Mediaboss Marketing

Everybodys finding errors in Duke historian Nancy MacLeans work of speculative historical fiction on Nobel laureate James Buchanan and the libertarian movement, Democracy in Chains. Id feel left out if I werent misquoted, so Im relieved to find my name on page 211. Heres what MacLean says about me and some of my purported allies:

Now: Did I actually say that the poor and working class are intent on exploiting the rich? Or that they contribute nothing? Well, heres what I wrote on pp. 252-53 of The Libertarian Mind, which is the source MacLean footnotes:

Economists call this process rent-seeking, or transfer-seeking. Its another illustration of Oppenheimers distinction between the economic and the political means. Some individuals and businesses produce wealth. They grow food or build things people want to buy or perform useful services. Others find it easier to go to Washington, a state capital, or a city hall and get a subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors. Thats the political means to wealth, and, sadly, its been growing faster than the economic means.

Of course, in the modern world of trillion-dollar governments handing out favors like Santa Claus, it becomes harder to distinguish between the producers and the transfer-seekers, the predators and the prey. The state tries to confuse us, like the three-card monte dealer, by taking our money as quietly as possible and then handing some of it back to us with great ceremony. We all end up railing against taxes but then demanding our Medicare, our subsidized mass transit, our farm programs, our free national parks, and on and on and on. Frederic Bastiat explained it in the nineteenth century: The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. In the aggregate, we all lose, but its hard to know who is a net loser and who is a net winner in the immediate circumstance.

On the preceding pages I introduced James Buchanan and the concept of public choice:

One of the key concepts of Public Choice is concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. That means that the benefits of any government program are concentrated on a few people, while the costs are diffused among many people. Take ADMs ethanol subsidy, for instance. If ADM makes $200 million a year from it, it costs each American about a dollar. Did you know about it? Probably not. Now that you do, are you going to write your congressman and complain? Probably not. Are you going to fly to Washington, take your senator out to dinner, give him a thousand-dollar contribution, and ask him not to vote for the ethanol subsidy? Of course not. But you can bet that ADMs corporate officers are doing all that and more. Think about it: How much would you spend to get a $200 million subsidy from the federal government? About $199 million if you had to, Ill bet. So who will members of Congress listen to? The average Americans who dont know that theyre paying a dollar each for ADMs profits? Or ADM, which is making a list and checking it twice to see whos voting for their subsidy?

I also wrote on page 253 about the parasite economy, in which

every group in society comes up with a way for the government to help it or penalize its competitors: businesses seek tariffs, unions call for minimum-wage laws (which make high-priced skilled workers more economical than cheaper, low-skilled workers), postal workers get Congress to outlaw private competition, businesses seek subtle twists in regulations that hurt their competitors more than themselves.

Lets be clear: when public choice economists and I talk about rent seeking and concentrated benefits, and we point to subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors, were not trying to protect the rich. Were talking about ways that businesses, unions, and other organized interest groups seek to use government to gain advantages that they couldnt gain in the marketplace. And when we suggest limiting the power of government to hand out such favors, we are arguing in the interests of workers and consumers.

I do not believe that MacLeans two very short quotations from The Libertarian Mind and the paragraphs in which she situates them fairly depict my argument in the book. One might even say that she reversed the meaning of the predators and the prey. Unfortunately, selective quotation and misrepresentation seem to be MacLeans M.O., as Steve Horwitz, Phil Magness, Russ Roberts, David Henderson, David Bernstein, Bernstein again, Nick Gillespie, Michael Munger, and others have pointed out.

By the way, Professor MacLean derides me as a writer subsidized by wealthy donors. Well, yes, its true that the Cato Institute is supported by voluntary contributions, not by tax funding. And donors to organizations Duke University, NPR, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute tend to be well-off. But I assure Professor MacLean that I was absorbing the ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, the American Founders, and John Stuart Mill long before I discovered that there might be jobs available to write about such ideas.

Although James Buchanan was not involved in the founding of the Cato Institute, as MacLean writes, we are proud that he chose to write frequently for the Cato Journal,speak at various Cato events, and allow us to count him as a Distinguished Senior Fellow. And we regret that he has been so ill treated by a fellow academic.

Read more:
Another Misleading Quotation in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains - Cato Institute (blog)

CARACAS Venezuelas democratic institutions are in ruins, its coffers are empty, and its citizens are searching for food in garbage dumps. Its people are dying from starvation, from preventable and curable diseases (at much higher rates than the Latin American average), and from violence including, in some cases, gunshot wounds inflicted by their own government.

More than three quarters of Venezuelas 31 million people want to free themselves from the stranglehold of their rulers, a small group of no more than 150 mafia-like figures (mostly military) who have hijacked the countrys democracy, robbed it blind, and created a devastating humanitarian crisis. The 18-year-old regime established by Hugo Chvez, and now led by President Nicols Maduro would rather hold an entire country hostage than lose power and potentially have to answer for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court. But how long can it hold on?

Venezuelans have actively pursued a change of government. In the December 2015 parliamentary election, two thirds of voters lent their support to the democratic opposition. That outcome should have loosened the regimes grip on the state and helped to re-establish the checks and balances envisioned in the constitution that Chvez himself drafted.

But the regime has systematically undermined the National Assembly through rulings from a Supreme Court that it packed with loyalists, using the outgoing legislature. At the end of last March, the Supreme Court went a step further, taking over all of the Assemblys powers a move so blatantly illegal that even the chavista Prosecutor General Luisa Ortega Daz denounced it as a rupture of the constitutional order.

With that, desperate Venezuelans took their opposition to the streets. On April 1, they began holding almost daily protests demanding another general election, despite the mortal danger of public opposition. Indeed, since the protests began, the regimes security forces have killed 85 demonstrators and wounded over 1,000 more, including by throwing tear-gas canisters into crowds and launching pellets at peoples chests, at close range. More than 3,000 protesters face criminal charges, simply for exercising their democratic rights.

Cornered, the ruling clique has become defiant. Maduro recently announced that if the regime cannot muster the votes needed to stay in power, it will use its weapons instead. But he is also taking more extreme political action to protect the regime: he has now ordered, by presidential decree (rather than by referendum, as the constitution requires), a constituent assembly, to be chosen on July 30, to draft a new communal constitution.

The demonstrations have now become what is essentially a popular uprising, with Venezuelas people calling on the armed forces to evict the regime from power. Ortega, for her part, has called on the Supreme Court to annul the regimes push to rewrite the constitution, but the court declared her request not receivable.

Venezuelans recognize that a Marxist-Leninist constitution approved by regime-appointed deputies would complete Venezuelas transformation into another Cuba within a month. The question is whether the rest of the world will stand by idly.

Luis Almagro, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS), has called its member states attention to the Venezuelan regimes grave constitutional and human-rights violations. At last months OAS General Assembly in Mexico, 14 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Bahamas, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, the United States, Peru, St. Lucia, Uruguay, and Paraguay) proposed a draft resolution on how to initiate a dialogue with the Venezuelan regime to no avail.

Such a dialogue would have focused on pushing Venezuelas regime to comply with the commitments mediated by the Vatican last autumn, including holding free and fair elections this year, releasing political prisoners, restoring the National Assemblys constitutional powers, and accepting humanitarian assistance. But, though 20 OAS member states supported the resolution, ten did not, owing to their dependence on Venezuelan oil and financing. That left the resolution three votes short of the required two-thirds majority.

Emboldened by what it perceived as a victory, the Venezuelan regime has ramped up its violence against protesters and organized a bogus coup against itself. During the recent siege of the Legislative Palace, an officer of the National Guard assaulted Julio Borges, the president of the National Assembly the only institution with any legitimacy left. The regime is also set to appoint a tame new deputy prosecutor general to replace Ortega, who has had her bank accounts frozen and is barred from leaving the country.

The opposition is firing back, organizing via the National Assembly an official referendum, on the basis of articles 333 and 350 of the constitution. Venezuelans will be able to weigh in on Maduros plan to rewrite the constitution and the oppositions push for new elections, the restoration of all checks and balances, and the formation of a national unity government. The vote will take place on July 16, in all churches in Venezuela, and with international observers.

Having lost all legitimacy, Venezuelas kleptocratic and murderous regime is hanging on by a thread. Already, individual OAS member states have imposed targeted sanctions on officials affiliated with the regimes aggressive drug-dealing faction the sub-group responsible for murdering young people in the streets and torturing some 300 political prisoners. (The European Union has yet to join the effort.)

By rejecting a democratic transition, the regime is only prolonging its own agony and creating higher costs for Venezuela. While the ruling clique is not eager to negotiate, a deal offered via the OAS or at the United Nations Security Council could prove difficult to refuse in the current context.

Such a deal would require an immediate general election and the cancellation of the constituent assembly, and could be implemented relatively quickly and easily, according to the existing constitution. If successful, it could help reinvigorate international trust and cooperation. More immediately, it would give the desperate, starving, and repressed Venezuelan people their country back.

Read more:
Death or Democracy in Venezuela - Project Syndicate

IRINnews.org

Securitising Africa's borders is bad for migrants, democracy, and development IRINnews.org South Africa's National Assembly recently passed a bill to set up a new border management agency. The Border Management Authority will fall under Home Affairs, a government department long distinguished by its lack of respect for immigrant and refugee ... and more »

See original here:
Securitising Africa's borders is bad for migrants, democracy, and development - IRINnews.org

Civility: we seek to instill it in our children and we expect it from even our most casual acquaintances. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Our constitution does not demand that our speech be civil. The constitution protects uncivil speech hate speech, even. But it does so not because our democracy approves of such speech, but because we believe that truth will expose lies and the evil of government censorship is greater than the perils posed by untoward speakers.

But what happens when the source of uncivil speech is not some fringe hate group, but the occupant of the Oval Office? And what happens when the lies target the very organs designed to ferret them out? We have never faced such questions before. Which explains why, on the 241st anniversary of our independence, American democracy finds itself in peril.

We have grown accustomed to the presidents lies, as recently inventoried in the New York Times. Yet such a simple enumeration fails to get at the danger. Consider Trumps workhorse that the mainstream media trucks in fake news.

If Trump were simply implying, without substantiation or proof, that the media routinely engages in unreliable reporting, this would be bad enough. But that is not the claim. Rather, it is that CNN, to take one favorite target, willfully fabricates false news to advance a partisan agenda.

The irony is rich, as the lie shamelessly attributes to CNN the very behavior that Trump himself is guilty of. Having maligned CNN as the enemy and not the vanguard of truth, the president minces no words about how enemies are to be treated. They are to be body-slammed to the floor and punched in the face.

Mr Trumps lies can better be understood as instances of libel they state falsehoods that malign their targets. As a sitting president, Mr Trump is, of course, immune from suit (just as he might be immune from indictment for having obstructed justice). But this does not change the libelous character of his speech.

What makes this libel so toxic is not the injury it does to the reputation of the New York Times or CNN, though certainly it may serve to discredit these organizations in the eyes of some segments of the public; it is the injury the comments do to our democracy.

But the full danger of Trumps uncivil speech becomes clear only when viewed through the filter of his defamation of our electoral process. The 2016 presidential election revealed genuine threats to the integrity of our voting system, and we have precise, reliable knowledge about their source.

But in his alarming testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the former FBI director James Comey revealed that while the president repeatedly asked whether the FBI had targeted him personally, he failed to express the slightest interest in the deeper issue Russias criminal tampering with our electoral process.

Instead, on his third day in office, Trump spread one of his most venomous lies: Between three million and five million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote. The president proceeded to bootstrap a bald lie into an alternative reality, establishing an independent commission to look into the nonexistent problem of voter fraud. Most recently, he has used the refusal of states to participate in this sham as evidence that they have something to hide turning lies into calumny.

Civility: we seek to instill it in our children and we expect it from even our most casual acquaintances. While a democracy can afford to tolerate some uncivil speech, it cannot withstand the sweeping cultivation of contempt directed against the institutions designed to keep government honest and elections safe.

This should be obvious to all public servants. And yet the present occupant of the White House has become the strident mouthpiece of uncivil speech that libels these very institutions.

Continued here:
The biggest threat to American democracy isn't Trump's uncivil speech - The Guardian

RESIDENTS OF ESSEX know that the fried clam was invented in 1916 at Woodmans, a much-loved clam shack that hugs the Essex River in its last approach to the sea. But few remember that one of our most essential words emerged around the corner. Just down Route 133, a weather-beaten sign on the First Congregational Church recalls John Wise, the minister who helped serve this small seaside community when it was known as Chebacco. In a small book published 300 years ago, in 1717, Wise gave a new urgency to a term that had never been acceptable in polite society, and which still gives us trouble. Democracy the word is so basic to our lives that we barely pause to hear it.

The story of democracy resembles an immigrants tale, though we rarely think about it that way. Like many newcomers, the word was first received with hostility, and took decades to assimilate. But now, its so much a part of our heritage that we cant envision ourselves without it. And its as New England as those fried clams.

Advertisement

From high school civics classes to presidential speeches, democracy is simply everywhere, part of a soundtrack that always plays faintly in the background. Even North Korea, the least democratic country on earth, calls itself The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. As Leonard Cohen wrote in his song Democracy, the term is so prevalent that its coming through a hole in the air. But a close study reveals that the word, like the thing itself, is more fragile than we might think. Or as Leonard Cohen would say, its real, but it aint exactly there.

That sounds right for 2017, when democracy is something of an endangered species. Abroad, it is not in vogue, as authoritarians crack down in Turkey, Egypt, and the Philippines, and Europe reels from one crisis to the next. At home, President Trump uses the catchphrases of democracy less often than his predecessors.

Get This Week in Opinion in your inbox:

Globe Opinion's must-reads, delivered to you every Sunday.

To some extent, that represents the obvious Democrats tend to like democracy more than Republicans. In Andrew Jacksons day, the Democratic party called itself The Democracy; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both gave frequent seminars about how a healthy democracy functions, including the value of opposition parties, the rule of law, a thriving free press. It is difficult to imagine President Trump going there.

A century after a hard-fought confirmation battle, the story of the first Jewish Supreme Court justice holds a lesson for Merrick Garland.

But some impressive Republicans have embraced democracy notably, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, who found democracy and freedom useful terms for what he was trying to build in Iraq. A new book by Condoleezza Rice, Bushs close adviser, manages to get both words into its title. Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom argues that the United States should not abandon the hard work of democracy abroad.

In fact, democracy has been contested for centuries, and New England furnished an early battleground. We love to quote John Winthrop in a way that makes him seem like a 20th century American; building a city upon a hill for all to see, a kind of theme park into which we can fit so much of what came later. But democracy was a term of reproach to the earliest Bostonians. John Cotton, spiritual leader to the first generation, wrote, Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. Instead, responsible leaders were expected to emerge from a tightly-controlled network of ministers and magistrates, working in concert to suppress any unhealthy outbursts of popular feeling.

Advertisement

But with time the old hierarchies gave way. In 1717, John Wise of Essex began to chip away at the authority of inherited ideas. Wise was not born into the Puritan elite the families, like the Mathers, that had dominated for decades. He was the son of an indentured servant who later became a butcher and a brewer Imbibe Wisely would have been a natural slogan for his product, if the Puritans had permitted advertising. When he went to Harvard, his father paid some of his tuition in malt.

But Wise did not feel especially inferior to the Mathers, or to anyone, and that helped him to argue in a new, more American language. He was a natural writer, with surprising wit for a Puritan. He was also commanding in person; of towering height, of great muscular power, stately and graceful in shape and movement; in his advancing years of an aspect most venerable. He grew up here, and when English officials began to impose new taxes and suppress dissent in the 1680s, he led a resistance. He was fined, jailed, and briefly stripped of his pulpit.

Such a figure was not likely to accept local intimidation either. In his rustic seat by the Essex River, he had grown steadily implacable, and when the Mathers tried a power grab, he was ready with a volley of verbal grapeshot. In 1717, he published A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches. On the surface, the book was about the way New England churches governed themselves, not electoral politics. But underneath, it was deeply political. Democracy is the theme of the book from start to finish; he uses the word often, like a cudgel, to club his opponents, and to argue that a church government that springs up from the people is better than one in which their betters make all the big decisions.

If Wises vocabulary was new; so was his reasoning, which drew not only from the Bible, but from the Light of Nature, and the Light of Reason phrases that were not so distant from the Enlightenment to come. To him, a human being was not quite as lost as the earliest Puritans had believed; but at the upper-end of Nature, a Creature of a very Noble Character, and therefore capable of self-government. In accents we would associate more with the end of the 18th century, he wrote, the end of all good government is to cultivate humanity, and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man is all his Rights, his Life, Liberty, Estate, Honor, & without injury or abuse done to any. To this country parson, it was as plain as daylight that there was no Species of Government like a Democracy to attain this end.

Of course, 1717 was decades before independence, and Wise was not there yet. But when his book was republished in 1772, one of the subscribers was the future commander of the minutemen at Concord. It was republished again in 1860, at another moment when democracy seemed to be up for grabs. By that point, not many people remembered John Wise. But his distant voice, 300 years ago, helps explain one of the more remarkable transformations in our history the story of how Massachusetts steadily forged a new language of self-reliance. A single word, democracy, was the pivot.

Condoleezza Rice ends her book with a reflection on Winston Churchills witty line: democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. He made that remark in a parliamentary debate in 1947. In the same debate, Churchill cited Americas example, working out democracy over many generations, fine-tuning, self-correcting, oiling the works. Way back in our history, the son of an indentured servant spoke the word so loudly that it can still be heard, three centuries later, over the din of the diners ordering their fried clams.

See the original post here:
Democracy's immigrant story - The Boston Globe