Andrew Breitbart: Message to Libertarians on Campus

Move to Start a Libertarian Student Group at Marquette

A Marquette student named Ryan Kulp wants to start an organization called Students for Liberty on the Marquette campus.

You can see the flyer here.

A lot of people call themselves libertarians, and we rather like some and aren’t a fan of some others. We think of Ron Paul as close to being a crackpot. And the Wisconsin Libertarian Party has had a badly misbegotten flirtation with 9/11 conspiracy theories.

On the other hand, the flyer associates Students for Liberty with the Cato Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies, two organization for which we have a great deal of respect.

Our view about speech and political discourse on campus is “the more, the merrier.”

Kulp only needs a small handful of students to sign on to begin the process of getting recognition as a student group at Marquette.

Any student who is a Ron Paul fan, or maybe not a Ron Paul fan but considers themselves a libertarian, would do well to contact Kulp and ask for more information.

Liberals Don’t Really Believe in a “Right to Privacy”

From Front Page Magazine:

One of the great lies of the latter half of the twentieth century is that there is a Constitutional right to privacy. The right to privacy was established by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Court ruled that the state could not restrict the use of contraceptives. That law hadn’t been enforced in nearly a hundred years when it was challenged, but that didn’t stop liberals from trying to strike it down.

Why? They wanted to make a point, and make it they did: according to the Court, the Constitution guaranteed a “right to privacy.” Where did this right to privacy come from? “[S]pecific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas, in one of the silliest and least substantive lines of reasoning in legal history.

Later, the “right to privacy” would be extended to unmarried sexual activity in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972); abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973); and homosexual activity in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Justice Kennedy ’s opinion in Lawrence is one of the most insulting opinions ever, stating that just because a state legislature finds something immoral doesn’t mean it can ban it and that the Constitution requires that Americans “respect” the private lives of homosexuals. “The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime,” Kennedy wrote — announcing a bizarre standard if the Constitution is designed to prevent federal overreach.

Let’s leave aside Kennedy’s logic here — the state constantly demeans the existence of consensual bigamists, prostitutes, incestuous families, bestiality practitioners, and adulterers, and in most of those cases, controls the destinies of those involved in these activities. Let’s focus instead on the basic point, which seems intuitively right to so many Americans: what we do in the bedroom should be our business alone.

I agree with that. You agree with that. We all agree with that. Libertarianism’s impact has been felt by us all — we know that we don’t want cops knocking on our door based on what we do with our sexual partners.

There’s only one problem: the left isn’t truly interested in the right to privacy. What starts in the bedroom doesn’t stay in the bedroom for the left. It ends with government pushing their bedroom agenda-of-the-day.

Now, it’s not enough that a woman has a right to choose to abort her baby – we have to publicly fund it. Now, it’s not enough that people have the right to have unmarried sex – we have to pay taxes to fund their child-rearing.

In California the courts have recently ruled that the right to privacy now requires that the state make no distinction between heterosexual relationships and homosexual relationships. Marriage is not a privacy issue — it is an issue of people’s relationship with the state. But the radical gay movement has not restricted itself to worrying about non-interference in the bedroom. It wants societal acceptance and legitimacy. By the same token, homosexual adoption isn’t a privacy issue — it impacts a child. But the left has sought to extend the right to privacy to cover the right to raise children without a mother or father.

As if that weren’t enough, California, spurred by the powerful gay lobby, has passed legislation changing the Education Code to require that children be instructed “on the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.” This is privacy turned on its head. What particular figures do in the bedroom has nothing to do with their contribution to American society. What does Leonardo di Vinci’s preference for boys have to with his historical import? The answer: nothing. But that’s not what the left cares about. They care about exposing children to homosexuality as early as possible in order to legitimate their anti-traditional values morality.

So what happened to the “right to privacy”? It expanded to include public approval of private sexual activity – which returns us closer to the anti-libertarian mold than the libertarian mold. After all, what if society shifts and decides to change its relationship with certain sexual activity again? Libertarianism provides a bright-line: government shouldn’t be involved with sexual activity. By getting the two intertwined again, liberal sexual activists actually bring themselves closer to the brink. Government-sponsored libertarianism is no libertarianism at all.

A genuine libertarian, of course, would no more want to use government to impose on the citizens the idea that homosexuality is perfectly moral and acceptable than he would want to use government to impose on the citizens the idea that homosexuality is immoral and unacceptable.

But a lot of “libertarians” are not really libertarians. They are merely secular social liberals who happen to be economic conservatives. Human liberty, to them, does not include the right to opt out of the gay agenda.

Liberals Are Less Informed About Economics

From the Wall Street Journal, a story about a public opinion poll testing knowledge of economics. The author is Daniel B. Klein.

Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and I considered the 4,835 respondents’ (all American adults) answers to eight survey questions about basic economics. We also asked the respondents about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian.

Rather than focusing on whether respondents answered a question correctly, we instead looked at whether they answered incorrectly. A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.

Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: “Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.” People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.

Basic economics acknowledges that whatever redeeming features a restriction may have, it increases the cost of production and exchange, making goods and services less affordable. There may be exceptions to the general case, but they would be atypical.

The researchers, rather generously, refused to count “not sure” against respondents. Maybe they misunderstood, or maybe they thought it is an open question (which in most cases it’s not).

What were the other questions?

The other questions were: 1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). 2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). 3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). 4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree). 5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). 6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). 7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).

So here we have a test of basic economic knowledge.

How did different groups respond?

How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.

To be sure, none of the eight questions specifically challenge the political sensibilities of conservatives and libertarians. Still, not all of the eight questions are tied directly to left-wing concerns about inequality and redistribution. In particular, the questions about mandatory licensing, the standard of living, the definition of monopoly, and free trade do not specifically challenge leftist sensibilities.

Yet on every question the left did much worse. On the monopoly question, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (31%) was more than twice that of conservatives (13%) and more than four times that of libertarians (7%). On the question about living standards, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (61%) was more than four times that of conservatives (13%) and almost three times that of libertarians (21%).

The survey also asked about party affiliation. Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.

Liberals and leftists like to think that their views are merely “enlightened.” Indeed, they chortled three years ago when a poll came out showing that a majority of Republicans don’t believe in evolution.

(Of course, in the same poll 40% of Democrats said they didn’t believe in evolution.)

But if Christian conservatives don’t much like evolution, liberals and leftists don’t much like economics.

But the implications of the two things are radically different. While not believing in evolution is pretty much an innocent foible (unless you want to be a biologist), not believing in economic science has nasty implications for public policy.

Further, the liberal ignorance of economics is not innocent. It’s rooted in a class-based ideology. Markets run counter to the class interests of liberals. Markets give power to people who produce wealth, and not to those who redistribute it.

Markets give power to ordinary people, who are allowed to live their lives the way they want. This is a source of frustration for people who believe they should be able to dictate the lifestyles of others.