Human history is a complicated tale. There are many ways to tell it. One is as a story of progress — from caves to huts to highrises. Another is regress — from harmony with nature to clanging, polluting machinery that destroys it.

Conflict is another common theme. Illiberals have spent the better part of the industrial era spinning tales of class struggle and racial or national conflict.

Competition is a less severe theme that many liberals like to stress. When church and state compete for power, the people are either left alone, or they can flee whichever is more oppressive. States that are numerous, small, and close have to have friendly, liberal policies, or else risk becoming little more than empty spaces.

Equality is still another. Many people think that rich and poor are less equal than before; look at income data. Others think that people are more equal than before. Slavery, monarchy, and titled nobility are largely things of the past. Status has (mostly) been replaced by contract.

History is much too complex for such simple conceits to explain everything. But all of them have at least some value for understanding where we came from, where we are now, and where we might be headed in the future.

There is one more aspect of history that has fascinated scholars from Thucydides to Lord Acton. That aspect is freedom. Like the others, it neither pretends to nor does explain everything.

But it does have one advantage. It ties together all the above narrative possibilities and more. Progress, regress, collective, individual, conflict, cooperation, more equality, less equality — they’re all there. And they all matter.

In my opinion, no living scholar synthesizes those disparate parts into a coherent whole better than Tom Palmer. The video below is a shortened version of a lecture that I have had the privilege of seeing a number of times over the years, with the added bonus of top-notch production values. This amateur history buff continues to learn from it to this day.

It’s 26 minutes long, which is about as long as an average sitcom. It is also far more rewarding, and at least as entertaining. If you have some spare time, it is well worth foregoing an episode of I Love Lucy to watch it. Click here or watch it below. And do keep an eye out for part two.

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch point out that duopolies rarely endure because they tend to abuse their customers. That creates an opening for competitors to enter the market.

Political markets are different than economic ones, but duopolies still have many of the same qualities — particularly regarding customer abuse. That’s why I was pleased to see a writeup in this morning’s Politico that the percentage of political independents is at an all-time high in a long-running Gallup poll. A full 40 percent of Americans have now opted out of the Republican-Democrat duopoly.

Comedian Louis C.K. once received a disturbing lesson in “fairness” from his children. As he tells the story in one of his stand-up specials, his daughter once accidentally broke one of her toys, and then demanded that Louis break her sibling’s toy “to make it fair.”

Wow. From the mouths of babes, a perfect example of how the impulse to “fairness” — seemingly so benign in theory — in practice so often leads to disaster.

Nature, of course, is not fair. It dispenses talent, intellect, and luck unequally amongst the populations of the world. As a result, some people will always end up with more than others.  When government sets out to impose “fairness” on society, it is therefore faced with a dilemma. It is impossible to make some people smarter, luckier, more talented. It is equally impossible to take away those blessings from those who have inherited them. The only recourse for government then, is to destroy or confiscate the material rewards which so often accrue as a consequence of such qualities. Fairness to all, then, is really punishment for many.

This is the reason that political systems that have as explicit charter the imposition of fairness so often descend into totalitarianism — total government power is the only way to enforce total equality. In such a state, misery and material want will be the norm; everyone will be equally unhappy. Like Louis C.K.’s two kids, each with a broken toy.

We should keep all of this in mind when we hear politicians like Barack Obama lament the “inequality” in our society, and we should always look askance at their solutions to this alleged problem. Material equality does not necessarily mean prosperity or stability. As Charles Lane noted recently in The Washington Post:

Western Europe’s recent history suggests that flat income distribution accompanies flat economic growth. Which European country recorded the biggest decrease in inequality between 1985 and 2008? That would be Greece.

Indeed.

Back in March 2009, President Obama issued a memorandum on scientific integrity to the heads of executive branch agencies and departments. It announced that “[s]cience and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of [his] Administration on a wide range of issues.” And in a statement to the press, Obama insisted that “Our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values.” Previous administrations (and one in particular – nudge nudge, wink wink … Know what I mean?) had let politics interfere with what should have been purely science-driven decisions by expert agencies. But that just wasn’t going to happen in the Obama administration.

I guess Kathleen Sebelius didn’t get the memo.

Yesterday, HHS Secretary Sebelius publicly overruled a decision by the Food and Drug Administration to make the Plan B emergency contraceptive available to girls under age 18 without a prescription. According to The New York Times, “Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A.’s commissioner, issued a lengthy statement saying it was safe to sell Plan B over the counter, while Ms. Sebelius countered that the drug’s manufacturer had failed to study whether girls as young as 11 years old could safely use Plan B.” Commissioner Hamburg’s public letter on the decision explains that:

“Our decision-making reflects a body of scientific findings, input from external scientific advisory committees, and data contained in the application that included studies designed specifically to address the regulatory standards for nonprescription drugs.  [FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research] experts, including obstetrician/gynecologists and pediatricians, reviewed the totality of the data and agreed that it met the regulatory standard for a nonprescription drug and that Plan B One-Step should be approved for all females of child-bearing potential.”

I don’t have access to the scientific research that the FDA considered in making its decision, so I can’t comment on the wisdom of either choice. And no one should be so naïve to think that potentially controversial decisions by scientific agencies, including the FDA, have not been subject to political pressures for as long as agencies have been making such decisions. After all, back in 2003, an FDA advisory panel recommended changing Plan B’s status from prescription only to over-the-counter. And it was widely believed that the decision was being held up by the White House, which only relented three years later when faced with Senate opposition to the administration’s new FDA Commissioner nominee. Only then, in 2006, did the FDA finally allow OTC sales to women 18 and older.

What I find so striking is that the Obama administration would be so brazen about it after taking such a holier than thou attitude on scientific integrity. After all, this is believed to be the first time that an HHS Secretary has publicly overruled a decision of the FDA, which is part of that department. The administration clearly wanted us to know that it was overruling the FDA.

The entire affair reminds me of an episode from season three of the television show “The West Wing.” For those who are unfamiliar with it, that program was a weekly serial that dramatized events in the day-to-day lives of White House staffers for the fictional President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet — an attractive, thoughtful, passionate, articulate, liberal former college professor cum politician. Sound familiar?

By season three, President Bartlet was preparing for what was expected to be a tough re-election campaign when the White House staff was informed that the FDA was about to announce its approval of the controversial RU-486 — the so-called “abortion pill.” When Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman suggests asking the FDA to postpone the approval, President Bartlet and the rest of the White House staff are indignant. “We could never interfere with an FDA decision,” they say, or words to that effect. “It’s an independent agency.” I recall screaming at my TV: No! Damn it! FDA is part of HHS. (Such is the life of a policy wonk.)

Oh, those were the days. When thoughtful liberal Democrats insisted that politicizing such an important decision just couldn’t be done — even behind closed doors, and even in the name of securing a much needed campaign advantage. Well, that was then, and this is now.

So, let’s hear it boys and girls:  Can a White House devoted to scientific integrity and its political henchmen over-ride a decision by the Food and Drug Administration?

Yes We They Can!

Anti-smoking advocates were in full throttle in Germany after former Chancellor of West Germany Helmut Schmidt kept puffing on his cigarette during a television interview last Sunday. In the Charlie Rose interview on German public broadcaster ARD, the 92-year-old Schmidt commented on German reunification and recent European history. He also said that smoking lots of cigarettes is responsible for his mental sharpness at his advanced age.

Activists against smoking were incensed – they called his smoking and comments on TV an outrage and charged that ARD was violating the anti-smoking laws and was endangering the health of the TV crew and the audience by allowing Schmidt to smoke.

Smoking supporters now have a new hero — certainly Schmidt’s distinguished looks belie his years, and his comments show he is still sharp. And, he has a full head of hair. Watch below:

Throughout history, most societies have been based on status. King, noble, and peasant. Brahmin and untouchable. Mandarin and coolie. One of liberalism’s crowning achievements is tearing down those old status societies and replacing them with contract societies. In a liberal society, all people have equal rights, and must deal with each other as equals. No man is forced to grovel before a duke or a king. He may look him in the eye now.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are far richer than I am. But if one of them wrongs me, I get my day in court. They might have better lawyers with shinier suits than me. But we are still equals before the law.

This was a novel phenomenon in the 18^th century, mainly confined to England and the Netherlands, and even far more imperfectly than today. Here’s how Isaac Newton’s funeral looked through French eyes:

Having come from a nation where aristocracy and clergy held a monopoly on power and privilege, Voltaire marveled at a society where a scientist was buried with the honors of a king.

Robert Zaresky and John T. Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding, location 877 in the Kindle version.

Isaac Newton’s life was a landmark event in the history of science. His funeral was, unknowingly, a landmark event in the history of human freedom.

Financial Times’s November 18 interview with Baltimore native John Waters (available ungated at Slate) is a great read for a couple of reasons: First, because Waters — the cult film director who made a career out of transgressive quirk and camp — is now working on a one-man Christmas show; and second, because Waters has a singularly refreshing perspective on Occupy Wall Street and anti-capitalism.

After complaining about pressures to make movies for nothing (“I can’t be faux underground”) and slamming “liberal censors” for rating his last film NC-17, Waters starts talking about young people today:

“I think young people are still having fun. I never think my time was better. I think they’re having the same amount of fun because it’s something new to them. They’re down at the Stop the Wall Street thing, which is, to me, hilarious.”

A thieving murderer who killed a professor is receiving a scholarship to attend a Louisiana law school, courtesy of college administrators and the NAACP:

When he was 20 years old, [Bruce] Reilly beat and stabbed to death a 58-year old English professor at Community College of Rhode island, capping off his crime by stealing the professor’s car, wallet, and credit cards. . . . Reilly is an admitted student in Tulane’s law school . . . The Louisiana Bar, like all other states, requires proof of good moral character and fitness to be admitted to the bar, a requirement that almost always excludes felons – particularly those who have been convicted of a violent crime as heinous as Reilly’s. . .It is next to impossible for him to become a licensed attorney even if he graduates, as Tulane University officials must surely know. . .As at least one student complained to The Times-Picayune, Reilly is taking up “another’s space in the law school even though he may never be able to practice as a lawyer because of his conviction.” But it gets worse.

Reilly is attending Tulane on an NAACP scholarship and a Dean’s Merit Scholarship. . . .Now, we know that the NAACP (and apparently the dean of Tulane) thinks it is appropriate to give a scholarship to a convicted killer

Earlier, a left-leaning British government paid the college costs of the “Crossbow Cannibal,” enabling him to take more lives after he had previously been incarcerated for attempted murder and many violent crimes. “While pursuing a PhD in “homicide studies” at the British taxpayers’ expense, a man with a long history of criminal violence became a serial killer, noted Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal. After Stephen Griffiths’ release from prison — and a mental hospital, in which he was diagnosed as an incurable psychopath — he was accepted by the University of Bradford; the government paid his fees and living expenses. Griffiths “killed and ate three women, two cooked and one raw, according to his own account.” He’s now serving a life sentence, giving him time to complete his doctorate on 19th-century murder practices, notes education expert Joanne Jacobs.

Every criminal, it seems, must have the chance to go to college at taxpayer expense, the more morally-depraved the better — at least according to the Progressive mind, which seems to view criminals as victims of society. (Tulane, by contrast, is a private — if heavily-government-subsidized — university. It receives not only federal funds, but also Louisiana state funds, which its law clinic then uses to sue Louisiana businesses that subsidize it through their tax dollars. Legal commentator Walter Olson has an interesting book, Schools for Misrule, that discusses the phenomenon of state-funded law clinics suing states to demand huge government spending increases — resulting in state taxpayers subsidizing lawsuits against themselves.)

Subsidies for academic underperformers are also in fashion. Maryland’s governor, Martin O’Malley, recently lavished money on a bottom-tier left-wing college whose students could not receive a high-school diploma at a school with rigorous standards.

As noted earlier, states spend billions of dollars operating bottom-tier colleges that manage to graduate few of their students — like Chicago State University, “which has just a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate,” and UT El Paso, which graduated only “1 out of 25 students in a timely manner.” As more and more mediocre students go to college, students learn less and less. “Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat.” “Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a widely-publicized January report from experts like New York University Professor Richard Arum. “36% showed little” gain after four years, and students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.”

F.A. Hayek is an unlikely conservative hero. After all, this is a man who titled one of his most famous essays “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He self-identified as a liberal — in the original sense of the word, which more or less means what we would today call libertarian. Since liberalism took on an entirely different meaning during the 20th century, Hayek wrote that he would settle for being called an Old Whig. But he could not stand to be called a conservative.

For one, he believed that “the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not be too much restricted by rigid rules.”* Sounds an awful lot like the Bush years.

Sure, No Child Left Behind will radically grow federal involvement in education, which is properly a state and local issue. But we have good intentions! Sure, the PATRIOT Act could easily be abused. But it’s OK, because our guys are in charge! They’d never overstep their boundaries.

Conservatism, Hayek argued, is not a rigorous philosophy. It is “essentially opportunist and lacks principles.”**

That’s why I was surprised to see that the Heritage Foundation, a proudly conservative think tank, published an abridged edition of Hayek’s classic 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. Heritage’s economic policies are reasonably free-market, at least when Democrats are in power. So it makes sense that they would be Hayek fans, even though they aren’t ideological soulmates. But I am wary that they are promoting him as a conservative thinker; he was not.

Still, popularization is one of the most important tasks a think tank can perform. It is also one of the most neglected. Kudos, then.

The heart of The Road to Serfdom is Hayek’s version of a slippery slope argument. It is an easy charge to level at the current administration, which could be another motivation for Heritage.

Hayek and Heritage would agree: government intervention tends not to get the results it seeks; intentions are not results. Frustrated economic planners believe the only solution is more intervention. When that fails, still more meddling ensues. And on, and on. Then one day the people wake up to find they have lost their freedom.

The lesson is to not give in to the urge to use the hammer of government to drive home the nails of social problems. There are better ways, and less destructive hammers with more precise aim.

That’s the popular understanding of The Road to Serfdom. But Hayek pointed out in 1973 that there is more nuance to his book:

What I meant to argue in The Road to Serfdom was certainly not that whenever we depart, however slightly, from what I regard as the principles of a free society, we shall ineluctably be driven to go the whole way to a totalitarian system.  It was rather what in more homely language is expressed when we say:  “If you do not mend your principles you will go to the devil.”

The Bush and Obama administrations have joined together to double the size of government in one short decade. Their spending and regulating has driven debt through the roof, slowed economic growth, and kept millions of jobs from being created.

Worse, this bipartisan binge of government activism is showing no signs of slowing down. Many people think we’re already well down the road to serfdom. It looks bleak. But it isn’t really. It is reversible; the road to serfdom is a two-way street. We can go back, so long as we remember the principles of a free society.

The trouble is that conservatives seem to forget the libertarian portions of their philosophy every time they win an election. That’s why I’m glad that Heritage is popularizing Hayek with an abridged, easy-to-read version of The Road to Serfdom. I just hope they don’t portray him as a symbol of an ideology he publicly rejected.

More people of all political stripes need to read Hayek and be exposed to his arguments. More people need to learn why government does harm, even when it tries to do good. More people need to learn how easy it is to go down the road to serfdom — and that our cars can go in reverse, too.

The more people realize this, the higher the odds that they will keep conservative politicians in check post-election. If the Bush-Obama disaster has taught us anything, it’s that the seduction of power makes even good men go to the devil.

I hope Heritage’s popularization of Hayek sends that important lesson far and wide — while acknowledging that he doesn’t fit into the progressive/conservative spectrum; Hayek was nothing if not an independent thinker.

*F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p.401.

**Ibid.

Bill Niskanen was an individual who will be missed sorely in a world where intellectuals of integrity are a rare breed.  But, he will also be missed as a smiling face in the often grim world of Washington. We at CEI join many others in wishing his wife Kathy and his family our condolences and thoughts.

I came to know Bill many years ago, when I was learning the Washington game at the Council for a Competitive Economy (CCE), which sought to bring together free market business leaders and pro-market public policy scholars.  Then, as now, I thought it critical for liberty-minded intellectuals to reach out to business leaders in our fight for economic liberty. After all, how can we defend capitalism, if we cannot enlist capitalists in that effort?

Bill as a fellow intellectual who had worked in business—most notably as Senior Economist at Ford—had experienced the tensions between the tactical expediencies that often dominate business decisions and the core principles critical for sustainable profitability. His insights and advice on reconciling these tensions were invaluable.

Bill, then a member of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, spoke at several CCE events and I came to know and like him. He brought a combination of insights into business, government, and economics that was unusual among prominent economists and gave him the ability to analyze a broad array of issues. After CCE closed down, I founded the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). As a tiny start-up, we needed third party legitimacy. I formed an advisory group of influential individuals who were willing to vouch that CEI’s business model was viable and its aims achievable. Bill accepted and became one of CEI’s early advisers. Bill was rather more respectful of economic orthodoxy than I, but amused and possibly impressed by my enthusiasm.

Bill had been one of the speakers at CEI’s Jefferson Group meetings which brought together the free market movement’s “best and brightest” to discuss public policy issues of the day. I recall his introductory remarks to one of his otherwise scholarly talks: “Now don’t worry, as Henry VIII said to his wives, I won’t keep you long!” And Bill, a tall man, also repeated the observation, “All great economists are tall. There are, of course, two exceptions, Milton Friedman…” and then he’d stop and grin (knowing that one would soon recall Galbraith).

Bill was always helpful whenever I sought to explore new areas of policy and to venture among academics. He and Chris Culp encouraged me to contribute a chapter, “Cowboys versus Cattle Thieves,” in their book, Corporate Aftershock: The Public Policy Lessons from the Collapse of Enron and other Major Corporations, and I think it is one of my best. It would not have happened without his push.

In social situations, Bill was always friendly and a bit bemused by the bustle of the business-social life inside the Beltway. Fran and I would often meet Bill and Kathy at the growing number of right-of-center soirees that have come to brighten the statist atmosphere of Washington. I only wish we could have had many more such exchanges. The impression I always got from Bill was that of a happy warrior with a conviction that logic would eventually prevail. That theme rested not always easily with my “In politics, logic is for losers” cynicism, but we both recognized that there are many niches in the war for liberty.

One of Bill’s ideas that strongly influenced me and that I’ve incorporated into mine was his view that government could approximate the efficiencies of the market only if—for whatever reason—it faced competitive pressures to perform. For example, sometimes two government agencies are assigned similar missions (the air role of both the Air Force and the Navy, for example). Competition spurs both groups to do better. This “warring bureaucracy” model of politics is critical, as it argues against the conventional wisdom that eliminating redundancy and “duplication” in government is always desirable. Competition in the private sector is important. Bill noted it is, if anything, even more important in the political world. CEI’s focus on competitive federalism is an aspect of his influence.

Bill’s major role in the free market movement was as Chairman of the Cato Institute from 1985 to 2008. Bill and Cato President Ed Crane made for an interesting and creative leadership team. Ed is one of the most forceful and principled individuals I’ve known. Bill was equally principled, but put greater priority in exploring new frontiers of economic theory. Together, they made for a formidable team in putting ideas into action. His legacy at Cato extends from the theoretical to the practical. Sound scholarship that forms the underpinnings of creative approaches to solving the problems that ever-expanding government creates.

A mark of Bill’s influence is the fact that his ideas live on, not just at Cato, but among all those who are working to maximize individual freedom in America and around the world. He will be greatly missed—for his accomplishments but most of all, for himself. It was an honor to know and to work with him.