Per Arne Karlsen

If someone were to propose today that the United States implement a “new,” “exciting” economic idea called “socialism,” in which government central planners effectively owned and controlled the entire economy, we would surely point out that such a system has already been tried and implemented, with disastrous results.

We should do the same with the supposedly “new,” “exciting” economic idea known as the “green energy economy”–in which government central planners mandate that practical energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear) be replaced by solar panels, windmills, dung piles, and corn fields. (Thomas Friedman’s latest column is a typical endorsement of such policies.)

There is nothing new and exciting about the “green energy economy.” There is a place overseas that has already provided stark evidence of what it means to pursue a “green energy economy,” and it’s not pretty. That place is called Europe, and it’s a testament to what happens when you force unproven, inefficient energy down people’s throat. A recent post at the free-market energy blog Master Resource explains:

Renewable energy has proved an expensive and unreliable source of energy everywhere it has been tried on a significant scale…Italy, Spain and Germany are cutting back on their taxpayer/ratepayer-funded generosity toward politically correct energies….In all, Europeans have tested the theory of a “clean energy revolution” to destruction.

For the gory details, read the whole article here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Investor’s Business Daily has published an essay from ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook on  Atlas Shrugged. The piece begins:

In the years leading up to 2008—09′s financial meltdown, government control over mortgages, interest rates and America’s banking system was at an all-time high.

And yet when crisis struck, free enterprise took the blame.

The cure, therefore, was to give government even wider powers. Washington can now bail out any company, fire CEOs, override contracts and print billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy — all in the name of the public interest. The result? Our deficits and debt continue to mount, and there’s a real possibility of a future like Greece’s.

This is the state of our world today. It’s remarkably similar to the state of the world in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a mystery story about a future America whose economy is disintegrating and whose government is accumulating power faster than anyone thought possible. This parallel is a big reason a record 500,000 people bought “Atlas Shrugged” last year.

So what can we learn from a book that foresaw in 1957 what few believed possible in 2007? We can learn a lesson the heroes of the novel learn: the cause of the government’s greater, destructive control of business. And we can learn how to oppose it.

Read the whole thing.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. In a just-published op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, my colleague Tom Bowden argues that Kagan does not understand the Constitution–the document which, if she confirmed by the Senate, Kagan will have to swear to uphold.

Alarmingly, Kagan’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that she rejects the Founders’ view of the Constitution as a charter of liberty whose purpose is to protect individual rights. Instead, she adheres to the modern view that it’s a mechanism for establishing unlimited majority rule over the individual.

As a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution for a certain purpose. They wanted a government that would respect and protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Aside from certain contradictions (the worst of which, toleration of slavery, required a bloody civil war to expunge), the Constitution is dedicated to protecting the individual from society by means of a limited government. The Supreme Court cannot objectively interpret the document’s language apart from this essential purpose.

Regrettably, however, too many of today’s judges reject this approach to constitutional interpretation.

Read the whole thing.

The other day I blogged about an antitrust class action suit against Apple and AT&T, relating to Apple’s hugely successful iPhone. That post was based on press reports. I’ve now had a chance to read the plaintiffs’ complaint as filed in court, and a subsequent court decision. They provide interesting detail, but the basic injustice of this antitrust case remains.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Apple sells “locked” iPhones. That means they work only on AT&T’s network. Consumers know the phones are locked into one network—there’s no mystery or fraud involved.

Okay, so what about the plaintiffs in this class action? They managed to scrape together enough money to buy iPhones and enter into two-year contracts with AT&T. They used their phones for the full two years. Then their contracts expired. Now they want to unlock their phones and use them on T-Mobile or some other network. There’s only one small problem with that—their individual software license agreements with Apple forbid such tampering. That’s not to mention violation of Apple’s software copyrights. But none of that bothers the plaintiffs and their class action lawyers.

Elsewhere, I have called antitrust laws a “war against contract,” and this case is a perfect illustration. These plaintiffs don’t want to be bothered with the contracts they signed. “I promise” means nothing to them. Instead, they assert what amounts to a divine right of hacking—to be achieved with the help of the infamous Sherman Act.

Here’s the plaintiffs’ legal theory: Apple and AT&T are monopolizing the so-called aftermarket for the iPhone. This “aftermarket” is not to be confused with the market for smartphones—that’s a huge market in which Apple is a significant but by no means dominant player (Blackberry, anyone?). No, the “aftermarket” amounts to the various ways of hacking the iPhone to make it work outside AT&T. Do you get this? Since the only way you can keep making calls on an iPhone after two years is sign up with AT&T for another two years, that’s evidence the companies are “monopolizing” the “aftermarket.”

Now you might say, wait: This “aftermarket” sounds more like an illegal enterprise than a market. If licensing agreements forbid unlocking, then why would the law protect an “aftermarket” devoted to unlocking? Well, in the wonderland of antitrust, anything is possible. If this class action is successful, Apple and AT&T may have to pay damages and abandon their policies against unlocking.

So much for sanctity of contract, which is but a distant memory in American law.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

In my article, “Justice Holmes and the Empty Constitution,” I discussed the widespread doctrine that the Constitution’s underlying purpose—protection of individual rights to life, liberty, and property—has no legitimate role in interpreting the document’s language. I summarized this view, pioneered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the early twentieth century and prevalent among judges today, as holding that “the Supreme Court presides over an empty Constitution—empty of purpose, of moral content, of enduring meaning—bereft of any embedded principles defining the relationship between man and the state.”

In recent hearings, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan confirmed her allegiance to this modern orthodoxy.

Kagan’s views came out under clumsy questioning from Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and religious conservative. Coburn’s questions mixed together several ideas: that individuals have natural rights—that those rights pre-exist the Constitution—that such rights are God-given—and that those rights include owning guns for self-defense.

Rather than try and untangle Coburn’s mish-mash of truth, falsehood, and controversial detail, Kagan used the knife of Holmesian orthodoxy to slice them away with a single stroke. Inquiries about man’s natural rights are irrelevant to her fitness for the Supreme Court, she testified, because they are “outside the Constitution and the laws.” As such, she told Coburn, “you should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief.”

Let’s consider the implications of Kagan’s view by means of a hypothetical Supreme Court justice. This judge knows, as a matter of fact, that the founding generation fought a bloody war against England to vindicate man’s individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. This judge also knows, as a matter of fact, that the Founders crafted the Constitution for a single purpose, stated in the Declaration of Independence: to “secure these rights.” He also knows, as a matter of fact, that the Constitution establishes a government of limited powers, well suited to the protection of those rights.

What would it mean for such a judge to abide by Kagan’s view of conscientious judging? It would mean deliberately setting aside all these facts as mere personal views, “outside the Constitution and the laws.” It would mean following Justice Holmes in treating the Constitution as a document “made for people of fundamentally differing views.” It would mean acting as if any political viewpoint with electoral clout—be it capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, Muslim totalitarianism, Christian fundamentalism, or some other ideology—has an equal constitutional right to shape American law for its own purposes, while the Supreme Court sits idly by.

This is an important issue—more important even than Kagan’s views on the Twilight film series. It’s a shame that our senators are not up to the task of making allegiance to our nation’s founding purpose a litmus test for confirming a Supreme Court nominee.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

In California, a federal judge has ruled that an antitrust class action suit can proceed against Apple and AT&T. What have those companies done to warrant being hauled into court? Basically, they agreed to sell only “locked” iPhones. A locked phone is one that works only on a specific mobile network—in this case, AT&T’s network.

So, let’s get this straight. Both Apple and AT&T want to make money. Apple makes money by creating cool mobile devices like the iPhone—creating, as in designing and manufacturing phones that didn’t exist before Apple’s brilliant designers and engineers thought of them. AT&T makes money by creating a mobile phone network–creating, as in erecting a complex array of electronic equipment capable of transmitting messages from handheld phones, a network that didn’t exist before AT&T created it.

Then Apple and AT&T decide to make money by working together. Although details of their deal aren’t public, it’s clear that AT&T saw an opportunity to increase its subscriber base by becoming the only retailer of iPhones. Apple, for its part, looked forward to receiving payments from AT&T based on a percentage of every iPhone subscriber’s monthly bill. Was this collaboration a good idea? You be the judge: consumers have bought 50 million iPhones in three years.

Let’s pause at this point to remind ourselves that the Apple-AT&T agreement does not interfere with anyone else’s smartphones or networks. The makers of Blackberry or Palm phones can choose to sell phones locked or unlocked. Networks such as Verizon and Sprint can choose whether to enter into exclusive contracts as AT&T did with Apple. In short, every other firm in the industry is free to make as much money as they can competing with Apple and AT&T.

So far, does this sound like conduct that should be illegal? Let’s look at what the plaintiffs are complaining about. According to reports, their lawsuit charges that the locked phone agreement “hurt competition and drove up prices for consumers.”

“Hurt competition?” This is competition. Apple and AT&T are competing with other makers of smartphones and with other mobile networks—and those other makers and networks are competing right back. In a free market, everyone else in the universe is at liberty to enter the market and offer a product that is better, cheaper, or both. No competitor can forcibly prevent another’s efforts.

“Drove up prices for consumers?” There was no price for an iPhone before Apple created and sold it. There was no price for an AT&T iPhone subscription until AT&T offered it. Those prices were not “driven up” from some arbitrary level that the plaintiffs would have wished to see. The prices were set by the owners of the goods and services being sold. Consumers were free to buy or to wait for some competitor to offer an equally attractive, unlocked phone.

As this suit progresses, observers should look closely at what conduct is illegal under this nation’s antitrust laws, and whether it should remain so.

[Update: Thanks to TheStreet.com for publishing this post to their many readers.]

Image: WikiMedia Commons

Organizers of a gay pride festival in Minneapolis are required by law to allow in an evangelist who wants to hand out Bibles, discuss theological issues, and conduct opinion polls, according to a recent ruling by a federal judge.

Why on earth did this become a legal issue? Why did it fall to a federal judge to decide who would be allowed to attend such a gathering, and what they could do there?

It’s because the festival was to be held on public property, city-owned land known as Loring Park. “As a festival attendee in a public forum, [evangelist Brian] Johnson is entitled to speak and hand out literature, quintessential activities protected by the First Amendment, so long as he remains undisruptive,” wrote Judge John Tunheim.

Conflicts such as these are built into the very concept of public property. After all, there is no rational standard by which one person can be deemed part of “the public” and another person excluded from “the public.” Therefore, Johnson can argue that he has a right to attend—just as the festival’s organizers can argue that their event will be spoiled by Johnson’s presence. Who’s right? Both of them, and neither of them. It’s an insoluble conflict, so long as governments continue to own and operate parks such as Loring Park in Minneapolis.

There is, however, a solution: private property. In a private setting, the festival’s organizers would be free to exclude wet blankets like Johnson the evangelist. Johnson, for his part, would be perfectly free to speechify about gay sex from his church’s pulpit or on any private property whose owner would allow it.

Consider that more than one-third of land in America is owned by governments, and millions of citizens have conflicting views on how that land should be used. That’s a prescription for endless civil war among pressure groups. The only prospect for peace lies in making public property private.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

My colleague Dr. Keith Lockitch recently spoke at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, held in Chicago, IL. The title of his talk was “The Roots of Climate Alarmism.” To view the video, follow this link, then scroll down to find the title slide for Keith’s talk.

In honor of the news that Eliot Spitzer–the disgraced, power-lusting former governor of New York–will be coming to prime time TV, I thought I’d make note of a column he penned earlier this month. Invoking Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Spitzer writes:

The question confronting the United States today is whether the notion of sacrifice–personal and collective–still has enough traction in our society to enable us to overcome the range of problems we face.

He goes on to name some of the sacrifices he thinks will solve these problems:

• “[S]lightly higher marginal tax rates for the top 5 percent…in order to fund the necessary investment in social infrastructure”
• “[A] carbon tax”
• “[A] somewhat more rigorous regulatory structure”

There’s a reason that Spitzer couches his program in the terminology of “sacrifice.” If he simply said the government should solve our problems by taking more of our wealth and our freedom, he wouldn’t win many converts. “Sacrifice” adds a moral dimension to Spitzer’s call for government intervention. The purpose is to morally disarm anyone who wants to safeguard his wealth or his freedom by saying, “You, you’re just being selfish.”

It’s no accident that dictators throughout history have justified their demands for power by appealing to the duty to sacrifice: freedom is selfish. It is the freedom to do what you want with your wealth and your life, rather than what society, Eliot Spitzer, or Barack Obama wants you to do. As Ayn Rand noted nearly 70 years ago in her novel The Fountainhead:

[J]ust listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice–run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that’s it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself–that will be the man who’s not after your soul.

Spitzer speaks of sacrifices. The Founding Fathers spoke of the individual’s right to pursue his own happiness. The Founders sought to create a free society. What, then, is Spitzer after?

Image: flickr

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview has created a scandal–but the real scandal we should be talking about is his Afghanistan strategy and how it needlessly imperils American lives.

Under his widely acclaimed counterinsurgency strategy, McChrystal “shifted the risks from Afghan civilians to Western combatants,” reports the NYT.  Translation: the rules place the lives and welfare of Afghans —  emphatically including the Islamist warriors we’re supposed to be fighting — ahead of American lives. Consider:

Before the rules were tightened, one Army major who had commanded an infantry company said, “firefights in Afghanistan had a half-life.” By this he meant that skirmishes often were brief, lasting roughly a half-hour. The Taliban would ambush patrols and typically break contact and slip away as patrol leaders organized and escalated Western firepower in response.

Now, with fire support often restricted, or even idled, Taliban fighters seem noticeably less worried about an American response, many soldiers and Marines say. Firefights often drag on, sometimes lasting hours, and costing lives. The United States’ material advantages are not robustly applied; troops are engaged in rifle-on-rifle fights on their enemy’s turf. [emphasis added]

I’ve argued in Winning the Unwinnable War and in talks around the country that this policy is self-crippling and morally perverse. And the policy is still in full-effect, as the experiences of soldiers on the ground can attest to.

Several infantrymen have also said that the rules are so restrictive that pilots are often not allowed to attack fixed targets — say, a building or tree line from which troops are taking fire — unless they can personally see the insurgents doing the firing.

This has lead to situations many soldiers describe as absurd, including decisions by patrol leaders to have fellow soldiers move briefly out into the open to draw fire once aircraft arrive, so the pilots might be cleared to participate in the fight. [emphasis added]

All of which confers an inestimable tactical advantage on Taliban fighters — “making it easier for them to hide to fight, to meet and to store their weapons or assemble their makeshift bombs.” Meanwhile, U.S. troops — with justified indignation — speak of “‘being handcuffed,’ of not being trusted by their bosses and of being asked to battle a canny and vicious insurgency ‘in a fair fight.’” How many more must return home in coffins, because they were purposely hamstrung in combat?

By all means, question McChrystal’s judgment in making derisive comments about his boss, the Commander in Chief. But isn’t it past time to question the propriety of an Afghan strategy that both endorse?

image: wiki commons

Most states have tax-funded film commissions that subsidize or grant tax credits to movie production companies, provided they agree to film scenes within the state’s borders. According to this article in The New York Times, some of these state agencies are getting nervous about the kind of films they are being asked to fund.

The Michigan film commissioner recently rejected a funding request from producers of a horror movie replete with “realistic cannibalism.” In Texas, a film company was told it need not apply for financing of a picture about the FBI’s Waco raid because of inaccuracies in the script. And in Florida, the legislature recently flirted with a proposal to deny tax credits to films that exhibit “nontraditional family values.”

There’s much to challenge in the notion of allowing states to lure in film production; for a start, look at how such programs violate the rights of taxpayers. These programs take money from ordinary taxpayers (a violation of their property rights) and use it to fund movies those taxpayers may well find abhorrent (a violation of their free speech rights).

The solution is not to dictate content according to some pseudo-standard such as “family values.” Rather, the solution is to end all government funding of film production. A state government’s job is to protect its citizens against criminals, not to attract moviemakers. Private individuals and companies wishing to attract film projects to their localities are free to offer whatever incentives (such as discounts on lodging, or attractive settings for filming) that they deem likely to benefit themselves.

Hollywood is quite capable of finding investors to fully finance its ventures. Producers who cannot attract private financing have no right to draw from the public treasury—whether their films depict cannibals eating human flesh, or Bible-toting families gathered for a Sunday picnic.

[Update: Thanks to Steve Simpson at the Institute for Justice for linking here. Welcome, readers of Congress Shall Make No Law, IJ's free speech blog.]

Image: WikiMedia Commons

My colleague Alex Epstein has published a new commentary at Forbes.com, “Three Myths About Oil.” Noting that the average American consumes three gallons of oil a day, Alex observes that nevertheless,

… oil’s detractors call it an addiction, downplaying its enormous benefits as fleeting pleasures that will necessarily bring long-term pain and destruction. An oil-based economy will inevitably collapse, they say, because oil is finite and will run out, because foreign oil causes terrorism, because oil, as a fossil fuel, will bring about climate catastrophe. Let’s examine these myths about oil.

Read the whole thing.

When the Supreme Court ruled that the government has to respect the right of corporations to engage in political speech, opponents of corporate speech (Obama included) put their weight behind the DISCLOSE Act. The Act reads like a grab-bag of policies united only by their intention: to place as many burdens as possible on groups that want to exercise their First Amendment rights.

DISCLOSE has been winding its way through Congress, but it faced strong opposition by the National Rifle Association (one of the groups subject to the proposed law). That is, until the House Democrats agreed to carve out an exception to the bill which–wouldn’t you know it–exempts the NRA from the Act’s speech-squelching measures. The exception was narrowly tailored so that only the NRA and a handful of other organizations (such as AARP) qualify. In return for this special favor, the NRA has agreed not to actively oppose the bill.

The lesson from Washington: free speech is no longer something you preserve by asserting your inalienable Constitutional rights–it’s something you preserve by throwing around your political clout.

At a time when hostility against the oil industry is at a high, while politicians and editorial-office heroes call for “ending our addiction to oil,” it’s important to reflect on why oil is so valuable—so “addictive,” in the terminology of our time.

A couple months ago, I blogged that “Most of us think of oil simply as the stuff that puts gasoline in our car. But oil, thanks to the ingenuity of the oil industry, does so much more. For one, it’s the building block for thousands of petroleum products—everything from Blu-Ray discs to asphalt to stitches to lipstick. And it provides the safest, most powerful, most convenient fuel, not only for automobiles but for the freighters, jets, trucks, and industrial machinery that power our global economy. Oil makes every aspect of our lives better.”

In that post, I illustrated how oil was vital in making possible something as basic as an affordable, healthy breakfast. The other day, I witnessed firsthand how vital oil is in making possible a safe, effective hospital. Sitting in on a highly advanced surgical procedure, I was struck by the skill of the surgeons, the stunning advances in medical technology (almost all of which involve petroleum components), and—what I want to talk about today—everyone’s commitment to maximize safety by keeping the environment as hygienic as possible by using oil-based products at every turn.

One of the virtues of petroleum products, including plastics, is that they are incredibly resistant to bacteria, moisture, germs. Another is that they can very easily be made impermeable, protecting whatever you want from whatever you don’t want to contaminate it. They can also be made incredibly cheaply, which allows for disposable products that are never used by more than one patient.

All of this was at work in the operating room. Just about all the furniture—the chairs, the cabinets, the drawers, were made of or coated by petroleum to keep them sanitary. The patient was lying on the bed, connected to durable, flexible plastic (oil) tubes that safely delivered food, coming from a sealed plastic (oil) bag that securely stored it. Another oil tube was designed to vacuum excess fluids. There were disposable foam (oil) cradles to prop up the patient’s arms or legs if necessary—made of oil to be disposable. The disposable, sterile gloves were either latex or synthetic—i.e., made of oil. Ditto for the disposable surgical masks and head-coverings. The doctors frequently needed to throw biological material away—which, thankfully they could do sanitarily with plastic (oil) trash-bags that could be taken away leaving no trace of their hazardous contents. Imagine if these products would have been made of wood, cloth, or metal. Can you imagine the corrosion, the bacteria-traps, the health risks? Infection used to be a highly common and deadly product of surgery—and lack of petroleum products was a big reason why.

Thanks both to the medical profession and petroleum products, you can have every expectation of your next trip to the hospital being a safe one.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

New York magazine’s Steve Fishman just penned a fascinating account of Bernie Madoff’s life behind bars. What I find most fascinating, however, is the reaction from a number of quarters to the effect that Madoff is “thriving behind bars” and living like a “rock star.”

What actually emerges from the article is the exact opposite conclusion: that Madoff was frightened and unhappy before he was caught, and that his life in prison is empty and pathetic.

Take Madoff’s life before he was arrested. According to Fishman:

For Bernie Madoff, living a lie had once been a full-time job, which carried with it a constant, nagging anxiety. “It was a nightmare for me,” he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,” he said in a little-noticed interview with them.

And what does life look like for Madoff, now that he’s been caught? As Fishman shows, Madoff lives separated from his family, surrounded by murderers and sex offenders, sweeping floors for fourteen cents and hour, and doing what he can not to fall victim to prison violence. Some rock star.

What comes across from Fishman’s article is that Madoff’s existential life now matches his inner life. A man whose inner life had been a nightmare is now trapped in a literal nightmare.

Madoff is often taken as the preeminent example of selfishness. But what the facts show is not a man who was concerned with his own interests, but rather someone totally uninterested in thinking about what kind of choices would genuinely promote his life. By trying to live like a criminal, rather than as a productive individual, Madoff guaranteed himself a meaningless, joyless, self-destructive  existence. There’s nothing selfish about that.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Another day, another major news story about Ben Bernanke’s economic prognostications. I find these stories bizarre on two levels. One, they never mention Bernanke’s obvious incentive to paint an overly-rosy picture of the economy’s future given that he wields more power over it than any other person. And two, they never give convincing evidence that Bernanke is a credible forecaster.

It’s taken for granted that Bernanke is an economic genius–a claim backed by everything but his actual track record as an economic forecaster. We hear of his distinguished academic career, the admiration in which he is held by the profession, even a near-perfect SAT score in high school. While these would be relevant if Bernanke were applying for more column-inches in Who’s Who, or a job at The Princeton Review, neither Bernanke’s academic popularity nor his IQ tell us whether his predictions hold water.

In this regard, his track record of predictions, by contrast, proves a lot:

• March 2007: “the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.”
• February 2008: “I don’t anticipate any serious problems of that sort among the large internationally active banks that make up a very substantial part of our banking system.”
• July 2008: Fannie and Freddie “…will make it through the storm,” are “in no danger of failing,” and “adequately capitalized.”

Why not write news stories about the prognostications of economists who actually predicted the financial crisis?

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In recent lectures on the incessant pressure group warfare over land rights in America, I’ve highlighted the legal hurdles that Walmart faces everywhere it tries to expand. Walmart’s low prices and non-unionized workforce pose big competitive challenges to high-price mom and pop stores as well as labor unions. Our legal system encourages such groups, as well as nearby landowners, to exert pressure on state regulators and courts to deny Walmart the zoning and development permits it needs to expand.

As far as I knew, however, other large chain stores typically refrained from trying to block Walmart’s expansion through local political pressure. Boy, was I wrong. According to this article in The Wall Street Journal, Walmart’s competitors are sometimes hiring outside consultants adept at “black arts” to block new Walmart projects, while disguising the true opponents’ identities.

In Mundelein, Illinois, near Chicago, a grocery store chain called Jewel-Osco became alarmed when a developer announced plans for a shopping center anchored by a 200,000-square-foot Walmart supercenter with a full grocery store inside. (Walmart is now the nation’s largest purveyor of groceries.) Jewel-Osco turned to the ironically named Saint Consulting Group for help. Saint appointed a project manager who, per company policy, adopted an assumed name. This manager then contacted landowners near the Walmart site and complained—falsely—about how construction of a Walmart had driven down the price of his parents’ home and ruined their planned retirement. Suitably riled up, neighbors climbed on the anti-Walmart bandwagon.

Using Jewel-Osco money, Saint’s project manager then hired a local attorney (at a cost of $20,000 to $55,000 monthly) to file suit on behalf of local property owners. Two and a half years later, a judge finally approved the project—but even that decision is now on appeal, and the project in limbo. The developer? He’s $3 million poorer. That was the cost of legal fees, expert testimony, and other expenses related to defending the suit.

Giant Foods, another grocery chain burdened by union wages and work rules, used Saint’s skills in a similar Walmart-blocking effort in North Cornwall, Pennsylvania, starting in 2005. But after sponsoring a lawsuit that delayed the project, Giant changed its mind and determined to build a new store of its own right across from the new Walmart. That meant telling Saint to switch sides and promote the commercial zoning instead of opposing it!

Is this the best American law can do—pit productive enterprises against each other in contests of political pull and courtroom strategy? I say no. The principle of property rights, if correctly applied, would take government coercion out of the game entirely (except in cases of nuisance, fraud, breach of contract, and the like). Property owners would be free, as a matter of right, to allow a Walmart (or a Giant or a Jewel-Osco) to be built on their land—but they would have no right to use government force against others in the local economy. So, for example, small shops could keep customers by offering friendlier service and more convenience—labor unions could stay strong by offering workers with superior skills and attitudes—landowners could preserve residential neighborhoods by voluntary covenants.

As for the new stores, the success or failure of each would depend on convincing individual consumers to patronize one or the other—and the outcome would be decided by persuasion, not by modern-day force of arms: fines, penalties, and the threat of jail.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Objectivist Academic Center is currently accepting applications for its Fall 2010 incoming class. Designed to provide a comprehensive and systematic study of philosophy, Objectivism and objective communication, this unique program is for those who are serious about advocating pro-reason, pro-individual rights, pro-capitalism views.

The program is especially designed for full-time college students, for whom there is next to no cost. Applications from professionals interested in pursuing careers as intellectual activists are also welcome.

For those who are not able to commit to a full program, the OAC offers an auditing option. Consider taking our “Seminar in Ayn Rand’s Philosophy of Objectivism.”

The final application deadline for this year is July 30.

The U.N. is about to pass another round of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. Is it despite the three earlier rounds of U.N. sanctions that Iran has geared up to produce even more nuclear material — or because of them?

Past sanctions were puny to begin with, then eviscerated by friends of Tehran at the U.N. (Predictably, the regime has sidestepped existing sanctions.) But even if credibly effective sanctions could be imposed — which at the U.N. is fantastical — Iran’s decades of pro-jihadist aggression demand a far more assertive response. Tehran is a belligerent theocracy stained with American blood. Ending the mounting threat from Iran requires a resolute, confident policy on our part, but by pursuing mousy “sanctions” and extending Tehran countless second chances, we’ve appeased the regime.

No wonder Iran’s leaders (credibly) brag of realizing their nuclear goals. Our weakness in the face of this malignant regime empowers it.

Agência BrasilWikiCommons

ObamaCare included a little-noticed provision that will force restaurant chains with twenty or more stores to list how many calories are in each menu item. My view: The government has no business getting involved here. If we want to know how many calories are in our lunch, we can patronize only restaurants that tell us.

But you might wonder: Who could possibly object to giving people more information?

Well, here’s one man who does. Ken Schelper is a Vice President of Davanni’s, a small chain of pizzerias. He notes that under ObamaCare’s caloric mandate, his company will have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to replace all of its store menus, brochures, and drive through signs–every time it changes a single ingredient.

Information isn’t costless. Whether it involves scientific experiments to discover how many calories are in a slice of cheese or printing new menus, providing customers with information imposes genuine costs on businesses–costs that ultimately get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer options.

Supporters of the menu requirement would have us believe that the only reason a company would choose not to provide certain kinds of information is because it’s trying to put something over on us. That’s simply not true. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that before ObamaCare passed, customers of Davanni’s were able to find out the caloric content of their food. It was on the restaurant’s website.

Image: flickr