My column on the US election published on February 28 in La Tribune (Paris)

La montée de Rick Santorum imprime un autre retournement à la campagne pour l’investiture républicaine. Nous serons mieux placés, après les primaires d’aujourd’hui (le mardi 28 février) dans le Michigan et l’Arizona, pour déterminer si l’ancien sénateur représente un défi majeur pour Mitt Romney, même si des sondages récents suggèrent qu’il l’emporte maintenant au niveau national.

Cette lutte nous rappelle quelques vérités sur la nature des processus politiques. Prenez le débat concernant l’établissement, sous le président républicain George W. Bush, de conditions de qualité de l’enseignement public pour que les États continuent de recevoir des subventions fédérales à ce chapitre. Dans un pays où l’autonomie et la démocratie locales représentent des valeurs historiques, l’opposition à l’intervention du gouvernement fédéral dans l’enseignement public, qui est ordonné localement selon les lois de chaque État, soulève des passions bien compréhensibles. « Il faut, disait si bien Montesquieu, que, par la disposition des choses, le pouvoir arrête le pouvoir. »

Or, M. Santorum avait voté pour l’intervention fédérale en question. À M. Romney qui le lui reprochait, il a déclaré que la loi violait ses principes mais que, « quand on fait partie d’une équipe, on doit parfois encaisser un coup pour elle ». Pour la même raison, M. Santorum n’a pas manifesté d’opposition aux subventions fédérales au planning familial, qu’il dit pourtant condamner pour des raisons morales.

M. Santorum s’est ainsi adonné à ce que tous les politiciens pratiquent et que les économistes des choix publics appellent « marchandage politique », « commerce des bestiaux » (horse trading) ou « échange des votes ». Le politicien vend son appui à cer-taines propositions de ses collèges en retour ce quoi ceux-ci appuieront ses propres projets. Les politiciens font commerce de leurs voix : « Je vous donne mon vote aujourd’hui, vous me donnez le vôtre demain. »

M. Romney a péché de la même manière quand il était gouverneur du Massachusetts, avalisant des mesures « non conservatrices » afin d’en faire adopter d’autres auxquelles il attachait une grande importance.

On peut démontrer que ce marchandage politique mène souvent à l’adoption de politiques dont les avantages sont bien inférieurs aux coûts, lesquels sont dissimulés par leur répartition sur un grand nombre d’individus. Quand on fait la somme des politiques adoptées, on s’aperçoit que personne n’aurait voté pour le panier complet. En d’autres termes, la concurrence politique n’a pas l’efficacité de la concurrence économique. C’est une banalité qu’il faut parfois rappeler.

Ni M. Romney, ni M. Santorum, ni du reste M. Gingrich ne s’en inquiètent, car le seul objectif de chacun est d’être élu. Un rapport d’un think tank indépendant estime que le programme de l’un ou l’autre de ces trois candidats creuserait le déficit budgétaire. Ron Paul, quant à lui, sait qu’il ne sera pas élu, ce qui lui permet de ne pas trop jouer à ces jeux politiciens dangereux.

“Many Florida Republicans sought a candidate who they thought could defeat President Barack Obama”, writes the Wall Street Journal tonight (on.wsj.com/yem4M5), “with significantly more voters who cited that as their top priority opting for Mr. Romney, according to exit polls.”

This is like saying, “many consumers bought tomatoes, citing their desire to have tomatoes recognized as the most consumed vegetable in the world”. No consumer would do this, knowing that his own purchase of tomatoes is not going to show in the statistics. Similarly, no rational voters would vote for a candidate in order to make a difference, which he would only do if, without his vote, another candidate would have been elected (on this, see my Regulation article “The Public Choice Revolution“).

Can voters be that irrational? Can each voter cast his vote to make a difference while knowing that he has never decided an election, and that nobody he knows ever has? Probably not. But they explain their motivation, which they don’t very well understand, with ready-made, senseless phrases. Talk is cheap.

After Newt Gingrich’s proposal for a moon colony, what could be better than quoting Lysander Spooner (http://lysanderspooner.org/node/64) on a related topic:

“Our pretended treaties, then, being made with no legitimate or bona fide nations, or representatives of nations, and being made, on our part, by persons who have no legitimate authority to act for us, have intrinsically no more validity than a pretended treaty made by the Man in the Moon with the king of the Pleiades.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966 [1886]), p. 89.

“In a shared bit of rhetoric and ideology, National Socialism, Fascism, and the New Deal all depicted their rise to power as the concrete realization of the idea of the nation, which until then had been uninformed, halfhearted, and theoretical.”
— Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 119

“On May 11, 1933, the main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, offered its commentary in an article with the headline ‘Roosevelt’s Dictatorial Recovery Measures.’ … ‘If not always in the same words,’ the paper wrote, ‘[Roosevelt], too, demands that collective good be put before self-interest. Many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist.’” — Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 19

With 80% of the New Hampshire precincts in, Ron Paul in assured of nearly a quarter of the vote and a solid second place. It is a great victory for liberty or, should I say, the great beginning of a future victory for liberty.

It is unlikely that Mr. Paul will win the Republican nomination. The political establishment is terrified of him — and for very good reasons indeed. Were he to win the nomination, I fear the probability he would get elected is low, even if he comes at a better time than Barry Goldwater did. But the seeds are sown. The fact that Mr. Paul received a sizable proportion of the youth vote is extremely encouraging. History is in the making. Perhaps we haven’t worked for nothing during all these years.

In my opinion, not all of Ron Paul’s ideas are unassailable. On monetary matters, for example, he would benefit from the advice of more critical libertarian economists. But all his proposals point in the right direction. He has a strong knowledge of, and commitment to, individual liberty. Pardon my self-serving bias but his endorsement of The Idea of America (edited by Bill Bonner and myself) shows the reality of the Ron Paul revolution (see the endorsement, and buy the book, at Amazon or at Laissez Faire Books).

Ron Paul’s campaign will have a major pedagogical impact towards the restoration of liberty in America, and in the rest of the Western world. For perhaps other countries will stop importing only what’s bad from America and, once this country becomes the beacon of liberty again, will import libertarianism.

During the last half of the 18th century, my estimate is that there were 222 inhabitants per police personnel in Paris. In American cities of 1,000,000 inhabitants or more, the 2009 number is roughly the same: 232 inhabitants per police employee. And don’t forget that ID papers and technology now make them much more efficient at tracking individuals. Some progress!

Sources: For Paris: Marc Chassaigne (1906), La Lieutenance générale de police (Genève: Slatkine_Megariotis, 1975); for the US: http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_74.html.

The Economist http://econ.st/tyzwbn

One could have thought that the old legal rule against double jeopardy would be strengthened as new surveillance technologies (ID papers, computerized databases, and DNA) made prosecution and condemnation easier and less costly. One would have been wrong as the demise of double jeopardy in English law shows. What happens in reality is that the lower the cost of power for Leviathan, the more power he wants. What the demise of double jeopardy means is that the state is certain to get a conviction when it really wants it, whether its victim is guilty or not: with its nearly infinite resources, it will just have to prosecute as many times as necessary before a jury caves in.