). We should respond by summoning the courage to teach economics and argue openly for defending individual rights. No more hiding behind the latest popular environmental, military, anti-racist, electoral, or aesthetic cause and pretending that Us too! is a powerful enough slogan to carry the day for liberty.

Have the guts to tell the next market-basher and property-rights-violator you encounter hes wrong, whether hes conservative, communist, corporate CEO, or even craven libertarian thinktank staffer.

Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on Twitter at @ToddSeavey

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With Capitalists Like These - Splice Today