Celebrities’ political opinions aren’t worth more than those of ordinary people; probably they’re worth less.  But I still consider it great news that pop singer Kelly Clarkson has endorsed Ron Paul because it demonstrates just how far his ideas are spreading.

Ron Paul’s supporters come from all walks of life because people from all walks of life want to end war, restore civil liberties, bring government spending under control, and let people make their own decisions.

Will it be enough to win the GOP primary?  I doubt it.  Too many Republican primary voters are attached to interventionist foreign policies and are too easily taken in by “limited government” talk from politicians whose actions and proposals indicate they wouldn’t really limit government at all.  But with Paul leading in the polls in Iowa and rising in New Hampshire, it’s hard not to get excited.  Even if it doesn’t result in electoral success in the short run, the spread of Ron Paul’s message to so many new people will mean great things for the future, sooner or later, one way or another.

In the Winter 2012 Independent Review, I review David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform. Here’s how it starts:

Few Supreme Court cases receive more scorn in U.S. law schools than Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45), the 1905 decision that struck down a New York law limiting the number of hours that bakers could work as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It’s safe to say that most legal academics and judges today believe that the Lochner Court engaged in extraordinarily outrageous “judicial activism” motivated by a devotion to extreme libertarian ideology, big business, or both.

In Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein makes the case that the conventional view is wrong. He provides persuasive evidence that Lochner does not deserve to be singled out as an especially activist or offensive case and that Lochner’s Progressive critics were the real activists with a much more disturbing agenda.

Read the rest.

Another full chapter of Libertarianism Today is now online for free — this one on why libertarianism is antiwar.  This is my favorite chapter of the book, so I’m especially glad I could make it available through Antiwar.com.

Other parts of the book you can read for free online:

• Reagan: No Revolution
• When All Drugs Were Legal
• The Drug War’s Dubious Foundations
• What Is Libertarianism? (full chapter)
• The Fight Against Intellectual Property (full chapter)

And if you want to read the whole thing, it’s on sale at a special low price for a limited time.

Just in time for Christmas, my book, Libertarianism Today, is available for its lowest price ever: just $22.47 for the hardcover!

Get this price while you still can by ordering direct from the publisher online or by calling 800-368-6868.  Sale ends January 15.

Several years ago, I wrote a review of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom by Cato Institute chairman Robert A. Levy and Institute for Justice co-founder William Mellor. As its subtitle suggests, the book criticizes twelve U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are especially offensive from a libertarian perspective, such as Wickard v. Filburn, Korematsu v. U.S., and Kelo v. City of New London.

Because I’m a libertarian myself, I agreed with most of their criticisms of the twelve decisions.

I had reservations, though, about their proposed remedy: “judicial engagement” on liberty’s behalf — that is, getting judges on board with (for example) the idea that Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause are much narrower than the Supreme Court has said they are since the New Deal era. This struck me as naive. Judges, after all, are part of the federal government, and the President and Congress both try to ensure that the people they put on the bench believe in maximum executive and legislative power. Judges haven’t increased government power because libertarian lawyers didn’t put the right arguments in front of them; they’ve increased government power because that’s what they were put on the bench to do.

In a response to my review, Levy and Mellor claimed that I was “far too cynical” — which only cemented my view that, for self-described libertarians, these two gentlemen weren’t nearly cynical enough about the federal courts. In fact, they seemed to have a faith in “good government” that is antithetical to libertarianism.

Lately, however, I’ve come to think that, whatever Levy and Mellor’s personal attitudes may be (it’s possible that I misread them), favoring “judicial engagement” for liberty does not require one to be naive about government and therefore is not contrary to the spirit of libertarianism.

My view on this has been influenced by Clark Neily, director of the Institute for Justice’s new Center for Judicial Engagement, who has lately been elaborating on the concept of judicial engagement in appearances at Federalist Society events (I attended one) and in a series of posts at the Volokh Conspiracy.

As Neily describes it, “judicial engagement” is about prodding judges to do their putative job of interpreting and applying the Constitution — which, for Neily, means striking down laws that don’t comport with the Constitution rather than just rubber-stamping legislatures’ decisions in every case under the useless “rational basis” standard of review as courts do most of the time. It is essentially about “calling judges out” when they allow constitutional rights to be violated.

Described that way, judicial engagement appears to be consistent with a libertarian attitude toward government. In the libertarian view, government officials are never to be trusted to do the right thing; instead, the people must be ever vigilant to ensure that government does as little damage to liberty as possible. In the judicial context, this means that we must constantly remind judges of their supposed job and accuse them of abdicating their responsibility when they fail to give legislation the scrutiny it deserves.

The belief in a need to promote judicial engagement is duly cynical inasmuch as it’s premised on the idea that judges can’t be expected to protect liberty in the absence of persistent, intense pressure. The IJ lawyers’ strategy of promoting their pro-liberty legal positions in the court of public opinion, which they believe influences judges, also reflects a “legal realist” attitude appropriate for libertarians, not a deluded vision of judges as unbiased, neutral arbiters.

Judicial engagement is not a panacea, of course. I still doubt that federal courts will meaningfully narrow their expansive reading of the Commerce Clause anytime soon; no 2012 presidential candidate strikes me the sort of person who would appoint judges who would limit federal power. Indeed, there’s every reason to think they would do the opposite. (Ron Paul and Gary Johnson are exceptions, but they are unlikely to win.)

As I have emphasized elsewhere, libertarians’ primary job is education — first of themselves, and then of others. This is essential to building a solid, long-term foundation for liberty. But just as it would be wrong for libertarians to neglect that duty, it would also be wrong to reject a means by which liberty can be increased — and people’s lives can be improved — in the short run. Going to court to fight for people’s liberty accomplishes this, at least sometimes, as one can see from libertarian legal activists’ victories in the Heller and MacDonald gun cases and in the Institute for Justice’s many victories. It also serves an educational function, even when the court battle is lost, by calling the public’s attention to the underlying issues; Kelo, for example, educated the public on the evils of the eminent domain power.

I can’t see how a libertarian could disapprove of this kind of judicial engagement — and to the extent that I have done so in the past, I’ve changed my mind.

Cross-posted at The Cockle Bur and The Libertarian Standard.

On Saturday, November 19, I’ll be speaking at the annual Freedom Seminar in Portland, Oregon. This year’s theme is “Freedom’s Future.” My lecture topics are “Is There Hope for Liberty in Our Lifetime?” and “Ideas: Are They Property?”.

I’m honored to be sharing the bill with the heroic Jacob Hornberger, president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. He’ll be speaking on “Why Protection of Civil Liberties Matters” and “Economic Liberty: Key to Freedom.”

The event will run from 9:20 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Lake Oswego, just south of Portland. Get the full details and register here.

George Leef reviews Libertarianism Today in the latest Freeman.

When writing legal briefs, should lawyers use “he” as an indefinite pronoun or something more politically correct, such as “he or she”? I’ve weighed in on this in the past, and the Above the Law legal blog quotes me in this post on the subject.

My view is that, unless you know a particular judge’s preference, you should use gender-neutral language regardless of your personal views. No judge is likely to be offended by gender-neutral language (especially if you do it in a careful way that doesn’t call attention to itself), but some may be offended by the use of “he” alone. Because your job as a lawyer is to win the case for your client — not to advance your own agenda regarding grammar, feminism, or political correctness — you need to do what is least likely to harm your client. So “he or she” it is.

There is, however, one exception: It is always okay to refer to a generic criminal defendant as “he.”

An email from a D.C.-based tea party outfit urges me to sign a petition “to fix the USPS.”

Their proposed solution to the U.S. Postal Service’s $8 billion deficit is Congressman Darrell Issa’s Postal Reform Act, which would reduce mail delivery to five days a week, allow advertising at post offices and on postal vehicles, and reduce postal workers’ benefits.

If the tea party movement is as radically anti-government as some make it out to be, this seems like an odd piece of legislation to promote. It merely tweaks the way the postal service functions; it does nothing to address the real problem, which is that the USPS is a government-run monopoly. If the bill passes, some tax dollars might be saved in the very short term, but the USPS will be just as badly managed as it always has been, and it will continue to rack up huge deficits. Take away one way for it to lose money, and it will surely find others.

At best, this bill seems to reflect the idea that government could function well if only it were “run like a business” — just cut some expenses, increase some revenue, and all could be well. But as Ludwig von Mises explained in Bureaucracy, any attempt to run a governmental organization as though it were a private business will fail because the organization still will not be able to engage in economic calculation and still will not be able to operate on a meaningful profit-and-loss basis as private businesses do. Postal workers and managers will still be focused on how to comply with bureaucratic rules, not on how to make money.

The only “reform” that can “fix” this is genuine privatization — that is, taking away the postal service’s monopoly privileges and subsidies and forcing it to either make a profit or go out of business.

I suspect that this bill’s promoters have little to do with the grassroots tea party; the finer details of postal policy are not the sort of thing that inspires a mass movement. I hope tea partiers who care about liberty — and I know there are many — will do as their figurehead Michelle Bachmann claims to do and read Mises, and then see why it’s pointless to waste time promoting legislation like this that doesn’t address the fundamental problems that have given rise to the big government they say they dislike so much.

Cross-posted at the Mises Economics Blog.