Reason Magazine - Staff > Matt Welch

Obama's Numbers

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:00:00 EST

I never quite understood libertarian enthusiasm for Barack Obama. Yes, his early and forceful opposition to the Iraq war made anti-interventionists swoon, but candidate Obama was, if anything, more belligerent than John McCain toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan. The drug war? The former pot smoker has said he’d call off the Drug Enforcement Administration’s raids on legal medical marijuana facilities, but that’s about it. (Recall, too, that he’ll have as vice president the very senator who created the odious position of “drug czar.”) Executive power? He’s been strangely silent about rolling back the excesses of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and he voted in 2008 to expand federal snooping into the affairs of innocent Americans. Property rights? Free speech? Capitalism? Guns? Surely you jest. (For a look at what Washington libertarians expect out of the new administration, see David Weigel’s “Beat the New Boss,” page 18.)

Only one pro-Obama—as opposed to anti-Republican—argument ever really resonated with me, and that was the notion that, unlike McCain and most Republican presidential nominees of recent vintage, Obama did a relatively credible job of making sure his budget figures “added up.” There was, I repeatedly read and heard from economic number crunchers such as The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, a genuinely impressive attempt to translate the hot air of campaign promises into the cold reality of a plausible balance sheet. “What I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut,” Obama said in his final pre-election debate with McCain. “I have been a strong proponent of pay as you go. Every dollar [in spending] that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.”

You should never take a politician at his word. But you should listen to what he campaigns on day after day, especially if he goes on to win big. Amid Obama’s host of illiberal campaign ideas—“fair” trade, centralized energy policy, New Deal–style infrastructure projects, more federal dollars into the sinkhole of public schools—the Democratic candidate also spiced his daily stump speech with a firm-sounding nod to fiscal responsibility. Coupled with a sorry budget situation that’s certain to get worse as a result of massive income tax losses from Wall Street, this commitment to fiscal sobriety may strangle many of Obama’s more expensive fantasies in the crib and crack open the door for ending or privatizing any number of inefficient federal programs.

This may sound like wishful thinking, but is it any more unrealistic than the expectation that a Republican administration will push for markets and limited government? As economics columnist Veronique de Rugy details on page 24, the outgoing Bush administration has increased the size of the federal government by just about every meaningful metric, to an extent not seen in several decades. Despite all the Democratic rhetoric to the contrary, this expansion includes a sharp growth in regulation. (For more on Wall Street regulation in particular, see Katherine Mangu-Ward’s “Is Deregulation to Blame?,” page 36.) It may be hard for Republicans older than me to accept, but voters who have known only the Clinton and Bush presidencies have little reason to believe that Republicans are preferable to Democrats on limiting government and keeping budgets halfway sane.

Somewhere along the way, making sure the numbers added up ceased to be a Republican virtue. The 2000 presidential election was fought largely over what to do with all those marvelous budget surpluses, which were estimated then at more than $4 trillion and assumed by all major candidates to stretch out past the horizon. Bush swore that “the best way to…make sure that the federal budgets don’t become bloated and don’t grow” was to cut taxes by more than $1 trillion. When his unified Republican government proceeded to bloat the federal budget in ways not seen since Lyndon Johnson, turning record surpluses into record deficits almost overnight, Bush just shrugged, holstered his veto pen (until late in his second term), and made halfhearted promises in every State of the Union address to “reduce” the deficit and really crack down on spending this time around. It was only slightly more believable than his fabled mission to Mars.

Today’s deficit (currently estimated at $1 trillion for fiscal 2009 alone) is tomorrow’s tax liability, in the form of ever-increasing debt service payments. It’s also a broken windows–like symbol that government has all but given up trying to live within any kind of budgetary discipline. Many Republicans during the Bush era stopped even pretending to care about any small-government notions aside from tax cuts. “The one mistake that could cripple a second Bush term,” Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform told me just after the 2004 elections, “is to accept the campaign promise to ‘cut the deficit in half in four years’ as a central goal of the administration.” That way “tax cuts are a problem,” Norquist said, “and Democrats have an equally valid solution: raise taxes.”

Turns out there was more than one mistake capable of crippling Bush, without his lifting a finger on the deficit. And Republicans’ singleminded pursuit of tax cuts as the only meaningful manifestation of limited government has ended up undermining public support for both.

Obama is perfectly capable of telling economic policy whoppers of his own. In addition to seconding every last bit of financial fear mongering that the Bush administration shamefully deployed to sell a deeply unpopular and ill-advised bailout (see Mike Flynn’s “Anatomy of a Breakdown,” page 26, and Tim Cavanaugh’s “Houses of Pain,” page 40), Obama in his victory speech on election night nonsensically described the current economic situation as “the worst financial crisis in a century,” while continuing to perpetuate the myth that America’s “middle class” is embattled, dwindling, and poor. He has missed few opportunities to bash trade with China, is fond of such absolutist non sequiturs as “we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers,” and he’s threatening to usher in the most left-bent economic program since at least the final year of George W. Bush.

But to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, the president-elect has bills no honest man can pay, balanced against a campaign pledge to deal with budgeting honestly. “We’re not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways,” Obama said in the final debate. “We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don’t work. I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page.”

Actually, that level of detail isn’t required. Obama could save more than $20 billion a year just by eliminating farm subsidies (subsidies that help keep the truly poor mired in poverty by blocking their ability to sell farm products to the world’s largest economy). There’s at least another $60 billion worth of federal corporate welfare out there begging to get snipped. Earmarks squander $20 billion a year.

There are bigger fish to fry in the military budget. Withdrawing from Iraq, Obama has estimated, will bring in $150 billion, and there are many billions more of potential savings being thrown every year to places such as the Korean peninsula. Real budgetary discipline would mean that we stop funding the Iraq war, the Afghan war, and any number of unvetted weapons systems through the deceitful and unprecedented “emergency supplemental spending” process.

All over the country, state and local governments are facing blown budgets and untenable pension obligations tied to plummeting stocks. New York Gov. David Paterson came to Washington just before the election rattling the cup for a federal bailout of his own. He won’t be alone. The good news, if there is any, is that Obama won’t be able to deliver medicine for everyone who ails. And if he’s serious about his campaign pledge to be fiscally responsible, Washington may even be the source of a little long-overdue pain.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.

"Would I Stay True if...My Personal Ambitions Seemed... Achievable?"

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

In 1998, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) faced a tough re-election fight from a Republican congressman named Mark Neumann. Feingold, co-author of the eventually successful (in passage, not in impact) Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, decided to put his soft money where his mouth was, refusing any of the then-legal stuff to be spent on his campaign, even while outside groups contributed $2 million in soft money for Neumann. After sweating bullets, Feingold eked out a win by less than 40,000 votes.

This demonstration of principle over politics impressed the hell out of Feingold's campaign reform partner, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

"I thought about that experience when I decided that I would try to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2000," McCain wrote in his 2002 political memoir Worth the Fighting For. "I knew I was a long shot, and given the curious place I now occupied in the affections of much of the Republican establishment, and the causes I had come to be identified with, I didn't expect much help, financial or otherwise, from party regulars."

The rest of this revealing passage should be mandatory reading for every morning-after media weeper who frets about where "the real McCain" went in the fall of 2008: "I thought about Russ's principled risk in his reelection campaign and wondered if I would have the guts to protect my integrity even if it meant lengthening the odds against me. I didn't worry that I would betray my positions or myself as long as I remained a dark horse. But would I stay true if by some unexpected turn of events my personal ambitions seemed a little more achievable? There was no point in worrying about that, I decided. I was unlikely to get close enough to the prize where such temptations would become a concern."

The rich are indeed very different than you and me; rich politicians like McCain even more so. But how many grown-ups do you know who honestly don't know whether they would hold onto their principles if they got within shouting distance of a lifelong goal? That's not the worry of a settled man who automatically puts "country first"; it's the anxiety of an aging adolescent who knows too well the potential weakness of his knees.

The John McCain that the national press fell in love with (literally) back in 1999-2000 was a John McCain who knew he was going to lose to George W. Bush. The man was openly referring to Bush and the Repblican establishment that overwhelmingly backed the 41st president's son as "the Death Star," in a Republican primary. He called Christian conservatives "agents of intolerance," made speech-stifling (and GOP activist-handcuffing) campaign finance reform his central theme, and thundered against the "false front" of "national prosperity." Non-Republican reporters (including yours truly) might have eaten it up at the time, but it was a strategy designed explicitly for failure, and maybe a little longshot fun.

"My decisions about how I would try to win were made out of political necessity as much as principle," McCain wrote in Worth the Fighting For. He could afford to talk down Iowan ethanol, because he couldn't afford to campaign in Iowa (one of many strategies and political positions that changed between 1999 and 2007). Even his comparative lack of enthusiasm for tax cuts at the time was heavily influenced by political positioning, not necessarily philosophy. "Republican primaries had long featured a bidding war to see which candidate could promise the biggest tax cut," he wrote. "I chose to offer the smallest, targeted to middle- and lower-income families.... Lest anyone think my positions were brave, if self-defeating, honesty obliges me to note that every poll my campaign conducted (and we took as many as could afford) found greater support for paying down the debt than cutting taxes for upper-bracket incomes." Country first!

Above all, McCain campaigned on a promise to "always tell the truth," to avoid "pandering," and to elevate the tone of political discourse. "'Judge all candidates,' I asked [voters], 'by the example we set; by the way we conduct our campaigns; by the way we personally practice politics.'" In 2008, many former McCain supporters have judged him precisely on those criteria, and switched their support to Barack Obama.

Should we care that a politician has so profoundly changed his positions and tactics in an effort to actually win this time around? For me, part of the answer lies within that startling quote above: "[I] wondered if I would have the guts to protect my integrity."

Note how McCain almost sounds like a helpless bystander in that mini-sentence. It's as if campaign politics were a filthy river at flood tide; dip a toe and you're off in the muck. This helps explain both why McCain started getting swept off to "crazy base land" three years ago, and why his apologists in the media could still manage to absolve him of guilt for doing so. It's not the Great Man, they cried, it's that tawdry party beneath him.

But such apologia wears its fatal flaw on its sleeve. You can't be a Great Man on one hand and an unwitting victim on the other.

The tone and results of the McCain campaign cannot be blamed on conflicting advisers, or "crazy base" Republicans yanking their standard-bearer hither and yon. The man who has run such a lackluster, unconvincing, and uninspiring race in 2008 is the exact same guy who seemed so hopelessly interesting in 2000. The only difference is, this time he thought he could win.

When you lack core philosophical belief or interest of your own, stuff like policy positions and campaign strategy are just malleable means to an alluring end. The John McCain we've seen these past two months is, in many senses, the real real McCain: A guy who, just as he worried six years ago, yields to the "temptations" of seeing his "personal ambitions" come tantalizingly close to fruition. We are fortunate we can see him respond to such a test before holding the reins of ultimate power.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason, and author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

Back to the Barricades

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

September 24, 2008, should go down in the history books as a day of infamy. And clarity.

That's when President George W. Bush looked into the eyes of anxious Americans and told them they weren't being nearly anxious enough. "America could slip into a financial panic," he warned (or was it threatened?), just hours before Washington Mutual became the biggest bank to fail in U.S. history without generating as much as a fluttered eyelid from blasé depositors (including me). "Millions of Americans could lose their jobs," he said, one week before new federal data showed unemployment unchanged at 6.1 percent, lower than it was for any month between January 1980 and June 1987. "The value of your home could plummet," he added, the same day new August housing figures showed the median U.S. house price to be $203,100. While down $73,000 in real terms from the height of the bubble two years ago, that's still a full 40 percent higher than it was at the beginning of 1997.

Aside from the innumerate hysteria, Bush sketched a worldview in which the federal government is single-handedly responsible for making sure all assets appreciate indefinitely. "The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account," he said, as if Americans were forced at gunpoint to invest for their retirement in equities instead of bonds or commodities. "Even if you have good credit history, it would be more difficult for you to get the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college," he said, as if he didn't understand that the financial crisis was triggered in the first place by unprecedented access to easy credit.

If you want to know when this country's political class, even those hailing from the allegedly pro-market Republican Party, lost faith in the single greatest economic organizing principle ever devised by mankind, look no further than the following six terse sentences from Bush's decidedly unpresidential speech: "I'm a strong believer in free enterprise. So my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention. I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business. Under normal circumstances, I would have followed this course. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly." Italics mine, to highlight the favored lament of reluctant central planners everywhere.

Bush's laundry list of horror was not predictive; it was conditional. We could avoid the cruel fate of "a long and painful recession" if and only if Congress agreed right now to allocate around $700 billion more in money it doesn't have so the Federal Reserve could use powers it never previously contemplated to buy up huge swaths of "toxic" mortgage-related financial instruments no bank currently wanted to sell (except to the government, at a premium above the market price). The details weren't important; as House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said at the start of bailout negotiations, "We don't have a choice now of debating whether this is a good or a bad thing." The elite opinion leaders in Washington and New York were nearly unanimous in their contention that only deeply irresponsible "nihilists" (in New York Times columnist David Brooks' phrase) and the "lunatic fringe" of "wing nuts" and "zealots" (The Washington Post's Dana Milbank) failed to recognize the urgent need for massive yet vague reregulation. "The fine points of financial reform can wait," The Washington Post's editorial board thundered. "For Congress, the immediate task is to avert economic disaster."

And it wasn't just the Bush administration and a bunch of newspaper columnists talking imminent collapse. GOP presidential nominee John McCain predicted that should a bailout fail to pass, "the present crisis will turn into a disaster," and "the gears of our economy will grind to a halt." Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) warned that "this is a sink-or-swim moment for America." Many commentators pointed to the 778-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on September 29, the day the House of Representatives temporarily rejected the bailout package, as proof that (in Milbank's words), "in the Congress of the United States, the insane are now running the asylum." When the Dow dropped 800 points the first full trading day after the bailout bill passed, most of the Dow-drop-proves-it crowd was oddly silent.

Political hyperbole and editorial board do-somethingitis aside, there is no exaggerating the importance of this moment. While congressional Republicans wobbled and eventually caved (see "Atlas Blinked," page 18), the Democrats were ready from day one to cooperate with the Bush administration's power grab. Polls in late September and early October showed the crisis had a beneficial impact on not just Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama but also a variety of down-ticket Democratic legislators. If the party that cares even less about markets converts anti-market rhetoric into electoral gains, and tops that off with a Democratic president who ran to the economic left of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and arguably even Howard Dean, we could find ourselves come January with an immediate governing crisis.

But I would suggest that something even deeper is afoot. When a Republican administration arbitrarily (and "temporarily") bans short selling just one decade after Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir bin Mohamad was globally (and deservedly) mocked for blaming his country's self-inflicted woes on "speculators," when a Republican presidential nominee unleashes retrograde attacks against the "casino culture" of Wall Street "greed," and when a Democratic Congress holds nearly daily hearings suggesting any number of "windfall profits" taxes and forced reductions in private-sector CEO pay, that sound you hear is a fragile consensus shattering and a warning bell clanging in the night.

After the collapse of communism and the attendant discrediting of Marxian economic models, the industrialized world more or less settled on democratic capitalism as the best available option for countries to grow and prosper (see "The Libertarian Moment," page 62). Old Europe slashed government involvement in industry, New Europe rode mass privatization to massive growth, East Asian countries went from emergingmarket "tigers" to full-fledged market economies, and China used markets to yank hundreds of millions up from poverty. One could perhaps be forgiven for thinking the 20th century's great economic argument had been settled.

Well, no more.

In June I read what I thought I'd never see again: a mainstream column, by a mainstream columnist (The Washington Post's David Ignatius), arguing against the effects of airline deregulation, one of the most liberating government acts of the last four decades (see "40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets," page 28). When reregulation is suddenly on the table even for an industry where market forces have cut prices in half while doubling the customer base, it's time to get back to first principles and fight like hell to secure victories we'd long thought won.

It is times like these that reason magazine was made for, 40 years ago. As we argue throughout this commemorative anniversary issue, many aspects of our lives are considerably better than they were in 1968, but some old debates never die. Now that the historic 2008 bailout-the ramifications of which we'll be sorting out for as long as, if not longer than, those of the equally rushed PATRIOT Act of 2001-has been signed into law, there has rarely been a more fitting time to engage in the basic argument that it is capitalism, not "emergency" intervention from Washington, that makes us freer, more prosperous, and more interesting. We hope we won't be making these same arguments 40 years from now, but we're fully prepared to do so if necessary.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.

The Libertarian Moment

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

If someone looked you in the eye in 1971 and said “Man, you know what? We’re about to get a whole lot freer,” you might have reasonably concluded that he was nuts, driven mad by taking too much LSD and staring into the sun.

Back during that annus horribilis, a Republican president from the Southwest, facing an economy that was groaning under the strain of record deficits and runaway spending on elective and unpopular overseas wars, announced one of the most draconian economic interventions in Washington’s inglorious history: a freeze on wages and prices, accompanied by an across-the-board 10 percent tariff on imports and the final termination of what little remained of the gold standard in America.

Though the world wouldn’t learn until later that this president was using federal law enforcement agencies to attack his real and imagined enemies, Richard Nixon’s yen for paranoid secrecy and executive branch power-mongering was well-established, providing an actuarial foreshadowing of corruption. Which isn’t to say that the Democrats of the time were any less statist: In 1972, their presidential nominee was even more economically interventionist than Tricky Dick. Widely (and rightly) considered the most liberal Oval Office candidate in decades, George McGovern actually claimed that wage and price controls were applied “too late—they froze wages but let prices and profits run wild.” And individual states were passing income taxes like so many doobies at a beachside singalong.

Yet even during that dark night of the American soul, with all its eerie echoes of George W. Bush’s final miserable days in office, premonitions of liberty-loving life abounded for those who knew where to look. The contraceptive pill, which gave women unprecedented control over their sexual and reproductive lives, had been made legal for married women in 1965, and was on the verge of being legalized for unmarried women too. A new political group, the Libertarian Party, started in December 1971, and a larger libertarian movement manifested itself in a host of young organizations and publications. Free agency in sports, music, and film, triggered by a series of legal battles and economic developments, ushered in a wild new era of individualistic expression and artistic independence. It was an unfree world but, as bestselling author (and eventual Libertarian presidential candidate) Harry Browne could attest, it was one in which you could still find plenty of freedom.

Widespread middle-class prosperity gave the average American the tools and the confidence to experiment with a thousand different lifestyles, many of them previously the sole dominion of the rich, giving us everything from gay liberation to encounter groups, from back-to-the-garden communes to back-to-the-old-ways fundamentalist churches, from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to Looking Out for #1. In 1968, the techno-hippies at the Whole Earth Catalog announced, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” A year later, a new technology allowing university computers to communicate with one another went live, laying the foundations for what would become the Internet. And the magazine you are holding, in its September 1969 issue, made what might have been the craziest argument of all during the Age of Nixon: If you abolish the Civil Aeronautics Board and get the federal government out of regulating “every essential aspect” of the airline business, Robert W. Poole wrote, then air traffic will grow while prices plummet. (For more on Poole’s story, see “40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets,” page 28.)

By the end of the 1970s, the Civil Aeronautics Board was in the dustbin of history, sharing much-deserved space with price controls, the reserve clause, and back-alley abortions. What started out as a decade marred by pointless war and Soviet-style central planning ended up being the decade that ended military conscription and—arguably even more stunning—regulation of interstate trucking. The personal computer introduced possibilities few people had ever dreamed of (though reason did; see “Speculation, Innovation, Regulation,” page 44), a property tax revolt in California spread like a brush fire across the country, and the Republican Party went from the big-government conservatism of Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller to the small-government rabble-rousing of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The Libertarian Party…well, it kept trying, winning one electoral vote in 1972 and 921,299 popular votes in 1980.

Most importantly, individuals burned through the 1970s with the haughty grandeur and splashiness falsely predicted of Comet Kohoutek. Stagflation be damned: Americans finally learned to live, dammit, in a no-collar world where both electricians and executives dressed like peacocks and women starting earning real money, not just as entertainers but as doctors and lawyers. Boys grew hair longer than girls, and girls started playing Little League baseball. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his era-naming 1976 essay, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “But once the dreary little bastards started getting money…they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran! They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken!”

Everything solid dissolved into the Bermuda Triangle, or at least a long series of Chariots of the Gods sequels. During the 1970s, we undoubtedly felt more discombobulated (Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull shared the bestseller lists), but there is no question in retrospect that we were considerably more free even by the time Thatcher padlocked the coal mines in Olde England and the Reagan Revolution ushered in the 1980s as a glorious decade of greed.

That ’00s Show

As in 1971, there is no shortage of reasons to grumble about the state of American liberty at the end of 2008. As this issue went to press, Congress had passed the economic equivalent of the PATRIOT Act, a nearly trillion-dollar bailout of the financial industry, involving whole-scale nationalization of the mortgage lending business (see “Back to the Barricades,” page 2, and “Atlas Blinked,” page 18). Despite (or perhaps because of ) eight years of a president who has increased regulatory spending by more than 61 percent in real terms, “deregulation” has become a concept even more panic-inducing than Janet Jackson’s nipple. Whether in international security, the financial world, or the cultural arena, the answer to everything seems to be a new clampdown. It is nearly impossible to cross a North American border without showing a passport, revealing biomedical information, and being entered into a database for decades. Every day across this great country some city council is finding a new private activity to ban, whether it’s selling food cooked with trans fats, using a cell phone behind the wheel, or smoking a cigarette outdoors. And the two major-party candidates for president are trying to out-populist one another with Oliver Stone–level attacks on Wall Street “greed,” while advancing economic plans filled with centralized industrial policy and extravagant promises that would undoubtedly burst the federal government’s already near-broken budget.

Yet if 1971 contained a few flickers of light in the authoritarian darkness, 2008 is chock full of halogen-bright beacons shouting “This way!” Turn away from the overhyped prize of the Oval Office and all the dreary, government expanding policies and politics that go with it, and the picture is not merely one of plausible happy endings to our current sob stories of mortgage-finance meltdowns and ever-lengthening war, but something far more radical, more game-changing, than all that we’ve grown to expect.

We are in fact living at the cusp of what should be called the Libertarian Moment, the dawning not of some fabled, clichéd, and loosey-goosey Age of Aquarius but a time of increasingly hyper-individualized, hyper-expanded choice over every aspect of our lives, from 401(k)s to hot and cold running coffee drinks, from life-saving pharmaceuticals to online dating services. This is now a world where it’s more possible than ever to live your life on your own terms; it’s an early rough draft version of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s glimmering “utopia of utopias.” Due to exponential advances in technology, broad-based increases in wealth, the ongoing networking of the world via trade and culture, and the decline of both state and private institutions of repression, never before has it been easier for more individuals to chart their own course and steer their lives by the stars as they see the sky. If you don’t believe it, ask your gay friends, or simply look who’s running for the White House in 2008.

This new century of the individual, which makes the Me Decade look positively communitarian in comparison, will have far-reaching implications wherever individuals swarm together in commerce, culture, or politics. Already we have witnessed gale-force effects on nearly every “legacy” industry that had grown accustomed to dictating prices and product and intelligence to their customers, be they airlines, automakers, music companies, or newspapers (it was nice knowing all of you). Education and health care, handicapped by their large streams of public-sector and hence revanchist funding, lag behind, but even in those sorry professions, practitioners are scrambling desperately to respond to consumer demands and compete for business. Politics, always a crippled, lagging indicator of social change, will be the last entrenched oligopoly to be squashed like a bug on the windshield of history, since the two major parties have effectively rigged the game to their advantage in a way no robber baron ever could. But the Dems and Reps, more bankrupt as brands than Woolworth’s and Sears Roebuck, are already in ideological Chapter 11.

The Libertarian Moment is based on a few hard-won insights that have grown into a fragile but enduring consensus in the ever-expanding free world. First is the notion that, all things being equal, markets are the best way to organize an economy and unleash the means of production (and its increasingly difficult-to-distinguish adjunct, consumption). Second is that at least vaguely representative democracy, and the political freedom it almost always strengthens, is the least worst form of government (a fact that even recalcitrant, anti-modern regimes in Islamabad, Tehran, and Berkeley grudgingly acknowledge in at least symbolic displays of pluralism). Both points seem almost banal now, but were under constant attack during the days of the Soviet Union, and are still subject to wobbly confidence any time capitalist dictatorships like China seem to grow ascendant in a time of domestic economic woe. Though every dip in the Dow makes the professional amnesiacs of cable TV and the finance pages turn in the direction of Mao, there is no going back to the Great Leap Forward.

Or the Great Society, for that matter. Try as politicians might, citizens continue their great escape from grand designs. Financially ruinous entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare are going nowhere slow, but all of us are getting better at finding ways to work around such stultifying bureaucracies. Virtually across the board, the government’s pension plan is becoming less important to retirees and the medical cartel is slowly losing its death grip on providing basic services. Even across old Europe, government spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen over the past several decades. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom has charted nothing but global increases since it began in 1995.

The ne plus ultra change agent as we lurch through the finish line of yet another electoral contest between our 19th century political parties is the revolutionary, break-it-down-and-build-it-back-up power of the Internet, and all the glorious creative destruction it enables at the expense of lumbering gatekeepers and to the benefit of empowered individuals. No single entity in the history of mankind has been so implicitly and explicitly libertarian: a tax-free distributed network and alternative universe where individuals, usually without effective interference from government, can reshape their identities, transcend limitations of family, geography, and culture. It’s a place where freaks and geeks and regular folks can pool their intelligence and compete (even win!) against entities thousands of times their size.

The generation raised on the Internet has essentially been raised libertarian, even if they’ve never even heard of the word. Native netizens now entering college exhibit a kind of broad-based tolerance toward every manner of ethnic, religious, and sexual-orientation grouping in a way that would have seemed like science fiction just a generation ago. The products and activities they enjoy and co-opt most, from filesharing to flying discount airlines to facebooking, are excrescences of the free-market ideas of deregulation and decontrol. Generations X, Y, and those even younger swim in markets—that is, in choices among competing alternatives—the way those of us who grew up in the ’70s frolicked on Slip ’n Slides.

Feelin’ Groovy

Understanding the Libertarian Moment is fundamental to understanding the 21st century. Power—economic, cultural, political—will accrue to those people who recognize that it’s over for existing power centers. The command economy, the command culture, and the command polity have all been replaced by a different model—that of a consultant, a docent, a fixer, a friend. The individuals and groups that will flourish in the Libertarian Moment will be those who open things up, not shut them down.

The first step toward understanding is to recognize that the moment is indeed upon us. In reason’s 20th anniversary issue, the most talked-about piece was Robert Poole’s then-controversial contention that 1988 was a lot “groovier” than 1968. (For Poole’s take on the freedoms to emerge since then, see “Groovier and Groovier,” page 14; also, consult Veronique de Rugy’s “Are You Better off Than You Were 40 Years Ago?,” page 24.) The single biggest piece of good news in the past 20 years (and arguably the past 90) was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it the final discrediting of Marxism as an economic and social model. Communism had ironically sided with the producer rather than the consumer, the factory owner rather than the workingman, by trying without success to shove unwanted commodities on unmanageable customers.

If the end of World War II hastened the end of old-style colonialism (by the mid-1960s, virtually all the conventional Old World empires had been thoroughly dismantled), the end of the Cold War marked the end of countless proxy wars between the two major superpowers. The erosion of top-down hegemony resulted not in chaos (as many feared) but a new era of freedom and mostly peaceful coexistence. As of the end of 2007, Freedom House ranked 90 of 193 countries as “free,” 60 as “partly free,” and 43 as “not free,” which is up from 81/57/53 in 1997, and 58/51/51 in 1987.

Not only are countries increasingly independent and free, but thanks to global trade they are increasingly prosperous as well, with an estimated 600 million people lifted out of poverty in China alone over the past three decades. War is declining, too: As the political scientist John Mueller documents in 2004’s The Remnants of War, armed global conflicts in which 1,000 people have died yearly have been in decline for decades.

Global freedom and prosperity may be the greatest single cause for rejoicing, but the Libertarian Moment affects our humdrum daily lives here in America as well. As Madge always told us about Palmolive, we’re soaking in it.

The Internet alone has created entire new economies, modes of scattered and decentralized organization and work, and a hyper-individualization that would have shocked the Founding Fathers. Liberated from the constraints of geography and 20th century career paths, Americans are more productive than they ever have been and their jobs are more personalized than ever, with strictly enforced punch-the-clock jobs morphing into flextime, telecommuting gigs. In less than two decades, we’ve moved from a “You want fries with that?” world to one in which “You want soy with that decaf mocha frappuccino?” no longer elicits laughs—except unintentionally, when John McCain tries to use Starbucks flavors as a stand-in for Americans’ lack of seriousness.

Critics continue to worry about the demise of what John Kenneth Galbraith and others described in the 1950s and ’60s as The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, in which too-big-to-fail megacorporations such as IBM and General Motors replaced the welfare state as a cradle-to-grave provider of social welfare services, status, and meaning. But fears of “a great risk shift” in which post-industrial free agents are left to fend for themselves is based on what the management guru Tom Peters once called, in a reason interview, the “‘false-nostalgia-for-shitty-jobs phenomenon’: Oh for the halcyon days when I could sit on the 37th floor of the General Motors Tower passing memorandums from the left side of the desk to the right side of the desk for 43 years. It’s just total shit. It really is. Life was not as glorious as imagined.”

The era of the blockbuster and the bestseller has been replaced with something new and wonderful: a world in which individuals are free to express themselves by tapping into millions of different book titles at Amazon, tens of thousands of different songs at Rhapsody, and dozens of different beers at even the least-provisioned supermarket (at least those that aren’t banned outright from selling alcohol). Smart retailers realize that the key to the future is to give the customer more choices, not to act as a chokepoint. In a similar way, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not structure interaction as much as provide a not-so-temporary autonomous zone to facilitate it. Individual users tailor the experience to their own desires rather than submit to a central authority. The inhabitants of such a world are instinctively soft libertarians, resisting or flouting most nanny-state interference, at least on issues that affect their favorite activities. When it comes to online commerce, at least, both producers and consumers scream bloody murder every time 20th century politicians attempt to levy taxes or restrictions on goods and services.

This wave of individualized creative destruction is battering incumbents in seemingly every industry except politics, where the status quo parties keep partying like it’s 1899. But look closer, and you’ll see they’re hemorrhaging market share just like broadcast dinosaurs on network TV. In 1970, the Harris Poll asked Americans, “Regardless of how you may vote, what do you usually consider yourself—a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or some other party?” Fully 49 percent of respondents chose Democrat, and 31 percent called themselves Republicans. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, those figures were 35 percent for Democrats and 26 percent for Republicans. The only real growth market in politics is voters who decline political affiliation, and the only political adjective seemingly gaining in popularity is…libertarian.

From lefty comedian Bill Maher to righty columnist Jonah Goldberg, from in-the-tank Democratic blogger Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas to in-the-tank Republican talk show host Neal Boortz, you can’t turn around in a political discussion anymore without hearing someone identify themselves at least partially (whether rightly or wrongly) as a “libertarian.”

The 2008 presidential campaign, and to a heartening degree the public debate and all-too-temporary congressional defeat of the Wall Street bailout, gave the first hints at what may soon become a permanent libertarian strain in politics. An uncharismatic libertarian congressman from Texas, Ron Paul, ignited a decentralized swarm of money-bombing donors to the Republican presidential primaries with his message of not wanting to run people’s lives (“we all have different values”), or the economy (“people run the economy in a free society”), or the world (“we don’t need to be imposing ourselves around the world”).

Though the Paul movement didn’t end up coalescing behind a single candidate for president after the primaries were over, its impact could still be felt in the fall, when, faced with a historic opportunity to socialize losses by throwing tax money at investment banks, Main Street Americans shrugged at least temporarily while Wall Street Atlases wept. As the chattering classes, politicians, and analysts compared a run of recent bankruptcies and market downturns to an economic Pearl Harbor requiring an immediate call to arms, more than half of the House of Representatives said that prudence dictated taking a deep breath or three.

On the stump, Barack Obama preaches a less-interventionist foreign policy and an interventionist domestic agenda; John McCain presents roughly the obverse. Despite each of them claiming to foment change, their adherence to old forms and old labels represents not the first real choice in the new era but the last presidential contest of the 20th century. Yet between them, and outside of their spheres, is a glimmering of a fusion that just might appeal to most Americans: engagement and integration with the world via cultural and economic exchange, and a more personally autonomous society at home in which individuals are responsible for charting their own course.

It’s wrong to look at politics as anything other than the B.A. Baracus of American society, the last one through the door and the last member of The A-Team to get the joke. And a simple study of incentives will tell you that political parties will use whatever is at their disposal to stay in power, particularly the government they control. Expecting Washington to cut back its main instrument of power after a capitalism-bashing political campaign is like expecting Michael Moore to share his Egg McMuffin with a homeless man.

But when the gap grows too wide between voter desire and government policy, between the way people actually live their lives and the way government wants them to behave, then a situation that looks stable can turn revolutionary overnight. Richard Nixon may have been sitting pretty in 1971, but he was sent packing to San Clemente by 1974. As back then, we emerge from life under George W. Bush bruised and battered but looking forward not to a protracted twilight struggle with an existential foe but to a new and largely unimaginable world of wonders. There is a learning curve at work here, one that human beings have been struggling with for 40 years, 400 years, 4,000 years. In context, it has only been recently that the concept of individual liberty has been prototyped and subjected to testing in anything approaching real-world conditions. Advances are inevitably followed by setbacks, and we stagger into the future punch-drunk, more like Muhammad Ali than Rocky Marciano.

But the power to swarm in the direction of freedom is the new technology fueling an idea that is as old as the American republic itself: No central government shall interfere with our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The Libertarian Moment is taking these self-evident truths and organizing them into a comprehensive approach toward living. It started where it always does, in business and culture, where innovation is rewarded. Statist politicians—it’s not fully clear that there is any other kind—will ignore that epochal shift at their peril. And will eventually be forced to fly to their own personal San Clementes.

Nick Gillespie is editor of reason online and reason.tv. Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.

McCain Really is a Hero

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

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Why John McCain Likes Being the Underdog

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

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McCain's Last Best Hope

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:30:00 EDT

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The Winner of Last Night's Debate? Washington

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:00:00 EDT

"We're gonna have to do something about home values," presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said at the beginning of last night's debate. Wait, was that a Republican nominee suggesting that the federal government has a causus belli to intervene when market prices go down?

You bet your assets.

"I would order the Secretary of the Treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes, at the diminished value of those homes and let people make those, be able to make those payments and stay in their homes," McCain said. "Is it expensive? Yes."

Is it yet another McCain Hail Mary pass in a campaign that will soon be remembered for nothing but? Also, yes. And it was the latest indication in a grim season for free marketeers that there is no corner of American life that leading politicians aren't eagerly lining up to nationalize.

This should be no surprise, neither to people who've been following John McCain's economic incoherence closely, nor for those who've merely watched the pro-centralization hysteria of the man he aims to replace. But last night's debate hammered home that we are truly entering the re-regulation era, at least if Washington politicians have anything to do with it.

McCain, obviously, was not alone. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) repeated his detail-free contention that it was "deregulation," not the implosion of the heavily regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that caused the subprime meltdown and the current financial crisis. "A year ago," he bragged. "I went to Wall Street and said, we have got to reregulate."

The Democratic nominee repeated his pie-in-the-sky idea that Washington-led industrial policy on energy can create "5 million new jobs," and magically transform the economy like, uh, the personal computer? "Energy policy can be the engine that the computer was the engine of our economy," he said, hinting at a fascinating alternative history whereby Mssrs. Hewlett, Packard, Jobs, Wozniak, and Gates were all products of central planning. "That's why we've got to make some investments."

Moderator Tom Brokaw gleefully got into the central planning fantasy life, wondering whether we should "fund a Manhattan-like project that develops a nuclear bomb to deal with global energy and alternative energy or should we fund 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley."

These kind of late-campaign enthusiasms for massive new federal intrusions into the economy might play better as entertainment if it weren't for the uncomfortable fact that the distance between bad economic ideas and new signed laws has been almost historically short over the last few weeks. The ground is moving under our feet, or at least under the feet of Washington and those who cover it, and if we're not careful we will wake up in a few months with the already historically bloated and indebted federal government owning a piece of every private decision in America that didn't turn out well. Airlines bet wrong on the price of oil? Here's your bailout, sir! Did you bet on the Angels instead of the Red Sox? Step right up, Main Street!

It is a whiplash-inducing thing, having lived through the Central Europeans' response to their much-graver "economic crises" of the early 1990s—basically, getting the government out of the ownership business, and letting the sold-off chunks fail if need be—and then coming back here to see both major political parties and the establishmentarian media get a national case of the vapors when a decade-long credit binge finally dries out a bit, and unemployment ticks up to a once-enviable 6.1 percent.

There once was something approaching consensus in the industrialized world that central economic planning was for losers. If this is how quickly America's leaders lose faith, I would hate to see the kind of solutions on offer if things actually do get as bad as they all predict.

In the meantime, we are also witnessing the full flower of what happens when a Republican who has never really worked in the private sector, who emulates the Wall Street-bashing of Teddy Roosevelt, and who has been explicitly railing against the "libertarian" wing of his own party for more than a decade, finally sees his lifelong prize dangled tantalizingly within his grasp. If you thought his economic policies were bad back before he ever had a real shot at the White House, is it really any surprise that in a time of high financial anxiety he's running to the economic left of Bill Clinton?

The only good news for all of us, once again, is that one of these two men will lose on Nov. 4. One senses, however, that the fight over re-regulation has only just begun.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.

Obama or McCain: Who's performing better?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

How long has this interminable yet strangely fascinating presidential campaign gone on? So long that even I, who have a book out on one of the two major candidates and a semi-political magazine to edit, would really, really rather talk about the rehabilitation of the Hollywood Palladium or the liberation of my fair ex-city's taco trucks (you're next, oh valiant bacon-dog vendors!). This campaign has gone on for so long that—no lie—during its course Angels closer Francisco Rodriguez has not once but twice blown game two of the American League Division Series against the Boston Red Sox; so long that when I saw Fred Thompson the other night in that great 1990 period piece Die Hard 2, it took me a few moments before I remembered to say, "Ha ha, I'm with Fred!"

But, as we all know, this is the most important election in the history of ever, and even if it's not, maybe talking about it for a week will make these last 30 days go faster. So let's start by going literal: Interesting choice of words there by my former colleagues, "performing." To paraphrase Elvis, all the world of politics is a stage, and the dramaturgy of the past two months has been, in almost every instance, more interesting and probably more revealing than the substance of any soliloquy.

Take the Obamas at the Democratic National Convention. Though a nation of pundits applauded, I groaned at Michelle's gee-willickers, I-watched-The Brady Bunch-too shtick on opening night. Thankfully for her, I wasn't the target audience. That whole week's staging, down to the mostly boring nomination speech, was designed to pound home two messages about Barack Obama over and over again: No really, even though you don't know me and I might be perceived with worry in some quarters, I am, in fact, as normal as any American you have ever met; and despite the inexperience, you can trust me on foreign policy. The exact same calculus was at play with the selection of Joe Biden, who, despite being one of the Senate's worst drug warriors and a Grade-A certified clown, at least knows a lot about foreign policy and allegedly seems "normal" to people in Scranton, Penn.

Obama is a smart enough campaigner to know in his core what this election's central truth has been even before President Bush declared that the Great Depression is just around the corner: This is a terrible, terrible year for Republicans, and deservedly so. All Obama has really had to do is avoid seeming too scary, radiate stentorian calm and hope there isn't soon another foreign policy crisis on the level of the Russia-Georgia war or worse. He has succeeded very well on all these points.

John McCain, on the other hand, has been performing like a chicken with its head cut off. Don't take my word for it; read such other non-Democrats as George Will, Charles Krauthammer and former maverick strategist Mike Murphy. The man has gone from one Hail Mary to the next, thundering against bailouts one day, voting for them the next, and exuding a kind of angry, scattershot incoherence that is clearly starting to become wearisome to a general population that once snacked out of his hand. It's almost impossible to remember at this point, but he was famously a "Happy Warrior" in the 2000 presidential campaign, though maybe that was because he knew he was going to lose.

Are the two candidates "resonating with voters"? Unlike too many political pundits, I am happy to admit that I have no freaking idea what "voters" think, nor would I be anything but scared if I ever found out. I do suspect that voters (or at least my wife) are connecting most on a human level with the unique character of Sarah Palin, even if many are concluding (with either sadness or glee) that she belongs nowhere near the Red Button. I do agree with Sebastian Mallaby today (it had to happen once!) that Obama and the Democrats are setting themselves up for a fall if they think that justified voter anger at the Wall Street crisis and the bailout is congruent with some kind of over-arching public desire for re-regulation and the kind of anti-Wall Street rhetoric I thought we'd safely buried with Oliver Stone. (Sadly for the Republicans, their standard-bearer is little better on this malefactors-of-great-wealth front.)

But Obama doesn't have to resonate or even offer sound economic policies to win this election; he just needs to talk calmly and hope we don't launch a shooting war with Pakistan. Democrats this year are fired up with hate for all things Republican; independents are sick of Republicans too. Even Republicans are tired of themselves, especially here in Washington.

A final first-day note of warning, however: John McCain loves being the underdog. His whole mentality and even worldview thrive on it. This has been the craziest election I can remember ( Mike Huckabee? Sarah Palin? A black guy with the middle name Hussein making the nomination finals against a woman?), and McCain is nothing if not a drama queen. We are going to see some pretty weird stuff here down the home stretch, perhaps starting as soon as Tuesday night's presidential debate. Though I'm afraid America will lose no matter who wins the election, at least we've been treated to some first-rate entertainment.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason and author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, now available in paperback with a new afterword by the author.

All week at The Los Angeles Times, Welch is debating University of Southern California law professor Kareem Crayton about the upcoming election and John McCain's and Barack Obama's policies (or lack thereof). To read Crayton's first response, go here. And check in daily at reason's Hit & Run for links to the latest exchanges.

Scared Straight

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:17:00 EDT

Attending a major-party political convention is a lot like putting a metal dish into a microwave. You know something bad's going to happen, but after four years you need to be reminded of the acrid smell.

Whatever was wafting over Denver and St. Paul this summer, it certainly wasn't the fine, fresh scent of freedom (even if I did spy a Ron Paul banner behind a Cessna on the last day of the Republican National Convention). Both friendly cities became concentrated police states, where local and state and even national law enforcement dressed up like hyper-militarized Ninja Turtles, just in case any loose scattering of "anarchists" was able to assemble a division of tanks. Almost every type of local business I frequented complained of drastically reduced sales, as sensible locals fled far from the scene rather than watch the gruesome spectacle of thousands expressing actual enthusiasm for 19th-century political parties that ran out of fresh ideas long ago.

I would ignore these made-for-TV exercises altogether if it weren't for the unhappy fact that the participants share duopoly power over history's most lethal military and control a guaranteed income stream coming straight from you and me. Figuring out what they're up to strikes me as an act of citizen self-defense. And/or self-mutilation.

In Denver, at the Democratic National Convention, I went to investigate one hope and one fear. The hope: Would Barack Obama's stance against the Iraq War really "change the mind set" of Washington foreign policy, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle? The fear: Are the Democrats really planning to run domestic policy the way they've been campaigning-significantly to the left of any Democratic ticket since Michael Dukakis? Both answers were disappointing.

On foreign policy, Democrats are all political intent, no guiding principle. Outfits such as the three-year-old Truman Project, "the nation's only organization that recruits, trains, and positions a new generation of progressives across America to lead on national security," distributed guides of military terminology to young activists and organized a series of confabs to discuss Democratic approaches to the world's persistent challenges. These foreign policy events were among the most well-attended of the week, dwarfing similar panel discussions from conventions past. And they produced little if any evidence that the candidate who rode anti-war sentiment to the nomination will do any real "changing" anytime soon.

Obama's main foreign policy adviser, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, hemmed and hawed whenever asked about various scenarios for using U.S. military force. Pre-emptive strikes in both Pakistan and Iran may prove to be necessary, he said, if Osama Bin Laden is located, or if Iran produces a nuclear weapon. When asked about a guiding philosophy for making crucial life-and-death decisions, Danzig offered up a nonsense slogan: "sustainable security." President Bush's (and would-be president McCain's) bellicose approach toward Russia helped lead to the invasion of Georgia, he and others contended, but then vice presidential nominee Joe Biden thundered that "we will hold Russia accountable for its actions." And throughout the convention the one ubiquitous foreign policy presence was former secretary of state and notable liberal hawk Madeleine Albright, who advocated "a more effective response" to "violent extremism" in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Sudan, and Congo, because even if "the world may not be clamoring for American leadership" right now, "there is no doubt that a guiding hand is needed." We just need time to convince the world that "we're not imperialists."

That's not a changed mind-set. It's a changed clock-back to 1999, when humanitarian interventions trumped national sovereignty and congressional disapproval. (For more on Democratic foreign-policy incoherence, see Jim Henley's "Between Iraq and a Soft Place," Page 63.)

On economics, too, I left Denver disappointed, though less surprised. There was no moderating of the antitrade rhetoric that marred the primary season. The economy-whose second-quarter growth was revised up to 3.3 percent during the week of the convention-was repeatedly pronounced "broken" and worse. The pro-business (though anti-Fourth Amendment) Democratic Leadership Council, so influential in the booming 1990s, was almost nowhere to be seen, replaced by a New Democratic Network affiliated more with Howard Dean than Robert Rubin. And the biggest former New Democrat of them all plunged the knife into the ideas he once at least flirted with.

Limited government, Bill Clinton said in the most electrifying speech of the convention, was an "extreme philosophy" that "we never had a real chance to see in action until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and Congress. Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades were implemented."

Set aside the fact that the Republicans actually spent the last seven years making the government larger. (For more on that debacle, read Veronique de Rugy's "Fear of a Unified Government," page 24.) This was a repudiation of the best parts of Clinton's own record, when he worked with Republicans, in the brief window of time when they seemed to care about limited government, to balance the budget and reform welfare. And it was an acknowledgement that the more statist, government-is-the-solution politics of his wife now held the whip hand in the Democratic Party.

And the Republicans? Well, the bad news is that they only sporadically pay lip service to the philosophy Bill Clinton claims is so extreme. The third day of the GOP convention in St. Paul, which was supposed to be dedicated to the topic of "reform," was more about every economic policy under the sun. Speaker Carolyn Dunn, a self-described "farm partner and community volunteer," made the retrograde Ralph Nader-like argument that the U.S. should achieve food security while enacting federal programs to repopulate the Midwest. "I do not want us to rely on unsafe shipments from overseas, where little oversight and none of the same standards apply," she said.

Alleged economics whiz Mitt Romney warned that "China is acting like Adam Smith on steroids," a statement that makes up for in Sinophobia what it lacks in understanding of what makes a hand invisible. Other speakers assured us that President John McCain will come out of the gate "cracking down on the speculative pricing of oil," going after "all institutions of power of wealth," and basically fixing everything in the country marked "problem."

"If you want to fight childhood obesity through physical education and nutritional meals in schools, then you are a McCain voter," said small business owner Renee Amoore. "If you want action, McCain's your man."

No matter who wins what on November 4, you can rest assured that the victors will be set to take "action" and in the process feed the beast of Washington intervention both at home and abroad. So should we be booking our one-way flights to Estonia?

I think not. For all the oxygen Democrats and Republicans suck out of the national room, their combined market share continues to bleed, as Americans choose other parties or political independence in evergrowing numbers. (For a penetrating interview with the likely third-place finisher for president this year, see David Weigel's "Bob Barr Talks," page 26.) As the Ron Paul movement and even some of the Obama enthusiasm indicates, Americans are hungry for a genuinely fresh set of political ideas and ready to embrace new technologies to combine their efforts in sudden and interesting ways.

Some year, sometime soon, the two-party lock will finally collapse under its own intellectual exhaustion and crass cynicism. Until then, I'll keep sticking metal in the microwave, reminding myself why I'm glad I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.

The Dangerous Failure of McCain-Feingold

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:46:00 EDT

Among the many critics of campaign finance reform, Bradley A. Smith may be the only one who has enforced the law he despises. From 2000 to 2005, including a one-year stint as chairman in 2004, Smith, a Republican, sat on the Federal Election Commission. There he was tasked with enforcing the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act. After years of withstanding the ire of John McCain and other advocates of political speech regulation, Smith founded the nonprofit Center for Competitive Politics, whose mission is to “educate the public on the actual effects of money in politics.”

Smith, who also teaches at Capital University Law School and practices law at Vorys, Sater, Seymour, and Pease, spoke with reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch in July. A longer version of the interview can be seen at reason.tv.

Q: Catch us up on how McCain-Feingold has been implemented, and how that is different from what was intended.

A: The law’s purpose was always kind of vague, shifting. It was sold to the American people like a 19th-century patent medicine. If you think campaigns are too negative, you want McCain-Feingold; you think they’re too long, you want McCain-Feingold; you think too much is spent, you want McCain-Feingold; you think they’re too nasty, you want McCain-Feingold; you just hate politics, you want McCain-Feingold. But what was generally promised to people was that it would get money out of politics.

I hardly know anybody who would say that those have been achieved. If anything, campaigns seem longer and more negative and more expensive than before. The era of McCain-Feingold is the era of Bob Ney and Jack Abramoff and $90,000 in Congressman Jefferson’s refrigerator. You could say that the era of McCain-Feingold is an era of corruption in American politics as great as we’ve seen since Watergate.

Q: What about disclosure?

A: Let me ask you this question: Imagine if George Bush were to announce here in the fading twilight of his presidency that in order to prevent terrorists from infiltrating American political parties and thus asserting control of American government, we needed to introduce the PATRIOT II Act. The PATRIOT II Act would require citizens to report to the government their political activities, and the government would keep that in a database. Which, by the way, they would then make available to private individuals, like employers, or maybe groups that might want to protest outside your home. What do you think would be the reaction to that law? Well, we have that law already, and it’s called the Federal Election Campaign Act, which requires the campaigns to report to the government who gives them money. The government keeps that in a database, and they make that available so that anybody can go online and look the stuff up.

Q: No one is taking public financing in this election. Is this the death of campaign finance reform?

A: The first thing people who believe in political freedom need to understand is that the opposition—the regulators—are relentless. They care about this issue. They care a lot about it. Even now, they are pushing very hard for what they call “full public financing of campaigns.” They’ve come up with this new name, “clean elections.” Because if you go to voters and say, we’re going to give candidates your tax dollars to campaign with, they’ll vote against it. But if you ask them to vote for “clean elections,” they’ll vote for it, because it’s kind of like asking voters to vote for a good economy or warm fuzzy rabbits.

The curious thing here is that they’re using the failure of McCain-Feingold as proof that we’ve got to have full government takeover of campaigns: The only solution, trust us, is more regulation, more of the same. The fact that we’re more heavily regulated in our politics than in any time in our nation’s history is just lost on them.

30 Years of Dallas

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Illegal Editor

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

I first broke immigration law one month after my 22nd birthday. Czechoslovakia had a rule, left over from the recently expired Communist regime, that foreigners were required to change around $15 per day at the state-run tourist office. Not only did I fail to meet the daily legal minimum, mostly due to poverty, but I changed whatever greenbacks I could with some strictly verboten Egyptian dudes, because they gave a 40 percent better return (when not robbing you, that is). So I was an immigration scofflaw and a violator of my host country's domestic laws, and that's without even considering the kinds of materials I was having mailed to me from Amsterdam.

The way I figured it, then as now, is if the laws governing my place of residence were dumb and/or prevented me from carrying out my peaceful day-to-day transactions, there was no reason to pull a muscle straining to comply.

It wasn't long thereafter that I hired my first $100-a-month illegal aliens. It all sounds so terrible that way, until you consider that the first such hire was me, along with my American co-conspirators and a couple of Yugoslav war refugees. One hundred dollars was lousy in any language, but still higher than the prevailing minimum wage. And it wasn't like we were going to find an ethnically homogeneous pool of local Czechs and Slovaks willing and able to work marathon hours launching an English-language newspaper in just four months. Like start-up businesses everywhere, we had a strong desire to become fully legal in order to avoid uncertainty and potentially costly hassles, but that goal just wasn't as urgent initially as getting product into customers' hands.

These memories come to mind whenever a friend or foe poses one of the most potent questions in America's ongoing family feud over immigration: "What part about illegal do you not understand?" Leaving aside the fact that most of these interlocutors have, at some point in their lives, knowingly (and illegally!) written a wrong date on a check, imbibed an illegal drug, or undervalued an item in a suitcase, there is something undeniably resonant about the criticism that illegal aliens openly flout U.S. law when they cross the border or overstay their visas, and then compound their original crime by either working off the books or obtaining fake Social Security cards. The whole arrangement can feel like an affront to the rule of law, a fact that immigration enthusiasts like me forget or downplay at our peril.

But as most small-government types are otherwise more than happy to tell you when it comes to stuff like the tax code and the regulatory state, nothing converts ordinary human beings into "criminals" faster than laws that shouldn't have been written in the first place. And there are few areas in American life where the laws are as byzantine, crazy-quilt, and Kafkaesque as those related to entering the United States from abroad. See our bureaucratic maze of a chart on pages 32-33, showing how legal immigration is a head-scratching, lawyer-demanding gauntlet that can take as long as two decades to complete.

If you glean one fact from the illustration, make it this: In an economically expansionary era in which 20 million jobs have been created in 15 years, unemployment hasn't once cracked 7 percent, and even the supposedly recessionary economy we're suffering through right now grew 1.9 percent in the second quarter of 2008, unskilled foreign workers are expected to fight over just 10,000 green cards a year. Restaurants and construction companies around the country have an exponentially higher demand for low-skilled workers, and laborers in Mexico have an insatiable desire for more money, but poorly conceived U.S. law prevents supply from meeting demand. That's one part of illegal I don't understand.

Another part, also reflected in the chart, is the notion that the federal government is the entity best suited to deciding what the precise ebb and flow of foreign-born labor should be at any given moment. You would think that prior catastrophes in the federal control of wages would be evidence enough that central labor planning doesn't work, but there's also the conspicuous contemporary example of Europe.

When European Union countries dropped almost all restrictions on labor movement in the 1990s, and then expanded membership to poorer Central European countries in the 2000s, the result wasn't the widely predicted cutthroat competition for ever-scarcer jobs in rich countries. Unemployment rates tumbled across all member states, especially the poorer ones. Finland, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom have all seen unemployment cut by more than half during the last two decades. The 15 countries that belonged to the E.U. in 1995 have gone from a collective unemployment rate of 10 percent to 6.7 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Note: Europe and America measure unemployment differently.)

A heavily bureaucratized labor market system, in which businesses are supposed to line up with specific foreign employees years before the paperwork is finalized, also clashes with the dynamic reality of entrepreneurial improvisation. Immigrants, particularly young adults, are famous for starting on a whim businesses that would not have existed without them, whether a newspaper in Prague or a taco truck in Los Angeles.

But even if job creation leaves you unmoved, there is another side effect of immigration restriction that should give pause even to the most fervent border closers: Cracking down on illegal immigration almost always ends up constricting the freedom of legal residents as well.

I observed this dynamic up close in California during the late 1990s, while going through the laborious process of getting my French-born wife a green card. Because of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the immigration panic that swept through the state in the early part of that decade, new federal laws ostensibly designed to thwart terrorism essentially gave every border guard the power to stamp "no entry" into my wife's passport if he so chose, without the possibility of appeal. So we sweated through every border crossing for three years while reading countless tales of legal-resident Canadian spouses of Americans being barred for five years, and Japanese business travelers being harassed by overzealous, underscrutinized immigration cops.

Two articles in this issue illustrate how today's anti-illegal immigration measure is tomorrow's anti-legal resident law. Senior Editor Kerry Howley's profile of anti-immigration crusader Russell Pearce ("The One-Man Wall," page 34) details how Arizona's toughest-in-the-country sanctions on employers who hire undocumented workers has required all employees, citizens or not, to be vetted through a federal database rife with errors. Legal residents are leaving the Phoenix area rather than living in fear of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigrant-hunting deputies.

And in "Who Killed Real ID?" (page 24), Associate Editor David Weigel explains how immigration fears stoked by the September 11 massacres nearly led to something that civil libertarians have fought against for decades: a national ID card. This story, thankfully, has a happy ending, as a ragtag coalition of Americans from across the political and geographic spectrums rediscovered their orneriness and sent the ill-begotten Real ID Act packing.

The successful anti-Real ID activists all exuded a quintessential American virtue that has been in surprisingly short supply these past seven years: confidence. When we forget that openness is our strength, opportunity is our drawing power, and skepticism of government intervention is our bulwark against tyranny, those are precisely the moments the country becomes a little less free. It's no surprise that the activists most eager to restrict immigrants are the ones most convinced that the United States is going to hell in a handbasket. They are wrong about that, and they are wrong about the law.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.

Irresponsible Predictions

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:30:00 EDT

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The Libertarian Case for McCain

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Lord knows, there is a libertarian case to be made against John McCain. Whether it's his hyper-interventionist foreign policy, disregard for constitutional liberties and individualism, or his up-front opposition to "the 'leave us alone' libertarian philosophy that dominated Republican debates in the 1990s," the 2008 Republican nominee has drawn fire from many free-marketeers through (as the Club for Growth has put it), his "philosophical ambivalence, if not hostility, about limited government and personal freedom."

But it would be inaccurate at best to claim that a McCain presidency offers zero potential upside for libertarians. After two years of studying the Arizona senator's habits (and coming to mostly critical conclusions), I can identify seven plausible reasons why a limited-government type might consider voting for the guy, even if I for one won't. Each reason, as you'll see, has as least one serious caveat.

The list:

1) He's a principled free trader, in a year that Democrats and Barack Obama are principled "fair" traders.

If you pore over John McCain's five books (each co-written by longtime aide and alter ego Mark Salter) you will see very little in the way of political philosophy and even less having to do with economic ideas. A notable and timely exception to that is free trade, where McCain for decades has been anti-protectionist and pro just about every trade agreement imaginable. Considering that Democrats have all but killed off their 1990s support for trade agreements, and are being rewarded by increased majorities in Congress, having a principled free-trader in the White House is one of the last best hopes that the single easiest anti-poverty program ever invented can continue and expand.

Caveat: He's also one of the biggest Washington enthusiasts for economic sanctions, which is the opposite of "free trade."

2) Divided government!

As George Will put it in his Washington Post column today, "Divided government compels compromises that curb each party's excesses, especially both parties' proclivities for excessive spending when unconstrained by an institution controlled by the other party. William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that in the past 50 years, 'government spending has increased an average of only 1.73 percent annually during periods of divided government. This number more than triples, to 5.26 percent, for periods of unified government.'"

Caveat: McCain, who has a long history of cross-party dealmaking, would surely cooperate with the Democratic majority on any number of potentially questionable measures. Including but not remotely limited to overreactive Wall Street regulation, expensive and ineffective climate change schema, and overly bureaucratic immigration reform.

3) He would veto the crap out of spending bills, particularly those laden with pork.

From a purely theatrical point of view, the specter of McCain using the bully pulpit to shame porkariffic legislators ranks as one of the single greatest prospects of a GOP victory. He has a long and honorable record of at least rhetorically going after unnecessary earmarks, avoiding them in Arizona, and rooting out contractor abuse in defense spending. And he's arguably the Senate's biggest booster of a line item veto, which if nothing else indicates a willingness to use a pen that George W. Bush let gather cobwebs.

Caveat: Pork only amounts to so much of the federal budget. If McCain is successful in increasing U.S. troop levels by 150,000, and boosting defense spending to 4 percent of GDP, he could remove every last slice of pork in the federal budget and still come out deep in the red. And given the way that McCain is now demagoguing any vote against "emergency" supplemental war spending as a Vote Against Our Troops, you can bet that the ahistorical and wildly irresponsible funding of our trillion-dollar wars will continue unabated.

4) He's against torture, and wants to close down Guantanamo Bay.

McCain rightly believes that having Washington condone torture reduces America's moral high ground, puts U.S. troops at risk, and produces reams of useless and inaccurate information. He understands that such a policy greatly reduces the country's already-diminishing stock of "soft power," for no appreciable benefit.

Caveat: As a legislator, most of McCain's handful of "reforms" that became law ended up enabling as much as reforming the stated practice. So it was with torture, where McCain's reform legislation ended up jeopardizing habeas corpus, an eight-century-old legal concept he's gone on to officially condemn.

5) He believes in the urgency of reforming, not adding, entitlements.

Another of the few consistent economic principles John McCain has shown is the belief that Washington needs to reform its massive entitlement programs today, instead of leaving a demographic mess to future generations.

Caveat: George W. Bush believed the same thing, had a Republican Congress for more than half his presidency, and couldn't do squat about it.

6) He would conceivably push for a more humane and open immigration system.

One of the more attractive aspects to McCain as a human is his transparent allergy to racism and xenophobia, particularly when directed at Latinos.

Caveat: As mentioned, McCain's previous efforts on this front ended up producing pretty gruesome legislation. After almost losing the Republican primaries over the issue, it's doubtful that a McCain immigration package would improve in 2009.

7) He would, along with Sarah Palin, bring sexual tension back to the White House.

Awkward hugs, an aging flyboy, a jealous wife...bring the popcorn!

Caveat: If you appreciate politics solely as entertainment, there's no caveat at all.

But if you worry about the accumulation of power in Washington, D.C., you should probably think twice before assuming that John McCain would amass less of the stuff than his opponents. Even if there are silver linings in his presidential clouds.

John McCain and the Republican Convention

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:00 EDT

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Wayne Allyn Root's Million-Dollar Challenge

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Last week, just before Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) big speech, Tim Cavanaugh and I attended a small fundraiser for Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root. The chatty Vegas sports bettor, memorably profiled by David Weigel two months back, was in a mind to talk about a fellow classmate of his at Columbia University back in the early 1980s, a guy by the name of Barack Obama.

Root is no fan of the Democratic nominee: "A vote for Obama is four years of Karl Marx, and no one should be happy about that," he told us and a few genial young libertarian activists over cocktails. "He's a communist! I don't care what anybody says. The guy's a communist.... And his mother was a card-carrying communist, and he says she's the most important person in his entire life; he learned everything from her."

But the thing Root really wanted to talk about was Obama's grades. Specifically, he was willing to bet a million dollars that he earned a better grade point average at Columbia than his old classmate, and that the only reason Obama went on to Harvard Law School was the color of his skin.

Some excerpts from the conversation:

Matt Welch: So tell us what we should know about Barack Obama that we don't?

Wayne Allyn Root: I think the most dangerous thing you should know about Barack Obama is that I don't know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever!

Welch: Yeah, but you were like selling, you know, Amway in college or something, weren't you?

Root: Is that what you think of me! And the best damned Amway salesman ever!

Welch: No, I'm sure that you were an outgoing young man, I'm just guessing.

Root: I am! That's my point. Where was Obama? He wasn't an outgoing young man, no one ever heard of him.

Tim Cavanaugh: Maybe he was a late bloomer.

Root: Maybe. Or maybe he was involved in some sort of black radical politics.

Welch: Ooooooooooh.

Root: Maybe he was too busy smoking pot in his dorm room to ever show up for class. I don't know what he was doing!

Welch: Wait, you weren't smoking pot in your dorm room?

Root: No, I wasn't. I wasn't. But I don't hold that against anybody, but I wasn't.... Nobody recalls him. I'm not exaggerating, I'm not kidding.

Welch: Were you the exact same class?

Root: Class of '83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don't get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was.

Other guy: Did he even show up to the reunion?

Root: I don't know! I didn't know him. I don't think anybody knew him. But I know that the guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It's very strange.

Welch: That's peculiar! Do you have any theories?

Root: Don't have any theories. I don't know. Don't know why. Kept to himself.... The only thing I could even imagine is that he talks in his biographies about being, you know, his identity crisis, his "am I black or am I white?" He chose black. And he hung out with a couple of black kids and never went near anybody and his wife? That's the only thing I can think of. All my buddies are white, what can I tell you! They don't know him, nobody's ever seen him, I don't know what to tell you.

Other guy: That's the era.

Root: That's the era. I mean, when I went to Columbia, the black kids were all at like tables going "Black Power!" We used to walk by and go, "What the hell are they talking about." And they didn't associate with us and we didn't associate with them. So if you track down a couple of black students, they'll probably know him. But nobody white's ever heard of this guy. It's quite amazing. Nobody remembers him. They don't remember him sitting in class.

Welch: Black power in '83?

Root: Ha ha. That's Columbia. Colubmia's radical, always was. There was gay power over here, and pot power over here, and black power over there, and Hispanic power over here, and feminism.

Welch: And what was your power?

Root: Oh I was the bookie guy, don't worry about it.... But here's the story that I think the press should be digging up, I really mean this, about Barack Obama. When George Bush annoyed everyone the first thing they went to was how dumb he was, and they said how bad he did in Yale, and blah blah blah, he got a C average. Then they found his C average was better than Al Gore's average, and it was better than John Kerry's average!

Cavanaugh: And then you stopped hearing the story.

Root: Right. But the point is all three of them had C averages. I had a B-plus, A-minus average at Columbia University.

Welch: Wait, you're bragging on your GPA?

Root: No, no I'm not, because here's the moral to the story.... I had a B-plus, A-minus average at Columbia University, in four years. When I graduated, I took the LSATs and I did well. I didn't do great, I did well; B-plus, A-minus average. My counselor at Columbia said don't even bother applying to Harvard Law School, because you can get into any law school in the country with your record, except Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton [Editor's Note: Princeton doesn't have a law school]. Except for the very top, you can get in anywhere, but don't even try those, because your grades don't cut it.

Well, everyone says how bright Barack is, but Barack won't release his transcripts from Columbia University.

Cavanaugh: Hmmmm.

Root: And I'd be willing to bet every dime I have in the world, a million dollars I'll put, I'll put a million dollars cash on the fact—

Welch: This is on the record—

Root: —that my GPA was better than Barack's—

Welch: Oooooh.

Root: ...and he got in based on the color of his skin.

Does anyone doubt that possibly Barack could have gotten into Harvard with a C average because he's black, where as I, white, couldn't get into the same school with a B-plus, A-minus average? And yet his wife says that America is a terrible nation unfair to minorities! I say, Au contraire!

I say the whole problem with America is we are racist against people because of the color of their skin. We're helping people because they're black. We're helping people because they're minority. We're helping people because they're poor. In reality only those who have the most skill and talent should get into Harvard, not because of the color of their skin.

So now I ask out loud in the press, I challenge my classmate to give his GPA against mine. And let's see if he really is the bright guy they all say he is. What if we discover he got into Harvard with a C average? Is he then the brilliant man America thinks he is? That would be a very good question, don't you think?

Welch: The follow-up I want to ask is: What if it's better than yours? You just said a million dollars!

Root: Well, who's taking the bet? I didn't hear anyone accept. No, I'm pretty sure I'm right. I'll go out on a limb. Listen, they always said with O.J. Simpson, you know, never ask the question if you don't know the answer, does the glove fit? I don't know the answer but I'm pretty sure I know the answer. He had a lower average than me and he got into Harvard and I didn't.

And so my answer is, has America really been unfair to minorities? No it hasn't. It was unfair to me. A white butcher's kid, whose father had no money, but nobody gave me a break. And do I have a chip on my shoulder? You're damn right I do. And I represent millions and millions of poor people in this country who weren't lucky enough to be poor and black, they were unlucky enough to be poor and white, and they can't get into Harvard. So maybe that country Barack's fighting for, he's got the wrong country here. He's been just fine in this country. The rest of us need someone to defend them....

Anyway my point is, for those of us in America who want to fight for talent being the determiner of who's successful or not, I'm your representative. Obama's the wrong representative. And for those who disagree, I say: I'm for affirmative action—I think the NBA should be 80 percent white. [...]

Welch: And are you hitting this note as you're doing all this media that you're doing from Nevada and stuff?

Root: I actually haven't; I brought it up tonight to you guys for the first time because I think reason is the right media to bring it up with, without being painted as a racist. Because I don't have a racist bone in my body.

What's So Republican About These Economics

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In all the hubbub of last night's Sarah Palin coming-out party, the theme of the night–reform–got lost. That was probably just as well for John McCain, since he's relying so heavily on the Great Man theory of politics, which values above all virtue over messy specifics.

But it was also convenient to laud McCain's "real reform" record without actually mentioning any of McCain's real reforms, because Republicans tend to hate what few real reforms McCain has made.

Take the speech-regulating, First Amendment-busting McCain-Feingold Act, a law so deservedly reviled in the Xcel Center that the only speaker all week to even utter the phrase "campaign finance" was a Democrat, Joe Lieberman. Or the procedural "Gang of 14" compromise to speed the way Washington confirms judges, an act of reform that once served as a deal-breaker for back-in-the-tank Republicans like Hugh Hewitt.

And McCain's failed proposals have fared little better with Republicans. The McCain-Lieberman bill for a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions, which is something that would have a decent chance at becoming law with a Democratic Congress? Not so popular among the free-market base. And McCain's enthusiasm for comprehensive immigration reform nearly strangled his candidacy in the crib.

So in lieu of practical examples of McCain reforms last night, the Republicans waxed at length about economic policy issues, an area where you'd think they'd do pretty well for those of us with preferences for limited government and free-market economics.

Well, think again. In campaign-vetted speech after campaign-vetted speech, Republicans (and a sprinkling of Democrats) sketched out a vision of economics that could charitably described as incoherent.

Carolyn Dunn, a "farm partner and community volunteer," stood up for two policies I haven't seen promoted since covering Ralph Nader: "Food security" and government-sponsored repopulation of the American midwest. "I care deeply about the food supply in this country. I do not want us to rely on unsafe shipments from overseas, where little oversight and none of the same standards apply," she said. "John McCain will work to restore rural prosperity by investing in renewable energy and high-tech connectivity, and will prioritize policies that will revitalize rural America.... Let's stop perpetuating the idea that to be successful you need to move to the big city."

Dunn wasn't the only one invoking the image of scary foreigners. Even Mitt Romney, the guy who was supposed to be the economic brains in the Republican primary field, exhibited one of the worst interpretations of the Invisible Hand I have ever seen, asserting that "China is acting like Adam Smith on steroids."

Luis Fortuno, resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, gave an energy-security speech that would have been right at home at the Democratic National Convention, if only it had contained the saw about "five million green jobs." "Under President McCain's leadership," Fortuno said, "we will become a leader in the new global green economy; by protecting our environment and addressing climate change; by promoting energy efficiency; and, finally, by cracking down on the speculative pricing of oil." Nassty Speculatorsses!

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina piled on, hinting at McCain's long record of meddling into the affairs of Wall Street: "John McCain believes that all institutions of power and wealth—whether they are government agencies or global corporations—must be both transparent and accountable to those they serve."

Renee Amoore, a "nurse, entrepreneur, and small business owner," posited that if you want anything to be better, whether it's the federal government's responsibility or not, McCain's your man. "If you want to fight childhood obesity through physical education and nutritional meals in schools, then you are a McCain voter," she said. "If you are sick and tired of all the DC yak-yak-yak, and realize that every day action is delayed, problems just get worse...If you want action, McCain's your man."

On this last point, Amoore is actually correct. If you think every problem should have a "fix me, president!" sign taped on it, then John McCain is indeed your man, since he is much more of an issue-by-issue problem-solver than someone who springs from a fixed philosophy about the proper role of limited government.

These were not the dominant sentiments on Reform Day. Far from it. There was plenty to cheer about as well, in rhetoric advocating lower taxes, smaller government, freer trade, and a much more active veto pen (the latter of which may be the single most attractive prospect of a McCain presidency). But as the last eight years of largely Republican governance taught us, talking about smaller government is no substitute for actually reducing its size.

The phrase "the devil is in the details" was tailor-made for the United States Senate. John McCain may have some noble reform impulses—wanting to overhaul and humanize the country's Byzantine immigration policy would be one example—but by the end of the sausage-making process the reforms bearing his name often end up limiting freedom more than unleashing it.

More worryingly is that the man who famously said "I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues" (and in fact said it twice, to opposing audiences, as a way of justifying two opposing positions on tax cuts), has an active career as a regulator, and few demonstrated strong principles on economic policy aside from a heartening fondness for free trade and bracing opposition to government waste. Last night's economic incoherence was a feature, not a bug, and if McCain presides over a Democratic Congress, there is no real telling what a Man of Action will do.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason and the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.