An email from a D.C.-based tea party outfit urges me to sign a petition “to fix the USPS.”

Their proposed solution to the U.S. Postal Service’s $8 billion deficit is Congressman Darrell Issa’s Postal Reform Act, which would reduce mail delivery to five days a week, allow advertising at post offices and on postal vehicles, and reduce postal workers’ benefits.

If the tea party movement is as radically anti-government as some make it out to be, this seems like an odd piece of legislation to promote. It merely tweaks the way the postal service functions; it does nothing to address the real problem, which is that the USPS is a government-run monopoly. If the bill passes, some tax dollars might be saved in the very short term, but the USPS will be just as badly managed as it always has been, and it will continue to rack up huge deficits. Take away one way for it to lose money, and it will surely find others.

At best, this bill seems to reflect the idea that government could be efficient if only it were “run like a business” — just cut some expenses, increase some revenue, and all could be well. But as Ludwig von Mises explained in Bureaucracy, any attempt to run a governmental organization as though it were a private business will fail because the organization still will not be able to engage in economic calculation and still will not be able to operate on a meaningful profit-and-loss basis as private businesses do. Postal workers and managers will still be focused on how to comply with bureaucratic rules, not on how to make money.

The only “reform” that can “fix” this is genuine privatization — that is, taking away the postal service’s monopoly privileges and subsidies and forcing it to either make a profit or go out of business.

I suspect that this bill’s promoters have little to do with the grassroots tea party; the finer details of postal policy are not the sort of thing that inspires a mass movement. I hope tea partiers who care about liberty — and I know there are many — will do as their figurehead Michelle Bachmann claims to do and read Mises, and then see why it’s pointless to waste time promoting legislation like this that doesn’t address the fundamental problems that have given rise to the big government they say they dislike so much.

Today the New York Times has a debate among legal scholars considering whether three years of law school, followed by the bar exam, should be required to enter the legal profession.

The best contribution is from libertarian George Leef, who argues that we should allow anyone to take the bar exam. As he points out, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most lawyers didn’t go to law school at all; they just apprenticed and learned how to practice law by working in a law firm. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be so now — except, of course, that the legal profession has been cartelized by the American Bar Association. Leef’s proposal would be an appropriate first step toward the libertarian ideal, which wouldn’t even require a bar exam.

Meanwhile, it’s funny to see law professors try to defend the status quo, arguing, almost in as many words, that students should be thrilled to pay $200,000 for three years of left-wing indoctrination and shouldn’t care so much about whether they’ll be able to practice law afterward — which probably they won’t be able to, at least not at a salary that comes anywhere near those of their privileged professors.

I listened to this “Freakonomics” podcast on fire safety, and not only does it have nothing to do with economics, it would seem that the people behind it are entirely unfamiliar with the economic way of thinking.

The podcast starts by telling us that fire deaths decreased by about 90% over the course of the twentieth century. These days, there are only about 3,000 deaths from fire in the U.S. each year. Great.

Then they put on a government fire-safety expert who tells us that’s not nearly good enough — he wants that number down to zero. Toward that end, he thinks we should all be required to have sprinkler systems installed in our homes, as California now requires for new houses.

This had me really ready for a dose of sound economics. I thought they would then put on an economist to explain why the optimal number of fire deaths is not zero because that would require a ridiculous expenditure of resources, if it’s even possible. I thought the show would explain that at some point, the marginal dollar spent on fire safety isn’t worth it.

But no. On the contrary, host Stephen Dubner simply took the bureaucrat’s word for it that tougher building codes have made us safer, that all we need to do to save more lives is enact even tougher codes, and that therefore we should do so. And that was the whole point of the podcast, apparently.

There was no suggestion that market innovation and increasing wealth may also have helped reduce the number of fire deaths (or, as I suspect, may have been the primary causes of the reduction).

More egregiously for a show supposedly about economics, there was no consideration of trade-offs. For example, no one considered that more expensive housing as a result of overprotective fire codes might actually make people with low incomes worse off. No one considered that sprinkler systems could cause flooding and costly water damage. And, of course, no one considered that I just might not want to have a sprinkler system in my house, and that it should be up to me because it’s my house.

One way to make sure no one dies in a fire — perhaps the only way — would be to force us all to live in steel cages and not allow us to have anything flammable. If the experts in government and at NPR follow their thinking to its logical conclusion, we may get down to zero yet.

The mainstream media is reporting that low consumer credit scores are hurting the economic recovery.

Today I appeared on CNBC’s Street Signs to argue the opposite view: that lower credit scores, and thus less consumer debt, are a good thing and the only way to real long-term prosperity. Have the “experts” learned nothing from our recent experience?

Should employers be allowed to check job applicants’ credit reports?

I debated that question on CNBC’s Street Signs today:

Of course employers should be allowed to check applicants’ credit. Why should they look only at the biased information you put on your resume? Credit reports provide a fuller picture.

My debate opponent, consumer advocate Joe Ridout, pointed out that there aren’t any statistical studies that show a correlation between bad credit and employees who rip off their employers. But why should we need such studies? How about a little common sense, which tells you that, say, someone who is routinely late in making payments just might be late for work?

The consumer advocates’ argument rests on the assumption that businesses are irrationally discriminating against applicants with bad credit.

But if we just assume that businesses are greedy and care only about making money — which, I think, the consumer-advocate types normally would grant us — then why would they spend money on credit reports that have no value? Do “consumer advocates” really believe that they not only know what’s best for you and me, but also know what’s best for businesses’ bottom lines?

Finally, let’s not forget the people with good credit and what a great service credit reports perform for them. A clean credit report lets you carry your good reputation with you wherever you go. Because of this market innovation, it doesn’t matter if you move to a new town where you don’t know the people at the bank or at your prospective employer’s office. They can check your report and see that, to that extent, you seem to be dependable.

It would be a shame if misguided activists and pandering politicians took some of this benefit away.

Libertarians with conservative backgrounds might grumble at this news: Responding to reports that diversity at big law firms is on the decline, a group of big corporations such as American Airlines, DuPont, and General Mills has just agreed to spend $30 million to hire minority- and women-owned law firms as outside counsel.

At first glance, this might seem like out-of-control political correctness or unseemly race consciousness. Why shouldn’t they just hire the best counsel, without regard to race or sex?

But as this National Law Journal article points out (free registration required), businesses aren’t doing this out of altruism or even just for the PR value. They’re doing it because the smaller minority- and female-run firms can do the work more efficiently, for less money than big white-male-dominated firms, which matters a lot in a tough economy.

This is exactly what free-market economists would predict. If minorities and women are insufficiently valued by some employers, they’ll go compete with those employers and win.

And if that holds true in the legal field, where personal characteristics and relationships matter far more than usual, that should make us all the more confident that it works most everywhere else, too — and that anti-discrimination laws aren’t as necessary as we’ve been led to believe.

Incidentally, Jeffrey Tucker has nicely summarized some of the problems caused by employment-discrimination laws in this review of Richard Epstein’s important book on the subject, Forbidden Grounds.

In a post on “Libertarian Schisms,” economist Arnold Kling tries to figure out whether he’s a Rothbardian or a Hayekian.

To do so, he asks himself several questions, the first of which is:

1. How are willing are you to talk about compromises with the state as it is?

My answer is, “very willing.” For example, when I talk about raising the retirement age for Social Security, that is a compromise relative to “abolish Social Security.”

I justify this not on the basis of political pragmatism but on the basis of self-doubt. I believe that the state could reduce or phase out Social Security without harmful consequences, but I am not certain of this. One can imagine potentially harmful consequences, including repercussions that ultimately harm the cause of liberty. In general, I think in terms of incremental steps and experiments rather than in terms of the ultimate libertarian ideal. The much-ignored Unchecked and Unbalanced champions those sorts of ideas, even as it aims for an ideal that is very different from our current form of government.

This is the sort of thing that is often said to make Rothbardians sound ridiculous. They won’t accept anything less than the abolition of social security — and that, of course, means they’re nuts!

But I’ve never met a Rothbardian who would disapprove of raising the social-security retirement age or consider it a “compromise.” To the contrary, it is a partial repeal — fewer people are entitled to taxpayer money than before — and therefore laudable.

A “compromise” would be something that substitutes a new government program for an old one, as in the case of so-called “privatization.”

It also isn’t un-Rothbardian, as far as I can tell, to think strategically about what advances toward liberty should be made before others. For example, some Rothbardians have thought about what the consequences might be of allowing open borders before repealing the welfare state — much to the dismay and disgust of certain “Hayekians.” (Unreasonable radical that I am, I say open them now anyway.)

I should add that Kling’s post does rightly suggest that most people who call themselves libertarians really aren’t too far apart on the vast majority of what matters, and the differences between them are primarily, though not entirely, ones of tone and emphasis. More talk about what we have in common, in addition to what divides us, would probably be beneficial.

Remember when The North Face went after a college student and his company called “The South Butt” for producing parody apparel?

The student, Jimmy Winkelman, refused to cease and desist, and now they’ve gone to court. Read Winkelman’s hilarious Answer, filed earlier this month, wherein it is pointed out that “the public is well aware of the difference between a face and a butt.”

And it says he’s fighting the lawsuit “to protect the integrity of the marketplace, freedom of choice for the consumer, freedom of speech for all, and the fundamental tenets of capitalism, competition, and the American Way.” Heroic!

A company called Moon Publicity is getting attention from blogs and news sites because it promises to let bidders advertise on the face of the Moon through “shadow shaping” technology, using robots to carve lines onto the lunar surface.

So when you look up at the night sky, instead of seeing the same old “Man in the Moon” face, you could see the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s arches.

And what’s wrong with that? Walter Block and I addressed this very question in a paper presented at the 49th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space, “In Defense of Advertising in Space,” and found nothing at all wrong with it. The Moon isn’t anyone’s property, so anyone is free to go use it as they see fit and to make it their property by homesteading.

Some people will still get upset, of course, but that doesn’t make too much sense. What if the Moon had a naturally occurring “swoosh” on it all along? Then presumably the environmentalist types would get mad if we disrupted that. Well, why should we prefer a given design only because it’s naturally occurring? Why not favor a face for the Moon that was actually designed to appeal to as many people as possible instead of something totally random?

Also, advertising benefits consumers, so Moon advertising could benefit millions or billions of people. On the other hand, if certain people hate the prospect of Moon advertising so much, they could always offer Moon Publicity money not to advertise on the Moon.

Probably this whole thing is a hoax and Moon ads will remain science fiction. But if not, then why not welcome the change? As a product of voluntary actions on the market instead of government coercion, Moon advertising would be more laudable than the original Moon landing.

(HT Reason.)

What will happen when Congress passes and President Obama signs the pending credit-card legislation?

Probably everyone will pay higher interest rates on cards in the first place, and some people will be denied cards who otherwise would have got them. And where will those people turn when they can’t get credit through their credit cards? As The Onion has explained, their only choice may be a loan shark — who will be unconcerned with federal legislation and rather less pleasant in his collection practices. This will be especially so in states, such as mine, that have banned “payday lending.”

Sure, probably fewer people will go to loan sharks than would have run up debt on cards, since the loan shark is less convenient and the penalties for late payments perhaps more obvious. But those who need short-term credit (and remember, very short-term credit on a card is free) will be deprived of a much safer, more consumer-friendly option.

There are reasons why a fully free market might result in less credit-card issuance and use, but adding more legislation on top of our current system only infringes on consumer freedom and, contrary to the politicians’ supposedly good intentions, may expose the most vulnerable to more risk of serious harm.

(More from me on credit-card legislation and regulation here, here, and here.)

Walter Block rightly notes that Loyola University New Orleans and Grove City College are the two best places in the U.S. to receive an Austro-libertarian undergraduate education. (Worldwide, I would add Universidad Francisco Marroquin to the list.)

Walter lists some advantages he believes Loyola has over Grove City. Because I’m not familiar enough with Loyola, I cannot say which school is superior. But I must point out reasons why Grove City, my alma mater, holds it own in comparison.

1. Block suggests that there are more Austrian economists at Loyola than at Grove City. But by my count, four out of six Loyola economists are Austrians, while two out of three GCC profs are Austrians — percentagewise, a tie. Plus, although the third GCC economist is not an Austrian, he is certainly pro-market. Also, adjunct Mark W. Hendrickson is an Austrian. I don’t know if Hans Sennholz’s son, Robert Sennholz, is still an adjunct (he was when I attended), but he would be yet another. The fact that the late Hans Sennholz was there and left his mark on the institution and its alumni counts for something, too.

2. Block suggests Loyola econ profs have more publications per capita. I’m sure they win this race based on Block’s prodigious output alone. But what difference does this make to students? Probably little to none. And in my experience, the GCC Austrians are first rate teachers (as, I’m sure, are Loyola’s).

3. Block points out that more Loyola students attend the Austrian Scholars Conference each year than GCC students. But he ignores that Grove City hosts the annual Austrian Student Scholars Conference, where GCC students far outnumber Loyola students. In fact, at the last ASSC, not a single Loyola student presented a paper. That’s fine, and probably has more to do with geography and school schedules than anything else. But if we want to compare along these lines, Grove City is not at a disadvantage.

4. Block points out that many of his students have and plan careers in academe. This is, of course, great. I don’t know what current GCC students are planning to do with their lives. (I’m putting mine to good use.) I’m similarly unable to comment on what kinds of meetings libertarian students have there; perhaps a reader will let me know.

5. Just as there are many freedom-friendly faculty outside the econ department at Loyola, so there are at Grove City. The first who comes to my mind is the Dean of the School of Arts and Letters, John A. Sparks. Others have made appearances at Austrian Scholars Conferences, including Rich Grimm.

6. Even if other professors are not quite Austrians or libertarians, almost all are basically friendly to free-enterprise. That is, one is unlikely to find any professor at Grove City pushing the kind of extreme socialist nonsense one finds on most campuses. As for Loyola (a.k.a. “Social Justice University“), one need only review Block’s own accounts (e.g., 1 2 3) to see what the atmosphere is like. Not only does the majority of professors not advocate free markets, they are extremely hostile to them.

7. That said, Grove City’s atmosphere is unique and not for everyone. It is an evangelical Christian school with strict conduct rules. To my mind, this is a plus, even if you don’t share those views, because you get to focus on your education without the distractions of alcohol and sex surrounding you. But I understand that many, including many libertarians, will view this as a drawback. (I cannot speak to the culture at Loyola, apart from the rampant leftism.)

8. Grove City College is one of only a few institutions of higher learning that takes no government money. Loyola is not one of the others. There’s nothing wrong with Loyola taking government money, as Block would be quick to point out. But at GCC, you can know that your education has been about as free from federal influence as any from an accredited college can be.

9. Grove City College owns the papers of Ludwig von Mises. The Mises Archive at Grove City has already been the source of four books of previously unpublished manuscripts, and also aided Guido Hulsmann in writing his great biography of Mises.

Having said all that, ideology probably shouldn’t be the deciding factor in choosing a school. If you can go to Yale or Harvard, or whatever school seems right for you, I say go, and learn Austrian economics and libertarianism from your real professors at the Mises Institute.

Yes, that’s an actual New York Times editorial headline: Charity Begins in Washington.

Ever-increasing private philanthropy is actually a bad thing, says the Times, because it crowds out government spending. Why, those private philanthropists can just give money to whatever they want! Better to tax us and let Washington decide where that money will go. I know, that sounds like an unfair caricature, it sounds like parody… but, well, read the piece.

Why politicians should be trusted to spend other people’s money more than private individuals should be trusted to give away their own money, I cannot fathom. That private charity is less likely to entail gross waste and more likely to serve those in need effectively is so obvious that it would seem unnecessary to point it out — and yet, there’s the Times. We might also point out to the Times that private charity would surely give much more for “social services” if government weren’t occupying so much of that field.

There are moments when I feel a bit sad over the decline and impending death of print newspapers; but not when I read evil nonsense like this.

This article from MSNBC shows how government-sponsored ethanol may seriously harm the environment, as fertilizer from the increased corn production makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico and kills sea life.

So not only does ethanol hit taxpayers twice — first through subsidies and then through higher prices for corn and related products such as milk — it also harms the environment. Plus it could not possibly achieve the silly goal of “energy independence.”

Politicians who pander to Iowans and the likes of Archer Daniels Midland by supporting this destructive program (e.g., 1 2 3) should be ashamed of themselves.

Should you be allowed to put a “For Sale” sign on your own car?

Most people would say yes, but some local governments say no — and the courts approve this because somehow “commercial speech” is deemed less worthy of protection than political speech. Never mind, of course, that political speech about issues typically involves advocating the use of violence against one’s neighbors, while political speech about candidates is almost always false advertising. Commercial speech, on the other hand, typically involves nothing more than buyers providing potentially valuable information to consumers. (On this, see Mises.)

I comment on this issue, and a recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision that slightly increases protection for commercial speech, in an op-ed in today’s Columbus Dispatch.

For this blog’s readers, I should add the caveat that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution should not apply to state and local governments. This point is well covered in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, which I highly recommend. But that issue is probably a lost cause, and in any event is not before the courts right now. The question is whether “free speech” includes, by definition, the right to speak without limitation about goods you want to sell, using your own private property. And the answer — which of course the U.S. Supreme Court is unwilling to understand — is yes.

It’s easy to think of ways the federal government could be reduced right now, and a recent book from the Cato Institute catalogs many of them in the hopes that lawmakers will see the light.

The question is, why would politicians ever reduce the power they’ve worked so hard to seize? The only reason would be because the people whose votes they need are demanding more liberty — which mostly people aren’t, at present. As a result, I suggest in my review of the book for The Freeman, projects such as Cato’s are well-meaning, but misguided. Education — for the Remnant, not politicians — is liberty’s, and civilization’s, only hope.

In case you missed it, yesterday’s New York Times offered a profile of “freegans” — people who live as much as possible, and relatively well, off other people’s garbage, which they get for free by combing through dumpsters and the like.

That’s fine, if it’s how you want to live, but the article gets really good when the freegans offer their political views:

Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because “I’m not down with capitalism.”

. . .

Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.

Of course it is only because of capitalism that people (even college students!) are so wealthy that they can simply throw away such miraculous products as television sets and computers when they’re done with them, and bums (let us call freegans what they are) can live relatively well off them for no money. These people have not “absented themselves from capitalism” — they’re among its least productive beneficiaries, the participants who truly do not “give back to society.”

I suppose it is yet another benefit of capitalism that it produces people like these to amuse us. I just hope they’re too busy dumpster diving to engage in another far-too-costless activity — voting.

Eminent domain threats, millions of taxpayer dollars, and tackiness are all reasons to oppose the forthcoming federal Flight 93 memorial.

For the details, read my op-ed from a Pennsylvania newspaper near the site.

There are things you can do to help mitigate the shortage of transplantable organs such as kidneys. For example, you can identify yourself as an organ donor on your drivers license. You can join LifeSharers. And if you’re really generous, you can give your organs away.

But Congress could end the shortage of transplantable organs entirely right now by repealing the ban on organ sales. Until it does, it will have the blood on its hands of the 6,000 people who die each year on the transplant waiting list.

Read my full op-ed on the organ shortage and our murderous Congress in today’s Columbus Dispatch.

The post office likes to make believe that it’s a real business with ridiculous gimmicks like its “forever” stamp and talk about being “competitive” in the market. But that can’t change the fact that the post office is an outrageously inefficient government monopoly, which exists only because the law protects it from real competition or even the consequences of its perpetually poor management.

Strip the post office of its special privileges. Then we would see what kind of “business” it’s capable of. In all likelihood, under those circumstances, it would quickly become extinct.

Read my complete op-ed on abolishing the postal monopoly in the Baltimore Sun.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, libertarian law professor Ilya Somin celebrates The Godfather for all the right reasons.

Here also is the Mises Institute’s movie guide on the Godfather movies, and Robert Murphy on whether we should loathe or love the mafia.

And of course Murray Rothbard was there first, with his Libertarian Forum review, and this essay contrasting The Godfather and Goodfellas.