Jacob Grier: Coffee, Cocktails, Commentary & Conjuring

Jacob Grier

Coffee, Cocktails, Commentary, and Conjuring

June 18, 2008

Don’t name Milton!

An amusing story from the Chicago Tribune:

Few names are more associated with the University of Chicago than Milton Friedman’s.

But that’s exactly the problem, say some faculty who want to put the brakes on a plan to name a new research center after the Nobel Prize-winning economist.

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors—about 8 percent of the university’s full-time faculty—said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could “reinforce among the public a perception that the university’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity.”

Aside from his achievements as an advocate for free markets and individual liberty, Friedman was an unquestionably brilliant economist with contributions to the field that were not limited to any particular political views. There are far worse names to have associated with one’s university.

[Hat tip: Newmark’s Door.]

Posted by Jacob Grier at 6:37 pm in Amusing| Economics| Libertarianism


June 17, 2008

Today in Dust-Up

Today in Dust-Up, Paul Roberts and I discuss whether or not the FDA has enough regulatory power. You can guess where I come down, but Paul doubts the agency’s efforts too.

On a related note, Peter Van Doren lays down some skepticism about food safety regulation in this Cato Daily Podcast.

Update: Also, whoever writes the headlines at LATimes.com deserves a raise.

Previously:
Back in The Jungle
Don’t blame Milton!

Posted by Jacob Grier at 3:44 pm in Economics| Food and Drink| Libertarianism| Writing


June 16, 2008

Dust-Up in the L.A. Times

This week in the L.A. Times Dust-Up feature, I’m discussing food policy with Paul Roberts, author of the recently released The End of Food. We take on a different question each day, taking turns on who goes first. Today’s question considers food-borne illness in our produce: is it a major menace or a manageable threat?

This should be a fun discussion. Paul and I don’t agree on everything, as you’ll see in the coming week, but we’d both like to see consumers eating better, fresher food, an end to subsidies for industrial farming, and regulations that aren’t bent to the interests of major corporate players. His book is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in why so much of our food is so bad and how out of touch we are with its origins.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 6:08 pm in Books| Food and Drink| Libertarianism| Writing


June 13, 2008

Back in The Jungle?

Paul Krugman makes another foray into the food safety issue today. His logic of blaming free market advocates for the failures of a regulatory agency is completely absurd — especially since the regulatory captures he notes in the article are exactly the kinds of things that make libertarians skeptical of government regulation in the first place.

Moreover, it’s not clear that the food safety crisis Krugman writes about has even occurred. News reports about food safety issues are certainly prominent, but according to Alex Tabarrok, the numbers tell a different story. The CDC’s data on foodborne disease outbreaks show a decline from 1998-2006.

Krugman’s previous column on food safety was covered here. Sadly, the intervening year hasn’t made him a better writer.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 1:58 pm in Food and Drink| Libertarianism


June 12, 2008

Paul’s new project

After the New Republic article about the Ron Paul newsletters came out, I worried that the money leftover in his campaign bank fund would go to an objectionable group. Fortunately, Paul is deciding instead to start a new project: The Campaign for Liberty, a fund raising group for libertarian-minded Republican candidates largely excluded from the party’s current ugly turn toward big government. He’ll also be holding a large rally in Minneapolis during the Republican National Convention — though not in the convention, where he and his supporters won’t receive a warm welcome. ABC News has the story.

I haven’t been following the so-called “Ron Paul Republicans” very closely, but this seems like a good use of the money (and one that campaign donors won’t object to). Paul has always been better at raising money than speaking as a candidate, and funneling money to some successful, small government Republicans would be a good direction for the movement he energized last year to take.

[Via Andrew Sullivan.]

Posted by Jacob Grier at 4:14 pm in Libertarianism| Politics| Ron Paul


May 21, 2008

Corruption: We’re doin’ it wrong

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Robert Frank argues that libertarian activists, unlike our left-wing counterparts, can’t possibly understand what it means to “sell out” and get a “real,” higher paying job in the for-profit sector:

Consider the poor Washington libertarian. Everywhere else in America his type is an exotic species, a coffee-shop heretic who quotes from “Atlas Shrugged” and steers every conversation toward Ron Paul or gold. Take him or leave him, he doesn’t care. He is his own master.

Not so the Beltway variety. Here, in the very home of the taxing, regulating leviathan, the libertarian is such a commonplace and unremarkable bird that no one gives him a second glance. Here he is a factotum of the establishment, a tiny voice in a vast choir assembled by business and its tax-exempt front groups to sing the virtues of the entrepreneur.

And therein lies his dilemma. Almost by definition, our young libertarian’s job is to celebrate the profit motive from the offices of a not-for-profit organization. He is subsidized, in other words, to hymn the unsubsidized way of life. Rugged individualism may be his creed, but a rugged individual he ain’t.

This is more than just an abstract problem, as I discovered last week at a panel discussion hosted by America’s Future Foundation, one of the lesser libertarian nonprofits in the city. The questions that night were whether nonprofit work constituted a “real job” and if moving to the private sector was “selling out” – ideas well known to any liberal do-gooder…

Selling out is not a threat to the market order; selling out is how the market gets its way. Just look at the city in which all these remarks were made. Private-sector Washington is one of the wealthiest places in America. Public-service Washington lags considerably behind. The chance of ditching the one for the other is what accounts for everything from the power of K Street to the infamous “revolving door,” by which a public servant takes a cushy corporate job after engineering some extravagant government favor for the corporation in question – or its clients.

The libertarian nonprofits that line the city’s streets often serve merely to rationalize this operation after the fact, giving a pious shine to the policies that are made in this unholy manner.

Oh no, our cover is blown! Cato Institute scholars are clearly in the pocket of the corporate donors who make up less than 10 percent of the organization’s funding. Just look at the site’s front page. There’s Ilya Somin arguing for better eminent domain protections for small property owners against politically connected developers. And here’s Swaminathan Aiyar noting the stupidity of biofuel subsidies that have been forced unwanted upon the nation’s big agricultural companies. Or how about Gerald O’Driscoll, a former Federal Reserve vice president, decrying the Fed’s bailout of Bear Stearns and the sweet deal it negotiated for Morgan Stanley? He’s just itching for a job at one of the other big banking firms.

Reason is even worse. Jacob Sullum’s opposition to the Phillip Morris-backed FDA legislation is merely a clever ploy to hide his friendly relationship with the nation’s largest tobacco company. Or perhaps he’s betting on getting a job with an internet gambling company after helping them crush those weak and defenseless Vegas casinos. Personally, I’m secretly hoping my raw milk article will land me a well-paid appointment shoveling manure at a local dairy. I’m not sure what angle Radley Balko is playing by getting Mississippi Drug War victims off Death Row, but I’m sure it’s something.

And don’t even get me started on the “merry litigators” at the Institute for Justice. They’re currently celebrating their victory on behalf of an Arizona bar owner who may now allow his customers to dance. We can expect IJ attorneys to line up cushy gigs in the Big Dance industry in no time.

Frank is right. We libertarians are conniving for luxurious, generously rewarded jobs in the for-profit sector. We’re just really, really bad it.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 1:34 pm in Libertarianism


May 20, 2008

Libertarians and labeling

Ezra Klein has a weird post up today accusing libertarians of being hypocritical in their opposition to laws requiring restaurants to post calorie information:

It’s a bit rich to watch libertarians and associated anti-government types oppose a regulation that gives consumers more useful information. This, after all, is how markets are supposed to work best. Consumers have better information, can pursue their preferences in a more coherent manner, and the market can provide, adapt, and innovate in response. Take trans fats, which have disappeared from just about every food save margarine now that they need to be listed on the package. If caloric information was posted, a lot of currently popular items would become unpopular (the awesome blossom, say), and restaurants would innovate towards lower calorie, but still filling, foods. In the absence of that information, the incentives to do so are weak. It’s one of those soft ways of making the market work better towards a social end: We agree that people should be healthier, people agree that they want to be healthier, and all this would do is give them the information to make healthy decisions. It would not actually bar any foods from production or sale. But because there’s some odd desire among some on the right to lionize unhealthy decisions (smoking!) and defend existing business models, whatever they may be, to the death, this regulation faces a steep uphill climb.

Information is a market good, too. It’s not a perfect market and one can reasonably argue that in some cases mandating label inclusions is for the public good, but more information isn’t always an improvement. Nor is government always better than the market at deciding what information ought to be provided; recall the mandated GM labels that were roundly ignored in the Netherlands. Corruption by lobbying is also an issue, as with Diageo’s manipulation of low-carb wine labeling and its current push to force nutritional labeling on the entire alcohol industry.

Requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts might indeed have the effects that Ezra hopes it would by making people think twice about what they eat and the social benefits might be worthwhile, but there’s nothing unlibertarian in being skeptical of mandates for information that we’re not sure customers are demanding in the first place.

Update: See Megan McArdle, too.

Previously:
Guess what? Burgers make you fat!
Do people know what they want to know?

Posted by Jacob Grier at 1:17 pm in Economics| Food and Drink| Libertarianism


April 9, 2008

Gene Healy blogs again

After a long blog hiatus, Gene Healy is back with a new site and a new book to promote. The blog is here, and a welcome return for those of us who’ve missed his grumbly libertarian cynicism. The book is The Cult of the Presidency, an examination of how the modern American president has acquired excessive powers at the expense of individual liberty and good government. I’m about halfway through it now and recommend it highly.

[Disclosure: Part of my job is promoting this book, but if you think that represents a conflict of interest then you profoundly overestimate the size of this blog’s readership.]

Posted by Jacob Grier at 12:57 pm in Books| Libertarianism


April 7, 2008

A bubbly anniversary

Today is the 75th Anniversary of the legalization of beer, which preceded the repeal of the Volstead Act by several months by classifying low-alcohol beer as “non-intoxicating.” For the libertarians among you, this is the one night of the year to raise a toast to FDR.

Update: In other news of beer liberation, the Virginia ABC is finally allowing the sale of Rustico’s tasty hopsicles.

Update 4/8/08: My friends Caleb Brown and Brandon Arnold discuss beer’s legalization in the Cato Daily Podcast.



March 31, 2008

GOOD on speakeasies

Nostalgic for the appeal of the speakeasy, or just not interested in being bothered by city health regulations, a few enterprising cooks are entering the speakeasy business. From GOOD:

Given that speakeasies violate numerous health codes and zoning laws, it’s not surprising that the people who run them are leery of letting in just anybody. (The Chowhound website won’t even allow discussions of secret restaurants on its message boards, for fear of getting them shut down.) Mark is more likely to offer a seat to the person who emails about fears of a life doomed to eating boxed macaroni and cheese than to someone who simply requests a reservation for two; the online application for Studiofeast, another Brooklyn-based speakeasy, asks applicants to describe their ideal last meal. Through word of mouth and aggressive filtration of potential diners, these hidden kitchens strive to create the perfect dinner party.

This libertarian foodie likes it! Read the whole thing here.

[Via Slashfood.]

Posted by Jacob Grier at 3:07 pm in Food and Drink| Libertarianism


March 25, 2008

Cato Institute down $0.36!

Note to Forbes.com newsbots: The Cato Institute receives just a small share of its funding from corporations. Nor is it a corporation itself, especially a corporation that sells down-market women’s fashion. You can’t buy stock in it. But if you could, you would, now that former Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis president William Poole has announced he’s joining the staff.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 2:36 pm in Economics| Libertarianism


March 7, 2008

Baylen is Crispy on the Outside

Baylen Linnekin — foodie, libertarian, former barista, and drinking buddy for one particularly memorable evening that left me spending the night on the floor of the coffee shop where I worked — has launched a new weblog with pal Jerry Brito. Check out Crispy on the Outside for all things related to bacon, food, bacon, stupid government regulations, and especially bacon. (You can see why Baylen and I get along.) Crispy’s one of my favorite new weblogs; add it to your RSS readers and blogrolls post haste!

Posted by Jacob Grier at 11:50 am in Food and Drink| Libertarianism


February 19, 2008

Litigating libertarians

Those of us of a libertarian bent have two very interesting cases in the courts right now, both carefully crafted to vindicate lost constitutional rights. The newest involves SpeechNow, an organization aimed at defeating candidates hostile to free political speech. Writing in the Washington Post, former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith and Institute for Justice attorney Steve Simpson explain what’s at stake:

Political activist David Keating created SpeechNow.org to give individual Americans a way to speak about candidates free of the byzantine campaign finance regulations that apply to modern political speech. The group’s particular mission is to protect First Amendment rights at the ballot box — to buy ads urging citizens to vote for politicians who support free speech and against those who do not — but its model could be applied to any issue or candidate a group of voters cares about.

SpeechNow.org is an independent group of citizens spending their own money on their own speech. It does not accept corporate or union contributions, makes no donations to politicians or parties and does not coordinate its activities with them. It will also fully disclose its contributions and expenditures to the Federal Election Commission…

Nonetheless, according to federal campaign finance laws and the FEC, SpeechNow.org must become a “political committee,” a PAC, and comply with a host of regulations that rival the tax laws in burden and complexity. Failure to do so could result in up to five years in prison for contributors and the principals of the group…

Imposing limits on groups such as SpeechNow.org ends up hurting the very people whom backers of campaign finance regulation always claim they’re trying to help — people of average means who must pool their resources to be heard — while leaving the field to the very wealthy to spend what they please.

Those are among the claims SpeechNow.org and its members made in a lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It challenges the constitutionality of requiring independent groups of citizens to register and organize as political committees. For the first time, federal courts will be asked to decide whether independent political speech by groups of individual American citizens has the full protection of the First Amendment.

The other is District of Columbia v. Heller, the challenge to DC’s gun ban that may end up being the first substantive Supreme Court case on the Second Amendment in 70 years. There’s been lots of commentary on the case, but my favorite article so far is this New York Times profile on its architect, Cato’s Robert Levy.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 10:17 pm in Law| Libertarianism


January 11, 2008

Where will Paul’s campaign money go?

At Volokh, Ilya Somin writes about the opportunity cost of donating to the Ron Paul campaign. That is, given how things have turned out, think of what better use these dollars could have been put to in the hands of a group like the Institute for Justice.

A more troubling cost is how the remaining money may yet be spent. From my understanding of the law, Paul could donate leftover millions to a non-profit organization of his choosing. Yes, I believe this includes the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the group that’s been vocally supporting Paul and that’s currently headed by the guy widely thought to have been his frequent ghost writer when the offensive newsletters were published.

11 CFR 113.2(b) provides [pdf]: “In addition to defraying expenses in connection with a campaign for federal office, funds in a campaign account . . . [m]ay be contributed to any organization described in section 170(c) of Title 26, of the United States Code . . . .” [meaning organizations who may receive tax-deductible contributions.]

I’m not a lawyer, so I may be incorrect. However this seems like a direct application of the law. For those of us who donated to the campaign, this would not be a thrilling outcome.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 4:43 pm in Libertarianism| Politics| Ron Paul


Once more on Paul

That Ron Paul bumper sticker looked so good on my Pontiac Aztek. Now I have two things to be embarrassed about when I drive.

Between Paul’s 1996 responses, his current non-response, his likely dishonesty on CNN, and his continued close association with the rumored author of the newsletters, I’m through hoping for a sufficient apology. As David Boaz writes at the Cato weblog:

Ron Paul isn’t running for president. He’s not going to be president, he’s not going to be the Republican nominee for president, and he never hoped to be. He got into the race to advance ideas — the ideas of peace, constitutional government, and freedom. Succeeding beyond his wildest dreams, he became the most visible so-called “libertarian” in America. And now he and his associates have slimed the noble cause of liberty and limited government…

Those words are not libertarian words. Maybe they reflect “paleoconservative” ideas, though they’re not the language of Burke or even Kirk. But libertarianism is a philosophy of individualism, tolerance, and liberty. As Ayn Rand wrote, “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” Making sweeping, bigoted claims about all blacks, all homosexuals, or any other group is indeed a crudely primitive collectivism.

Libertarians should make it clear that the people who wrote those things are not our comrades, not part of our movement, not part of the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick. Shame on them.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 1:20 pm in Libertarianism| Politics| Ron Paul


January 10, 2008

Ron Paul on Wolf Blitzer

Ron Paul appeared on Wolf Blitzer today to talk about his old newsletters. It’s on YouTube, parts one and two.

Paul repudiates the charges of racism, apparently to Wolf’s satisfaction. He denies knowing who wrote the articles, knowing how to find that out, and reading them when they were published. These last three claims are hard to swallow.

Watching the videos, my impression is of a good man whose sense of integrity is pulling him in two different directions. Pulling in one direction is his honesty; in the other, his loyalty to old friends. Sadly, he’s chosen the wrong friends, and he’s misguidedly protecting them at the sacrifice of his own reputation.

Then again, perhaps I’m just reading libertarian blog rumors into the situation. With neither Paul nor the author(s) coming forward, it’s too damn hard to be sure.

Update 1/11: The rumors are going mainstream. Here’s The Economist naming names.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 10:55 pm in Libertarianism| Politics| Ron Paul


January 9, 2008

Ron Paul in Texas Monthly

I vaguely recall reading this Texas Monthly profile of Ron Paul. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember this part:

Then [political adversary] Morris’ subalterns dug up something even more damaging to Paul: copies of a 1992 newsletter he had published that contained racially tinted remarks.

They caused a minor sensation. In one issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report, which he had published since 1985, he called former U.S. representative Barbara Jordan a “fraud” and a “half-educated victimologist.” In another issue, he cited reports that 85 percent of all black men in Washington, D.C., are arrested at some point: “Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” And under the headline “Terrorist Update,” he wrote: “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

In spite of calls from Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas State Conference of the NAACP, and other civil rights leaders for an apology for such obvious racial typecasting, Paul stood his ground. He said only that his remarks about Barbara Jordan related to her stands on affirmative action and that his written comments about blacks were in the context of “current events and statistical reports of the time.” He denied any racist intent. What made the statements in the publication even more puzzling was that, in four terms as a U. S. congressman and one presidential race, Paul had never uttered anything remotely like this.

When I ask him why, he pauses for a moment, then says, “I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me. It wasn’t my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around. I think the one on Barbara Jordan was the saddest thing, because Barbara and I served together and actually she was a delightful lady.” Paul says that item ended up there because “we wanted to do something on affirmative action, and it ended up in the newsletter and became personalized. I never personalize anything.”

His reasons for keeping this a secret are harder to understand: “They were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them . . . I actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn’t come from me directly, but they [campaign aides] said that’s too confusing. ‘It appeared in your letter and your name was on that letter and therefore you have to live with it.’” It is a measure of his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the time.

The article confirms that Paul very foolishly allowed his name to be used on articles he didn’t and wouldn’t write, then through some warped sense of loyalty to the author(s) and undue deference to his advisors opted to try and defend them rather than take immediate responsibility for his mistake. And even though this should have destroyed his campaign, he won a seat in Congress. Having escaped unscathed once before, it’s perhaps understandable why he thinks it’s not a big deal this time around.

But it is a big deal. It’s a huge deal. His failure to see that has not only alienated him from many of his supporters, but tarnished the image of libertarian ideas for people who have been exposed to them for the first time through Paul’s presidential run. We’re all paying now for his unwillingness to repudiate these statements the first time they were used against him. Simply issuing a press release that they are “old news” and declaring that they do not represent his beliefs isn’t going to make them go away; the flippancy with which he’s treating their reappearance shows that his sensitivity to these matters hasn’t much improved since 1996.

In fact, if the Texas Monthly writer is correct that his interview is the first in which Paul publicly denied writing these abhorrent passages, then Paul’s statement yesterday that “for over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name” is not true. He seems to be implying that he has taken responsibility since his campaign to return to Congress, or at least since 1998. The profile was published in late 2001.

[Via Virginia Postrel, whose thoughts on the matter are posted here and here.]

Update 1/10: As always, read Jim Henley too.

Update 1/11: Jim points out that Paul had ample opportunity to denounce the statements in 1996 and clearly didn’t. Combined with his thoroughly unconvincing appearance on CNN last night and his continued close association with the probable author of the articles, I no longer think there’s anyway to deny Paul’s culpability in their publication.

Posted by Jacob Grier at 11:29 pm in Libertarianism| Politics| Ron Paul


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