Voice For Liberty

Tag: Liberty

  • An IRS political timeline

    An IRS political timeline

    Internal Revenue Service IRS logo

    In the summer of 2010 President Barack Obama and his allies warned of conservative groups with “harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” At the time, supporters of AFP like myself were concerned, but AFP saw the president’s attacks as evidence of the group’s influence.

    This week Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal looks back at the summer three years ago in light of what we’re just starting to learn about the Internal Revenue Service under the Obama Administration. Strassel writes: “We know that it was August 2010 when the IRS issued its first ‘Be On the Lookout’ list, flagging applications containing key conservative words and issues.”

    Strassel presents a timeline of events from that time. Here’s an entry that should concern everyone:

    Aug. 27: White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does “not pay corporate income tax.” The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. The report has never been released.

    This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status.

    Somehow, I’m not surprised that the Obama-controlled Treasury Department is slow in investigating allegations of misdeeds by an Obama economic adviser, even though Goolsbee hasn’t worked for Obama for some time.

    In conclusion, Strassel ties it all together and links the current IRS scandal to Washington:

    These were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were repeated by the White House and echoed by its allies in campaign events, emails, social media and TV ads. The president of the United States spent months warning the country that “shadowy,” conservative “front” groups — “posing” as tax-exempt entities and illegally controlled by “foreign” players — were engaged in “unsupervised” spending that posed a “threat” to democracy. Yet we are to believe that a few rogue IRS employees just happened during that time to begin systematically targeting conservative groups? A mere coincidence that among the things the IRS demanded of these groups were “copies of any contracts with and training materials provided by Americans for Prosperity”?

    This newspaper reported Thursday that Cincinnati IRS employees are now telling investigators that they took their orders from Washington. For anyone with a memory of 2010 politics, that was obvious from the start.

    It’s evident that we’re just starting to uncover what’s been happening to freedom and liberty under the Obama Administration (and past presidents, too). We don’t know where this will lead, but we need to be thankful for organizations like Americans for Prosperity and others that haven’t backed down.

    An IRS Political Timeline

    President Obama spent months in 2010 warning Americans about the ‘threat’ to democracy posed by conservative groups, right at the time the IRS began targeting these groups.

    By Kimberly A. Strassel

    Perhaps the only useful part of the inspector general’s audit of the IRS was its timeline. We know that it was August 2010 when the IRS issued its first “Be On the Lookout” list, flagging applications containing key conservative words and issues. The criteria would expand in the months to come.

    What else was happening in the summer and fall of 2010? The Obama administration and its allies continue to suggest the IRS was working in some political vacuum. What they’d rather everyone forget is that the IRS’s first BOLO list coincided with their own attack against “shadowy” or “front” conservative groups that they claimed were rigging the electoral system.

    Below is a more relevant timeline, a political one, which seeks to remind readers of the context in which the IRS targeting happened.

    Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal (subscription not required).

  • Governing by extortion destroys freedom

    By Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute.

    Government takes and gives

    Merriam-Webster defines extortion as the “… exaction of money or property through intimidation or undue exercise of authority.” It’s illegal for individuals or corporations to engage in extortion, but some governments are increasingly using forms of extortion to exact higher taxes, make citizens more dependent upon government and ultimately, strip away economic and political freedom.

    Government intimidation may not come with Soprano-like threats of violence. Some government officials may not even realize they are extorting the populous — the practice of presenting the government solution as the only option has become that commonplace. But no matter how politely or subtly phrased, the message is “give us what we want or else …” The “or else” comes in many forms.

    The federal government punishes citizens with flight delays and service cuts to senior citizens while continuing to lavish taxpayer money on favored political friends and countless other examples of waste and duplication. The federal government will either get to borrow and spend as much as it wants or innocent citizens will pay the price.

    Some state officials in Kansas want to extend a temporary sales tax and/or take away deductions for home mortgage interest and property taxes. They say it’s necessary to avoid massive budget deficits that would de-fund schools and services. The message is that higher taxes are the only alternative, when in fact they could choose to bring down the cost of government services and stop giving out corporate welfare in the name of economic development.

    University officials in Kansas say they will raise tuition, eliminate professors, and restrict student admissions if state aid is even slightly reduced. They say nothing of reducing administrative costs that rose three times faster than inflation or using large cash reserves that accumulated from a 137 percent increase in tuition and fees over the last ten years. Give them what they want or students, parents, and staff will suffer.

    Local governments routinely tell citizens that taxes must be increased to avoid police and fire layoffs, pool closings and other direct service reductions. Why not consolidate overlapping government programs and bureaucracy instead of raising taxes? Or maybe stop giving taxpayer money away to friendly developers who support the growth of government and help underwrite campaigns for public office?

    Our state and nation were founded on the principles of freedom and limited government. Yet those who stand in defense of freedom are often met with ridicule. Carl Brewer, the Mayor of Wichita, recently issued a thinly veiled threat to sue a woman for asking him to recuse himself from a vote to give a $700,000 sales tax exemption to a campaign contributor (and fishing buddy). A columnist for the Hutchinson News falsely blamed those who want less government intrusion in our lives for poverty, high property taxes and other woes as opposed to following his prescription for progressive, big government solutions.

    Thomas Jefferson said, “Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.” Some in our state seems to have forgotten that and are working to prove another of his maxims, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

    Citizens must be persistent and vocal in reminding elected officials of the former or we shall continue to suffer the loss of liberty.

  • A second Bill of Rights, by Franklin Roosevelt

    If we wonder what was the genesis of the modern nanny state, listen to this speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s part of his State of the Union Address from 1944.

    The purpose of the original Bill of Rights is to protect our freedoms from government. But to provide the things Roosevelt calls for — food, clothing, a decent home, adequate medical care, and a good education — requires an expansive government. These rights are called positive rights because they require action by the government, in contrast to the negative rights found in the Bill of Rights. Richard A. Epstein explains the consequences of the “Roosevelt Rights”:

    All of these are positive rights, which means necessarily that some unidentified individuals or groups have the duty to provide decent wages, home, health, and education to the people. The individual so taxed can discharge that duty only by forfeiting his own right to reap the fruits of his own labor. Yet the incidence and size of these hefty correlative duties are left unaddressed by Roosevelt.

    We are witnessing today a modern rerun of Roosevelt’s incomplete strategy. Obama’s healthcare plan, for instance, designates a generous set of “essential health benefits” to a large number of individuals entitled to affordable care on the newly created government exchanges. But these benefits cannot be funded with higher taxes on the “millionaires and billionaires,” whose combined wealth falls short of what is needed. So what duty will undergird the new right?

    This sort of funding crisis could never arise under the Bill of Rights 1.0, whose correlative duties are negative — or, put another way, they impose a “keep off” sign on other people. If I have the freedom of speech, your duty is to forbear from disrupting the speech with force, and vice versa. Each of us can demand forbearance from the use of force by all others.

    David Kelley elaborates further in a chapter from The Morality of Capitalism:

    By contrast, welfare rights are conceived as rights to possess and enjoy certain goods, regardless of one’s actions; they are rights to have the goods provided by others if one cannot earn them oneself. Accordingly, welfare rights impose positive obligations on others. If I have a right to food, someone has an obligation to grow it. If I cannot pay for it, someone has an obligation to buy it for me. Welfarists sometimes argue that the obligation is imposed on society as a whole, not on any specifi c individual. But society is not an entity, much less a moral agent, over and above its individual members, so any such obligation falls upon us as individuals. Insofar as welfare rights are implemented through government programs, for example, the obligation is distributed over all taxpayers.

    From an ethical standpoint, then, the essence of welfarism is the premise that the need of one individual is a claim on other individuals. The claim may run only as far as the town or the nation. It may not embrace all of humanity. But in all versions of the doctrine, the claim does not depend on your personal relationship to the claimant, or your choice to help, or your evaluation of him as worthy of your help. It is an unchosen obligation arising from the sheer fact of his need.

  • Surveillance state arrives in Wichita

    In an effort to control crime in Old Town, Wichita is importing the police surveillance state. Right now the targeted area is a small part of the city during certain periods of time. But once camera use has started, it is likely to spread across town, especially given the enthusiasm of police and elected officials like Wichita city council member Lavonta Williams (district 1, northeast Wichita), according to Wichita Eagle reporting.

    Many people may not be aware of the gross invasion of privacy that government cameras represent. Have you used the facial recognition technology in Google’s Picasa software? It’s uncanny how accurate it is. In the hands of government, it’s a concern.

    Some surveillance cameras can read car license plates two blocks away. With facial recognition technology and optical character recognition, police don’t have to actually watch the live or recorded video to learn who has been in a location. Computers can create databases, updated in real time with who is where at what time. Alerts can be programmed, so that if a person or car is seen, police can be notified.

    Then, we have to wonder whether the cameras work as advertised. The website You Are Being Watched, a project of the American Civil Liberties Union, comes to this conclusion: “An increasing number of American cities and towns are investing millions of taxpayer dollars in surveillance camera systems. But few are closely examining the costs and benefits of those investments, or creating mechanisms for measuring those costs and benefits over time. There is extensive academic literature on the subject — studies carried out over many years — and that research demonstrates that video surveillance has no statistically significant effect on crime rates. Several studies on video surveillance have been conducted in the UK, where surveillance cameras are pervasive. The two main meta-analyses conducted for the British Home Office (equivalent to the US departments of Justice and Homeland Security) show that video surveillance has no impact on crime whatsoever. If it did, then there would be little crime in London, a city estimated to have about 500,000 cameras.”

    An irony is that law enforcement likes recording citizens, but not the other way around. As John Stossel has noted, police don’t like to be recorded. In some states its a crime to tape a police officer making an arrest. A video excerpt from Stossel’s television shows the attitudes of police towards being recorded. At Reason Radley Balko details the problem, writing “As citizens increase their scrutiny of law enforcement officials through technologies such as cell phones, miniature cameras, and devices that wirelessly connect to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and LiveLeak, the cops are increasingly fighting back with force and even jail time—and not just in Illinois. Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue.”

    Further irony is found in the parties promoting the cameras. Council member Williams was instrumental in crafting Wichita’s smoking ban. So too was Charlie Claycomb, president of the Old Town Association. One of their arguments was that everyone should have the right to enter any business and not be subjected to secondhand smoke. It was an argument based on civil liberties.

    I’d like to be able to enjoy a cocktail in Old Town without my presence monitored and noted by the police. Is that a civil liberty worth preserving?

    Wichita should reconsider this decision. It seems like an easy solution to a problem. But it’s another journey down the road of the ever-growing regulatory regime in Wichita.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Thursday September 6, 2012

    Debbie Wasserman Schultz lies about lying

    During these convention weeks, advocates on both sides have been fact-checking the other side, and charges are being made about which side is the biggest, boldest liar. But when people lie about lying … that’s a whole new level. Human Events reports on DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and sums up this way: “It was already common knowledge that Wasserman Schultz is a serial liar — on one memorable recent occasion, when CNN host Wolf Blitzer called her out for lying about Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform proposals, she essentially insisted that the urgency of her political agenda gives her the right to lie as necessary.” See Debbie Wasserman Schultz Caught Lying about Lying.

    Speaking of facts and Politifact

    What happens when the fact checker of record isn’t reliable? That’s the situation Politifact finds itself in, according to reporting by Jon Cassidy in Human Events: “Once widely regarded as a unique, rigorous and reasonably independent investigator of political claims, PolitiFact now declares conservatives wrong three times more often than liberals. More pointedly, the journalism organization concludes that conservatives have flat out lied nine times more often than liberals.” More at PolitiFact bias: Does the GOP tell nine times more lies than left? Really?

    Your share of the debt

    Now that the U.S. national debt has passed $16 trillion (or $16,000,000 million as I like to say) you might be interested in learning the magnitude of your personal liability. The Economic Freedom Project has a calculator to tell you. Click on What’s Your Lifetime Share of the National Debt?

    Pachyderms to host House candidates

    This week the Wichita Pachyderm Club features Republican candidates for the Kansas House of Representatives. Scheduled to appear are: Jim Howell (District 81), John Stevens (86), George F. “Joe” Edwards II (93), Benny Boman (95), and Phil Hermanson (98). The public is welcome and encouraged to attend Wichita Pachyderm meetings. Meetings are Fridays at noon, in the Wichita Petroleum Club on the top floor of the Bank of America Building at 100 N. Broadway. The meeting costs $10, which includes a delicious buffet lunch and beverage. For more information click on Wichita Pachyderm Club.

    Even garage sales can’t escape the regulatory regime

    Kansas Policy Institute comments on garage sale regulations in Wichita.

    Apply for Wichita’s civilian sign corps

    Related to garage sale signs, Wichitans can now apply to be part of the civilian sign enforcement patrol. The city has made these documents available on its website: Overview of the Volunteer Sign Removal Program and Sign Removal Volunteer Application. If you want to participate in this program, you’ll need to complete a volunteer sign removal application, complete the required training course, sign a liability release, sign an oath or statement agreeing to abide by city codes and the program rules, submit to and successfully pass a background check, have valid Kansas drivers license, have a currently registered vehicle in good operating condition, have current vehicle insurance, commit to a geographic area and time, commit to safety first; appropriately use provided vests and tools, commit to provide required reports, commit to dispose of signs as directed, commit to wear the provided identification badge, and commit to allowing only authorized (city trained and approved) persons to remove signs. The city also advises applicants to check with their insurance agents for coverage relative to the use of vehicles in this program. I can’t imagine most auto insurance companies will be happy that their customers are using their cars in a quasi-law enforcement application. … For more on why this law is a bad idea, see Proposed Wichita sign ordinance problematic.

    Activists organize!

    As a result of an excellent day-long training session recently produced in Wichita by Campaign for Liberty, activists that support limited government and free markets are meeting regularly. For information about the Wichita meetings, contact John Axtell.

    The seven rules of bureaucracy

    In this article, authors Loyd S. Pettegrew and Carol A. Vance quote Thomas Sowell: “When the government creates some new program, nothing is easier than to show whatever benefits that program produces. … But it is virtually impossible to trace the taxes that paid for the program back to their sources and to show the alternative uses of that same money that could have been far more beneficial.” In order to understand the foundation of America’s morass, we must examine bureaucracy. At the root of this growing evil is the very nature of bureaucracy, especially political bureaucracy. French economist Frédéric Bastiat offered an early warning in 1850 that laws, institutions, and acts — the stuff of political bureaucracy — produce economic effects that can be seen immediately, but that other, unforeseen effects happen much later. He claimed that bad economists look only at the immediate, seeable effects and ignore effects that come later, while good economists are able to look at the immediate effects and foresee effects, both good and bad, that come later. … Both the seen and the unseen have become a necessary condition of modern bureaucracy. (Bastiat: That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.) The first rule? “Maintain the problem at all costs!”

    Democracy, or majority rule?

    A new video from LearnLiberty.org, a project of Institute for Humane Studies is titled Should Majorities Decide Everything? To me, the most important part is near the end, when the speaker says that without a properly limited government, rule by majority “substitute[s] the tyranny of a king with the tyranny of a larger group.” LearnLiberty also explains: “According to Professor Munger, democratic constitutions consist of two parts: one defining the limits within which decisions can be made democratically, and the other establishing the process by which decisions will be made. In the United States Constitution, the individual is protected from majority decisions. Professor Munger warns, however, that these protections are slowly being stripped away as American courts of law fail to recognize the limits of what can be decided by majority rule.”

  • Republicans recognize overcriminalization

    A section of the platform agreed to at the Republican National Convention expresses concern over the rise of overcriminalization:

    “The resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and judicial systems have been strained by two unfortunate expansions: the over-criminalization of behavior and the over-federalization of offenses. The number of criminal offenses in the U.S. Code increased from 3,000 in the early 1980s to over 4,450 by 2008. Federal criminal law should focus on acts by federal employees or acts committed on federal property — and leave the rest to the States. Then Congress should withdraw from federal departments and agencies the power to criminalize behavior, a practice which, according to the Congressional Research Service, has created ‘tens of thousands’ of criminal offenses. No one other than an elected representative should have the authority to define a criminal act and set criminal penalties. In the same way, Congress should reconsider the extent to which it has federalized offenses traditionally handled on the State or local level.”

    Overcriminalization has risen to become a serious threat to the freedom and liberty of citizens, placing increasing and arbitrary power in the hands of federal officials. According to The Heritage Foundation, overcriminalization is characterized by these factors:

    1. The use of strict liability crimes (i.e., offenses that dispense with the requirement that a person act with a “guilty mind,” however defined) to outlaw conduct, particularly in commercial and regulatory fields;
    2. The passage of several laws applicable to the same conduct, which enables prosecutors to multiply charges and thereby threaten a person with a severe term of imprisonment if he does not accept a plea bargain;
    3. The delegation to administrative agencies of the responsibility for filling in the details of a substantive criminal law, which thereby vests in the agency responsible for enforcing the law the power also to define its terms; and
    4. Enforcing through the criminal law conduct that, if it is to be enforced by the government at all, should be enforced through administrative or civil mechanisms.

    The first item should be particularly troubling to citizens, as it removes one of the elements necessary to convict someone of a crime — that the person intended to commit a crime. The Heritage Foundation paper Without Intent: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law explains:

    “A core principle of the American system of justice is that individuals should not be subjected to criminal prosecution and conviction unless they intentionally engage in inherently wrongful conduct or conduct that they know to be unlawful. Only in such circumstances is a person truly blameworthy and thus deserving of criminal punishment. This is not just a legal concept; it is the fundamental anchor of the criminal justice system.”

    After noting the 4,450 federal laws and estimating that tens of thousands more are located in federal regulations, the authors explain the problem regarding intent:

    “But something fundamental is often lacking from this tidal wave of penal provisions: meaningful mens rea requirements. Mens rea is a Latin term describing a culpable mental state, without which there can be no crime. Lamentably, Congress has enacted scores of laws with weak or no mens rea requirements, the result of a legislative process that is haphazard at best and arbitrary at worst. In doing so, it has eroded the principle of fair notice beyond recognition and dangerously impaired the justification for criminal punishment that has for centuries been based on an individual’s intent to commit a wrongful act.”

    While overcriminalization is often seen as a federal problem, it infects states and cities, too. Recently the Wichita City Council passed a sign ordinance that has the characteristics of overcriminalization. A key provision is this: “The existence of a temporary sign in the right of way or on public property directing attention to a person is prima facie evidence that such person has caused the placement of such sign in the right of way or on public property.”

    This means that the mere existence of a sign promoting a candidate being in the wrong place is evidence that the candidate is guilty of a crime. No matter how well a candidate trains staff and volunteers on proper sign placement, if a sign is in the wrong place, the candidate is presumed guilty. It’s difficult to defend against this presumption.

    The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has created a series of short videos that explain more about overcriminalization. The first, titled “Overcriminalization: Criminalizing the Everyday” is presented below, and additional titles may be viewed here.

  • SWATing a threat to political speech

    Conservative bloggers are being targeted with an illegal and dangerous tactic with the aim of silencing or moderating their voices. The tactic is SWATing (from the police special forces often named Special Weapons and Tactics). The perpetrator makes a telephone call to police falsely reporting that a crime — usually a violent crime — has been committed or is in progress at a blogger’s home.

    Erick Erickson of the prominent conservative blog RedState relates the story of his SWATing: “Sunday night as my family and sister’s family were around the dinner table and playing outside, sheriff’s deputies pulled into my driveway responding to an accidental shooting at my home. One deputy was in the driveway. Another blocked the end of the driveway with his car. A neighbor tells me another was up the hill from the house. There was no shooting at my home. Someone called 911, claimed to be at my home, and claimed to witness a shooting at my home.”

    Besides the illegality of making a false police report, the tactic is dangerous to both police officers and people at or nearby the targeted address.

    U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia has written to Attorney General Eric Holder expressing his concern regarding the SWATing attacks. In his letter he wrote “Any potentially criminal action that incites fear, seeks to silence a dissenting opinion, and collaterally wastes the resources of law enforcement should be given close scrutiny at all levels.”

    Later he added “The perpetrators appear to be targeting individuals who are vigorously exercising their First Amendment rights to political speech. As you know, these reported efforts to intimidate those who choose to enter the political forum and express their opinions are in conflict with the founding principles of our nation. Regardless of any potential political differences that may exist, threats and intimidation have no place in our national political discourse. Those who choose to enter into that political discourse should not have to worry about potential threats to their or their family’s safety.”

    The purpose of SWATing is to, as Chambliss explained, silence conservative bloggers, or make them less likely to write posts and articles. Besides the attempt to tamp down civil debate and discourse, the SWATing technique is illegal and potentially deadly. It goes beyond bullying. Those who use it are domestic terrorists.

    The use of SWATing against conservatives stands in contrast to a recent New York Times column by Charles M. Blow. In the column, Blow uses the bullying of an elderly bus monitor to draw a larger conclusion: Republicans are bullies. “… bullying has become boilerplate. Hiss and taunt. Tease and intimidate. Target your enemies and torture them mercilessly. Maintain primacy through predation.”

    Later Blow wrote “But bullying is always about power — projecting more than you have in order to accrue more than your share.” That describes SWATing: Illegally summoning police power to target and intimidate your enemies.

  • Central planning: Are we humans or pawns?

    From LearnLiberty.org, a project of Institute for Humane Studies, a video titled Adam Smith and the Follies of Central Planning.

    “How do you like being told what to do? If someone tells you to do something you find enjoyable or fulfilling, you may not mind. What if you are told to do something contrary to what you would choose for yourself? What if the government was the one telling you to do it? Adam Smith, the philosopher and father of economics, talks about a “man of system,” a central planner who believes he can orchestrate the lives of others, like chess pieces that can be moved at will. As Professor James R. Otteson illustrates, society suffers when the man of system attempts to force his desires on the lives of individuals in ways that contradict their own desires. According to Smith, people are not chess pieces to be moved on a board; they are living and thinking and have their own wills. Individuals pursuing their own desires will constantly be in conflict with the desires of any central planner.”

    In Kansas, we see the rise of central planning in several ways. Officials believe they can plan and guide our economic development efforts, and the results have not been successful.

    Wichita believes it can plan its downtown development and direct taxpayer subsidy to politically-favored developers and campaign contributors, but voters, when given a chance, reject this.

    Then we have the rise of sustainable communities planning, shepherded by the professional planners working at Regional Area Economic Partnership.

    All these are examples of the problem explained in the video.

  • Myth: Markets can solve all problems without government at all

    When thinking about the difference between government action and action taken by free people trading voluntarily in markets, we find that many myths abound. Tom G. Palmer, who is Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, General Director of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and Director of Cato University, has written an important paper that confronts these myths about markets. The twentieth myth — Markets Can Solve All Problems without Government at All — and Palmer’s refutation is below. The complete series of myths and responses is at Twenty Myths about Markets.

    Palmer is editor of the recent book The Morality of Capitalism. He will be in Overland Park and Wichita in May speaking on the moral case for capitalism. For more information and to register for these events see The Morality of Capitalism. An eleven minute podcast of Palmer speaking on this topic is at The Morality of Capitalism.

    Myth: Markets Can Solve All Problems without Government at All

    Myth: Government is so incompetent that it can’t do anything right. The main lesson of the market is that we should always weaken government, because government is simply the opposite of the market. The less government you have, the more market you have.

    Tom G. Palmer: Those who recognize the benefits of markets should recognize that in much of the world, perhaps all of it, the basic problem is not only that governments do too much, but also that they do too little. The former category — things that governments should not do, includes A) activities that should not be done by anyone at all, such as “ethnic cleansing,” theft of land, and creating special legal privileges for elites, and B) things that could and should be done through the voluntary interaction of firms and entrepreneurs in markets, such as manufacturing automobiles, publishing newspapers, and running restaurants. Governments should stop doing all of those things. But as they cease doing what they ought not to do, governments should start doing some of the things that would in fact increase justice and create the foundation for voluntary interaction to solve problems. In fact, there is a relation between the two: governments that spend their resources running car factories or publishing newspapers, or worse — confiscating property and creating legal privileges for the few — both undercut and diminish their abilities to provide truly valuable services that governments are able to provide. For example, governments in poorer nations rarely do a good job of providing clear legal title, not to mention securing property from takings. Legal systems are frequently inefficient, cumbersome, and lack the independence and impartiality that are necessary to facilitate voluntary transactions.

    For markets to be able to provide the framework for social coordination, property and contract must be well established in law. Governments that fail to provide those public benefits keep markets from emerging. Government can serve the public interest by exercising authority to create law and justice, not by being weak, but by being legally authoritative and at the same time limited in its powers. A weak government is not the same as a limited government. Weak unlimited governments can be tremendously dangerous because they do things that ought not to be done but do not have the authority to enforce the rules of just conduct and provide the security of life, liberty, and estate that are necessary for freedom and free market exchanges. Free markets are not the same as the sheer absence of government. Not all anarchies are attractive, after all. Free markets are made possible by efficiently administered limited governments that clearly define and impartially enforce rules of just conduct.

    It is also important to remember that there are plenty of problems that have to be solved through conscious action; it’s not enough to insist that impersonal market processes will solve all problems. In fact, as Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase explained in his important work on the market and the firm, firms typically rely on conscious planning and coordination to achieve common aims, rather than on constant recourse to market exchanges, because going to the market is costly. Each contract arranged is costly to negotiate, for example, so long-term contracts are used instead to reduce contracting costs. In firms, long-term contracts substitute for spot-exchanges and include labor relations involving teamwork and conscious direction, rather than constant bidding for particular services. Firms — little islands of teamwork and planning — are able to succeed because they navigate within a wider ocean of spontaneous order through market exchanges. (The great error of the socialists was to try to manage the entire economy like one great firm; it would be a similar error not to recognize the limited role of conscious direction and teamwork within the wider spontaneous order of the market.) To the extent that markets can provide the framework of creation and enforcement of rules of just conduct, advocates of free markets should promote just that. Private security firms are often better than state police (and less violent, if for no other reason than that the cost of violence are not easily shifted to third parties, except by the state); voluntary arbitration often works far better than state courts. But recognizing that entails recognizing the central role of rules in creating markets and, thus, favoring efficient and just rules, whether provided by government or by the market, rather than merely being “anti-government.”

    Finally, it should be remembered that property and market exchange may not, by themselves, solve all problems. For example, if global warming is in fact a threat to the entire planet’s ability to sustain life, or if the ozone layer is being degraded in ways that will be harmful to life, coordinated government solutions may be the best, or perhaps the only, way to avoid disaster. Naturally, that does not mean that markets would play no role at all; markets for rights to carbon dioxide emissions might, for example, help to smooth adjustments, but those markets would first have to be established by coordination among governments. What is important to remember, however, is that deciding that a tool is not adequate and appropriate for all conceivable problems does not entail that it is not adequate and appropriate for any problems. The tool many work very well for some or even most problems. Property and markets solve many problems and should be relied on to do so; if they do not solve all, that is no reason to reject them for problems for which they do offer efficient and just solutions.

    Free markets may not solve every conceivable problem humanity might face, but they can and do produce freedom and prosperity, and there is something to be said for that.