I am a faculty member at Florida State University, and received an announcement that nominations are open for the Martin Luther King Distinguished Service Award at my university. One criterion for nomination is: “Nominees from the faculty must demonstrate scholarly excellence and a personal commitment to diversity.” I do have a sustained record of scholarship, and at a university—an institution committed to the transmission of ideas to our students—my libertarian-leaning commitment to individual freedom and limited government (the ideas on which our nation was founded) puts me distinctly in the minority among faculty members and shows my commitment to diversity of thought in an institution whose faculty members often promote a left-wing ideology.

Can one be any more committed to diversity than to teach the ideas of liberty at an institution of higher learning when so many faculty members advocate more government control over our lives?

If the federal government wants to sell land in California, California’s State Lands Commission must have the first shot at purchase, not any private developer. That was according to Senate Bill 50, by Santa Monica Democrat Bill Allen and signed by Jerry Brown in October of 2017, but it’s not going to happen.

Last week U.S. District Judge William Shubb tossed SB 50 which he ruled violates the Constitution’s supremacy clause and the property clause that gives the federal government the right to dispose of its own property. The properties include Admiral’s Cove in Alameda, which the Navy seeks to sell to a developer; 78 acres owned by the Army in Dublin, and U.S. Postal Service property in Sacramento, among others. The possibilities are indeed vast because the federal government owns 45.8 percent of California, 52.9 percent of Oregon, and a whopping 84.9 percent of Nevada, practically the entire state.

The federal government owns 28 percent of all land in the United States and 47 percent of land in the western states. Farmers, ranchers, and developers support more sales of federal land, and the funds could help pay down massive government debt. Politicians often oppose sales of federal land, unless a state government is the exclusive buyer, per SB 50. Last year, when the Trump administration filed suit against the measure, California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a member of the State Lands Commission, proclaimed:  “We will use every legal and administrative tool to thwart Trump’s plans to auction off California’s heritage to the highest bidder.” Newsom is now seeking to replace the outgoing Jerry Brown as governor.

John Bolton is President Trump’s National Security Advisor. While speaking at an event hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington D.C. on October 31, 2018, he weighed in on the national security implications of the U.S. government’s budget deficit and the national debt:

“It is a fact that when your national debt gets to the level ours is, that it constitutes an economic threat to the society. And that kind of threat ultimately has a national security consequence for it.”

Bolton went on to describe how the White House will seek to deal with the threat:

“In the near term, the budget deficit problem is in the discretionary spending. The entitlements come in a few years and that problem’s going to have to be addressed. But right now, you can have significant impact on both the deficit and the national debt by cutting government spending on the discretionary programs.”

In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge famously said that the “chief business of the American people is business.” Today, however, this could be reworded as “the business of the American people is redistribution.” And government redistribution of income and wealth—violations of personal property rights—is tearing apart the social fabric of the country.

Today more than half of Americans receive more money from government transfer* programs than they pay in federal taxes. When a majority of people benefit, on net, from government transfers and its growth, a tipping point is reached where pulling back is increasingly difficult, if not politically impossible.

The figure below shows transfers and federal taxes by household across income quintiles. The lower three quintiles receive far more in government transfers than they pay in taxes. Only the top two quintiles pay more in taxes than they receive in transfers, effectively subsidizing the bottom groups.

Sources: Congressional Budget Office, The Distribution of Household Income, 2014, 2018; and Ryan McMaken, “More than Half of America Gets More in Welfare than it Pays in Taxes,” Mises Wire, October 24, 2018.*

When the government imposes tariffs or import quotas, it harms a few foreigners—exporting producers and their workers mainly—but it harms far more people in the country with these trade obstructions, who suffer an absence of superior options or face higher prices for the imported types of goods on the domestic market owing to lessened competition.

Likewise, when the government imposes restrictions or quotas on immigration, it harms a few foreigners—the foreigners who wish to enter the country mainly—but it harms far more people in the country with these obstructions, who suffer an absence of superior options in labor and other markets or face higher prices for the immigrants’ types of services, besides being deprived of their freedom to deal with their most preferred or rewarding trading partners as customers, tenants, neighbors, and friends. Not to mention that enforcement of immigration restrictions fosters the maintenance of a domestic police state that menaces everyone living in the country to which immigrants wish to come.

These two cases of government obstructions at the border thus have many parallels. The important point is that they give rise to harms imposed on the multitude for the sake of creating unearned income for a minority in the country whose government imposes the obstructions.

In an October 24 ruling, Yolo County judge Samuel McAdam reinstated the sentence of convicted murderer Daniel Marsh and sent him back to prison. This came as some relief to families of his victims, who again had been put through an ordeal.

In April, 2013, Marsh was 15 when he murdered and mutilated Oliver Northup, 87, and his wife Claudia Maupin, 76, in their Davis home. The depraved double murderer, who aspired to be a serial killer, was tried as an adult, convicted, and in 2014 drew a sentence of  52 years to life. Two years later he caught a break.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of the famous Bitcoin white paper authored by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. The pioneering cryptocurrency, as well as its platform of a decentralized “blockchain,” has unleashed changes in society that we are only beginning to appreciate. Writers with expertise in programming and/or public key cryptography are penning tributes celebrating Nakamoto’s technical innovations, but I want to discuss the profound impact Bitcoin has had as a new potential form of money. The brute fact of Bitcoin’s existence—and the other cryptocurrencies it inspired—has forever changed the way both the public and economists think about money.

Before Bitcoin, most of the public simply assumed that money, as well as any electronic payment system built upon it, had to be orchestrated by the government. After all, the actual monies in day-to-day use—whether the dollar, peso, euro, or yen—were all issued by sovereign political entities. And although the banking system and online payments (in the age of the Internet) are largely handled by privately run companies, the entire network is heavily regulated by the world’s governments. Thus it is understandable that most people have simply assumed the state had to create the money and regulate its use.

As the late Malcolm Muggeridge said, the real advantage of elections is to remove those in power, and voters often do just that.  The ruling class, by contrast, can exploit elections to expand government, redistribute wealth, reward cronies, and provide a soft landing for washed up politicians. Consider Proposition 71 on the 2004 ballot.

This $3 billion measure promised live-saving cures for a host of diseases by creating the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. At one point, this new state agency had directed a full 91 percent of its research funding to institutions with representatives on its governing board. Though some offered to serve with no salary, CIRM hired non-scientist Art Torres, a former state senator, and promptly tripled his salary to $225,000. CIRM bosses drew salaries of nearly $500,000 but the state agency has produced none of the promised cures and therapies, so no royalties are flowing into state coffers, as Proposition 71 promoters also promised in 2004.

Just in time for Halloween, Truth In Accounting has updated its Zombie Index for state governments.

TIA’s Bill Bergman explains what the Zombie Index is and why ranking at the top of the list is not a good thing for the residents of the states that do:

This index is inspired by the work of Edward Kane, Professor of finance at Boston College. Kane wrote books warning about the developing crisis in the deposit insurance system in the late 1980s. Kane coined the term “zombie bank,” referring to banks and thrifts that were effectively insolvent but allowed to remain open via untruthful accounting and regulatory forbearance.

Kane called them “zombies” because they were really dead but allowed to walk among the living, and false accounting delayed loss recognition. Zombies had incentives to take large risks to try, in Kane’s words, to “gamble for resurrection”—especially considering moral hazard generated by expectations that taxpayers would get the downside of the gambles. These incentives, in Kane’s view, amplified the cost of the savings and loan crisis for taxpayers.

Humans have always had tribal instincts, supporting those in their group and viewing outsiders with hostility. In primitive societies, people cooperated with other members of their group, and viewed outsiders as potential predators, and potential prey. Encounters between people who did not know each other were likely to be violent.

People in primitive societies identified members of their group based on personal knowledge, which limited the size of their groups. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar concludes that people are only able to have stable personal relationships with about 150 people, so primitive societies were small, limited to those the members knew personally, and interactions with outsiders were often hostile.

Adam Smith said the remarkable growth in the productivity of modern societies is a result of the division of labor (specialization), but that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. Primitive societies, which operated based on everyone having personal knowledge of its members, were necessarily small, which limited the extent of the market and therefore their economic productivity.