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Ask Brian Doherty Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Libertarian Movement

Brian Doherty is the historian of the libertarian movement in America. His big, honking book Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs) is the definitive volume on the subject. He has spent the last year keeping tabs on Gary Johnson, Bill Weld, and the Libertarian Party posse, and will continue to be Reason‘s point man on all things libertarian and Libertarian.

In case that wasn’t enough for you, he’s also the author of This is Burning Man (Little, Brown), Gun Control on Trial (Cato), and Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired (HarperCollins/Broadside). So ask him about desert pyrotechnics, guns, or Pauls!

Hit him up over at his Twitter account for an hour today starting at noon eastern, using the #askalibertarian hashtag. And then donate!

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Clinton & Trump Aides Forum Devolves Into Screaming Match – “I Would Rather Lose Than Win The Way You Did”

How was this ever going to end well? An election post-mortem forum erupted into a shouting match as top strategists of Hillary Clinton’s campaign accused their Republican counterparts of fueling and legitimizing racism to elect Donald Trump. Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri exclaimed "I would rather lose than win the way you guys did," to which Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, fumed "I can tell you are angry, but wow… Will you ever accept the election results?" And it went down-hill from there…

As NBC News reports, a Harvard panel that traditionally writes the first draft of presidential campaign history devolved into a shouting match between Trump and Clinton aides on Thursday in a raw, emotional display echoing the divisive campaign.

 Jennifer Palmieri, who was Hillary Clinton's communications director, zeroed in on Steve Bannon, the incoming chief strategist for President-elect Donald Trump who once ran the web site Breitbart.

 

"If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost," said Palmieri, one of six Clinton aides who sat across tables from top Trump campaign staff at a forum moderated by three journalists, NBC News' Andrea Mitchell among them. "I would rather lose than win the way you guys did."

 

Kellyanne Conway, who managed Trump's campaign, was visibly angry and indignantly interrupted. "Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?"

 

"You did, Kellyanne. You did," Palmieri said, as other Clinton aides chimed in in the affirmative. With only two microphones allowed to be open at any given time, the shouting match was so heated it became difficult to follow.

 

"Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white, working-class voters? How about, it's Hillary Clinton, she doesn't connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn't have an economic message?" Conway said.

 

"There were dog whistles," said Clinton strategist Joel Benenson at one point.

 

Said Conway: "Guys, I can tell you are angry, but wow. Hashtag he's your president…will you ever accept the election results? Will you tell your protesters that he's their president, too?"

Exposing a somewhat stunning level of cognitive dissonance, seemingly blaming the media, The Washington Post reports that Clinton’s campaign aides insisted, again and again, that their candidate had been held to a different standard than the other contenders — as evidenced by the controversy over her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Palmieri said that many political journalists had a personal dislike for the Democratic nominee and predicted that the email issue will go down in history as “the most grossly overrated, over-covered and most destructive story in all of presidential politics.”

 

“If I made one mistake, it was legitimizing the way the press covered this story line,” Palmieri said.

 

Mook added that Trump deftly used his rally speeches to “switch up the news cycle.”

 

“The media by and large was not covering what Hillary Clinton was choosing to say,” Mook said. “They were treating her like the likely winner, and they were constantly trying to unearth secrets and expose.”

 

For instance, Mook posited that the media did not scrutinize Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns as intensively as the issue of Clinton’s private email server.

 

Conway retorted: “Oh, my God, that question was vomited to me every day on TV.”

Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, meanwhile, served notice that the election may be over but that the battles it spawned are not.

“You guys won, that’s clear,” Benenson said. “But let’s be honest. Don’t act as if you have a popular mandate for your message. The fact of the matter is that more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump.”

 

At which point Conway turned to her side and said: “Hey, guys, we won. You don’t have to respond. He was the better candidate. That’s why he won.”

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Vice President-Elect Mike Pence on the Carrier Deal: ‘The Free Market Has Been Sorting It Out and America’s Been Losing.’

At the tail end of 2008, Mike Pence, then a Republican congressman from Indiana, appeared on Fox News to state his strong personal opposition to a bailout to the Detroit auto industry. “As the American people know,” he said, “we can’t borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing economy or a healthy domestic automotive industry.” At the same time, he also declared his opposition to the Troubled Asset Relief Program that came in the wake of the financial crisis, writing a letter to congressional colleagues insisting that government should not intervene to protect businesses from failure. “We now have a deal that promises to bring near-term stability to our financial turmoil, but at what price?” he wrote. “Economic freedom means the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail.” On Fox, Pence stressed not only his own opposition, but the large number of Republican legislators who stood unified in opposition to the deal. He was acting as a representative of the party’s stance.

In the eight years since, Pence appears to have changed his mind.

At a press conference yesterday Pence, now the governor of Indiana and the Vice President elect, announced that he and President elect Trump had brokered a deal with air-conditioning maker Carrier to keep about 800 jobs in the United States that had previously been set to go to Mexico. In exchange for keeping some jobs in the U.S., Carrier would receive $7 million in incentives from the state of Indiana.

At the conference, Pence defended the arrangement by declaring that “the free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing.” After which, according to The New York Times, President-elect Donald Trump cut in to agree, saying, “Every time, every time.”

Trump’s enthusiastic dismissal of free market mechanisms should come as little surprise. As a businessman, he built his real estate empire on crony capitalist dealmaking, repeatedly urging government officials to give him special treatment so that his own projects would succeed. On the presidential campaign trail, he was frequently disdainful of the free movement of goods and workers across borders.

But the statement from Pence, who is the Trump administration’s closest link to conventional Republican politics, should be taken as a declaration of intent for the GOP as a political institution. Although Republicans have frequently and sometimes flagrantly acted in opposition to basic free market principles, the party has typically maintained a surface pretense of adhering to a pro-market understanding of the world. The GOP wasn’t exactly a free-market party, but it often pretended to be.

Even President George W. Bush, when announcing his administration’s response to the financial crisis, framed his lack of orthodoxy as an exception necessary to uphold the larger idea, saying that he has “abandoned free-market principles to save the free market system.” Even a break from free-market ideas had to be framed as a defense of free-market philosophy.

In announcing the Carrier deal, Pence has made it clear that the party has abandoned free-market principles, period. Under Trump, the GOP has dropped the pretense.

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Since 2014 The US Has Added 571,000 Waiters And Bartenders And Lost 34,000 Manufacturing Workers

As another month passes, the great schism inside the American labor force get wider. We are referring to the unprecedented divergence between the total number of high-paying manufacturing jobs, and minimum-wage food service and drinking places jobs, also known as waiters and bartenders. In October, according to the BLS, while the number of people employed by “food services and drinking places” rose by another 18,900, the US workforce lost another 4,000 manufacturing workers.

This is the fourth consecutive month of declining manufacturing workers, and the 7th decline in the past 10 months.

The chart below puts this in context: since 2014, the US had added 571,000 waiters and bartenders, and has lost 34,000 manufacturing workers.

While we would be the first to congratulate the new American waiter and bartender class, something does not smell quite right. On one hand, there has been a spike in recent restaurant bankruptcies or mass closures (Logan’s, Fox and Hound, Bob Evans), which has failed to reflect in the government report. On the other hand, as the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant performance activity index showed in October, overall industry sentiment is the worst since the financial crisis, due to declines in both same-store sales and customer traffic, suggesting that restaurant workers should now be in the line of fire for mass layoffs.

 

 

However, what we find more suspect, is that according to the BLS’ seasonally adjusted “data”, starting in March of 2010 and continuing through September of 2016, there has been just one month in which restaurant workers lost jobs, and alternatively, jobs for waiters and bartenders have increased in 80 out of the past 81 months, with just one month of job losses, something unprecedented in this series history.

Putting this divergence in a long context, since the official start of the last recession in December 2007, the US has gained 1.8 million waiters and bartenders, and lost 1.5 million manufacturing workers. Worse, while the latter series had been growing, if at a slower pace than historically, it has now clearly rolled over, and in 2016, some 60,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost.

Like last month, we remain curious what this “data” series will look like after it is revised by the BLS shortly after the NBER declares the official start of the next recession.

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Oil Dips After Former Saudi Oil Minister Admits On OPEC Deals, “We Tend To Cheat”

Not really surprising anyone, former Saudi Arabia oil inister Ali Al-Naimitold a forum in Washington that it “remains to be seen” if the OPEC deal is successful, noting that the “market is set to rebalance if everyone cuts production” but added “we tend to cheat.”

Having been replaced in May, former Sauid oil minister Al-Naimi had plenty to say today…

  • *FORMER SAUDI OIL MINISTER ALI AL-NAIMI SPEAKS IN WASHINGTON
  • *AL-NAIMI SAYS MORE SHALE OIL, GAS TO BE FOUND WORLDWIDE
  • *AL-NAIMI SAYS MARKET TO BALANCE IF EVERYONE CUTS PRODUCTION
  • *AL-NAIMI SAYS `REMAINS TO BE SEEN’ IF OPEC DEAL SUCESSFULL
  • *ON OPEC DEAL, AL-NAIMI SAYS ‘WE TEND TO CHEAT’

The reaction is practically nothing for now…


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FDA Salt Guidance Could Kill More People Than It Saves

SaltWikimediaThe Food and Drug Administration issued proposed guidance in June to the food industry aiming to reduce the amount of sodium in many prepared foods. In its draft guidance, the agency stated:

Average sodium intake in the U.S. is approximately 3,400 mg/day. The draft short-term (two-year) and long-term (10-year) voluntary targets for industry are intended to help the American public gradually reduce sodium intake to 2,300 milligrams (mg) per day, a level recommended by leading experts and the overwhelming body of scientific evidence. The targets are also intended to complement many existing efforts by food manufacturers, restaurants, and food service operations to reduce sodium in foods.

The FDA further asserted:

CDC has compiled a number of key studies, which continue to support the benefits of sodium reduction in lowering blood pressure. In some of these studies, researchers have estimated lowering U.S. sodium intake by about 40 percent over the next decade could save 500,000 lives and nearly $100 billion in healthcare costs.

So, the science of salt is settled, right? Actually, no. The FDA asked for public comments on its draft guidelines and it evidently received sufficient pushback that it extended the deadline for comments until December 2, 2016. As I reported earlier more and more studies are calling into question that idea that reducing salt consumption at the population level will actually result in net health benefits. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in August 2014 finding that people who consume less 1,500 milligrams of sodium (about 3/4ths of a teaspoon of salt) are more likely to die than people who eat between 3,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium per day (1.5 and 3 teaspoons of salt).

The free-market think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has submitted comments that show that the FDA’s confident claim that reducing salt consumption by Americans will save lives is at best, a hope, and at worst, tragically wrong. The CEI comments to the FDA nicely summarizes the relevant scientific studies. Here is the nub of the issue:

Reduced sodium consumption affects different individuals in different ways. Only an estimated 17 to 25 percent of the population is “salt sensitive”—they experience higher blood pressure with increased dietary sodium—while 75 percent are considered salt resistant and will experience no change in blood pressure with altered dietary sodium. However, an estimated 11 to 16 percent of the population are inverse salt sensitive, which means reduced dietary sodium can increase their blood pressure. With this heterogeneity in response to salt, trying to force a population-wide reduction in sodium availability in order to reduce incidences of hypertension would be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

Among other evidence, CEI cites a 2014 metanalysis in the American Journal of Hypertension of more than two dozen sodium studies which concluded that risk of death appeared to be lowest among individuals consuming between 2,565mg and 4,796 mg of sodium a day with higher rates of death in the upper and lower range. The FDA itself notes that average daily consumption – 3,400 mg – is right in the middle of that range.

CEI correctly argues:

For a minority of the population, reducing dietary sodium can be an effective means of lowering cardiovascular and hypertension risk. But identifying for whom sodium restriction may be beneficial and by how much is something that individuals and their doctors must determine. For the general population, sodium reduction is, by no means, a silver bullet to reducing hypertension and has the potential to increase risks for a large portion of the population.

Treat people as individuals not just as members of an undifferentiated public health herd. Let’s hope that the FDA will heed this advice and withdraw its misguided draft guidance.

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You Opposed Donald Trump, So Why Aren’t You Freaking Out?: New at Reason

“You opposed Donald Trump, so why aren’t you freaking out?”

David Harsanyi answers:

Well, for starters, allowing liberals to determine my level of anxiety—which would be full-blown, round-the-clock histrionics—over what’s nothing more than another election would be foolish. Until it’s not. The era of Trump hasn’t even started yet, and the entire establishment keeps using the term “era of Trump” as if things have actually changed.

They haven’t. If you’re genuinely interesting in being an effective critic of the next president, acting like Adolf Hitler is pounding at your doorstep every time Trump tweets something might not be the most effective plan in the long run.

Not to mention, the left has been such an astonishing hypocrite on so many issues related to Trump that it’s a bit difficult to move forward without pointing it out. Joining activists who’ve spent years attacking the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments—and now the Electoral College—in a newfound veneration of the Emoluments Clause is a bit much. Of course, Trump should be held accountable for his potential conflicts of interest, and one hopes conservatives who value good government will stand up when tangible evidence emerges that they exist. But the critics on the left aren’t serious about the Constitution. They’re serious about the Democratic Party.

View this article.

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Do 1901 Expedition Logbooks Confirm There Is No Global Warming?

Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

OOPS! Antarctic sea ice has not changed for more than 100 years.

This further demonstrates that the global warming created by man is just a fraud to get more taxes. Scientists have looked over the logbooks of polar explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton from their expeditions during 1901-1904 and 1907-1909. The theory that sea ice has declined post-1950 because of man cannot be supported.

The Telegraph has reported that:

“new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming.

 

"We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years, since satellite observations began. Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these new findings suggest it may not be anything new.

 

"If ice levels were as low a century ago as estimated in this research, then a similar increase may have occurred between then and the middle of the century, when previous studies suggest ice levels were far higher."

I had a conversation in a hotel with someone who was very much a believer in man created global warming. I began to notice a pattern to their thinking. When you test anything, you must see how it is connected to other reasoning. What emerged was a fundamental belief that government is good and there to take care of you until you die. This notion appears to be linked to those who just want to be taken care of, but not to the point that they are on welfare. They will pretend to be independent thinking individuals, but there is a core surrender of independence because they do not want to think no one is in charge. They voted for Hillary as well, and this all seems linked to this desire not to be responsible for the future in a subtle way. Perhaps it is linked to childhood when you did not have to work or cook. They just took care of you. It seems that those who believe in global warming are more likely to trust government. What happens when they wake up and discover nothing is as they thought it would be?

Meanwhile, the energy output of the sun is dropping faster than anyone expected. Snow has actually begun falling in Tokyo and other parts of eastern Japan. Tokyo recorded its first November snowfall since 1875 when the government started collecting records. But hey. Now they want to call this climate change and somehow still attribute this to mankind.

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Here’s a completely different idea about Sunday’s “apocalypse”

The latest apocalypse du jour, following in the footsteps of Brexit and the Donald Trump election, is Italy’s Constitutional referendum that takes place this weekend.

Global financial media is in a panic about this, suggesting that a “NO” vote will lead to total chaos in Europe.

The referendum itself isn’t particularly revolutionary; Italians are voting whether or not to change the Constitution and reform their government.

Right now Italy’s legislative system is fairly inefficient.

Like the US, new laws require approval from both the Chamber of Deputies (Italy’s version of the House of Representatives) as well as the Senate.

The proposed reforms in the referendum aim to streamline this process by reducing the Senate’s involvement in new legislation.

Those who oppose the reforms claim that the Constitutional changes would give the government too much unchecked power, and the latest opinion polls are showing that most Italians will vote NO.

(We’ve seen how ineffective polls are, so let’s wait until the actual votes are counted.)

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has promised to resign if he loses the referendum, prompting widespread predictions that Italy’s populist party will take over, pull the country out of the eurozone, and cause a meltdown in Europe.

OK. Maybe that happens.

Then again, maybe Renzi doesn’t actually resign after all.

Or maybe Germany makes a sweetheart deal to keep Italy in the euro.

There are plenty of different scenarios that could unfold.

But there’s an apocalyptic feel in financial media, an eerie certainty that the end of the world is nigh, with headlines like

“Italy on the BRINK: ‘No’ vote in Renzi’s referendum could spark euro economic APOCALYPSE”

Personally I think the fears may be overblown, just as they were with Brexit. The UK didn’t fall into the English Channel just because Brits voted out.

But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about interesting ways to make money from this.

Here’s an idea that’s completely different. And stay with me on this. It’s a bit crazy, but the reasoning is sound.

Balsamic Vinegar.

Yes, I’m serious.

Not the cheap knock-off stuff you find in the grocery store that’s nothing more than sugar and caramel coloring.

I’m talking about traditional balsamic vinegar, or Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale.

Traditional balsamic is like fine wine. It has to be aged for YEARS. Sometimes decades, even up to a century in a few cases.

In fact, in order to be considered tradizionale, it must be certified by a special council which puts the vinegar through rigorous testing before giving the official seal of approval.

This means that the traditional balsamic vinegar which people consume today was actually produced 30+ years ago.

Bottom line, Traditional Balsamic Vinegar is scarce.

We can’t go back in time several decades to make more of it. And I like assets with built-in scarcity.

Demand, meanwhile, has been steadily growing, particularly in North America and Europe.

And in China (where black vinegar currently dominates), consumers are just starting to discover high quality traditional balsamic… so there’s a real catalyst for demand growth.

These are strong supply and demand fundamentals.

A bottle of traditional balsamic can cost anywhere from $50 to hundreds of dollars or more, at least in the retail market.

(That’s cheaper than fine wine, where a single bottle fetches thousands of dollars. Yet unlike wine, balsamic doesn’t require special handling or climate control.)

But I think it could become possible to buy high quality tradizionale even cheaper.

Right now the euro is considerably undervalued, especially compared to the US dollar where the euro is trading near its lowest levels in more than a decade.

This means that, for US dollar investors, euros are cheap, and hence certain euro-denominated products and assets are cheap.

If Italy votes NO and does slide into a bit of turmoil, many Italian products and assets will become even cheaper.

I’m not willing to buy fixed assets in the country (like real estate) just yet, because those come with huge property tax liabilities.

But a couple of barrels of aged traditional balsamic purchased at a deep-discount directly from a producer? That could make a very interesting store of value.

Paper currency doesn’t stand the test of time. Real assets do.

And I’m always drawn to any opportunity where I can trade overvalued paper currency for a bargain-discount real asset with compelling supply/demand fundamentals and long-term growth prospects.

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More Roadblocks Emerge For Jill Stein As Michigan AG And Trump File Lawsuits In PA and MI

Jill Stein’s hopes of completing hand recounts in WI, MI and PA are fading fast.  After a PA judge dismissed the recount petitions of several precincts in Montgomery county yesterday, today we find that the Michigan Attorney General, Bill Schuette, has filed a suit in Michigan to block her recount efforts there as well.  Among other things, Schuette points out that with just around 1% of the vote in Michigan, Stein doesn’t qualify as an “aggreived” candidate and is therefore not entiteled to a recount.  Meanwhile, he also notes that a hand recount would cost Michigan taxpayers millions and put “voters at risk of being disenfranchised in the electoral college.”

In a court action filed today, Schuette echoes arguments made for President-elect Donald Trump, arguing Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who received just over 1% of the vote in Michigan, is not an “aggrieved” candidate entitled to a recount, and there isn’t time to complete a recount, even if Stein was entitled to one.

 

“If allowed to proceed, the statewide hand recount could cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars and would put Michigan voters at risk of being disenfranchised in the electoral college,” Schuette said in asking the Michigan Supreme Court for immediate consideration of his petition barring a recount.

Of course, Stein didn’t help her cause by telling CNN that she has “no evidence” of vote tampering.

 

Meanwhile, according to Politico, Trump’s attorneys have also filed suits to block recounts MI…. 

Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump filed an objection Thursday with the Michigan Bureau of Elections, a move that under Michigan law halts the recount until the complaint is resolved.

 

Trump’s team, in its objection, argues that Stein hasn’t provided sufficient evidence to doubt the election results.

 

“All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake,” the complaint argues.

 

The recount, scheduled to begin Friday in Ingham and Oakland counties, is now awaiting a Board of State Canvassers ruling on the objection. The board, which must resolve the objection within five days according to state law, is scheduled to meet Friday to consider the matter. If the board fails to adopt the objection, the recount will go forward, but if the board does adopt it, the recount will cease.

…and PA as well.

Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump have moved to block the vote recount in Pennsylvania, adding to complaints filed to stop similar proceedings in Michigan and Wisconsin.

 

“Despite being no more than a blip on the electoral radar, Stein has now commandeered Pennsylvania’s electoral process, with an eye toward doing the same to the Electoral College,” the complaint filed Thursday states. “There is no evidence — or even an allegation — that any tampering with Pennsylvania’s voting systems actually occurred.”

Jill, we really do think it’s time to take whatever money you have left from bamboozling Hillary supporters and find another cause…

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