VOICES for REASON

“The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy on behalf of a Supreme Court majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. He was referring to the speech bans that since 2002 have muzzled corporations under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

No more. The Citizens United decision struck down the ban, not only liberating America’s corporations to speak out during campaigns but also unleashing a torrent of commentary, both praising and denouncing the Court’s actions. As the heated debate gets hotter, a timely panel discussion is slated for Tuesday, March 16, in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and the Institute for Justice.

“Citizens United and the Future of Campaign Finance Law” will feature a lively debate among three lawyers who filed briefs on opposite sides in the case, and an academic expert on the history of free speech. I’m fortunate enough to be moderating the event, which will review the case in historical context, evaluate its merits, and look to the future. One crucial issue on the table is whether such regulations should survive at all.

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In the Christian Science Monitor, Don Watkins and Yaron Brook draw on Atlas Shrugged to illuminate a crucial difference between two opposite kinds of businessmen in our economy:

The producers, such as Hank Rearden [a character in Atlas Shrugged], inventor of a new metal stronger and cheaper than steel, work tirelessly to create products that improve human life. The looters are basically pseudobusinessmen, like the incompetent steel executive Orren Boyle, who get unearned riches by getting special favors from politicians. Their business isn’t business, but political pull.

The CSM titled the piece “Apple vs. GM: Ayn Rand knew the difference. Do you?” It’s a good oped that sheds light on how government intervention in the economy distorts the behavior of businessmen.

Read the whole thing.

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“On Jan. 21, poor Justice Holmes must have turned in his grave.”

So writes Mimi Marziani in the National Law Journal, lamenting the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, issued on Jan. 21, 2010. That’s the controversial case holding that corporations have a right to speak out on political issues without being censored.

What’s the connection with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who died back in 1935? Well, Holmes spent much of his long career arguing against the idea that the U.S. Constitution is a bulwark of liberty, a barrier to governmental infringements on individual rights. So Marziani is right that Holmes, if he were alive today, would have dissented in the Citizens United case—just as he dissented more than a century ago in the case forever associated with his name, Lochner v. New York. (In that 1905 case, the Court struck down a maximum-hours law for bakers.)

In fact, Marziani says, there’s a direct parallel between the two famous cases. Citizens United, she asserts, is “Lochner’s 21st century equivalent.” Why? Because both cases were driven by a conviction that the Constitution should be interpreted where possible to protect people against the awesome power of government to violate their rights. Along with Holmes, Marziani believes that the Constitution is agnostic on the relationship between individuals and the state. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicholas Kristof gives us his best case for passing ObamaCare:

Critics doubt that the Senate and House bills would succeed in containing health care costs very much, and they may be right. It’s hard to know. But the existing system is a runaway roller coaster. Isn’t it prudent to try brake pedals even if we’re not sure how well they’ll work?

You’ve got to love likening a sprawling new government program to further bureaucratize, politicize and intervene in American health care to putting on the brakes.

No, Kristof, I don’t think it’s particularly prudent to expand government’s control over health care based on nothing but the blind hope it will work; I don’t think it’s prudent to approach any problem without understanding the nature of that problem. Read the rest of this entry »

In the modern era, it is common to hear people put forward the view that in war, “the pursuit of victory would necessarily create new grievances and guarantee an even more destructive conflict in the future.” We hear versions of that invoked all over the place — it is, for instance, central to the rationale for America’s nation-building strategy in Afghanistan. But this idea deserves to be questioned in light of empirical evidence. In his new book, Nothing Less than Victory, Dr. John David Lewis takes on that question (among others) from a historical perspective. He considers “six major wars in which a clear-cut victory did not lead to longer and bloodier war, but rather established the foundations of long-term peace between former enemies,” and looks at how and why those successes were achieved.

Over the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity of hearing Prof. Lewis present his analyses of major wars in history, and every time I’ve come away tremendously impressed with his scholarship. This book examines major conflicts in the ancient world (including the Greco-Persian Wars and the Theban Wars) as well as three episodes that may be better known today: General Sherman’s march through the American south during the Civil War; the lead-up to World War II; and the U.S. victory over Japan in 1945. My copy arrived recently, and I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing how he weaves together the threads of his argument.

Kudos to Prof. Lewis for bringing this important volume to light.

Do you know what Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez said the other day? He was speaking at a televised ceremony in his presidential palace. In the room were representatives of Chevron, the American oil giant, and other multinational oil companies. They had just signed on to invest billions of dollars to exploit oil in Venezuela’s Orinoco basin.

“Dear friends, partners, allies,” Chavez told the assembly, “you know you have all the guarantees of our Constitution and our laws.”

Really? And exactly how strong are those guarantees?

Chevron might want to ask ExxonMobil about that. Whatever Chevron’s reasons (or rationalizations) for going in, the record of Venezuela’s treatment of foreign companies speaks for itself. Less than three years ago, Venezuela nationalized massive oil facilities operated by Exxon and several other western companies. They all had signed agreements guaranteeing long-term concessions. Chavez just tore those up and tossed them away.

I call it theft by engraved invitation. I say “theft” because I reject the widespread view that a nation owns the natural resources within its borders and is therefore entitled to seize private assets; when a state like Venezuela seizes private assets, I think that should be regarded as a kind of theft. And I say “engraved invitation” in reference to the so-called contracts that western companies sign with eyes wide open, delivering their advanced technology—and the engineers and technicians who understand and operate it—to the custody of thuggish governments with long histories of seizing private assets whenever they please.

What would happen if companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil were to stand up and declare that nationalization is theft? What if they called upon their own government to issue similar condemnations? What if such companies ceased propping up the world’s failing socialist economies?

I’d like to see what would happen to Chavez and his ilk if they were deprived of victims.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

Following the Climategate scandal, I commented that on the climate issue “there has been a consistent pattern of exaggeration and deception, of context-dropping claims, and of distortion of the facts and the scientific process”—and that this has been driven by “a widespread commitment to environmentalist ideology.”

Well since Climategate, there have been so many other scientific scandals that have emerged it’s hard to keep up with them all. As the Wall Street Journal put it:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Here’s a round-up of the growing list of scientific distortions from the Orange County Register’s Mark Landsbaum.  So much for “The debate is over.”

Photo credit: flickr/azrainman

In Citizens United v. FEC, the recent campaign finance case I discussed here and here, the Supreme Court noted that one of the arguments for restricting corporate speech is that “[s]tate law grants corporations certain advantages–such as limited liability, perpetual life, and favorable treatment of the accumulation and distribution of assets.” According to this line of argument, corporations are “creatures of the state” and they give up any claim to First Amendment rights in exchange for special state-granted favors.

In answer to this argument, the Court quoted a dissent by Scalia from a previous decision: “It is rudimentary that the State cannot exact as the price of those special advantages the forfeiture of First Amendment rights.”

The Court, which admirably upheld the free speech rights of corporations, took it for granted that corporations wouldn’t exist save for special favors from the state. It’s a common view of corporations. But it’s one that must be questioned.

There’s reason to think that all of a corporation’s essential features–”corporate personhood,” perpetual life, and limited liability–could arise by voluntary agreement among individuals on a free market, without a single government favor. Consider what many regard as one of the most controversial features of a corporation, limited liability. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Scialabba and I have already addressed most of the substantive arguments Ralph Nader and Robert Weissman raise in their Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Case Against Corporate Speech” (see here, here, and here). But this is revealing:

Corporations know that money makes a big difference when it comes to blocking protections for workers, consumers and the environment. Wall Street, health insurance and drug companies, fossil fuel and nuclear power companies, and defense corporations have been hard at work defeating common-sense reforms that would make them more accountable.

Do we want more elected officials to believe that to challenge corporate agendas is to risk their career?

This means: “We should restrict corporate speech because it interferes with us passing our anti-corporate agenda.” As my colleague Onkar Ghate has pointed out, the same argument could have been made by segregationalists during the sixties: “We should restrict speech by blacks because it interferes with our anti-black agenda.”

Image: flickr

Last week I spoke at the 13th annual Energy & Environment Conference and Expo in Phoenix. This is one the largest events in the U.S. devoted to energy and environmental issues, with over 650 speakers and more than 2300 attendees.

Marketing slogan: “650 speakers tackle solutions for USA’s energy independence and reducing carbon emissions.” Well, make that 649, because the gist of my presentation was to argue against the “solutions” that every other speaker had to offer.

As I told the audience attending my panel session, I was there to make the case for not doing anything about climate change—or, more specifically, for not imposing a massive regime of government controls, regulations, or market interventions aimed at restricting greenhouse gases in the name of allegedly fighting climate change.

Mine was definitely the most controversial talk on my panel session. I was even attacked as a “denier” by one of my co-panelists, the executive director of the American Solar Energy Society. But there were a number of people in the audience who came up afterwards to thank me for presenting a contrarian view that they felt was badly needed at this conference.

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