Gary Johnson's "Seven Principles of Good Government"

Over a year ago, I think, I donated $100 to Libertarian party presidential candidate Gary Johnson's "Our America Initiative" for the promise of receiving a copy of his forthcoming book when it was published.  It was slated to be released in the summer of 2011.  I was beginning to feel like I would never see it when a small, nondescript package arrived at my door a couple weeks ago bearing the Our America Initiative logo.  I opened it up and found not just a copy of Gary Johnson's book, but a signed copy of his book.  Yay!

The book itself is very short, 152 small pages with large type and dozens of pictures.  The first six chapters explain Johnson's life story, and the final seven are each short essays on one of his principles of good government.  The book is filled with anecdotes from his time in business, government, and competing as an athlete.  If you've ever listened to one of Gary's speeches, or heard any extended interviews with him, you've probably heard at least a few of them already.  (Very few were new to me, but I devour pretty much all the news on him and his campaign that's out there.)

Gary Johnson was the governor of New Mexico for 8 years.  He ran a self-funded campaign as a complete outsider to politics, only having introduced himself to the Republican party a few weeks before entering the race for governor.  He ended up winning the very close primary, and then went on to win the general election to become New Mexico's 29th governor.

During his time in office, Governor Johnson was wildly successful at keeping the state's budget under control, and at keeping state bureaucrats out of the way of the private sector.  He vetoed 750 bills during his time in office (more than all the other governors in the country combined during that time) and ended up leaving New Mexico with a budget surplus.  During his time in office the state's public sector workforce shrank by about 1,200 jobs, while the private sector workforce grew by more than 20,000 jobs.  He cut taxes 14 times and never allowed a single tax to be increased during his 8 years as governor.  

Prior to his time as governor, Johnson was a construction entrepreneur who started a one-man handyman business and grew it into one of the largest construction firms in his state.  He gives several anecdotes in his book about how hard work paid off for him, how just showing up on time and doing what you're asked to do (or maybe a little bit more than what you're asked to do) was the key to his success in business.

These are Gary Johnson's seven principles of good government, which the last half of his book explains:

• become reality based
• always be honest and tell the truth
• always do what is right and fair
• determine a goal and set a plan for reaching it
• make sure everyone who should know your goal, does
• acknowledge mistakes immediately
• love what you're doing; if you don't, find something else to do

In my opinion, these aren't just principles for good government, they're principles for a good and productive life.

The principle that I think had the biggest impact on me, as Gary explained it, was his principle of always being honest and telling the truth.  He explains how he was not always honest with his wife, Dee, when he was governor (and even before that).  Not that he kept huge secrets from her, but he told her "white lies" sometimes because it was easier than telling the truth.  Eventually he and his wife had grown far apart because he had not been totally honest and because the "white lies" compounded.  They ended up getting a divorce, and not long after that his now ex-wife died suddenly from hypertensive cardiovascular disease.  He still says he's guilt-ridden because of his actions that, in part, led to the divorce.  It's a great warning for all of us who might think that telling a little "white lie" today might be easier than telling the truth.  In the end, it probably won't be.

Overall, I found this book to be a good, quick read.  It clearly doesn't have the meat of books written by previous libertarian presidential (and vice-presidential) candidates, probably because Gary Johnson is not a philosophical and rhetorical heavyweight, but it's packed with the life experiences of someone who has been to the promised land and fought hard to implement libertarian ideas.  In the unlikely event that Gary Johnson actually makes it into the White House, I think it would be like the second (third?) coming of Grover Cleveland: An honest, incorruptible President who believes firmly in the rights of the individual.

Drug Testing Welfare Applicants

The other day I got involved in a little bit of a discussion on facebook on the issue of drug testing welfare applicants.  I tried, as always, to be respectful of everyone involved but the friend of mine who originally started the thread ended up un-friending me (which is too bad, but I didn't really know him anyway, and I didn't ever ask to be his friend in the first place, he was just some random guy from high school who had decided to send me a friend request) so my input got cut short.  I figured I might as well follow up on this blog.  Here's how the exchange went:

The Cost-Benefit Case
As you can see, the reason I don't think drug testing welfare applicants is a good idea is because it's a waste of money.  Florida pioneered this strategy and ended up losing $45,780 (not including attorneys fees, court fees and the thousands of hours of staff time it took to implement this policy).  On top of that, there is a strong suspicion at Gov. Rick Scott just pushed this measure because he has ties to the drug testing company "Solantic."  So, really, this whole thing reeks of corruption and graft.  Sure, it sounds plausible.  Who would defend giving money to drug addicts?  But the fact is it cost an extra $118,140 over and above what Floridians were paying for welfare already, drug addicts and all, to screen the applicant pool and knock the cost down by $72,360.  Clearly the cost exceeds the benefit, and from a consequentialist standpoint the policy should be rejected.

The Constitutional Case
The ACLU has argued that drug testing welfare applicants is unconstitutional because it violates the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches.  As I stated in the facebook thread, I don't buy that line of argument.  The 4th Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches, as I see it, applies to situations where a citizen is just minding his own business and the government decides to come in and search him or his property without cause.  In this case, it seems to me that the citizen is going to the government to apply for welfare, and the government is just making sure the applicant passes the criteria it has set up for the program.

I am willing to admit it's a bit of a gray area, and I'm not comfortable making that constitutional case too forcefully.  For example, based on my line of reasoning you could say, "Kyle, when you use government roads voluntarily, does that mean the government has a right to search your car as a condition of driving on them?"  I would be very uncomfortable answering yes to that question.  I think that a program could be setup that would search every car on the road and be constitutional, but the government would need to have checkpoints at every driveway, or the exit of every neighborhood, or the entrance of every freeway, so that there was no "reasonable expectation of privacy" (the legal test established in Katz v. United States to determine whether an unwarranted search is constitutional or not) when driving on government roads.  I think a program that actually passed that constitutional test would cost trillions in enforcement costs and lost productivity for absolutely no benefit whatsoever, but it would be constitutional.

Rather than comparing drug testing of welfare applicants to random searches on the highway, I would compare it to admissions at a public university.  To be admitted to a public university you need to meet certain requirements:  GPA, SAT scores, and perhaps extracurricular activities.  You provide this information when you apply for government colleges, just as you would for private colleges, so that the government can screen the applicant pool.  That's more what I see going on here.

Of course, just because something is constitutional doesn't mean it's a good idea.  Just look at the post office, which is specifically authorized in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution.

Should The Applicants Pay?
In Joe's parting shot, he said that he thought the applicants should pay for the drug tests instead of the government.  That's a fair enough sentiment, I suppose, but it wouldn't make a lot of difference.  It's just an accounting gimmick that doesn't change how resources are actually used.  If applicants end up passing the drug test and getting welfare, as 98% of them will, they will end up recouping their losses from the welfare benefits.  So really what you're doing when you make the applicants pay for drug testing is reducing welfare benefits. 

You might think I'd be in favor of reducing welfare benefits.  Well, I am, but this isn't reducing welfare benefits, it's just shifting the welfare benefits around.  What do I mean?  You do cut benefits to the welfare beneficiaries, but the money saved is now going to drug testing companies for make-work jobs that we've already determined are useless.  It's now just corporate welfare instead of social welfare.

In the final analysis, if welfare applicants don't have to pay for the drug tests it's just a pointless increase in government spending.  If welfare applicants are made to pay for the drug tests social welfare spending is transformed into corporate welfare for some lucky drug testing companies.  It makes no difference.  It's a shell game.

Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) and the US Sugar Program

In the interest of keeping tabs on one of the senators representing my neck of the woods, I am one of the 187 people who subscribe to the youtube channel of Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID).  In general, he's a pretty free market type.  He's consistently rated as one of the more conservative (although not anywhere near the most conservative) US Senators, and he is easily the most conservative US Senator from "Cascadia" (loosely defined as WA, OR, ID, and BC Canada).  He's a frequent guest on CNBC and the other financial networks since he holds a lot of sway in some very important financial committees.

I usually wish he'd go much further than he does, but I generally like what I hear from him when it comes to the budget and the economy.  So imagine my surprise on Wednesday afternoon when I checked my youtube subscriptions and found this atrocity waiting for me:

Senator Crapo has never been someone I would describe as one of my "political heroes," but I was reasonably confident I could at least trust him to have a rudimentary grasp of economics and tow the free market line at least when it came to Washington DC's most egregious debacles.  Apparently I was wrong.

So what, you ask, is the US Sugar Program, and why is Senator Crapo's support of it so disappointing?

The US Sugar Program was one of the programs started by FDR during the Great Depression to elevate the price of sugar.  The theory then was that farm prices were collapsing, and elevating them above the market price would "fix" the economy.  Of course that didn't work (for reasons you can discover for yourself in Henry Hazlitt's classic book "Economics in One Lesson" if you don't understand them already), and most of the programs eventually expired.  For example, we somehow realized that slaughtering pigs as a "cure" for low pork prices was utterly counterproductive.  But the US Sugar Program has remained a fixture.

The program works to inflate US sugar prices by restricting imports of sugar and setting a floor under sugar prices by buying surplus sugar production.  According to the Heritage Foundation US sugar prices have been elevated by 49% over the world price, as of May 2012, because of the restrictions on imports.  These elevated prices are undoubtedly good for sugar producers, but what about the food processing industries that use sugar?  Not so much.  In fact, it's the main reason that the US candy industry has been on the decline.  Economist Dan Griswold, of the Cato Institute, has documented in his book "Mad About Trade" that candy companies like Hershey's, Brachs and Kraft have closed dozens of candy manufacturing plants in the US over the past decade or two and moved production to countries like Canada and Mexico because the sugar price in those countries is much closer to the world price.  So, in essence, Senators like the "Honorable" Mr. Crapo have decided that the US would rather have jobs producing and stockpiling sugar nobody wants (12 pounds of surplus sugar per American each year according to Mr. Crapo himself!) than high wage jobs manufacturing candy products that the market is actually demanding.  And he has been willing to take your money and pay more than $2 billion over the past 10 years just to warehouse all of this excess sugar.

Incidentally, the US should probably not even be producing sugar at all.  Brazil can produce a pound of sugar for roughly 1/3 the price it costs US farmers to produce it.  So it's no wonder sugar producers pay for more than 34% of US farm lobbying, and 54% of it's Political Action Committee donations, despite producing less than 2% of the value of  all US crops.  I think every American should be outraged that these people are ripping you off and Senator Crapo is helping them do it.  Morally it's as if the US sugar producers paid Mr. Crapo to kidnap and beat up sugar consumers that refused to pay the elevated prices or bought from foreign sellers.  The only difference is that we call him an "Honorable" Senator instead of a gangster, and he uses the police instead of mob soldiers.

But what really irritates me is not that he's complicit in ripping us off, but that he's using completely backwards economic reasoning to do it.  It wouldn't be so bad if Mr. Crapo were on a committee overseeing some tiny corner of the economy or focusing on foreign policy or something like that, but this guy is on the committees overseeing banking and the financial sector.  He's even the ranking member on the "Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment!"  It is unbelievable that a person in his position would tell us with a straight face that price floors theoretically create shortages, and act like it's a great vindication of this particular price floor that it has instead created a massive surplus (just as Econ 101 predicts it should).

One last unintended consequence of this boneheaded policy (combined with the ridiculous US corn subsidies), that the Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gov. Gary Johnson sometimes talks about, is that US food processing companies end up putting high-fructose corn syrup into their products instead of using sugar.  Now I'm not an expert on the health ramifications of this, but apparently that's not the greatest thing for Americans' health.  Some have argued it's a major contributor to obesity in the US.

So basically, this policy is leaving Americans fat, broke, and unemployed.  We've known how bad these policies are at least since the days of Fredrick Bastiat and Adam Smith, and yet they still continue to pop up and even thrive because of the support of economically illiterate politicians like Mr. Crapo.  Here's to hoping American/Cascadian politicians eventually come to their senses.  I won't hold my breath in anticipation.

Peter Schiff's "The Real Crash"

Anyone who knows anything about my regular media consumption habits probably has a good basis for suspecting that Peter Schiff is my favorite pundit, radio show host, and writer.  (That suspicion would probably be correct, although I hesitate to pick favorites.)  I don't remember where I first heard of Peter Schiff, but I think it was when he ran for Senate in Connecticut in 2010.  He was one of the few Republican senate candidates across the country in that election that I thought was really carrying the banner of liberty.  I ended up donating some money to his campaign and also making a few hundred phone calls on his behalf as a volunteer.  Yeah, I guess you could call me a regular "Schiff-head."

Peter's most remarkable quality has been his ability to speak what he thinks is the truth to any audience, without any fear of conflict, and without any regard for hurt feelings (although he rarely, if ever, makes it personal).  This has lead to some hilarious interviews, congressional testimony, and speeches.  Probably my favorite was his speech before the Mortgage Bankers Conference in Las Vegas in 2006.  He laid out, in stunning detail, exactly why most of the members of the audience were about to go belly up financially.  In the Q&A period one of the questioners even asked, "So are you just saying I should slit my wrists?"  Obviously Peter wasn't advocating suicide, but his thesis was proven correct a year later.  The housing market collapsed, and we're still (unfortunately and unnecessarily) reeling from that shock.

But Peter doesn't think that the housing bubble was the worst of what's in store for America's troubled economy.  Not even close.  In the first two chapters of his latest book, "The Real Crash:  America's Coming Bankruptcy, How to Save Yourself and Your Country," Peter argues that the government's actions in response to the housing bubble (TARP, Stimulus I and II, Quantitative Easing I, II, and potentially III, etc.) have led to unsustainable levels of government debt, and that either the banking sector will be wiped out when the government defaults on it's debt if interest rates rise, or the economy will be wiped out by hyper-inflation if the Fed decides to fix interest rates at perpetually low levels.

The next nine chapters are focused on what the government can do in order to fix the economy with minimal pain.  I say "minimal" pain, because the fact is there is going to be a lot of pain no matter which course we choose to go.  We may have more or less pain, sooner or later, but the pain is unavoidable at this point.  Peter's prescriptions for the economy are more or less the standard laissez-faire policies that any free market type would advocate:  sound money, deregulation, and better tax policy.  He specifically advocates for the FairTax, which would throw out the entire federal tax code and all the taxes within it in favor of a single national sales tax.  I like that idea a lot.

Peter takes special care in advocating the destruction of the "third-rails" of politics:  Medicare and Social Security.  It's obvious, to anyone who has bothered to look at the numbers, that these programs are unsustainable.  They simply can't continue as they are currently structured forever, or even much longer.  Medicare alone will bankrupt this country in short order if it is not changed.  Peter advocates means testing these benefits so that they only apply to the people who really need them, instead of feathering the nests of well-off seniors.  As he points out, the benefits end up as just a subsidy for whoever inherits these wealthy seniors' wealth since the seniors themselves can afford to pay for their medical expenses out of pocket or purchase some kind of insurance product (and if they can't, means testing obviously wouldn't apply to them).

The final chapter, as well as little blurbs throughout the book, focuses on how to position your investments to prepare for the collapse that Peter thinks  is coming.  I don't really have any assets to invest so this is not really applicable in my case, but it was a really interesting read.  He recommends a "three-legged stool" of quality dividend paying stocks chosen for their ability to profit from the collapse, cash and bonds in countries with sound monetary and fiscal policy, and gold and gold mining stocks.

Perhaps the most interesting part in this book was an appendix which briefly reviewed the history of monetary policy in the United States, including numerous Supreme Court citations.  There's been a huge argument lately over whether it is even legal for the government to produce paper money, since the constitution declares that states can only make gold and silver legal tender and prohibits government from emitting "bills of credit."  I think Peter shows conclusively and indisputably that paper currency is illegal according to the constitution.  Of course, it doesn't matter because the Constitution today says whatever a few robed political appointees say it says.  Ah well...

As (I think) with all books I read, I have a couple areas of disagreement with this book.  The biggest one was on the issue of birthright citizenship.  Peter went through advocating a bunch of great reforms that would move the US much closer to an open and rational immigration policy, and then in a final paragraph he decided to just throw in (what felt to me like) "Oh, and by the way, we should end birthright citizenship."  He doesn't really defend it at all, or even argue why it's necessary.  It's just thrown in there as a solution without a problem, and I happen to think that government solutions to non-existent problems are very dangerous.  Ending birthright citizenship would visit massive bureaucracy on every birth in the US.  It would be a boon for attorneys.  We'd need to have a national registry of citizens and/or a national ID card.  We'd end up spending a fortune to figure out who is and who is not a citizen.  And for what?  No benefit whatsoever that I can see.  A lot of people, I think Peter included but I don't remember for certain, argue that the 14th Amendment made birthright citizenship the law of the land.  This is just not true. There has been a long tradition of birthright citizenship in the US before the 14th Amendment, and going back to the common law of England and continental Europe.  It's a wonderful, unambiguous, bright line rule.  It needs to stay.  Check out this presentation at the Cato Institute for more information on the pitfalls of ending birthright citizenship.

But despite that minor criticism, I thought the book was very sound.  For someone who likes their public policy reading spiced with a little bit of investment advice, I think it's probably the only way to go.  And, by the way, Peter's dad, Irwin Schiff, wrote a fantastic comic book decades ago that you can now get online for free here.  So if you don't have money to pick up "The Real Crash," be sure to at least check that out.

Conversation With An Immigration Restrictionist

Immigration is an issue that, in my opinion, a lot of libertarians still have trouble coming to grips with reality on.  Even libertarian paragons like Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard held relatively restrictionist views (in practice, anyway, not necessarily in theory) when it came to immigration.  Even Ron Paul (who I think is fantastic on virtually every other issue) wants to put armed troops on the border with Mexico!  Don't think for a minute they'd just be playing poker...

I, myself, am an almost completely open immigration type and it's an issue that I love to debate.  I even managed to convince a Libertarian candidate running for congress to change his position on birthright citizenship earlier this year.   

A few months ago I had an interesting conversation with an immigration restrictionist, who also happens to be a fellow member of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Washington and supporter of Ron Paul, over facebook.  Here is the exchange:

                                                                                                 

RLC Person: Can we talk about immigration? I'd like to try to understand why some of you seem to think the US has no right to prevent citizens from other nations from crossing our borders to live and/or work.

Me: I don't think the US has *no* right to restrict immigration, but I think that the burden of proof should be on those who seek to prevent peaceful people from trying to improve their lives rather than on those who would allow it. I think if you take that view there are only really two reasons why you should prevent someone from immigrating (and please, if you've got another one let me know):

1.) They have a criminal background.
2.) They carry a deadly and contagious disease.

That's it. Get rid of quotas, and let all peaceful people immigrate and it will be much easier to catch those who would do us harm.

RLC Person: Kyle, do you think America belongs to the American people?

Me: What do you mean by "America"? Americans own most of the land in America. But that doesn't mean immigrants couldn't rent an apartment (which is a mutually beneficial trade). I don't accept the argument that one person, or group of people, should be able to prevent a mutually beneficial trade without overcoming a significant burden of proof.

RLC Person: I mean, do you think this nation belongs to Americans, as in US citizens.

Me: I believe in a limited government. Regardless of who controls it (and yeah, I guess theoretically US citizens control the government but I tend to think of the government as "them" rather than "us" since they generally don't represent anything I stand for).  Regardless of who the government belongs to, there should be limits on its power. One of the limits should be on their ability to prevent peaceful people from working to improve their lives.

RLC Person: OK, so do you think you have some sort of natural right to move and work in Australia or Mexico or Denmark if that's what you'd like to do? You don't think the people of Australia and Mexico and Denmark have the right to decide who gets to live and work in their nations?

Me: The only right they have to prevent me from doing so is derived from the barrel of a gun. It is not any kind of natural right.

RLC Person: Do you have the right to prevent other peaceful people from entering your home and sleeping in your bed, rocking in your chair, or eating your Quaker Oats?

Me: Yes, I own my home. But this is a false analogy. Immigrants do not break into people's houses. They generally rent apartments from people who enjoy collecting the rent. If no one would rent or sell them a place to stay, they could not come.

RLC Person: No, it is not a false analogy. America is home to Americans, not Australians.

Me: Yes, it is a false analogy. Here is a closer analogy:

Do you have the right to prevent your neighbor from renting his basement out to other peaceful people? Do you have the right to prevent those peaceful people from purchasing food at "your" local grocery store?

The answer is no because your neighbors house is not yours, even though it is in your neighborhood, and the local grocery store owner is the one who owns the grocery store.

RLC Person: That would be all well and good if the neighbors new tennents weren't using the local ER for medical treatment they can't pay for, sending their ESL students to the neighborhood schools etc...

Me: Ok, so now what you are asking is a totally different question. Do we have the right to prevent immigrants from using government services? The answer is an *emphatic* "yes." [In retrospect, I should have pointed out that this may not be a great idea in every case, but ah well... live and learn.]

RLC Person: Even if all of the other issues are worked out...government services, and taxes the issue of limited resources will continue to exist. So, unless we're going to acquire additional land, water, energy etc we still cannot allow everyone who would like to live and work here come without diminishing the quality of life of future generations.

Me: Limited resources is not an issue. You need to understand economics. These people produce things. Every dollar they earn represents more than a dollar of goods or services that they provided to the market. And anyway, the market prevents things from becoming scarce. Scarcity means increased prices and profits, more room for entrepreneurs to enter the market and keep everyone happy. It is NOT an issue.

The price of resources goes down over time, and has for hundreds of years. This reflects the decreasing scarcity of these resources. In fact, the only factor of production that reliably becomes more expensive over time is labor. What does that mean? We have a scarcity in people (and it's created by the government preventing people from immigrating!).

RLC Person: If there is one thing this country is not facing a scarcity of it is people. Additional people require additional space, water and energy. They produce additional trash and pollution.

Me: Additional people also produce clean water and energy, they build places to live (and if you lived where I do, in rural Eastern Washington, claiming that we lack space would not pass the laugh test), and they clean up trash and pollution. The cleanest places in the world are also the most advanced.

People produce more than they consume. Every dollar they earn represents more than a dollar of goods or services that they provided.

RLC Person: Tell it to the trees, the wolves, the rivers, the bears, and all of the other species threatened or endangered by loss of habitat to human activity and the people inhaling the air in San Bernardino and other areas plagued by smog.

Me: Do you think that people create more pollution in poor countries (where they literally do their laundry in the rivers) or in an advanced country like the United States? Isn't it better for the environment to have these people living in a prosperous country than in poverty?

RLC Person: Kyle, the answers to these problems cannot be solved by letting them all come HERE. The answers to the problems of the citizens of other nations rest with them. We cannot house the world any more than we can police the world.

Me: Who are you to decide whether they should be allowed to go anywhere? If they are coming here and renting an apartment from someone who wants to rent it to them of course they can be housed here.

RLC Person: You need to read my previous statement and consider the truth I just stated, Kyle.

Me: It's not a truth. It's just a slogan. It's like saying "We can't police the world so we can't feed the world." Well, we already feed the world. It doesn't matter if they're here or not. These are problems of economics, not government, and the market solves these problems very well.

RLC Person: The problem isn't just economics. What did you read a couple of books or articles and now everythings about the free market? The world is a complicated place and living in it requires more than just a sound economy.......which in case you hadn't noticed......we don't have to share with all of these people you want to throw the doors open to.

BTW, we do not "feed the world". Hell, we don't even feed ourselves. Go to a supermarket, a big one.....say Walmart or other large chain and look at the produce, check out all of those country of origin labels. Go on and look at canned and bottled foods like mushrooms and garlic and see what nation produced them. Head over to the seafood and check out just how much of the shrimp comes from other countries.

I don't know where you've spent your young life, in school I hope but you need to get out in the real world and live a little and see the way things actually are instead of the way you think they are or wish they would be.

                                                                                                 

At this point a lot of other members from the RLC started jumping in and arguing with her.  After a while, she ended up posting a link to a schoolhouse rock song about "elbow room." I think that gives you a pretty good picture of the level of thinking we're dealing with on the restrictionist side.

Additional arguments in favor of a more open immigration policy can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Libertarian Feminism

I recently came across a new sub-species of libertarian that I did not know about before:  libertarian feminists.  Now, obviously I have known that there are libertarian females (although, not that many, unfortunately) but libertarian feminists?  From my, admittedly meager, knowledge of the subject, the term "libertarian feminism" seemed almost oxymoronic, at least in connotation if not in practice.

But despite the vaguely socialist reputation of feminism these days, the early history of feminism was apparently dominated by, mostly little known, "libertarian" feminists (at the time called "liberal" feminists, "liberal" being used in the classical sense).  Born out of the anti-slavery movement, many of the libertarian types, like William Lloyd Garrison, who had worked to bring equal rights to blacks felt that women should have equal rights as well.

A broad definition of feminism would be the idea that women should be treated the same as men.  Libertarianism holds that all individuals own themselves, and should be treated equally under the law.   From these, perhaps imprecise, definitions it would seem that the term "libertarian feminist" is not oxymoronic at all.  Quite the opposite, it seems redundant.  In fact, libertarians would oppose, on principle, all of the laws that originally sparked the feminist movement:  the problems with marriage law, divorce law, suffrage, etc.  A wife who left her husband, for example, could be forcibly returned, not unlike a runaway slave.  A man who assaulted or raped his wife wasn’t considered a criminal.  There were lots of restrictions on property ownership for women.  These kinds of laws are not compatible with the libertarian principle of self-ownership, or the non-aggression axiom.

Now, at this point in history, my impression is that practically all of those objectionable laws are gone.  There are probably still a few remnants, and I'm sure any libertarian worth his salt would oppose them if he was made aware of them, but it seems to me that they're a pretty rare find and certainly not currently the most egregious fault of the state.  What libertarian feminists deal with at this point are laws that are not explicitly anti-female, but implicitly anti-female.*  Veronique de Rugy wrote an article for April's edition of Reason magazine listing many of the most important examples of these kinds of laws.  Included are things like tax law, which punishes lower earning spouses by taxing them at their spouses' rate.  Since most women earn less than their husbands (this is rapidly changing, but still technically true for the moment at least), women end up paying a higher tax rate, in practice, than men.  The myriad laws that restrict workplace mobility also have a disproportionate effect on women, who leave and re-enter the workforce much more frequently than men because of childbirth.  Restrictive immigration laws prevent low-wage labor from entering the country that could be used in child care, and end up forcing working mothers to pay more for daycare.

But today's non-libertarian feminists don't really focus on ending laws, hence the socialist reputation.  Instead they seem to rally around passing laws to turn women into a protected class.  That strategy is doomed to backfire, as it has for other protected classes.  Just take one law intended to benefit women:  mandatory paid maternity leave.  As de Rugy explains, this law actually hurts women more than it helps by leaving all women, whether they choose to have a child or not, with a lower wage:

Government mandates that force employers to approve lengthy maternity leaves make hiring women of childbearing age less appealing. As a result, women are more likely to be unemployed or to see their compensation reduced, whether they want to have children or not. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber has shown that real wages for women in the 1990s in states that require comprehensive maternity expenses fell, compared to states that don’t.

And, on his radio show, Peter Schiff has frequently pointed out that provisions such as free birth control and the liability that comes with hiring a woman (the risk of a lawsuit from a woman who finds the workplace offensive or sexist) reduce wages and job opportunities for women in a similar way, while purporting to help them.

Another frequent refrain of the socialist feminists, as I guess I've dubbed them, is "equal pay for equal work."  Libertarianism doesn't really have much to say about this, except to say that there shouldn't be laws against paying people unequally since it's a voluntary transaction.  But economics does have something to say about "equal pay for equal work": as long as there is unequal pay for equal work, employers who hire workers from the less equal class will benefit and employers that discriminate will be hurt.  This doesn't mean that racist or sexist businesses will go out of business, necessarily, but they will end up paying a price for their racism or sexism in the form of higher than average wages.  So why do women only get paid 70 cents on the dollar (or whatever the current bogus figure is), compared to a man?  They actually don't.  The discrepancy is an artifact of how you slice up the numbers.  If you look at similarly qualified men and women, none of whom have ever married (apples to apples, in other words), you find that women actually earn a few cents more per hour than a man for the same job.  This makes intuitive sense to me, since all I hear my male friends complain about is how there are too few women at their workplace and how they wish there were more.  I have never heard of a guy who complains about having too many women around (I'm sure he exists, but I have no sympathy for him).

The one area where some libertarians may have a principled objection to libertarian feminism would be on the issue of abortion.  So far as I can tell, in order to be a libertarian feminist you have to be radically pro-choice.  Most libertarians don't have a problem with this, but 30-40% of libertarians are pro-life on the principle of self ownership.  There's really a divide in libertarianism on this issue and it has to do with what you define as a person, when a person obtains rights, etc.  It's a complex issue, and one that probably deserves it's own post, so I'll leave the nuts and bolts of it for another day.  Suffice to say, I think preventing the murder of ~650,000 female fetuses each year would be pro-woman, but I can understand how libertarians who do not think a fetus is entitled to rights would think of anti-abortion laws as anti-woman.  In general I think pro-life libertarians seem to have a great amount of respect for the pro-choice position of other libertarians, and vice versa.  Progressives and conservatives, for the most part, just end up talking past each other on the issue. 

Anyway.  In conclusion, libertarian feminism is way more awesome than socialist feminism.



*Many would argue that today's laws, and even culture, are more anti-male than anti-female. I don't really have too much of an opinion one way or the other when it comes to that, except to say that bad laws will always benefit certain groups at the expense of others, and there is no shortage of bad laws.