As Congress debates the merits of the “public option” for health insurance, we might look at Florida for some experience, because Florida has had a public option for years, not for health insurance but for property insurance.

After Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992 some Floridians were having difficulty purchasing homeowners’ insurance.  (The reason: rates are regulated, and at the regulated rates some properties are too great a risk.)  So, the state government formed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, which is owned and operated by the State of Florida.

As originally envisioned, Citizens would charge rates above those charged by private insurers, to make Citizens the insurer of last resort.  Nevertheless, Citizens found plenty of customers.

After two bad hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005 property insurance rates in Florida rose, and in his campaign for the office, current Governor Charlie Crist promised voters that if elected he would see that their property insurance bills “dropped like a rock.”

One tactic he used was to change Citizens’ rate structure so it was competitive with private insurers.  His idea, like President Obama’s idea with health insurance, is that with a public option, private insurers would have to keep their rates in line or risk losing customers to the government insurer.

That’s what’s happened in Florida.  Today about 30% of homeowners’ policies are written by Citizens, which is the largest property insurer in the state.  It’s about to get bigger too.  The largest private insurer, State Farm, had a rate request rejected last year, and now is pulling out of the state altogether (for property insurance; they’ll still insure your car).  As the largest private insurer pulls out over a three-year period (that period negotiated with the state), Citizens will get an even larger share of Florida’s property insurance.

Everybody in Florida knows Citizens is a fiscal time bomb.  Already, every Florida insurance policy (on homes, boats, cars, etc.) pays a surcharge that goes to Citizens, but Citizens still doesn’t have sufficient reserves to weather a major hurricane.  When one comes, Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bill.

The legislature knows this, and actually passed a bill last year that would have done a great deal to solve the problem by partially deregulating rates private insurers could charge.  State Farm would have stayed in Florida had that bill taken effect, but it was vetoed by the Governor.  The public option is displacing private insurance.

In Florida, the public option has meant a substantial socialization of insurance, subsidization of the public option by those who take a private option, and the creation of  a fiscally-unsound public insurance company despite the subsidy.  Now, we have an opportunity to do the same thing at the national level with health insurance.  The results have not been good in Florida, and everyone in Florida knows it.  Why would it be any different at the national level?

Those of us laboring for academic reform often feel like Sisyphus, rolling a rock up the hill only to have it come crashing down again. The gods of academe seem to have condemned higher education to inevitable decay.

That thought came to me as I read about the demise of an institute (at Hamilton College) that did everything right, yet the overlords of Political Correctness purged themselves of enemies and “deviationists.” I use these terms because the notion that all-is-political, enemies-must-be-destroyed is linked so strongly to communism and its close cousin national socialism.

In the above unhappy story, Mark Bauerlein tries to see a silver lining by noting that the Institute survives outside the college. Students can go there and read books for which they receive no academic credit, of course. If ever there was a case study in how much the Left prizes control of higher education, this is it.

The next time you are tempted to think that much of what happens is a “misunderstanding” or “good intentions gone awry,” please banish the thought. When push comes to shove, there are those who would put a bullet in your head if this were a different place and time. Instead, they kill ideas by depriving them of air space on campus. No institute, no nonconformist faculty.

Or, as Stalin put it: “no people, no problem.” We, the few, will retire some day and then there will be nobody to speak out against the barbarians.

That is our problem.

Postscript: Robert Weissberg nails the problem(s) exceptionally well in this article.

Second only to Ron Paul, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson is the most pro-liberty politician of any prominence. It looks like he might be considering a presidential run. Johnson seems like a dream come true (at least for a politician). For example, he supports the second amendment, marijuana legalization, and fought tax increases while governor. He also supported Ron Paul for president in the primaries. Sounds too good to be true? Perhaps. The big question is where he stands on foreign policy though the support for Paul is a good sign.

Expressing his frustration with an occupation in Afghanistan that is doomed to fail, citing similarities between the U.S. effort and the failed Soviet occupation of the same country, reminding us that the futility is reminiscent of American involvement in Vietnam, calling the entire project a “complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission” that is strategically bankrupt to the core, Matthew Hoh has submitted a compelling and bold letter of resignation from his post as the Senior Civilian Representative for the U.S. Government in Zabul Province. The whole document is well worth reading.

Although democracy now comes closer than anything else to serving as a world religion, it has never lacked critics. For millennia those critics, such as Aristotle, had large followings among political thinkers and practicing politicians. Even as late as 1787, when a group of prominent men met in Philadelphia to compose the U.S. Constitution, democracy was viewed with trepidation, and the framers created an apparatus of government in which democracy was hemmed in on all sides, lest the country fall into the much-dreaded condition of “mob rule.”

Nowadays, democracy’s defects are more likely to be seen as relatively benign ― its devotees like to quote Winston Churchill’s quip that “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” ― or as defects not of democracy itself, but of the party shenanigans and other frictions that keep the democratic system from operating more fully. Thus, people complain of “gridlock” and bemoan a “do-nothing” Congress because these things impede the unrestricted functioning of democracy.

Public choice theorists have written countless articles and books spelling out the manifold ways in which democracy, viewed as a political decision rule for making collective choices by means of voting, may fail to aggregate the preferences of individual constituents into an outcome that represents the “will of the people.” More than fifty years ago, Kenneth Arrow showed that no such aggregation is possible, given certain seemingly appealing restrictions on the nature of people’s preferences, such as transitivity (if A is preferred to B, and B is preferred to C, then C cannot be preferred to A).

None of this theorizing had the slightest effect on the common people’s idea that democracy can and should translate the “will of the people” into collective choices; nor has it kept generations of politicians from talking as if such a translation were possible and desirable. (Political practice, in contrast to political rhetoric, has always proceeded in the usual corrupt fashion, featuring scheming plutocrats, privilege-seeking special-interest groups, and the iron law of oligarchy.)

I mention these things only by way of introduction, however, because here I wish to claim that democracy’s gravest defect has little or nothing to do with the defects traditionally ascribed to it. I maintain that its severest defect, indeed, a flaw so critical that it gives democracy the potential to destroy civilization, pertains to its effect in corrupting the people’s moral judgment.

To see how this corruption comes about, let us begin by recognizing that in many people’s eyes, certain government functionaries may legitimately take actions that would be condemned as criminal if anyone else were to take them. If you or I were to threaten a neighbor with violence unless he handed over a specified sum of money, we would  be universally recognized as engaged in extortion or attempted robbery. Yet, the functionaries of St. Tammany Parish, the state of Louisiana, and the United States of America routinely obtain money from me in precisely this manner. And although many people subject to such takings may complain that the amounts demanded are excessive, hardly anybody describes the exactions as constituting nothing more than extortion or armed robbery. Why not? Because the functionaries who assess and collect these sums of money ― which they style “taxes,” not loot, plunder, or swag ―  are democratically elected “public officials.”

From a moral point of view, I am hard pressed to see how their employment status gives them a defensible right to act in ways that everyone would recognize as criminal if undertaken by a private individual. In political theory, a representative democratic government is said to derive its just powers by delegation from the people who are governed, with their consent. I assure you that I have never consented to have the various governments rob me, especially for the financing of countless activities that I consider to be useless, destructive, or inherently criminal. Regardless of the uses to which a government puts its booty, however, the people cannot justly delegate to political representatives any rights that they do not possess. If I do not have a right to plunder my neighbor, how can I delegate that right to a government functionary who purports to represent me?

The situation is the same with regard to innumerable other actions that governments carry out, including unjust imprisonment, murder, and demands for compliance with so-called “regulations.” If you or I were to demand the same actions that regulators commonly prescribe, our demands would be plainly seen to constitute unjustified intimidation and lawless coercion, at best. Likewise, if I were to send a private Predator drone to Pakistan to fire explosive missiles into villages, killing women, children, and other innocent persons, I would be seen as a monstrous mass murderer, and demands would be made that I be apprehended and “brought to justice” or killed. Yet when President Obama causes deaths in this way, no such demands are made. How did Barack Obama come by the right to kill innocent people? By democratic election to the presidency of the United States, of course. Most people actually believe, and act on the belief, that mere election to a political office can endow a person with standing to disregard the moral requirements applicable to people in general. And not only the elected official, but all those officials beneath him in the chain of command ― nobody demands that the technician who sits comfortably in the United States and directs the exact operation of the lethal drone be brought to justice; he, as the saying goes, is “only following orders.”

In the war-crimes tribunals conducted after World War II, many defendants pleaded not guilty on the grounds that they were only following orders. This defense, however, was ruled inadmissible, because the top authorities of the Nazi regime, from Adolf Hitler on down, were themselves viewed as war criminals, albeit unavailable in many instances to stand trial as such. In contrast, none of the military officers and men who carried out the fire bombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, and Dresden were indicted; nor were those who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; nor were Churchill and Truman (Franklin Roosevelt having already departed this realm of political strife). Strange to say, Hitler himself originally came to power through democratic procedures, which shows that sometimes democracy is not enough to absolve a leader of criminal acts. Winning a war may also prove decisive when innocence and guilt are being decided and punishments administered.

I fully understand how most Americans would react to the preceding observations. They would say that in wartime, certain actions that would be regarded as crimes during peacetime automatically cease to have this character. It’s an interesting theory: if the leader, especially a democratically elected one, prosecutes a war, he thereby overturns the entire basis of morality ― provided of course that his side wins the war. Killing the innocent, for example, carries no stigma; nor does wanton destruction of property, unjust punishment or imprisonment, and a thousand other actions that would be regarded as flagrant crimes during peacetime.

As the government has grown in this country (and others) during the past century, the scope of government action has widened greatly. Government officials now demand vastly greater sums of money from their subjects, and they demand compliance with vastly more regulations. They and they alone may act in these ways without bringing moral denunciation down on themselves. No wonder they sometimes deport themselves as gods: by their election they have been loosed from the moral bonds that constrain you and me, and, thus unencumbered, they have soared to ever greater heights of criminality and savagery. “When the president does it,” Richard Nixon insisted, “that means that it is not illegal.” Interviewer David Frost pursued the point, asking: “the dividing line is the president’s judgment?” To which Nixon responded, “Yes, and the dividing line and, just so that one does not get the impression, that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate.” Ah, yes, blessed election ― that “accountability moment,” as George W. Bush described it ― surely covers a multitude of sins. We may think of those sins as democracy in action.

Libertarians often argue about whether they might more successfully recruit followers by showing that a free society works best or by showing that an unfree society is unjust. Most libertarians, as I see the matter, have chosen to base their arguments on utilitarian grounds, often because they despair of ever convincing the average person that government officials chronically, or even intrinsically, violate moral strictures. Although I have no doubt whatsoever that free societies do work better than unfree ones, that they deliver, for example, greater prosperity and more rapid economic progress for the masses, I am skeptical that we can cut deeply into the current mass support for the welfare-warfare-therapeutic state unless we open people’s eyes to see that the government actions they now support ― and demand ever more of ― are utterly immoral because they violate individuals’ just rights on a gigantic scale and because the government leaders who propose and implement these measures acquire not an ounce of moral justification from their democratic selection for office. “What works best” remains ever open to dispute, as public policy debate on almost any current issue illustrates: each side has its academic experts, prestigious scientists, or other authorities to prop up its position, and although these two sides rarely offer equally compelling evidence, the lay person can scarcely be expected to see through all of the disinformation and rhetorical flimflam.

Everybody understands, however, without any advanced instruction in the matter, that murder and robbery are wrong, and that no one has a justifiable right to bully his neighbors simply because he does not like the way in which they are conducting their lives. The greatest barrier to libertarian progress continues to be that most people give a moral pass to such criminal actions when democratically elected functionaries take them. This presumed moral immunity by virtue of election to public office is the sheerest superstition ― a montrous mistake in moral reasoning ― and if people can be brought to see it for what it really is, then they will be able to act more effectively to regain some of their lost freedom.

A new political thriller from PBS, “Endgame,” provides the little-known, true back story of apartheid’s end in South Africa, with credit given to a for-profit mining company. Foreseeing that deteriorating conditions in South Africa would likely result in a total loss of their assets, Consolidated Goldfields initiated secret discussions between representatives of the white South African government and the exiled black African National Congress (ANC), paid for and hosted at the company’s estate in England. These talks resulted in Nelson Mandela’s being set free after nearly 30 years in prison, and the public promise by South African President F.W. de Klerk to end the government-sanctioned system of discrimination known as apartheid.

Thus, Malcolm X had it completely wrong when he opined: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” As our new book, Race and Liberty in America, shows:

Capitalism punishes racial discrimination in the marketplace. Capitalism undermines racism by penalizing those who act on their “taste for discrimination.” Firms willing to recruit workers and market their goods and services without regard to color or national origin have a competitive advantage. American streetcar companies, to take but one example, fought segregated seating because it added to their cost of doing business.

This is not to argue that there are no bigots or racists. But Jim Crow, apartheid, and other race- or gender-based laws are at root institutionalized protection from competition, enacted to penalize and make illegal voluntary activities that are taking place in the absence of such laws. In the post-Civil War South, for example, the races were intermingling, intermarrying, and doing business together as a natural course of events. It was only through enacting Jim Crow that those who did not want competition from blacks were able to prohibit, with the full force of the government behind them, these voluntary activities. In the absence of such laws, bigots themselves bear the costs of their own discriminatory behavior, and individuals seeking to maximize their profits and opportunities receive benefits from doing so without racial or other discrimination.

Racism is thus only successfully institutionalized and sustainable through the power of the State, and its cure is to remove the ability of the State to either confer privileges or prohibit peaceful activities for any ostensible reason whatsoever.

Of course, the end of apartheid in South Africa involved many events subsequent to the Consolidated Goldfields peace talks. As portrayed in “Endgame,” for white Afrikaners, “Our fear (of ending apartheid) stems from the knowledge that one day we will be punished for all the terrible wrongs we have inflicted.”

The solution for that challenge—as well as forestalling white revenge against the ANC for its history of terrorist activities—was provided through Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s leading the extraordinary Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For his charming, entertaining, and incredibly moving account of the experience, watch the video of Archbishop Tutu’s address to the Independent Institute’s Gala for Liberty: here.

News is coming in on the most bloody bombing in Baghdad in two years. The temporary lull in violence there, at least in relative terms, has allowed Americans to forget about the precarious nature of the occupation. We have a president who as a politician opposed the Iraq war before it started, but by summer 2004 he was saying, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.” By 2008, before the election, he was saying the surge was working beyond our “wildest dreams.” But the “success” of the surge was largely due to the U.S. bribing and arming militant factions in Iraq. Also, the Iranian government put pressure on Iraqi Shiites to calm down their belligerence. This could all blow up, and certainly if the U.S. decides to rattle its saber at Iran. Americans would prefer to forget the U.S. occupation of Iraq, marking the imperial mindset, but the U.S. will soon have been occupying the nation for seven years, and, unfortunately, another explosion in mass violence might be the only thing that makes Americans remember the significance of this fact.

The United States enacted its minimum wage law in 1938.  It didn’t cover all workers, and still doesn’t, but establishes a policy that in some cases government should abridge people’s freedom of contract to mandate a wage different from the one people might agree upon.  The “principle” appears to be that some wage levels are too unfairly low to be allowable, even if the employee and employer agree to them.  I must put “principle” in quotation marks, because some employment is not covered by the minimum wage law, so the “principle” does not apply to everyone.

Now, at the other end of the wage spectrum, we are enacting a maximum wage law.  President Obama’s pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, is mandating substantial pay cuts for executives in banks and auto companies that received federal bailout money.  In addition, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has proposed a plan to limit compensation of all bankers — not just those who received federal money — in an effort to prevent risky investments by banks.  Bernanke’s maximum wage law would not set any hard-and-fast maximum; rather, it would allow the Fed to, at its discretion, veto compensation schemes it didn’t like.

Like the old minimum wage law, the new maximum wage law would not cover every worker, but Mr. Feinberg did say he hoped his guidelines “might be voluntarily adopted elsewhere.”

For decades the federal government has had a minimum wage law to keep people from being paid too little.  Now it is enacting a maximum wage law to keep them from being paid too much.  It doesn’t cover everyone, but with a foot in the door, it will be a small step toward broader coverage.

President Obama has declared that “the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.” Yet the State of Hawaii, where Obama himself graduated from a top private high school, has just signed a budget-cutting contract with its teachers’ union paring 17 Fridays from the remainder of school year, but leaving teachers with nine paid holidays and six paid “teacher planning” days. At 163 instructional days, Hawaii’s public school calendar is now the shortest in the nation, and only 90% of the 180 days required by law for private schools in most parts of the country.

The State of Hawaii spends $11,060 per student, with more than a quarter of the State’s entire general budget going to the department of education. Yet the educational system turns out students ranking 47th in the country in eighth-grade reading and math. By comparison, tuition at Hawaii’s private schools averages $10,078.

With a recipe for disaster looming for Hawaii’s public school children—fewer days in schools that already under-perform the rest of the nation—now is a good time for Hawaii’s taxpayers to demand a refund of their tax dollars and for the State to privatize its schools. This can be done through teachers/and or parents owning the schools (as detailed in our book, “Can Teachers Own their Own Schools?”); by selling or turning individual schools over to non-profit or for-profit entities as appropriate; letting the market create alternatives; and letting those that fail, close. The record shows that lower taxes result in an increase in charitable giving among Americans, so Hawaiians left with more of their own money could be expected to contribute to non-profit schools directly and/or to programs such as our Independent Scholarship Fund which provides private tuition vouchers for lower-income families to send their children to private schools. Experience has shown that all schools—public and private—improve where competition exists, and there’s every reason to suppose this would be Hawaii’s experience as well.

It’s time for Hawaii’s parents to demand the same freedom of choice the Obamas have exercised in selecting a private education for their daughters. After all, that’s now the only way they can accede to Obama’s call for “more time in the classroom.”

Megan Williams now says she was lying all along when accusing seven men of kidnapping, sexually abusing and assaulting her. The seven plead guilty to charges two years ago.

Indeed, “former Logan County prosecutor Brian Abraham, who was in charge of the case, said no one ever went to jail because of Williams’ statements. Instead, Abraham said Tuesday night, he decided early in the case not to rely on Williams’ statements, but on the physical evidence and the statements of the co-defendants.”

And what did the defendants admit to? “According to the admissions of those eventually convicted, Williams was physically and sexually abused. She was beaten repeatedly, held against her will, burned with hot wax, stabbed in the leg, and forced to perform oral sex on at least two defendants.”

So let me get this straight. The supposed victim claims all the crimes were made up, yet government officials claim that the evidence apart from her accusations — as in, the evidence of something that Williams now admits never happened — was enough to send them to prison.

Now, if something did not happen, and prosecutors claim the evidence and the process were still legally sufficient to put innocent people in jail, then the entire system isn’t even theoretically just.

Williams’s attorney muses, “It sounds to me that there are innocent people held in jail for something they did not do. I have no idea what convinced them to plead guilty.”

Well, I have an idea. The entire criminal justice system, like any socialist institution, is inherently rigged against actual justice. And so most people sent to prison never enjoy a trial, but instead are bullied into pleading guilty because they know their chances with a trial are slim, that the cards are stacked against them, and that if they lose a trial they will end up punished far harsher than what they could “negotiate” in a plea bargain. Despite all these plea bargains, our system is not one characterized by leniency, as we have more prisoners, both in absolute terms and per capita, than any other nation on earth. And so most convicts plead guilty, but we cannot be sure if they are actually guilty, as this was never proven beyond a reasonable doubt, even by the state’s own terms. When it is so much more attractive to cop to a heinous crime than to fight a false charge, even confessions must be doubted as a matter of course. Perhaps the standard should be to prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, regardless of what the accused says. But that would require far too much deliberation for each case. This would be possible in a civil society with very few crimes, but when there are seven million Americans on parole or probation or behind bars, procedural niceties cannot get in the way of an ever expanding prison state.

I couldn’t guess how many innocents have been wrongly imprisoned, even having plead guilty, for crimes they did not commit, including truly vicious crimes. But I do know that I cannot possibly trust the state when it says someone is guilty, even if there’s a confession. A system that is able to railroad seven people into confessing to crimes they never committed, whose sentencing seems to prosecutors to be soundly based on “physical evidence” and their own desperate guilty pleas, even in retrospect, even despite it being clear there was no crime all along, can simply never be trusted in general to protect justice, nor in any given case not to have committed a great error or engaged in great immorality.