by Jacob Huebert on March 18, 2011
in History, Law
In the latest Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, now online, I review UCLA law professor Stuart Banner’s book Who Owns the Sky?: The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On.
Banner’s book is outstanding because it presents the history of air law in an engaging, accessible way. But it’s also flawed because it accepts without much question that it was necessary for the U.S. government to assert jurisdiction over U.S. airspace and to regulate the aviation industry. At first, federal control might seem appropriate because, given the interstate nature of flight, it might be simpler to have uniform licensing and other rules for the whole country rather than a patchwork of state laws. But, in practice, federal control led to regulation of the airline industry, benefiting big airlines at everyone else’s expense. The book doesn’t really consider that cost.
Still, it’s a great book and a perfect starting point for anyone interested in this area of the law.
Read the review. Buy the book.
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Today is Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, and while conservatives are using the occasion to tout his ostensible greatness, many libertarians are taking the opportunity to point out the many ways in which Reagan was no friend of liberty despite his occasional libertarian rhetoric.
I’ve summed up some of the most damning evidence against Reagan in this excerpt from Libertarianism Today. The classic libertarian anti-Reagan work, though, is Murray Rothbard’s “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy,” featured today at LewRockwell.com. Also essential is Sheldon Richman’s article on Reagan’s atrocious record on taxes, spending, trade, and regulation. And if that’s not enough to convince you of what Reagan was really about, I also recommend Jeff Riggenbach’s new piece, “The Reagan Fraud — And After.”
On the other hand, to be fair, Daniel McCarthy offers some evidence in mitigation in his article “Revising Ronald Reagan,” focusing particularly on Reagan’s desire to negotiate with rather than annihilate the Soviets despite the wishes of warmongering neocons.
That’s nice, of course, but not being as murderous as you could have been doesn’t get you very far in my book.
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For most of U.S. history, people took it for granted that you had a right to ingest whatever substances you want. Therefore, all drugs were legal — cocaine, heroin, all of them — and things were more or less fine.
A newly available excerpt from Libertarianism Today describes what life was like when all drugs were legal.
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The legal cartel would like to abolish judicial elections — and if it can’t do that, it would like to control the information voters get as much as possible, to maximize lawyers’ influence and minimize everyone else’s.
Their latest idea in Ohio is to remove judges’ party affiliation from the primary ballot. In this piece from Ohio public radio, I give some thoughts (around 1:30) on why that’s a bad idea.
The main reason is because taking away party labels deprives voters of some of the most valuable information about a judicial candidate. Republican judges are likely to have one judicial philosophy, Democrats another. In most respects, there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties, but when it comes to judges at the state level, the differences are real and important, and the effects of who controls the bench can be huge.
My interest in this topic may seem out of place among my usual radical libertarian views (including extreme skepticism about democracy), but it’s not. Throughout U.S. history, the Hamiltonians (and eventually the Progressives) have wanted to prevent people from choosing their judges and make them submit to unaccountable rule by their “betters,” while the Jeffersonians have resisted. That by itself tells you a lot about which side people who care about liberty should root for in this fight.
I’ll have more on this soon.
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by Jacob Huebert on August 15, 2010
in History, War
Earlier this month, the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had conservatives once again defending the U.S. government’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Normally one doesn’t find political pundits devoting entire columns to defending things the government did more than half a century ago, but I can see two reasons why they do so here.
One, of course, is the atrociousness of what the government did. A nuclear attack on a civilian population is so heinous that it might make people think about the violent, criminal nature of their rulers. So you have to keep reminding everyone that it was okay because it was (supposedly, not really) necessary to save grandpa’s life.
The other purpose — for neoconservatives, the main purpose — is to justify in advance doing it again to Persians and others who have been deemed less than human.
This is why libertarians must never shy away from this issue. It’s also why it’s especially disgusting to see the bombings defended in an official publication of my alma mater, Grove City College. What defending mass murder has to do with “Christian scholarship” or the school’s advertised “authentically Christian” education, I can’t fathom. (I would say it’s a new low, but they did it last year, too.)
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At the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Randy Barnett says libertarian political activists shouldn’t waste their efforts on nullification, as Tom Woods urges in his new book, because it’s a “sketchy” theory.
I find it remarkable that Barnett would consider nullification a waste of time. Barnett has devoted an extraordinary amount of effort to trying to use the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause to protect libertarian rights — even though the Supreme Court established in 1873 that the Clause does no such thing, and the Court hasn’t wavered in that view ever since, even when it had a clear opportunity to do so in McDonald v. Chicago. In short, the Privileges or Immunities Clause has never been used to do what Barnett wants it to do, and there is no reason to think it ever will be, unless you think some future U.S. president is going to nominate a Court full of Clarence Thomases.
Meanwhile, what has nullification done? As Woods shows in the book, it’s been used numerous times throughout U.S. history to defend individual rights against the federal government. Recently, for example, it has been used in California to protect medical marijuana users there — after Barnett was unable to do so through his preferred means of fighting in the federal courts, in Gonzales v. Raich.
Who’s wasting their time?
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Today is the official release date of Thomas Woods’s new book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. I’ve read it, and it’s great.
I’ll have a full review later. For now, here’s the short one I posted on Amazon:
If you’re serious about smaller government, read this book., June 28, 2010
There have been so many conservative and libertarian books complaining about how Congress has exceeded its constitutional powers and the federal government has grown far beyond what the Founding Fathers ever intended.
This one is different: It actually shows how we could do something about it.
First, Woods shows why the usual methods don’t work. Electing new Senators and Representatives doesn’t work because no matter what politicians promise, they always end up caving to special interests. Trying to get the Supreme Court to strike down unconstitutional laws doesn’t work, either, because the judicial branch is part of the very federal government we want to restrain, and it’s shown again and again that it won’t respect the Constitution’s (supposed) limits on federal power.
Next, Woods explains the alternative: nullification, whereby individual states can declare unconstitutional laws null and void and prevent their enforcement against the state’s citizens.
Although that idea may be new to many readers (most civics teachers, historians, and law professors completely ignore it), Woods shows that it is not new at all. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and many others in the founding era thought nullification was essential to stop the federal government from growing out of control. And Woods shows how nullification has been used at various times in American history to attack oppressive federal laws, including the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Fugitive Slave Act.
Most importantly, Woods shows how nullification can work again today. Some states are already starting to revive it — for example, California has said no to the federal government (even the Supreme Court!) on the issue of medical marijuana, and many states have said no to the federal REAL ID Act.
The numerous historical documents included with the book prove the importance of nullification in American history and provide additional ammunition you can use to make the case to others.
This isn’t a dry work of history or legal theory, though. It’s a manual for how we could shrink the federal government to something much closer to what the people who ratified the Constitution intended. That means Tea Partiers, libertarians, and anyone else who is serious about seeking real change — instead of just playing the same old rigged political game — should read this book.
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In an earlier post, I mentioned how important it is that we stop treating presidents like gods and recognize they’re just ordinary jerks.
In that spirit, here’s a transcript (and audio) of LBJ ordering some pants, belching, and talking about his “nuts” and “bunghole.”
It’s not as good, though, as the incident Gene Healy recounts in The Cult of the Presidency, in which “asked by a reporter why America was in Vietnam, LBJ unzipped his fly, wagged his member at the audience and exclaimed, ‘this is why!’”
Healy suggests LBJ’s behavior there was the result of being intoxicated by power, but maybe it was just those uncomfortable pants.
In any event, perhaps it says something encouraging about the present times that the press would no longer suppress such a story. (Would they?)
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Last week, Lew Rockwell posted an item about officers “subduing” and arresting two people who had the audacity to stand where President Obama’s motorcade wanted to go.
I recalled this yesterday as I read an October 1900 newspaper article, which reported an indignity that VP candidate Theodore Roosevelt suffered when newsboys threw mud at him “and greeted him with insulting language . . . as he departed from the church at which he had attended.” The story was a small item several pages into the paper and there is no indication that the boys were “subdued” or arrested, or that they got into any trouble at all. Instead, the mud-spattered TR just huffed off on his way.
The story included no quotes from experts on how terrible it is that our youth would show such disrespect for a great political leader and no editorializing.
Today, of course, this would be the top news story for a week, Chris Matthews would rend his garments over the blasphemy against our civic religion, and the kids would likely be tazed or killed, and, if they lived, charged with felonies.
Another newspaper article from the same month mentioned that trick-or-treaters stopped by the White House and were greeted by President and Mrs. McKinley. The kids weren’t participating in a photo op, but were just knocking on the front door as they would at any other house. Because you could do that, because the president was not a god.
For more details of the good old days when people treated presidents like the ordinary jerks they are (and how far we’ve fallen), I highly recommend Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency.
UPDATE: Norman Horn informs me that The Cult of the Presidency is now available online for free in PDF, Kindle, and ebook formats.
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