Do you remember the Sixties? I do, vividly. The latter half of that decade was the worst time of my life so far as the enveloping social and political conditions were concerned: endless, horrifying war; unraveling civil rights movement; urban riots and violence; political assassinations and mass protests; university upheavals and bombings; police brutality at every turn; political leaders—the cosmically offensive LBJ above all, with Nixon a close second—so foul that one had to avert his eyes from their hideous visage and pinch his nose to keep out their stench of death and moral putrefaction.

Yet amid all of this social and political horror, the time was pervaded by a bizarre hopefulness, especially among young people. Caught up with one basis or another for optimism and personal commitment—New Leftism, anti-Establishmentism, communitarianism, hippy love-harmony, anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, and so on—many of us became convinced that the future would be better, that never again would we be fooled by the “new boss,” that in some fundamental way we were living through an irreversible revolution. Before long, of course, most of these youthful optimists ran off the rails into violence, drug-dazed escapism, abandonment of social engagement for more personal goal-seeking, and a thousand other forms of personal accommodation to the defeat of all attempts at sweeping societal transformation.

Thus, the new world we anticipated and worked to create never arrived, and so we went on to make our separate ways through a world that in its essentials remained the same as the old: war after war; political corruption that stinks to heaven’s heights; spiritual anxiety and rootlessness; fascination with culturally superficial and ephemeral foolishness.

We now have, of course, some things that we lacked then—personal computers, the Internet, the Web, and an abundance of electronic gizmos—and some of us fancy that these things will allow people to congeal in the creation of a truly better world. I have my doubts. The Establishment is stronger than ever: more pervasive and inescapable in its surveillance; more lethal and invasive in its police presence; more lavishly funded; stronger in its ability to lock hundreds of millions in helpless dependency; and no less ruthless than it was then. Against these immense forces of the Establishment, we can only send, at most, a few million mostly youthful optimists, unorganized and mutually quarrelsome, easily distracted by the vibrations of the latest tweet or twerk. This scenario is not a promising portent of genuine revolution. What I saw and experienced and participated in during the Sixties had much greater promise and, for a decade or so, much wider participation, yet it fizzled out, leaving only marginal changes for the better (the major exception being the elimination of the draft, which was truly important). The idea that today’s dissidents will have more success strikes me as the sheerest wishful thinking.

How can Americans overcome record government spending and debt, escalating healthcare costs, intrusive federal surveillance, endless wars, ongoing economic malaise, high unemployment, failing schools, and increasing abuses of civil and economic liberties? In this superb, new video from the recent, sold-out event sponsored by The Independent Institute and The Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies (CSU-East Bay), former, twelve-term Congressman and Presidential candidate, Dr. Ron Paul, takes a candid look at America’s increasingly dysfunctional political system.  Drawing on his 24 years in Congress, he highlights the need to rein in unchecked government power.

The author of numerous #1 New York Times bestselling books, Dr. Paul is a leading advocate for individual liberty, privacy, limited constitutional government, low taxes and spending, free markets, restrained foreign policy, and sound money. The New York Post has called him a man who “cannot be bought by special interests. There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles.” And, Judge Andrew Napolitano calls him “The Thomas Jefferson of our day.”

“I strongly support Ron Paul, we very badly need to have more . . . who understand in a principled way the importance of property rights and religious freedom.”
—Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences

“Paul has a coherent political worldview and states his positions clearly and unapologetically, without hedges. . . . the ability of Paul . . . to compel a desperately needed debate . . . economic, moral, security, liberty—makes his success worth applauding.”
—Glenn Greenwald, author and former columnist, Salon.com and The Guardian

“Ron Paul is the Thomas Jefferson of our day.”
—Judge Andrew Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst, Fox News Channel

“He has the newest and the oldest campaign message there is: freedom matters.”
—Andrew M. Sullivan, author, blogger and former Editor, The New Republic

“What the founders knew is that you can get any decent person in there, you give them unchecked power, and they become a monster. . . . Ron Paul has always talked about these issues, and . . . I have a lot of respect for what he’s saying.”
—Naomi Wolf, author, The Beauty Myth and Give Me Liberty

“In Congress, Paul is known as Dr. No, for his staunch refusal to vote for any bill he thinks might expand government power. . . . This message has hit home.”
—New York Times

“I think he’s the only guy who really understands monetary policy, economic policy, the proper role of the state, the proper role of the U.S. in the world. . . . if you asked me who is speaking truth to power, it’s Ron Paul.”
—David A. Stockman, former Director, Office of Management and Budget; author, The Triumph of Politics and The Great Deformation

“[He] cannot be bought by special interests.”
—New York Post

Although Obamacare’s health-insurance policies are shocking people by imposing very high deductibles, high deductibles alone are a feature, not a bug, of high-performing health insurance. In the absence of over-regulation of health insurance, every dollar a beneficiary pays directly to a healthcare provider, instead of to a health insurer as premium, reduces administrative and bureaucratic costs. If very few patients incur health spending above the deductible, administrative costs and hassles should shrink.

Robert Laszewski, a well-known health-insurance executive and consultant, recently stated that only three or four percent of beneficiaries would hit a $5,000 deductible. The real question is whether the high deductible is attached to a policy that is consumer-driven (i.e., covers costs that consumers themselves are willing to pay premiums to health insurers to cover) or government-driven (i.e., forces consumers to pay premiums that finance the government’s priorities instead of their own). This is the real struggle over Obamacare.

Employment gives people earned satisfaction and upward mobility. It can be especially fulfilling when a person is employed in their preferred field. But government policies often deprive some people of these benefits by establishing artificial barriers to employment.

One such barrier is occupational licensure that prohibits employment in a specific occupation unless a would-be worker obtains government permission by first satisfying various licensing requirements. These requirements are typically enacted in the name of “protecting public health and safety,” but their true purpose is to stifle competition from aspiring workers and businesses.

The common perception is that occupational licenses are required primarily of doctors, dentists, nurses, and other high-skill occupations where an unqualified practitioner could do serious harm to a customer. But many government licenses are required of relatively low-skill jobs, and these requirements eliminate the bottom rungs of the economic ladder for many poor and less-educated people.

The Institute for Justice examined licensing requirements for 102 low- and moderate-income occupations such as barber, florist, makeup artist, massage therapist, preschool teacher, shampooer, and tree trimmer in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The report found that five of the six states that impose the heaviest licensing burdens in the country are in the West (see the graphic below on the 20 worst states). Consider, for example, the nation’s most populous state of California, ranked second worst.

Graphic produced by Veronique de Rugy and Rizqi Rachmat, Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The New York Times made a splash last week with an analysis that purportedly shows that the U.S. middle class is declining relative to the middle class in other countries. Especially, the data make it look like Canadian median income surpassed U.S. median income in 2010, when U.S. median income was $18,700.

This analysis shares a weakness with similar studies: It measures cash disposable income but does not include in-kind benefits. For both Canadians and Americans, health care makes up the biggest share of those benefits. Although the Times article discloses this weakness, it also makes a somewhat misleading statement about sales taxes and health benefits in the two countries:

The definition does not include sales taxes or noncash benefits, such as health care provided by a government or employer. (Americans tend to face lower than average sales taxes, but they also receive less comprehensive health benefits and thus must use more of their disposal income on health care.)

First, the difference in sales taxes is important enough that it should be measured as a reduction in disposable income. Because both the Canadian federal government and provincial governments levy these taxes, the combined rate is much larger than in the United States.  In Ontario, Canada’s largest province, the combined sales tax rate is 13 percent.

It’s just not fair: only one of the Senate millionaires pictured here is a womanElizabeth Warren is out selling herself and her new book, Fighting Chance, and her headline du jour is “We Are Not Resting Until at Least 50 Senators Are Women”

I’m not sure why she thinks that would solve her biggest beef, which is, in her words:

“Let’s just be real clear – the game is rigged and it’s rigged in favor of those who have money and who have power.”

If she was talking about the game she’s currently playing—the U.S. Senate—she couldn’t have spoken truer words.

In fact, 2014 marks a new record for Congress: For the first time in history, most members of Congress are millionaires, and the median net worth for all Senators increased by 10.8% over the prior year, to $2.7 million from $2.5 million.

According to a new analysis of personal financial disclosure data by the Center for Responsive Politics:

Of 534 current members of Congress, at least 268 had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012, according to disclosures filed last year by all members of Congress and candidates. The median net worth for the 530 current lawmakers who were in Congress as of the May filing deadline was $1,008,767 …

Breaking the numbers down further, congressional Democrats had a median net worth of $1.04 million, while congressional Republicans had a median net worth of almost exactly $1 million. In both cases, the figures are up from last year, when the numbers were $990,000 and $907,000, respectively.

Median incomes for Democratic Senators dropped a bit, due primarily to John Kerry’s leaving to become Secretary of State, removing his 2011 average net worth of $248 million from the pool, but remain in the very comfortable neighborhood of $1.7 million.

So the next time one of your “representatives” in Washington tells you she feels your pain, ask her to put her money where her mouth is.

Joseph A. DiMasi, Christopher-Paul Milne, and Alex Tabarrok have written a devastating Report Card demonstrating how poorly the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does its business. The FDA has a government-granted monopoly on deciding the safety and efficacy of new medicines. Nobody in America is allowed to choose to take a medicine not approved by the FDA without breaking the law.

The seeds of this monopoly were planted over a century ago, and they have sprouted into a thicket that is preventing Americans from benefitting from new medicines in a timely fashion. From 1993 to 2004, the FDA permitted an average of 33.4 innovative medicines annually. This dropped by 24 percent, to 25.3 innovative new medicines, in the period from 2005 to 2013.

Further, the FDA has twelve review divisions, and DiMasi and colleagues have examined the performance of each one. Not only is the FDA getting slower at permitting new medicines, but performance is inconsistent across divisions. The median time to approve a new oncology or antiviral therapy is just under 200 days, whereas it takes almost 600 days to approve a new neurology drug.

DiMasi and colleagues have added to this analysis by measuring the productivity of each review division, that is, the number of new drug applications per full-time staffer. Surprisingly, the review divisions with the largest number of applications per staffer were oncology and antiviral — the ones with the fastest approval times! Perhaps it proves the old adage that if you want something done, give it to someone who is already busy.

Familiarity may indeed, as the saying goes, breed contempt, but it also breeds a sort of somnolence. People who have never known anything other than a certain state of affairs—even an extraordinarily problematic state of affairs—have a tendency not to notice it at all, to relate it, so to speak, as if they were sleepwalking through it. Such is the situation of modern people in relation to the state. They have always known it, and they take it completely for granted, regarding it as one might regard the weather: whether it brings rain or sunshine, lightning bolts or soothing spring breezes, it is always there, an aspect of nature itself. Even when it proves destructive, its destruction still qualifies as something akin to “acts of God.”

We relate to the state in this sleepwalking fashion, however, not because doing so is hardwired in our genes, but because our conditions of life and our long historical accommodation to living under the state’s domination predispose us to react to it in this oblivious manner. People who have lived in other circumstances, however, have reacted quite differently. Only when human populations adopted settled agriculture did they prove amenable to state domination. During the vastly longer epoch of human existence in small hunting and gathering bands, the state was impossible: people had few if any nonperishable stores of wealth to be plundered, and if someone attempted to impose state-like domination on a band, its members simply ran away, putting as much distance between themselves and the exploiters as necessary to escape the would-be state’s predation. (See, for example, James C. Scott’s recent analysis in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.)

Christina Hoff Sommers offers a great fact check on the propaganda currently being spread to “Ban Bossy,” here. As she details, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s campaign is rooted in cherry-picked data and at least one extremely old study that conveniently support her premise. Girls overall are doing better than boys, and “Bossy” is irrelevant to the conversation.

I don’t favor campaigns against words. As the youngest of six children, I was the target of quite a bit of teasing growing up, and Mom well taught me, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

On a more serious level, Independent Institute Research Fellow Donald Downs was recently honored by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, for his path-breaking work against campus speech codes (such as our book by him, Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus).

Unfortunately, the largely liberal (now there’s a misnomer if ever there was one) attempt to control who can say what has now moved off the campus and into the mainstream, and has further expanded to witch hunts against private citizens’ private giving to causes liberals decide are verboten (e.g., Brendan Eich and the Kochs).

So I’m not really advocating for banning the term, but I would very much appreciate the enlightened disuse of the term “Giving back.”

“Giving back” is shorthand for “Giving back to the community,” the implication of which is that one’s blessings have been provided by the community.

The corollary of it is in statements such as President Obama’s, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

Yes, we are placed in community together, and yes, we are directed to share our blessings and bounty with our fellow creatures. But our blessings are from our Creator, our relationships are as autonomous, equally loved and valued, individual creations, and our charity (from the Greek “agape:” love) is given, voluntarily, in reflection of the love our Ccreator has given us. It is not repayment for value given, it is voluntary, and taxes are not some kind of secular alternative.

The church leaders currently crusading in Illinois for a progressive income tax apparently missed that lesson in seminary. When they quote Jesus, “For everyone to whom much is given, much will be required,” to support their arguments, do they think Jesus was suggesting that one should render unto Caesar for him to benevolently provide for the people?

It is a short trip from accepting the concept of “giving back” to believing that the coercive misappropriation of higher percentages of productive labor equates with “justice”.

So, please: Just say No to “Giving back.”

The White House and its media allies have been cheerleading Obamacare’s apparent success at exceeding the president’s stated target for enrollments in the Obamacare health-insurance exchanges. Even more importantly, they have asserted that a significant proportion enrolled in the exchanges are young people. President Obama declared that 35 percent of enrollees are under the age of 35.

Enrolling enough young people into Obamacare was important because insurers are forbidden to charge applicants premiums commensurate with their health risks. Also, insurers are prohibited from charging older people premiums that exceed three times what they charge younger people. However, it would be more actuarially accurate for insurers to price the premiums of older people at more than six times the amount they charge young people.

So, the Obamacare exchanges need lots of young people paying premiums to subsidize the older people. Failure to recruit enough youngsters would condemn the exchange plans to higher medical claims, and necessitate a significant spike in premiums in 2015.

A previously stated goal was that 40 percent of enrollees be young. So, 35 percent looks close enough. However, President Obama’s victory statement is a piece of lawyerly evasion, as first identified by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post.