Limbaugh rose to No. 1 in the market, doubling the size of his audience in just a year. . . . When a radio consultant told his friend Ed McLaughlin about Limbaugh’s popularity there, the ABC Radio Networks President traveled to Sacramento to hear him firsthand. . . . McLaughlin, who credited Limbaugh with rescuing AM radio from oblivion in a 1994 Forbes profile, recruited the local host to New York. He debuted a two-hour talk show on WABC in August 1988 that they soon began syndicating across the country. At the time, AM radio was facing an existential crisis. Listeners had gravitated to FM for music, leaving AM radio in search of a winning programming format. Talk filled the silence.

Limbaugh’s program in Sacramento that launched his nationally syndicated “The Rush Limbaugh Show” was only possible after the FCC’s 1987 repeal of the suffocating Fairness Doctrine (created in 1949) had opened up AM radio to free speech and new programming competition. For over three decades, Limbaugh’s program was by far the most popular radio show in America, airing on more than 650 stations nationwide across the Premiere Radio Networks with a weekly audience of 25 million, and on May 7, 2020, Limbaugh announced on air that Premiere had calculated an audience that day of 43 million people with an average listening time of two hours and 28 minutes. But throughout his career, he never lost affection for his successful radio roots in the Sacramento area, regularly returning to the area and often on his show humorously singling out comments “For those of you in Rio Linda.”

We had the memorable opportunity to work with Rush Limbaugh on two pivotal occasions.

The first occurred in the mid-1980s, when I was in the process of producing the paperback edition of a book on the growing problem of affordable housing in California, Resolving the Housing Crisis: Government Policy, Decontrol and the Public Interest. Edited by the late, renowned economist M. Bruce Johnson (U.C. Santa Barbara), who would become the founding Research Director at the Independent Institute, the book assembled the most comprehensive-ever critical analysis of government housing and land-use controls restricting the supply of housing and new construction and creating the unaffordable housing tragedy that has only greatly worsened today, including contributing to the massive problem of homelessness.

The acclaimed Clemson U. economist Thomas W. Hazlett (Ph.D., UCLA) at the time was a new assistant professor at the University of California at Davis (U.C. Davis). Tom had contributed the superb Chapter 10 in Resolving the Housing Crisis, “Rent Controls and the Housing Crisis,” and he had further assisted Bruce in completing details for his Introduction to the book.*

Bruce and I were planning to be in Sacramento in spring of 1984 for a one-day conference I had organized on the housing crisis in California with the California Chamber of Commerce and other groups. Bruce was to be a keynote speaker along with the housing and land-use expert Ward A. Connerly, and all attendees would receive a free copy of the book.

Tom had first met Rush Limbaugh at an event at U.C. Davis at which former U.N. Ambassador Jeane D. Kirkpatrick (1926-2006) spoke, and Tom and Rush became good friends. As a result, Tom helped us arrange for Bruce and me to visit with Rush while we were in town for the housing conference to discuss the book’s findings in the KFBK studio.

We had already arranged for Bruce to be interviewed about the book on numerous radio programs, but none of the show hosts understood the housing issue and were quite clueless of government’s culpability in creating the problem. But in visiting with Rush, we found that just as Tom had promised, he had clearly done his homework on the book and understood its findings, interviewing Bruce at considerable detail for an entire hour.

I recall Bruce’s delight, excitement, and amazement with the interview by this guy who neither of us had ever heard of but who, unlike other radio hosts, fully understood what Bruce was saying and the central need for deregulation, free markets and private property rights.

The second time we connected directly with Rush was when we had published the first edition of the Independent Institute’s book, Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate by our Research Fellow, the late S. Fred Singer, and featuring a foreword by Frederick Seitz, former President of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rush enthusiastically interviewed Fred, who at the time was in Bonn, Germany, having addressed the Austrian Parliament in Vienna a few days earlier, and Rush subsequently published the interview in The Limbaugh Letter (December 1997):

Fasten your seatbelts—you are about to get some real science from one of the foremost experts on global climate change. In fact, Dr. Singer devised the basic instrument for measuring stratospheric ozone. He was somewhat reluctant to discuss the political aspects of the global warming debate—though I tried. Still, as a scientist, he backed me up . . . and confirmed things I’ve been saying for years. . . .

The book became a major seller with extensive media coverage featuring Fred, and was instrumental in redefining and redirecting public climate debate away from unscientific alarmism, leading up to the U.S.’s refusal to ratify the deeply flawed 1992 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Incidentally, we have just released Hot Talk, Cold Science in a Third Revised and Expanded Edition (twice the size of the previous editions in 1997 and 1999), completed by Fred before his death in 2020 and co-authored with the climatologists David R. Legates (U. of Delaware) and Anthony R. Lupo (U. of Missouri), and with a new foreword by the eminent physicist William Happer (Princeton U.)

We will forever be grateful for the very kind and generous assistance of the late Rush Limbaugh.

Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

* * * * * * * *

*Other distinguished scholars who were contributing authors to Resolving the Housing Crisis include Peter Colwell (U. of Illinois), Carl Dahlman (U. of Wisconsin), Robert Ellickson (Yale U.), Bernard Frieden (MIT), Norman Karlin (Southwestern U. Law), James Kau (U. of Georgia), Richard Muth (Stanford U.), Roger Pilon (U.S. Office of Personal Management), Judith Robert (U. of Michigan), Bernard Siegan (U. of San Diego), and Robert Weintraub (U.S. Joint Economic Committee), as well as Stephen DeCanio, H. E. Frech III, Alan Gin, Lloyd Mercer, Douglas Morgan, and Jon Sonstelie (all from U.C. Santa Barbara).

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Our defense of individual liberty does not arise out of a philosophy that says to the world, “Leave me alone.” Rather, we defend liberty from a philosophy that says specifically to the government, “Leave us alone so we can be together.”

Where individuals are free and government is limited, people have the incentive to engage in commercial transactions for mutual benefit. They also have the leeway to establish educational, artistic, familial, and religious relationships that are not transactional—relationships that often involve self-sacrifice for others, especially children. All of this arises without being dictated by bureaucrats. A free society is like choosing your own schoolyard friends rather than having the teacher assign them to you.

Historically, this reflects a “classical liberal” outlook. Part of the genius of this outlook is to distinguish society from the state: It is not the role of the state (i.e., government power) to control society or to determine its features. The state can stifle society but it cannot create it, because society is the flowering of human freedom.

It would be a mistake to try, somehow in the name of freedom, to liberate individuals from the influence of society—family, community, faith, art, etc. That would scarcely be human! Human dignity shows itself best when we bind ourselves freely to one another in affection or at least respect and mutual tolerance. In this way we fulfill the ethical framework of natural law, and we forge natural, living links to those who went before us and to generations yet to come.

So the point of liberty is not to protect the individual against the influence of society but rather against the coercion of the state. The stronger civil society is, the less need there is for coercive state power. Conversely, when the voluntary bonds of mutual association weaken, and individuals are “on their own,” then the situation is ripe for the abusive extension of state power. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Totalitarianism exploits such vacuums. The cardinal sin of totalitarianism is to insist that society conform to the state and to require that culture—indeed, human nature itself—reflect government policy. But human nature is not a creation of the state, and should not be under the thumb of the state or public policy.

Therefore lovers of liberty want more than just limits on government power; we also want to foster a society with a humane culture. We celebrate the many ways that people provide for the common good without resorting to government—successful profit-making businesses, of course, and also a multitude of other ventures like cooperatives, philanthropies, private medical insurance pools, and NGOs of all kind. Our now-classic book, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (published in 2002) sets forth nongovernmental cooperative solutions even in areas where most people think only of government—such as in urban planning, courts, and education.

In a healthy society, most of the activities of human life have nothing to do with partisanship or ideology. By contrast, in a socialist system where government lays claim to the means of production, and where everything is potentially subject to state control, everything operates in the shadow of politics; the government is always trying to mobilize society toward the achievement of some urgent, collective goal. As Oscar Wilde once remarked, “The trouble with socialism is that it leaves you with no free evenings.” By contrast, a free society flourishes when people get together on their own terms, whether to build gun ranges or organic gardens or mutual aid societies.

“Thank you, teacher, but I’ll choose my own friends—lots of them!”

[This piece first appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of The Independent. To receive this quarterly newsletter by mail, become an Independent Institute member today!]

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Lewis’s aversion to government was clearly revealed in 1951 when Winston Churchill, within weeks after he regained office as prime minister of Great Britain, wrote to Lewis offering to have him knighted as “Commander of the Order of the British Empire.” Lewis flatly declined the honor because he, unlike the “progressives,” was never interested in politics and was deeply skeptical of government power and politicians, as expressed in the first two lines of his poem “Lines during a General Election”: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear / All that; it is their promises that bring despair” (in Poems, p. 62).

Lewis had held this view for many years. In 1940, he had written in a letter to his brother Warren, “Could one start a Stagnation Party—which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?” He further stated, “I was by nature ‘against Government'” (Letters of C. S. Lewis, p. 179).

. . . .

For the full article, please click here.

Part 2 Part 3

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It’s a violation of the Constitution to use the panels without a declaration of war—and just calling it a “war” on terror doesn’t count.

A devoted constitutional expert, Fox News host, and avowed, conservative disciple of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Judge Napolitano noted that:

The last time the government used a military tribunal in this country to try foreigners who violated the rules of war involved Nazi saboteurs during World War II. They came ashore in Amagansett, N.Y., and Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and donned civilian clothes, with plans to blow up strategic U.S. targets. They were tried before a military tribunal, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt based his order to do so on the existence of a formal congressional declaration of war against Germany.

In Ex Parte Quirin, the Supreme Court case that eventually upheld the military trial of these Germans—after they had been tried and after six of the eight defendants had been executed—the court declared that a formal declaration of war is the legal prerequisite to the government’s use of the tools of war. The federal government adhered to this principle of law from World War II until Bush’s understanding of the Constitution animated government policy.

Now in a new article by Rick Ungar, “True conservatives condemn military tribunals for terrorists,” he pursues the issue further and states:

American conservatives would do well to listen to the words of Judge Napolitano as he makes his case in support of strictly construing the Constitution. . . . Those who support the Constitution can’t have it both ways. You either respect the rule of law, even when it is inconvenient and a bit scary, or you don’t. That’s the whole point of having a Constitution. . . . Your leaders are hustling you, turning their alleged belief system inside out to score points with populist outrage – and turning the Constitution inside out in the process. These leaders are nothing more than scared little men and women caving into popular fear rather than doing their jobs.

As Judge Napolitano further noted:

The framers of the Constitution feared letting the president alone decide with whom we are at war, and thus permitting him to trigger for his own purposes the military tools reserved for wartime. They also feared allowing the government to take life, liberty or property from any person without the intercession of a civilian jury to check the government’s appetite and to compel transparency and fairness by forcing the government to prove its case to 12 ordinary citizens. Thus, the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, which requires due process, includes the essential component of a jury trial. And the 6th Amendment requires that when the government pursues any person in court, it must do so in the venue where the person is alleged to have caused harm.

Numerous Supreme Court cases have ruled that any person in conflict with the government can invoke due process—be that person a citizen or an immigrant, someone born here, legally here, illegally here or whose suspect behavior did not even occur here.

Think about it: If the president could declare war on any person or entity or group simply by calling his pursuit of them a “war,” there would be no limit to the government’s ability to use the tools of war to achieve its ends. We have a “war” on drugs; can drug dealers be tried before military tribunals? We have a “war” on the Mafia; can mobsters be sent to Gitmo and tried there? The Obama administration has arguably declared “war” on Fox News. Are Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and I and my other colleagues in danger of losing our constitutional rights to a government hostile to our opinions?

I trust not. And my trust is based on the oath that everyone who works in the government takes to uphold the Constitution. But I am not naive. Only unflinching public fidelity to the Constitution will preserve the freedoms of us all.

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