TLS Podcast Picks: The Rise and Fall of Tuna; Shakespeare’s Impact; Gay Marriage

Libertarian Theory, Protectionism, War
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Recommended podcasts:

  • “How Shakespeare Changed Everything,” KERA Think (Aug. 22, 2012). This is one of the most fascinating interviews I’ve heard in some time—with Stephen Marche, author of How Shakespeare Changed Everything, which details the amazing influence Shakespeare has had on our culture. Interviews with such knowledgeable scholars highlight how great it is to have a society of 7 billion people that can afford to support scholars who can devote such depth to specialized topics. This interview is just a delight to listen to; I have the book on my to-read list. The main libertarian takeaway is some of the examples given to how Shakespeare’s plays have been reworked and remixed over the ages in various contexts. (I touch on some of this in posts in the tag Everything Is a Remix.)
  • “The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food,” KERA Think (Aug. 23, 2012) A very interesting interview with Andrew F. Smith, author of American Tuna: The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food. The story is absolutely fascinating: about how tuna went from basically trash-food status with zero percent market, to huge popularity in just a few years in the early 1900s; and then how its popularity increased even more when there were other food shortages during WWI; then how production was hurt when 600 of the tuna boats were pressed into service during WWII and many Japanese-American fishermen were put in concentration camps and other tuna fishermen put into the Navy; how the mylar bags were adopted in part to avoid import tariffs; how the US government encouraged the tuna industry in other countries, in Japan and South America, after WWII in part because of shortages it has imposed by previous policies, leading ultimately to the devastation of the American tuna industry. Utterly fascinating interview. And it highlights the tragic effects of and distortion caused by state intervention in the market.
  • “Why the GOP Should Embrace Gay Rights,” Reason.tv (Aug. 22, 2012). A short interview with David Lampo, publications director at the libertarian Cato Institute and the author of the new book, A Fundamental Freedom: Why Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians Should Support Gay Rights. “Despite the influence in the party of social conservatives and the Religious Right, Lampo argues that if Republicans actually followed their own rhetoric about limiting the size and scope of government, they would be able to attract gay and lesbian voters who otherwise vote Democratic. An active member of Virginia’s Log Cabin Republicans, Lampo believes the party’s acceptance of marriage equality is inevitable given the huge social gains gays have made in recent decades.” For my own take on why libertarians should support gay marriage, see my post California Gay Marriage Law Overturned: What Should Libertarians Think?.
  • Update: see also Wendy McElroy, “The Art of Being Free,” CSPAN-2 (July 14, 2012). A discussion at Freedomfest with the iconic libertarian feminist author of The Art of Being Free.

 

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Federal Net Outlays

“We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years”

Corporatism, The Left, Vulgar Politics
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That’s the absurd title to a blog post over at The Atlantic today. The writer claims that the U.S. government is now the smallest it’s been since LBJ was president. The article is making the rounds among leftists, who, against all reason and common sense, have managed to convince themselves that the US government is getting smaller.

The claim is based on a calculation of total government employment as a ratio of the total US population. Right off the bat we know that comparing these ratios from 1968 and today will be off. This is largely because in 1968, most people whose salaries were funded by taxpayer sweat actually worked for the government. There weren’t mercenaries shooting up foreigners back then, or an enormous government-funded non-profit sector or legions of “consultants” who are really just government employees making extra-large salaries.

On top of this is the fact that government size is not only measured in the number of government employees. Better measures would include the US prison population, or taxes paid, or pages of government regulations or the number of federal laws, or the number of people groped by TSA pedophiles. Needless to say, all of these things have exploded in recent decades. On top of that, you have the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on salt, fat, guns, raw milk, and a number of other things.

Yep, government sure is a shadow of its former self!

But, to make it simple, let’s just look at government spending. In 1968, the US government spent $883 dollars for every one of the 201 million Americans, or annual outlays totaling 178.1 billion. In 2011, the US government spent a whopping $11,493 for every one of the 313 million Americans for total outlays of 3.6 trillion. That’s an increase of 1,923 percent since 1968. The CPI over this period increased 545 percent, so we’re talking an enormous increase, even when adjusted for the official inflation rate.

We can also look at this another way. The amount of money taken from each American has increased almost 2,000 percent since 1968, which is more than triple the inflation rate.

Federal Net Outlays

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Moving license no longer needed in Missouri

Business, Protectionism
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Any blow struck for economic liberty is worth celebrating, even if the person wielding the hammer is not, shall we say, a fan of Rothbardian libertarianism.  But there is encouraging news from Tim Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which pressured the Missouri legislature to repeal its licensing laws regarding moving companies:

Under the old law, a person applying for permission to operate a moving company was required to submit to a licensing scheme under which existing moving companies were given the privilege of basically vetoing the application. We challenged that law on behalf of St. Louis entrepreneur Michael Munie, and argued the case in federal district court in April. But in the meantime, state lawmakers passed legislation repealing the law, and this afternoon, Governor Nixon signed that bill, thus opening the road for economic opportunity in the Show Me State.

Baby steps, to be sure — Missouri and most other states have licensing laws for dozens of occupations, some imposing absurd educational requirements (in Texas, for example, “shampoo specialists” at hair salons must have 150 hours of training before they can even test for their license) and exorbitant costs for both training and the licensing process itself.  None of these laws actually do anything to ensure quality service for consumers; they exist solely to protect incumbents from competition.  These laws can’t disappear quickly enough, and kudos to the PLF and other organizations, such as the Institute for Justice, for continuing to challenge them.

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The NFL is Not for Libertarians

Business, Corporatism, Employment Law, Statism
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Tonight marks one of the more bizarre annual rites in the American worship of state power—the NFL Draft. I realize I may be alone in this characterization. Just this morning, Mises Institute president Doug French wrote a lengthy editorial celebrating the Draft. But I don’t share the public’s love of the fraudulent, anti-libertarian monstrosity that is the National Football League. As I see it, you can support liberty or the NFL, but not both.

The NFL is not a private enterprise in any free-market sense. It was at one time, but since the 1960s, it has steadily morphed into a subsidiary of the state. Admittedly, this process did not begin at the NFL’s insistence. In the 1950s, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division decided to interfere with the rights of NFL franchise operators to make rules regarding the presentation of their games on the new medium of television. By 1961, the NFL was forced to lobby Congress for a special antitrust exemption just so it could sign its first national television contract. A few years later, a similar exemption was secured to permit the NFL’s merger with the American Football League.

In the decades following the merger, the NFL embraced its special status and started demanding municipal governments, rather than franchise owners, assume the financial risks of constructing new stadiums. Today, 23 of the 32 clubs have stadiums built no earlier than 1992. Most are financed primarily through taxes or government-backed bonds. Generally, NFL owners contribute only about one-third of the cost.

In Cleveland, for example, the city used bonds to pay for 75% of the cost of the Browns’ stadium, which opened in 1999. The team only pays $250,000 per year in rent to the city. Keep in mind, the new stadium was only built after the first Cleveland Browns franchise moved to Baltimore in 1995. Why did they move? Because then-Browns owner Art Modell, after financially mismanaging the team for years, needed a government bailout, which he received from the state-run Maryland Stadium Authority in the form of M&T Bank Stadium. And to get one step further back, the Maryland Stadium Authority came into existence only after Baltimore’s previous NFL team, the Colts, moved to Indianapolis when the latter city—through the Marion County Capital Improvement Board—offered the club’s owners a brand new stadium.

Even when owners pay for a share of construction costs, it usually comes in the form of long-term debt. Franchise sales in recent years have also been heavily leveraged. When Daniel M. Snyder purchased the Washington Redskins from the estate of Jack Kent Cooke in 1999, he paid a then-record $800 million, which included assumption of $155 million in debt on the stadium Cooke built just before his death and another $340 million Snyder borrowed from a European bank.

Without direct government financing in the form of taxes and municipal bonds, and indirect financing in the form of interest rates artificially manipulated by central banks, most of the NFL stadiums erected over the past 20 years would not exist, at least in their present forms. Nor would debt-fueled sales like Snyder’s been possible. …

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LibertariaNation [Italy] Interview with Kinsella on IP and Libertarianism

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Corporatism, IP Law, Libertarian Theory, Podcasts
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I was interviewed Feb. 23, 2012, by Fabrizio Sitzia of the Italian libertarian group LibertariaNation.org. It was posted today on YouTube. We discussed intellectual property and related issues such as SOPA, plagiarism, IP-by-contract, and other libertarian issues such as prospects for liberty in the future; the importance of technology, the Internet, and globalism; Ron Paul and electoral politics; and libertarian sentiments and receptiveness among today’s young people. The audio file is here, and streamed below. (See also Italian Libertarian IP Debate.)

[C4SIF]

Now at KOL162.

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