Kevin Zeese, a leading proponent of the conservative/liberal/libertarian antiwar coalition, is soliciting signers for this excellent letter. If you want to add your name, as I did, send an email to Zeese at kbzeese@gmail.com.

Dear President Obama:

The wars in which the United States is currently engaged—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Libya—are undermining U.S. national and economic security, degrading the standing of the United States in the world community and fueling hatred abroad for Americans. These wars have been justified on false premises, and in the case of Libya there was not even the pretense of a congressional declaration of war, making it an impeachable offense. We urge you to end the current wars and start a national dialogue about shifting U.S. foreign policy away from dominance through military might, and toward being a member of the community of nations.

It is time to end all of these wars. It is time to initiate a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy away from domination of others through military might and damaging sanctions. As a first step we urge a major withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan–as you promised. This withdrawal should be at least as large as the 50,000 troop escalation you put in place early in your presidency. This withdrawal should be defined as a clear first step to a rapid withdrawal of all troops and private contractors from Afghanistan. It is time to return to our Founders’ declared conception of the United States as a democratic Republic and not an Empire. In short, it is time for America to come home.

The people signing this letter come from all segments of the political spectrum. We are conservatives and progressives, liberals and libertarians, from the right, left and center. We are Democrats, Republicans and independents. We represent a healthy and still vital American tradition,indicated by the fact that the majority of Americans want the United States to bring our troops home from these counterproductive and unnecessary wars.

With the death of Osama bin Laden it is time to end the “war on terror,” which Vice President Dick Cheney described as a multi-generational “Long War.” The U.S. needs to normalize relationships with countries around the world, especially in the Middle East. We recognize that there are important natural resources in these areas. But we can achieve energy independence and a sustainable economy in more effective ways than war and empire. The United States clearly has the wealth and knowledge to make this transition, and showing how it can be done would be an unparalleled service to our people and the world.

This is the time for a profound shift in foreign policy. A perfect storm has demonstrated the urgent need to reconsider militarism and promiscuous interventionism:

• The U.S. economy can no longer sustain a military that spends as much on weapons and war as the rest of the world combined.
• The U.S. economy is in dangerous straits with mass debt fueled in large part by military spending that makes up 55% of federal discretionary spending.
• In war after war the US military has found that it cannot defeat people who seek to protect their countries and reject foreign domination, the very lesson of our own American Revolution.
• Documents published by Wikileaks have clearly discredited the idea of the U.S. being the “good cop of the world.” Instead the world now sees our government as one that dominates through threats, violence, bribery, spying and illegal actions, and a government all too willing to use military force to achieve its ends. That is not the polity which the majority of Americans wish.
• The death of Osama bin Laden is an opportunity to stop the growth of terrorism, growth inspired in significant part by unnecessary wars, which commonly feature torture, raids on families and the killing of innocent civilians. War brings suffering on a massive scale and unnecessary war brings pointless suffering.

This is a historic opportunity to redirect U.S. foreign policy down the pathways of peace, liberty, justice, respect for community, and fiscal responsibility. George Washington urged Americans to “cultivate peace and harmony with all” and to “avoid overgrown military establishments,” which are “hostile to republican liberty.” It is time for Americans to reject fear and militarism and embrace the highest, noblest aspirations of our heritage. It is time to come home, America.

Sincerely,

In their new study, “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled,” economists Timothy Conley (University of Western Ontario) and Bill Dupor (Ohio State University) present their empirical findings of the economic impact on employment of the 2009 Obama stimulus package of $787 billion, entitled the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARRA was passed based on Keynesian economic theory that claimed that massive federal spending would boost the economy of the Great Recession and create private-sector jobs. However, Conley and Dupor find the following:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services. This suggests the possibility that, in absence of the ARRA, many government workers (on average relatively well-educated) would have found private-sector employment had their jobs not been saved. Searching across alternative model specifications, the best-case scenario for an effectual ARRA has the Act creating/saving a net 659 thousand jobs, mainly in government.

Conley and Dupor further note that:

A large fraction of the Federal ARRA dollars was channeled through and controlled by state and local governments. . . . Upon acquisition of ARRA funds for a specific purpose, a state or local government could cut its own expenditure on that purpose. As a result, these governments could treat the ARRA dollars as general revenue, i.e. the dollars were effectively fungible. . . . Federal aid arrived when state and local governments were entering into budget crises. . . . The deterioration of the non-Federal government budget position occurred concurrently with an increase in Federal grants . . , mainly due to the ARRA, of approximately the same amount. In fact, a substantial component of the ARRA was authorized specifically to cover states’ tax losses (through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund) and the most dramatic cost increases (through support for state Medicaid programs).

These federal policies were inspired by the similarly harmful policies of FDR in his New Deal of the 1930s. However in his book, Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity, Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs has shown that federal stimulus measures then were responsible for prolonging and deepening the Great Depression which did not end until after such policies were ended in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The U.S. government is blaming Syria for skirmishes at the Israel border. So far, the U.S. has resisted pressures to intervene against the Syrian regime, despite its crackdowns against civilians somewhat resembling those of Libya’s. Hawkish Senators and others have lately called for war with Syria, and of course American political leaders have been toying with the idea of attacking this nation since the height of the Bush years, when the hilarious line was that Saddam’s WMD were being stashed there. So why the restraint? Syria is a great ally of Iran, and the Obama administration seeks Syria’s assistance in persuading Iran to abandon its nuclear program and sponsorship of anti-Israel violence.

Strange how that works, but that’s realpolitik for you. The U.S. cares so much about protecting the oppressed peoples of the world against despots that it will refrain from its normal policy of bombing nations for the sake of peace, if there is the potential to get the repressive foreign state on board in convincing another such state to be less belligerent itself.

As for the Iran nuclear program itself, so far the evidence does not show it to be a credible threat to anyone, not now and not in the near and foreseeable future.  But the talking heads keep referring to the program as though it is a weapons initiative, rather than a civilian energy undertaking. The administration seems to bask in this conflation, although, as with many other lines of propaganda, it is never explicitly said by high officials directly. To the contrary,in 2007 the National Intelligence Estimate found with “high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair testified that the intelligence community stood by this assessment in March 2009. The International Atomic Energy Agency has corroborated this in its annual reports. Yet over and over we see American policy shaped by this notion that Iran’s nuclear program is some sort of threat. Much of the hysteria concerns the bizarre Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is characterized as a dangerous dictator, although he doesn’t have the power over the Iranian state that is often assumed.

In any event, it is perhaps a silver lining that fear of Iran may be forestalling U.S. war for a change. But if the calculation shifts, the U.S. could find itself in yet another conflict.

Independent Institute Research Fellow Emily Skarbek is interviewed here by Nick Gillespie of Reason TV regarding the Institute’s very timely and far-reaching Government Cost Calculator.

The Calculator enables any American to clearly understand three aspects of federal government spending. First, the Calculator helps you determine how much a person will pay for various federal programs now and over the course of a lifetime. Second, it compares those tax payments to the forgone earnings that would have been possible if such funds were kept and invested in private market accounts. Finally, the Calculator enables you to see the difference between government expenditures and your tax payments, clearly illustrating the growing debt obligations you face in the future. Unlike total or “per capita” government debt calculators currently available, the Calculator personalizes government spending, enabling you to see how much federal programs are costing you now and how much they will cost you in the future.

You can then break down federal spending into twenty-two areas to further explore exactly what the comparative costs mean and then pursue the issues further in numerous books, articles, etc.

Writer Brendan Behan once remarked, “There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.”  I am an economics professor at Florida State University (FSU), and my department has been getting lots of publicity this week.

Our run in the spotlight started with an op-ed on May 1 in the local newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, in which the writers were criticizing a grant my department received from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation because, the writers argued, we gave up our academic freedom to get the money.  The story was picked up by the St. Petersburg Times, and seems to have gone viral after that.  I could pick and choose a few links to share, but when I just Googled “Florida State University economics Koch” Google returned 211,000 results.  You can see for yourself what people are saying.

I don’t object to the investigative reporting that is being done on this issue.  As a government-run institution, I am happy to have our activities scrutinized and for the press to inquire into our funding sources, and how we are spending our money.  In this case, however, I think the press coverage has distorted the facts.

The money from the Koch Foundation was intended to fund faculty positions, to provide money for graduate student stipends, and to fund some undergraduate programs.  All of the negative publicity has been with regard to the faculty positions.  The contract with the Koch Foundation says that a committee that includes a representative from the Foundation will screen and approve any hires on that money, that the Foundation will get annual reports on the activities it funds, and that it can withdraw its support at any time if it is dissatisfied.  The money is coming as annual grants to support one year’s spending.  None is going into an endowment.  FSU is being criticized for allowing the Koch Foundation to have a say in who we hire.

Here are some facts about our accepting this money.  We recognized at the outset that we didn’t want an outside organization telling us who we could hire, and agreed we would only take the money if the Foundation agreed to support candidates we wanted to hire.  If there were no mutually acceptable candidates, we would not take the money.

Further, if you look at the three faculty we added with the Koch money, only one of them actually went through the screening process described above.  In two out of the three hires, we identified a candidate we wanted to hire without any Koch Foundation screening, we presented the candidate to Koch, and they said they would fund the hire.  They aren’t telling us who we can or cannot hire.  If the Koch Foundation turned down a candidate we wanted (and, they have turned down none of our suggestions), we could always hire them with our own money (which means, money taken from Florida’s taxpayers).

The university also agreed that if during the grant period the Koch Foundation decided to withdraw its annual appropriation to support those hires, the university would fund the positions.  The Koch Foundation could not determine who we hired, or whether someone would be terminated.  They could only determine whether they would pay for a hire.

This seems reasonable to me.  More than a decade ago I wrote a book (which is for sale through the Independent Institute) describing the way that philanthropic donations often end up supporting causes that the donor would have found abhorrent.  Donors always make donations with the intent of furthering ends with which they agree, whether it is funding cancer research, or supporting a symphony orchestra… or the teaching of the virtues of the market system in an economics department.  Once the money is given, especially if it is in the form of a bequest, or goes into an endowment, there is always the risk that the money will be spent for things which the donor would not approve.

In our grant from the Koch Foundation, they protected their interests both by only agreeing to provide the money if it was spent on something we saw as our mutual interest, and by having the right to stop their payments to us if they were dissatisfied with how they were using them.  On our end, we protected our interests by agreeing (within our department) that we would only hire on those lines if the candidates were people we would have chosen anyway, and (as a guarantee from our university administration) that if the Foundation did withdraw their funding mid-way through the contract, the university would fund those positions.  Does this constitute giving up our academic freedom?

In addition to being able to hire three faculty in tight budgetary times—at no taxpayer expense—we are also supporting several graduate students and undergraduate programs with money from the Koch Foundation.  Nobody in the department objects to the hires we made, and we are happy to have the financial support for our students.  But, understandably, there are some faculty who are upset about the negative publicity the Koch money has brought us.

Perhaps one source of hostility toward this agreement stems from the fact that Charles Koch is well-known for supporting libertarian causes, and the publicity is intended as an attack on Koch.  As a faculty member in the Florida State University economics department, I may be too close to the situation to give an objective judgment.  The agreement was signed and the Koch money began coming to our department in 2009, and after two quiet years, all of a sudden this week the subject is getting a lot of press.

In the 1980s, many prominent conservatives spoke openly in favor of liberalizing immigration. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who was responsible for the United States’s last mass amnesty. The left was often skeptical about immigrants. Unionists opposed the free labor competition. Environmentalists and population controllers were among the most vocal advocates of restrictionism.

The politics of the 1990s appeared to be different. California passed Proposition 187, which cut illegal aliens off many state services—an initiative supported by voters who wanted to see the immigrants shut out as much as by those who objected to the illicit government spending. The rights of aliens to due process took a major beating in the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, supported by most congressional Republicans and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The restrictionist campaign of Pat Buchanan got lots of attention, and, into the next decade, among the several betrayals by Bush and the mainline GOP cited by rightwingers was their supposed commitment to open borders and amnesty.

Now President Obama boasts of having cracked down on the border. He wants a “comprehensive immigration” reform proposal, and is citing the dramatic increase in deportations and drug interdiction on his watch as evidence that now is time to pursue such a proposal. Undoubtedly, Republicans are fearful of moving too far toward liberalization, as they often have to prove to their base supporters how tough they are on the subject.

I must say I’ve never been very convinced by this idea that both parties are “soft” on immigration. To the contrary, as with most other excuses for increasing police power—drugs, terrorism, crime—both parties tend to play up fears and support a burgeoning surveillance state.

Sure, most politicians bow to political correctness enough to say that “we are a nation of immigrants” and to talk about how great immigration is for the United States. But most, also, seem to draw a major distinction between those who cross the border legally and those who do so without Washington’s permission.

The two parties have slightly different rhetorical emphasis, but they both favor government action to restrict immigration. The conservatives want more fences and militarized cops or even soldiers on the border. The liberals tend to focus on the supposedly predatory businessmen  who dare to hire undocumented workers. They want more spying on corporate America. Both factions have favored the National ID card as a measure to keep the huddled masses from taking the jobs of the native-born.

But what about the moral issues involved? If someone wishes to cross the border to come into the United States, either to visit, to move, to work, or to lounge around on his cousin’s couch, where is the moral authority of the government to get in the way? It appears to me that this is a clear cut issue. Now, some will say that a nation is nothing without its laws. I would ask if they would defend every single law of the United States (to say nothing of the other nations), or whether if in fact some of those laws are immoral and ought to be repealed, their violators pardoned. Some will say that a nation is nothing without borders in particular. Yet the United States did not have any major restrictions on immigration until the late 19th century—around the same time that America began fully abandoning what made it unique among nations to become just another imperialistic centrally managed leviathan as were all the nations of the Old World from which no small part of America’s population had fled, hoping to find a better climate for liberty here in the U.S. Immigration controls were part of the Progressive agenda, along with business regulations, alcohol prohibition, welfare programs, criminal justice reforms and perpetual war abroad.

It is particularly rich for the United States to wish to enforce its borders against peaceful immigrants when it does not seem to respect the borders of other countries at all as it concerns national security policy. Obama claims the right to go into any country, find someone he has determined is an enemy combatant, and summarily execute him. The president does not appear to respect the borders of Pakistan. Why should some poor laborer respect the United States’s borders with Mexico? Of course, this is an unfair parallel, as the laborer has no realistic prospect of enforcing an alien jurisdiction in this country, and is most likely not going to kill innocent civilians with drone attacks, unlike the U.S. president. American nationalists hysterically worry about Muslims coming to the U.S. and imposing Sharia law. I’m much more afraid of Obama’s law—a law that he does in fact impose throughout much of the world.

Indeed, if borders have any legitimate purpose at all, it is to restrain governments, not people. But the U.S. government has never felt restrained by its borders. Quite the reverse. For centuries, U.S. politicians have pushed to expand the formal and informal boundaries of the United States so as to cover an ever larger section of the Earth’s surface. And then, somehow, the politicians complain that some poor worker might seek to enter this nation of immigrants and stolen land for the criminal goal of taking a rough job and helping his family survive.

Now, if it is true that no nation-state can function long without forcibly maintaining control over even thousands of miles of borders, then this is all the more reason to resent and oppose nation states. For there is simply no reason under the principles of basic morality and natural law that being born on one side of a line drawn on a map should mean you have more rights and liberties than being born on the other side. And yet, illegal aliens are detained in cruel conditions and sometimes forgotten about. They live in constant fear of the immigration authorities and thus cannot live as openly in the economy and community as they should be able to. They are separated from loved ones in their home countries by the caprices of the history of conquest. The very fact that some are proposing to turn them into second-class citizens is evidence that their situation is even worse than that of second-class citizens.

Illegal immigrants shouldn’t get welfare, but neither should anyone else. They shouldn’t have to pay taxes either (nor should anyone else). And perhaps they shouldn’t be granted citizenship, but in a free society, being a citizen shouldn’t matter much. If politicians want to keep them from voting, that is fine as far as it goes. But no actual rights should be deprived of someone due to their home address.

Obama’s position on immigration is not liberal and even worse is the position of those who find him to pander to immigrants. The proper position, the one that embodies American values in the best sense of the phrase: Let them stay. Let them in. Allow the market and communities to figure out the cultural and ethnic makeup of the country. As with all other social issues, the federal government cannot help but make the situation less humane and less civilized.

See also the Independent Institute’s open letter on immigration and Bob Higgs’s “The Difference Between and Illegal Immigrant and Me.”

Yesterday, after I had participated in the commencement exercises at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin, in Guatemala City, I was interviewed by a reporter for Prensa Libre, an important newspaper in this city. I did not know what the reporter would ask me, but I supposed that his questions might have something to do with economic affairs or with the reasons for my having been given an honorary degree by the university.

To my surprise, all of the reporter’s questions pertained to the drug war in Guatemala—its causes, what the government’s policy should be, how the government might combat the cartels more effectively, and so forth. I used this occasion to emphasize the same points that I—along with many others—have been making about this so-called war for decades: in particular, that the possession, use, and commerce of narcotics should not be legally forbidden; that the major consequence of this prohibition has been the creation of a black market in an artificially high-priced, widely demanded set of goods; that this black market has attracted persons willing to take risk, violate the law, and use violence to settle disputes among themselves and their rivals; that the government’s conduct of the drug war has contributed greatly to the massive corruption of the police and the political authorities; and that the general public has suffered in a variety of ways as a result of the policy, most significantly because of the widespread killing that it has occasioned, especially in Colombia and Mexico, but also because of its huge expense and its grave damage to civil liberties in the United States and elsewhere.

I got the feeling that these views were not exactly what the reporter was looking for. The character of his questions led me to suspect that he was interested in hearing my views about how the drug war might be fought more effectively. But I have no way to know, of course, so my hunch may be completely off base.

In discussing the economic conditions and prospects of Guatemala with my colleagues at UFM during the past few days, I have been somewhat surprised by the frequency with which the conversation has returned to the drug war and its effects on this country. Guatemala apparently has become a focus for a large volume of the transport and financial dealings that the narcos carry out as part of their vast international business. They are insinuating themselves deeply into legal businesses and government activities here—and of course into politics, as well—and thereby becoming a major force in determining the country’s economic fortunes, for better or worse. They are also provoking a palpable degree of fear among the local people. Private security personnel are on display everywhere in Guatemala City in great numbers; the private-security industry must be a major source of income and employment here.

Meanwhile, in the United States, most of the people go on with their daily lives unaware of the widespread harm that their support for the U.S. drug war—and its hugely destructive spillovers around the world—is causing. This whole policy is almost incomprehensible to some intelligent people here in Guatemala. They wonder how a segment of the U.S. public, consisting of puritanical busybodies willing to support the use of coercive force against their neighbors’ private use of certain substances, can keep in place for decades such a horrific policy.

I explain to my friends that by this time, the U.S. politicians have learned that the coercive-busybody faction can be satisfied and their votes garnered without seriously offending another faction that opposes the policy and that the bulk of the public is simply sleepwalking through life while the drug war rages around them, barely out of their sight. Moreover, the drug war has deeply entrenched an enormous police apparatus, enriched and militarized local police across the country, and given the authorities a fine means of enriching themselves by corruption and covert cooperation with the narcos. If anyone wanted to find an example of a public policy whose overall benefits (if indeed one even considers such benefits to exist) fall dramatically short of its overall costs, no better example could be found.

Although most Americans have long since grown accustomed to and complacent about the drug war, which has become for them a sort of public-policy background noise, the people of small countries such a Guatemala cannot be so blase about it. It is altering the very fabric of political and economic life in their countries, and it is causing violence, kidnapping, robbery, and murder to flourish in places where life would otherwise be much more peaceful. To anyone who seriously ponders the drug war, its manifest evil ought to be undeniable, yet many Americans continue to support it, more or less, and only a small minority of Americans appreciates it for the almost indescribably destructive madness that it truly is.

Senior Fellow Robert Higgs has just superbly reviewed for the Journal of Policy History the very important book, War, Revenue, and State Building: Financing the Development of the American State, by Sheldon D. Pollack (Cornell University Press).

In addition, this weekend Dr. Higgs has been awarded an honorary doctoral degree in the social sciences (Doctados Honoris Causa Ciencias Sociales) from Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala. Here is a video of the award and his presentation:

When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the stereotypical bowdlerizers of speech–the people excising “offensive” lyrics and literature—were the uptight blue-nosed sort who feared that “someone, somewhere, was having fun.” (H.L. Mencken).

Now, the “progressive” Left has replaced the Puritanical Right as the great policer of speech. “Progressives” have always policed speech (“you are politically incorrect, comrade!”) so this is really nothing new. Both Left and Right have a long history of searching out words they feel are too sensitive to the ears of minors or thin-skinned individuals. (Apologies in advance for those who suffer from blue noses or thin skin).

Latest example: the Canadian “Standards Council” has banned the Dire Straits song for using the word “faggot” in the classic 1980s tune “Money for Nothing.” I learned this after listening to the song on the Dire Straits’ album “Brothers in Arms.” The song brought back memories of my youth so I searched out the video which was as good as I recalled (classic MTV video of the 1980s). Alas, the video has also been excised so that it is “good for all countries.” Now Canada can join the Religious Right in America and the Muslim bloc (in the United Nations) in bullying or outlawing “hate speech.” Perhaps the result will be some Universalist Code of Speech.

What makes this even more chilling is that they are attacking not only present speech but scouring the past for things that might offend someone if ever read or heard now. Shades of Fahrenheit 451.

The new rule of thumb: don’t say anything that might offend any one one hundred years from now. Good luck guessing what might be on the “hit list” in the year 2111!

Coda: the secondary definitions for “bluenosed: “Canadian.”

Kind of appropriate, eh?

My article on Talk Radio as an example of spontaneous order in tornado relief just appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Here is an excerpt:

The tornado that tore through here late last month left 41 dead and 12 still missing. Whole neighborhoods now resemble bombed-out postwar Tokyo or Berlin. But this devastation is only part of the story. Tuscaloosa is now the scene of an inspiring volunteer relief effort taking place without the guidance of any central planner.

Instead of going home for break, for example, students in the Greek system at the University of Alabama and historically black Stillman College stayed to cook more than 7,000 meals per day. Local churches have assembled armies of volunteers and vast stores of goods, ranging from dog food to child car seats, and are dispersing them with no questions asked at “free department stores.” It is doubtful that a more secular city could have fared as well.

Other than churches, much of the strength of Tuscaloosa’s extensive mutual aid comes from an unlikely source: right wing talk radio. The four Tuscaloosa Clear Channel stations have pre-empted their normal fare of Rush, Hannity and top 40 songs to serve as a relief clearinghouse through simulcasts. Gigi South, the local market manager for Tuscaloosa Clear Channel, says that it was her decision to begin the simulcasts. It was hard to do otherwise. Employees saw demolished neighborhoods outside their windows and the desperate calls for help came in almost immediately. Because many residents lost power and were unable charge cell phones, battery-operated and car radios often became their only form of communication.

These stations have only 12 full-time employees among them, but they’ve have had a vast impact. The on-air jocks have taken on grueling shifts, sometimes working 10 hours straight. The goal of the simulcasts is simple: Connect givers and victims and allow them to exchange information. According to Ms. South, “this whole thing has been about connecting listener to listener. They are the ones doing this. We’re just the conduit.”