Voice For Liberty

Tag: Capitalism

  • Economic freedom at decline, across the U.S. and in Wichita

    Earlier this year Robert Lawson appeared in Wichita to speak about economic freedom throughout the world. While the United States presently ranks well, that is changing. Writing this month in The Freeman, Lawson and his colleagues warn of dangerous trends — particularly the Obama Administration’s response to the recession — that pose a threat to the economic freedom that powers growth and prosperity.

    While the article is focused primarily at the national economy, there are lessons to be learned locally, too. In particular, increasing intervention into the state and local economy leads to compounding the loss of economic freedom.

    As an example, the Wichita City Council has just approved a plan for the revitalization of downtown Wichita that calls for public investment to be made downtown. While the plan is promoted as a market-based plan, it is, instead, a government plan to redirect investment from where people have decided it should be to where politicians, bureaucrats, and their patrons think it should be. These patrons are sometimes called “crony capitalists,” as explained in this passage from the article (James D. Gwartney, Joshua C. Hall and Robert A. Lawson:
    The Decline in Economic Freedom    ):

    It is important to distinguish between market entrepreneurs and crony capitalists. Market entrepreneurs succeed by providing customers with better products, more reliable service, and lower prices than are available elsewhere. They succeed by creating wealth — by producing goods and services that are worth more than the value of the resources required for their production. Crony capitalists are different: They get ahead through subsidies, special tax breaks, regulatory favors, and other forms of political favoritism. Rather than providing consumers with better products at attractive prices, crony capitalists form an alliance with politicians. The crony capitalists provide the politicians with contributions, other political resources, and, in some cases, bribes in exchange for subsidies and regulations that give them an advantage relative to other firms. Rather than create wealth, crony capitalists form a coalition with political officials to plunder wealth from taxpayers and other citizens.

    We are now in the midst of a great debate between the proponents of limited government and open markets on the one hand and those favoring more collectivism and political direction of the economy on the other. The outcome of this debate will determine the future of both economic freedom and the prosperity of Americans and others throughout the world.

    In Wichita, “those favoring more collectivism and political direction of the economy” are winning. Not only are they winning the actual political votes, they are also winning the battles within their own minds. Astonishingly, many of the crony capitalists in Wichita have deluded themselves into believing that they are supporters of free markets and capitalism. But taxpayer-supported institutions like Wichita Downtown Development Corporation and Visioneering Wichita exist for the very purpose of directing taxpayer funds toward the crony capitalists. Even the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce plays a role in the plunder of the taxpayer, with its president nodding in approval as nominally conservative members of the Wichita City Council expressed their support for the collectivist, anti-market vision for downtown Wichita.

    The heads of each of these organizations, along with city council members Sue Schlapp, Paul Gray, Jim Skelton, and Vice Mayor Jeff Longwell consider themselves to be conservatives. Many of these have personally assured me they are in favor of free markets.

    The actions of the council members, not only their enthusiastic embrace of the downtown plan, but their interventions — at nearly every meeting, week after week — that interfere with the market economy and destroy economic freedom, show that none have even a basic understanding of the difference between the economic means and the political means. Writing in his recent book The Science of Success, Koch Industries Chairman and CEO Charles Koch explains the difference:

    The economic means of profiting involves voluntarily exchanging your goods or services for the goods or services of others. Parties will not voluntarily enter into an exchange unless they both believe they will be better off. Therefore, you can only profit over time in a system of voluntary exchange (a market) by making others better off.

    The political means of profiting transfers goods or services from one party to another by force or fraud. A coerced or fraudulent exchange leaves at least one of the parties worse off. Examples are stealing, committing fraud, polluting, using unsafe practices, filing baseless lawsuits, lobbying government to hamper competitors or obtain subsidies and promoting self-serving redistribution programs.

    The economic means creates wealth by making each participant, and, therefore, society as a whole, better off. The political means, at best, merely distributes wealth. As a general system, it causes the overcoming majority of people to be worse off. (emphasis added)

  • Global warming alarmism: the money motive

    The motives of global warming alarmists, who insist that mankind must ratchet back economic progress in order to save the earth’s climate: Are these motives pure and scientific, or are there other forces in play?

    Many have suspected that the global warming battle is more a war against capitalism than anything else. Now new information is revealed that reinforces these suspicions. As Investor’s Business Daily tells it: “Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change (say that twice), told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week: ‘The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.’ After all, redistributing global wealth is no small matter.”

    The Climate Cash Cow

    Investor’s Business Daily

    Hoaxes: A high-ranking member of the U.N.’s Panel on Climate Change admits the group’s primary goal is the redistribution of wealth and not environmental protection or saving the Earth.

    Money, they say, is the root of all evil. It’s also the motivating force behind what is left of the climate change movement after the devastating Climate-gate and IPCC scandals that saw the deliberate manipulation of scientific data to spur the world into taking draconian regulatory action.

    Left for dead, global warm-mongers are busy planning their next move, which should occur at a climate conference in relatively balmy Cancun at month’s end. Certainly it should provide a more appropriate venue for discussing global warming than the site of the last failed climate conference — chilly Copenhagen.

    Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change (say that twice), told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week: “The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.” After all, redistributing global wealth is no small matter.

    Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said “climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth” and that “it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization.”

    Continue reading at Investor’s Business Daily.

  • The problem with public-private partnerships

    As the City of Wichita gets ready to undertake the revitalization of downtown Wichita, we need to make sure we understand the many problems inherent in the “public-private partnership.” The following commentary by Fred L. Smith, Jr. President of the Competitive Enterprise Institute originally appeared on OpenMarket.org, and it does an excellent job explaining these problems. Some of these I and others have brought to the attention of the Wichita City Council.

    The Problem With Public-Private Partnerships

    by Fred Smith

    In our half-political, half-private world, there are a growing number of public-private partnerships. Almost nothing in the current world can be done without implicit or explicit permission by local, state, federal or (increasingly) global regulators. But the term, public-private is normally used to denote the joint funding and, sometimes, joint management of some “public” facility — streets, water systems, and so forth.

    The rationale for “public” investments is that they are “public” goods, whose benefits are not adequately captured by the provider. There are many problems with this concept — in practice, it means that someone wants something and nobody seems to be providing it. Note, from a Coasian/Schumpeterian free market perspective, these are exactly the “lures” that lead mankind to pursue the unexplored entrepreneurial paths to the future. Rushing in with government assistance distorts and preempts those creative forces.

    Sometimes, public-private partnerships can be a transitional step toward privatization. The concept of “corporatization” that is, reorganizing an activity now performed by some political agency so that its inherent economic realities become more understandable and transparent, may be a useful step in privatizing the activity.

    In most cases, however, public-private partnerships are simply a means of using tax breaks, regulatory easing, taxpayer support and so forth to subsidize some private activity: stadia, light and heavy rail — mass transit generally, sometimes (for God’s sake) hotels and malls, downtown development districts. Where I live in Washington, D.C., businesses are allowed to add a “special tax” to pay for services the city supposedly pays for with normal tax revenues. Such public-private partnerships suffer from the full array of government failures:

    • Log-rolling and pork-barrel politics: I’ll vote for your PPP if you vote for my PPP.
    • Weakened market tests: resources are devoted to a project not because it benefits the citizenry but rather because it benefits a powerful interest group and/or because a creative referendum entices a majority of voters to support their special interests.
    • Weaker Management: Absent market tests, managers are less motivated to find that mix of services and creative array of financing tools to ensure that it proves “profitable” (that is, a rational allocation of capital). Roads, even charter schools, etc all have suffered here immensely.
    • Lack of innovation: No institution in the private world can allow itself to stagnate – the creative forces of destruction will soon make it obsolete. PPP managers face much weaker innovative forces — if things go wrong, they can always appeal to their “public” nature for taxpayer bailouts.
    • Corruption: Crony capitalism abounds in the PPP world.
    • Faddism: Markets sometimes go on kicks — the tech boom, for example — but these soon collapse. Governments go on kicks for many decades — “renewable energy” and “mass transit” being perhaps the best examples but “magnet” investments in downtown malls, stadia and convention centers are perhaps even more persistent ones. Before Walmart became a PPP, it did more for consumers than all the PPP malls in the world.
    • Crowding Out: Capitalism plays a critical role in allocating capital — planting the seeds for our future. That is a very difficult task, one made much more difficult by the existence of PPPs. Government already seizes a disproportionate amount of our wealth and the PPP concept allows it to further distort the allocation by market forces. I’ve argued that the genius of the Progressives in the late 19th century was to preempt or push large sectors of the emerging future (the environment, schools, electromagnetic spectrum, infrastructure, welfare, the medical world) into the political world. The PPP concept simply exacerbates this tendency.

    Our challenge is to find ways to expand the private sector and only very rarely does the PPP concept do that. It allows people to be sloppy — “That would never pay for itself but it obviously has value, thus, we need some government help. Let’s not make it an honest government function, let’s make it a Public-Private partnership and get the best of all possible outcomes!!”

    This Mixed Economy model is less honest than true socialism (government acting directly) for many reasons. If as is often the case, things go wrong, it will be capitalism — not government — that will be blamed. PPP activities are less subject to consumer sovereignty (look at airports or schools). The true costs of the activity don’t appear on government budgets — making it appear that PPP arrangements are “bargains.”

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Friday October 15, 2010

    Moran at Wichita Pachyderm today. Today’s speaker at the Wichita Pachyderm Club is current United States Representative and Republican Party Senate nominee Jerry Moran. As a large audience is expected, please arrive by 11:45 to get your buffet lunch in time for the noon start (the larger meeting room will be used). Cost is $10, which includes lunch.

    Rasmussen: Voters don’t trust politicians’ promises. “Half (50%) now believe that when politicians break campaign promises, it’s because they deliberately made a false promise to get elected. Thirty-nine percent (39%) disagree and say unforeseen events after they took office forced them to break their promises.” In keeping with my belief in limited government, I might suggest that candidates promise to do less. But then liberal candidates say that conservative candidates don’t have a plan. More at Voters Believe Overwhelmingly That Politicians Don’t Keep Their Promises, and Most Say It’s Deliberate.

    No developer welfare; no apartments. The Wichita Business Journal reports that since developer Jason Van Sickle isn’t able to obtain federal historic preservation tax credits on a property, he’s abandoning plans to develop the project. Tax credits are, in effect, grants of money paid to — in this case — real estate developers through the tax system. But not to worry for the developer: he’s planning to hit up the state of Kansas and its taxpayers for historic preservation tax credits.

    Capitalism saved the miners. Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal: “It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism. … The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop: ‘The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.’ Uh, yeah. That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right.” Henninger lists all the innovative technology used in the rescue, that innovation driven by capitalism in the countries where it is not snuffed out. A lesson: “In an open economy, you will never know what is out there on the leading developmental edge of this or that industry.” Innovation is driven by private companies with profit as their motive.

    Holland demands debates, then skips out. According to the Lawrence Journal-World, “[Kansas Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Tom] Holland was invited to the hour-long debate broadcast on WIBW radio and TV, but he declined because he said WIBW had already sponsored an earlier gubernatorial debate at the Kansas State Fair, and because the debate moderators were conservative radio talk show hosts Raubin Pierce and Megan Mosack.” Yes, Pierce and Mosack are conservatives. But Holland, who at one time demanded a series of 10 debates with Brownback, should have appeared. Conservative candidates and officeholders are summoned before liberal newspaper editorial boards all the time. They go and suffer the inevitable criticism. Holland should have done the same — and by all accounts, the questions were fair. And if the questions weren’t fair, Holland could have done what many candidates do in forums: they say whatever they want without regard to answering the question that was asked.

    This Week in Kansas. KAKE’s Chris Frank appears to talk about Hawker Beechcraft and Louisiana. Then Kansas Public Radio Statehouse Bureau Chief Stephen Koranda and myself discuss Kansas politics and poll results. Tim Brown is the host. “This Week in Kansas” airs in Topeka on WIBW TV channel 13 Saturdays at 11:30 am, and in Wichita on KAKE TV channel 10 Sundays at 9:00 am.

    Jim Anderson Program features candidate debate. Kansas fourth Congressional district hopefuls Democrat Raj Goyle and Republican Mike Pompeo will appear on Anderson’s radio show. Evidently, minor party candidates Susan Ducey (Reform Party) and Libertarian Shawn Smith will not appear, despite having made credible appearances on a recent KWCH televised forum. After this, Attorney Genreal candidate Derek Schmidt will appear. The Jim Anderson Program airs from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm Saturdays on KNSS Radio 1330 on your old-school AM radio, live on the station’s website, or on your iPhone through the station’s free app.

    Kansas statewide races polled. KWCH and SurveyUSA report poll results under the headline GOP poised to win statewide races. The closet contest is for Attorney General, where challenger Derek Schmidt leads incumbent Stephen Six 48 percent to 40 percent. For the race the pollster notes: “Compared to other, stable Kansas statewide contests, there is notable volatility in the Attorney General race, uniquely; any outcome is possible.”

    Stossel on the future, tonight. “This Friday at 10pm [9:00 pm Central time], Fox News will broadcast my heated argument with NYC Transit Worker’s Union President John Samuelsen. It’s part of my special, ‘The Battle for the Future.’ More at Stossel’s blog.

    Tea party rules? The New York Times reports: “Enough Tea Party-supported candidates are running strongly in competitive and Republican-leaning Congressional races that the movement stands a good chance of establishing a sizeable caucus to push its agenda in the House and the Senate, according to a New York Times analysis. … While the numbers are relatively small, they could exert outsize influence, putting pressure on Republican leaders to carry out promises to significantly cut spending and taxes, to repeal health care legislation and financial regulations passed this year, and to phase out Social Security and Medicare in favor of personal savings accounts.” Related: FiveThirtyEight estimates Congressional Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann has 98.9 percent probability of winning her reelection contest.

    Vote Smart Announces VoteEasy. A new project presents information on federal offices. Select your state and zip code, and you’ll have information about the candidates you’ll be voting for — or not for. Click on VoteEasy to get started.

  • New York Times’ criticism of Koch Industries

    The anti-human agenda of the New York Times is on full display in its criticism of Charles Koch, David Koch, and Koch Industries regarding a contribution to the campaign against the AB32 ballot measure in California.

    To the Times, the question of man-made global warming and its purported harm is fully settled. Anyone who questions this is labeled a crank — or worse.

    Slowly but surely, the contradictions of the global warming alarmists are being revealed. Writing in the Washington Times, Richard Rahn points out the conflict of interest inherent in many of the global warming alarmists:

    It is also true that more environmental scientists say that global warming is a problem than not. But if you omit from your sample all of those environmental scientists who are on a government tab — salary or research grant — and those relatively few environmental scientists who are on the tab of an oil company or some other vested private industry, you are likely to have a much smaller ratio between those who agree versus those who disagree about global warming. If you are a professor at a state university and write a research paper showing that global warming is not a problem, how long do you think your government funding will remain?

    In the case of the New York Times, a crusade against energy fits right in with its hatred of capitalism and the freedom that inexpensive energy gives to millions of Americans with modest incomes. If you’re the typical Times reader, you don’t have to worry much about the cost of energy. But for most Americans, the cost of energy is very important.

    Inexpensive energy — which the Times opposes — is essential to our standard of living and its continued advancement. As economist George Reisman has written, we need to consider “the comparative valuation attached to retaining industrial civilization versus avoiding global warming.” This is a balance that global warming alarmists don’t consider. Or if they do, they come out against human progress in favor of something else.

    The types of carbon emission controls and reductions advocated by the Times would lead to — in Reisman’s words again — “the end of further economic progress and the onset of economic retrogression.” Summing up, he writes: “Global warming is not a threat. But environmentalism’s response to it is.”

    This is why we should be thankful that Charles and David Koch have been active in the global warming debate. Koch Industries‘ position on this issue is given on their website KochFacts.com:

    A free society and the scientific method require an open, honest airing of all sides, not demonizing and silencing those with whom you disagree. We’ve strived to encourage an intellectually honest debate on the scientific basis for claims of harm from greenhouse gases. Because it’s crucial to understand whether proposed initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases will achieve desired environmental goals and what effects they would likely have on the global economy, we have tried to help highlight the facts of the potential effectiveness and costs of policies proposed.

  • Thompson makes case for liberalism, freedom, capitalism

    Speaking to an audience in Wichita last Thursday, author and scholar C. Bradley Thompson delivered a lecture that explained the foundation of the greatness of America, and cautioned that this greatness is, and has been, under attack.

    Thompson’s lecture was sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute and underwritten by the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation. Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and Harvard Universities and at the University of London.

    In his lecture, Thompson explained the “two Americas,” which he said are “two radically different moral and political visions for America.” These are two different perspectives on the meaning of the word “liberalism.”

    America, Thompson said, is and always has been a liberal nation. The question to ask, he said, is: Which liberalism? Thompson drew a distinction between what he called the old liberalism of America’s revolutionary founding fathers, and the new liberalism associated with “the ‘Republicratic’ party of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.”

    The philosophy of the old liberalism, Thompson said, is summed up in the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    The philosophy of the new liberalism, however, is this: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” These are the words of Karl Marx and the political philosophy of socialism.

    Thompson said that these two competing moral philosophies have dominated American culture for the last 100 years. He asked: which of these is the most dominate in American life and culture today? The answer, he said, is clear, holding up a copy of Newsweek magazine from last year whose cover claimed “We are all socialists now.”

    In examining the two forms of liberalism, Thompson started with the old liberalism. This insisted that men have the right to be free and to pursue their happiness without interference from others. Politically, government should be strictly limited through a separation of church and state, school and state, economy and state, and culture and state. Economically, individuals should be free to produce and exchange their goods and services free from government control, and government should not take wealth.

    Socially, Thompson said that the founder’s liberalism is best expressed by “rugged individualism.” This is distinctly American — there is no French version of this, he told the audience.

    This is a “principled commitment to freedom” in which individuals are morally sovereign.

    Liberalism embodied itself in America’s founders a distrust of political power. The question at the time of the founding was “How can the grasping power of government be tamed and harnessed in a way that would serve the legitimate functions of government?” The solution was to subordinate the government to the Constitution. Written constitutions, then, are the fundamental law.

    Initially, the night watchman state advocated by Thomas Jefferson was strictly limited with a “tightwad budget.” Government asked only that citizens respect the rights of others, live self-starting, self-reliant, virtuous lives, and that citizens deal with each other through persuasion and voluntary trade. In exchange, the state promised protection from domestic and foreign criminals and to govern by the rule of law.

    But the “land of the free,” Thompson said, would not, and could not, last.

    Turning to the new liberalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, Thompson said these are its principles: Morally, he repeated the Marxian slogan: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This, he said, is the moral philosophy of altruism: Selfishness is the ultimate form of evil, and that selflessness is the highest moral good. “Man’s greatest moral duty is to sacrifice one’s self to needs of others,” he told the audience. President Obama has called for such sacrifices, he said.

    In practice, Thompson said that altruism means the hard-working must be sacrificed for the lazy. The best is sacrificed to the lowest common denominator. In practice, he said it punishes ability and virtue, rewards incompetence and vice, destroying incentive, responsibility, integrity, and honesty in the process.

    Egalitarianism is at the center of the new liberalism, he said. New liberalism says that individuals have positive rights and positive freedom. It means that everyone — regardless of ability and productivity — should be made equal. Freedom from fear and want become basic human rights.

    “The modern welfare state is morally corrupting and fundamentally evil on all levels. It teaches one man that he has the right to live off the work of another man.” The impact on the moral character of Americans is that presently 61 million Americans are dependent on the government for their daily housing, food, and health care. This has grown by 31 percent in the last nine years, Thompson said.

    Politically, new liberalism says that the common good trumps individual rights. Individual self-interest must be always be sacrificed to the general welfare. Since this “public interest” is undefinable and non-objective, the coercive power of the government must be too: undefinable and non-objective. “Unlimited ends requires unlimited means,” Thompson said.

    While liberal socialism speaks of grand ideals such as social responsibility, what it really wants is more basic: power. “There is a direct and causal relationship between the morality of sacrifice, and force, and the violation of rights.”

    Examples of the violations of rights and freedoms include Social Security, which violates the rights of younger Americans by forcing them to fund the retirements of senior citizens. Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare force taxpayers to fund the health care of anyone who claims to need it. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 violates the rights of bankers by forcing them to make risky mortgage loans to people that they wouldn’t have otherwise lent to. The ARRA (the federal stimulus bill of 2009) forces taxpayers to pay for all sorts of programs.

    Underlying all these programs is altruism, the moral philosophy which says we must serve others, whether we want to or not.

    Thompson went on to explain how altruism affects our lives day-to-day. The tax and regulatory system means that workers must work (on average) until April 9th to pay their taxes. This means, Thompson said, that for almost three and one-half months we are all enslaved to someone else.

    Thompson said that we are dying a slow death by regulatory strangulation. Endless commands by government bureaucrats regulate nearly all aspects of our lives. “We live in a world today — believe it or not — more heavily regulated than was Nazi Germany during the 1940s or Communist China is today.” Besides federal regulation, state and local governments add to the regulatory burden.

    The regulations have a much more insidious effect, Thompson said: “Each and every new entitlement or regulation passed by government seduces and tranquilizes the American people to become ever more reliant on politicians and bureaucrats for their daily sustenance and for their daily decision making and actions.”

    Thompson continued: “A moral culture of radical independence has become a moral culture of slouching dependence.” The last 80 years have seen the greatest expansion of political power, and the greatest loss of freedom, in our history. The untold story of our national history of the last century is “how the American people sold their freedom and sold their souls to the nanny state.”

    There are two questions confronting Americans today. First, have we reached a “tipping point” where government is on an unstoppable downward cycle?

    Second, and more important: Have we reached a point of no return on the road to serfdom?

    There is also another way to divide the two Americas, Thompson said: the rulers and the ruled. The ruling class is all the politicians of both major parties, along with bureaucrats at all levels, college professors, journalists of the mainstream media, think tank policy wonks, community organizers, and corrupt businessmen who support corporate welfare. This class presumes it is intellectually and morally superior to those it rules over.

    This ruling class, Thompson said, seeks to manage and regulate two classes of Americans: those who work and pay taxes, and those who don’t. By redistributing over one-fourth of what Americans produce, the ruling class rules over the country. The rule of law is replaced by the rule of men.

    And what does the ruling class want, Thompson asked? It wants us simply to obey. The country is drifting slowly and steadily to soft despotism.

    The two Americas are irreconcilable, Thompson told the audience. We can’t have both, he said — we must have one or the other.

    Concluding, Thompson said that “Americanism created a sphere of freedom unprecedented in world history.” The freedom philosophy of Americanism has liberated the creative and productive power of millions of ordinary Americans, listing the many impressive contributions of America to the world. The principles of individualism, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism have revolutionized human life and improved it immensely.

    This American, “old liberalism” philosophy that has liberated ordinary men and women to pursue their own values and greatness is under attack, and we must fight to keep it alive.

  • Author C. Bradley Thompson to appear in Wichita

    Next week author and scholar C. Bradley Thompson will deliver two public lectures in Wichita.

    On Thursday September 16 Thompson will speak on the topic “Two Americas: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Freedom.” This lecture is sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute and underwritten by the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation. The event begins at 5:30 pm with a complimentary reception followed by the program at 6:15 pm. Seating is limited and reservations are required no later than Friday, September 10th by phoning 316-828-5624. This event will be at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Wichita.

    “We are delighted to have one of the nation’s foremost experts on the Constitution speaking on such an important topic at our third annual public forum in Wichita,” said Dr. Jason Ross, vice president of education programs at the Bill of Rights Institute. “Constitution Day gives us the opportunity to reflect on the blessings of liberty Americans have enjoyed, and on the challenge of preserving these liberties for our children. I know Dr. Thompson’s remarks will help Wichita citizens understand and appreciate the importance of our Constitution at this pivotal time in our nation’s history.”

    “This public lecture offers a rare opportunity to interact with such an engaging and acclaimed scholar,” said Susan Addington, grants manager for the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation. “Dr. Thompson’s knowledge of history and deep understanding of our nation’s Constitution will make this an inspiring presentation.”

    In addition to the public lecture, Dr. Thompson will offer a day-long Constitutional Seminar for Wichita-area social studies teachers of grades 8-12 titled, “Liberty and the Founders: In Their Own Words,” also sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute and funded by the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation. Teachers will participate in discussions led by Dr. Thompson and three teaching strategies sessions conducted by Bill of Rights Institute Master Teacher, Gennie Westbrook.

    On Wednesday September 15, Thompson will speak at the CAC Theater on the Wichita State University Campus on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, with this schedule:
    6:00 pm Doors open for meet and greet
    7:00 pm Lecture
    7:45 pm to 9:00 pm Questions and Answers

    The event is free for WSU students and all school age children. A donation of $10 is requested but not required of all adults to help cover the expenses.

    C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of London.

    Professor Thompson is the author of the prize-winning book John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. He has also edited The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader and was an associate editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. His current book project is on “The Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism.”

  • Capitalism means freedom

    In recent years, the ideas and principles of capitalism have taken a beating. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 was a blow to the freedom that capitalism is built on, although President George W. Bush had done a fair job trampling on the principles of capitalism.

    Locally, it was a bad year for capitalism and economic freedom in the Kansas Legislature. The Wichita Eagle editorial board seems to have the disparagement of capitalism as its primary goal, as it promotes government action at the expense of economic freedom and individual liberty at every opportunity.

    What is capitalism? Milton Friedman, in introducing his book Capitalism and Freedom, wrote this as a way of defining capitalism: “… competitive capitalism — the organization of the bulk of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market — as a system of economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.”

    Some writers allow government no role at all in the economy, unlike Friedman’s small-state capitalism.

    The economist George Reisman writes this in his monumental book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics:

    Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production. It is characterized by the pursuit of material self-interest under freedom and it rests on a foundation of the cultural influence of reason. Based on its foundations and essential nature, capitalism is further characterized by saving and capital accumulation, exchange and money, financial self-interest and the profit motive, the freedoms of economic competition and economic inequality, the price system, economic progress, and a harmony of the material self-interests of all the individuals who participate in it.

    Reisman’s lecture Some Fundamental Insights Into the Benevolent Nature of Capitalism is a useful look at the principles and benefits of capitalism.

    First, capitalism and freedom are intertwined, as Friedman wrote too. Reisman writes “Individual freedom — an essential feature of capitalism — is the foundation of security. He expands on the meaning of freedom, writing “Freedom means the absence of the initiation of physical force.” This is the libertarian belief in the nonagression axiom, as asserted by Murray N. Rothbard: “The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.”

    Being free from aggression means being free from the common criminal, but also, as Reisman explains, free from government aggression: “Even more important, of course, is that when one is free, one is free from the initiation of physical force on the part of the government, which is potentially far more deadly than that of any private criminal gang.”

    It is the recognition of government as aggressor that (partially) separates libertarian belief from conservative. As the libertarian John Stossel explained: “Increasingly, it seems that the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals is that the conservatives know government is force. But that doesn’t stop them from using it.”

    This is just the first insight into capitalism in Reisman’s lecture.

  • At Americans for Prosperity, George Will is optimistic

    Friday night’s dinner at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation fourth annual Defending the American Dream summit featured Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Will as keynote speaker.

    Will’s message was that while progress in limiting the growth of government has been reversed, this can be overcome, and he believes that a restoration of liberty and economic freedom will happen.

    As the dinner was a tribute to former President Ronald Reagan, Will told the audience one of his favorite lines from Reagan during the 1980 campaign: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job.”

    Continuing, he said that “Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter 2.0 and it is time to hit the delete button.”

    Will told the audience that the “retreat of the state” that started with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan has been reversed. This should be reversed again, he said.

    On the federal stimulus, Will said that the downward revision of GDP from a bad number to an even worse number is evidence that the stimulus is not working.

    There are two things that the administration is saying that are “funny,” Will said. One is that our current crisis was brought on because there was too little government regulation and administration. The second is that the problem with the stimulus is that Republicans made it too small. “The government is dangerously frugal at the moment,” he said to laughter from the audience.

    But Will said that the government controls the money supply and interest rates, leading to control of home mortgages. He traced the edicts of government that increasing percentages of mortgages must be given to those with poor credit. These expansions of the federal government, along with the No Child Left Behind education law, happened under Republican administrations, evidence that not only Democrats are too blame.

    Government is dominating the energy sector too. He said that matters because “no less of an authority of energy” than Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that “America should use more natural gas rather than fossil fuels.”

    In health care, half of spending is already government money, and that will increase, as will the 138,000 pages of health care regulations.

    As to the alleged dangerous frugality of the government, Will said we are “marching into the most predictable financial crisis the world has ever seen.” This crisis is self-inflicted, he said.

    Illustrating the size of government, he said that at the time of the first world war, when federal government spending exploded, the richest man in American could have personally retired the federal debt. But today’s richest man could pay for only two month’s interest on the deficit.

    The administration’s planned spending program will result in a situation ten years from now when federal entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) plus the interest on the federal debt will consume 93 percent of federal revenue. The debt will be one hundred percent of GDP. This will crowd out private borrowing and investment. As a nation, he said we don’t save enough to fund both government and the investment needs of the private sector economy.

    Will noted the remarkable progress of American medicine during his lifetime. But both presidential candidates campaigned against the pharmaceutical industry in 2008, which Will said was “shocking.” “It is time to quit stigmatizing those who create wealth, those who extend life, those who reduce pain. Get the government out of the way, and let them get on.”

    The economy is fragile, Will said, and we need not burden it more with taxes. He referred to Congressman Paul Ryan, who said we have a nation with “too many takers and not enough makers.”

    On education, he said we need an education system that “equips people to compete in a free society.” He criticized the short school year in the U.S., as compared to other countries. He told the audience that a major problem with schools is the teachers unions. The increased spending on schools has not worked. 90 percent of the difference between schools can be explained by characteristics of the students’ families, he said. “Don’t tell me the pupil-teacher ratio, tell me the parent-pupil ratio.”

    Even with as many problems as there are, he said that an “aroused citizenry” like that in the room tonight can fix the problems. He’s not pessimistic, he said, because Obama has stimulated a “new clarity” from the American people.

    There is a tension today between freedom and equality, two polar values. Liberals today stress equality of outcomes, and believe that the multiplication of entitlement programs to produce this equality serves the public good. But conservatives stress freedom, and that multiplication of entitlement programs is “subversive of the attitudes and aptitudes essential for a free society of self-reliant, far-sighted, thrifty and industrious people.”

    The Obama presidency has passed its apogee, Will told the audience. Quoting Winston Churchill, he said that “The American people invariably do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” Will said he believes that Americans believe that “a benevolent government is not always a benefactor, capitalism doesn’t just make us better off, it makes us better.”

    Will told the audience that “Americans for Prosperity exists on the principle that when you change the nation’s economy, you change the national character in the process.” Urging the citizen activists to get involved, he echoed a remark made by Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who had spoken earlier: “You are the point of the lance. Go to work.”

    Before his speech, Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David H. Koch awarded Will the George Washington award. This is AFP’s highest award, given to Will for his work in defending and advancing economic freedom.

    Koch also spoke about the goals of Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which he said are to advance economic freedom and prosperity by limiting government growth, spending, and taxation. It is a grassroots movement that holds political leaders of every party accountable. AFP advocates for the free market economy, which he said improves lives and created the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.