Obama Promises to Create 2.5 Million Jobs

In today’s weekly address from the President-Elect, Obama promises that the federal government will create 2.5 million jobs his first two years in office. Here’s the address, less than four minutes:

Any chance this means he’ll make a commitment to economic liberty? In the past few decades there has been a nationwide explosion of protectionist regulations — laws designed specifically to help a favored group at the expense of everyone else. There were about 80 occupations with barriers to entry in 1981, today there are over 1,000.

Recently I wrote a piece for the Foundation for Economic Education that says this:

In 2004 the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in Powers v. Harris, “[W]hile baseball may be the national pastime of the citizenry, dishing out special economic benefits to certain in-state industries remains the favored pastime of state and local governments.” And for decades, following the instructions of the U.S. Supreme Court, federal and state courts have stood by while legislators engage in this “favored pastime” at the expense of consumers and entrepreneurs.

In the absence of meaningful judicial supervision, politicians have gone to almost any imaginable length to protect special interests. When a powerful lobby demands protection from competitors, governments have been all too willing to invent — and courts all too willing to accept — patently ludicrous excuses for shutting down entrepreneurs. A court upheld Louisiana’s florist-licensing scheme, for example, because requiring florists to take a test, which would be graded largely on the subjective beauty of their floral arrangements, might help protect the public from “infected dirt.”

The true victims of this new “favored pastime” are people like Clemens and countless other Americans, honest individuals whose lives have been turned upside down solely to protect the politically powerful. Such examples are seemingly endless.

Obama could go a long way towards helping spur job creation by leveling the playing field in the marketplace, striking down special interest privileges and securing equality before the law.

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The Supreme Court just said that? Today??

Wonderful language from the U.S. Supreme Court in today’s decision in Indiana v. Edwards:

As I have explained, I would not adopt an approach to the right of self-representation that we have squarely rejected for other rights-allowing courts to disregard the right when doing so serves the purposes for which the right was intended. But if I were to adopt such an approach, I would remain in dissent, because I believe the Court’s assessment of the purposes of the right of self-representation is inaccurate to boot. While there is little doubt that preserving individual “ ‘dignity’ ” (to which the Court refers), ante, at 11, is paramount among those purposes, there is equally little doubt that the loss of “dignity” the right is designed to prevent is not the defendant’s making a fool of himself by presenting an amateurish or even incoherent defense. Rather, the dignity at issue is the supreme human dignity of being master of one’s fate rather than a ward of the State-the dignity of individual choice. Faretta explained that the Sixth Amendment’s counsel clause should not be invoked to impair “ ‘the exercise of [the defendant’s] free choice’ ” to dispense with the right, 422 U. S., at 815 (quoting Adams, 317 U. S., at 280); for “whatever else may be said of those who wrote the Bill of Rights, surely there can be no doubt that they understood the inestimable worth of free choice,” 422 U. S., at 833-834.

Now if only our courts — particularly this one — would acknowledge this “inestimable worth of free choice” when it comes to economic liberty. As I’ve written on this blog before, our rights are only abitrarily protected by the courts and it depends on the type of review the courts choose to use. Unfortunately for economic liberty, the courts have decided on their own to afford it the lowest standard of review and, therefore, the least possible protection. Last week this issue was discussed in an op-ed in the Baltimore Examiner that Liberty Girl helped edit:

In the past few decades, there has been a nationwide explosion of protectionist regulations in the United States. In 1981, there were about 80 occupations with such barriers to entry; today there are more than 1,000.

Politicians should not be able to get away with passing these laws, but since the 1870s courts have largely turned a blind eye, pretending as if such regulations exist for legitimate purposes. The result has been ludicrous justifications for protectionism, as in licensing florists is OK because it protects the public against “infected dirt.”

Thankfully, after many years of neglect, courts are finally waking up…. [They] play a vital role in protecting fundamental rights. As William Mellor and Robert Levy write in their new book, “The Dirty Dozen,” “Like all rights, the right to earn an honest living is meaningful only if it can be enforced and protected.”

Indiana v. Edwards, No. 07-208, slip op at 8 (Scalia, J. dissenting), available here.

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Crushing the entrepreneurial spirit in Zhengzhou

A hair salon entrepreneur just wanted the freedom to hold his customers hostage, yet Big Brother has crushed his liberty to do so. A sad day for maniacal crackpots everywhere.

Reuters has the story that the MSM probably tried to hide from you:

A Chinese hair salon has been shut down and fined 500,000 yuan ($71,280) for holding two customers hostage and charging wildly excessive fees for haircuts, a newspaper reported on Monday.

College students Zhang Yi and Yuan Sha Sha went for a haircut at Baolou International Beauty Salon in Zhengzhou, in the central province of Henan, expecting to pay the 38 yuan ($5.42) advertised on the window.

But when the barbers were done, they produced a joint bill for 12,000 yuan ($1,700), enough to make anyone’s hair curl, the Beijing News reported.

“After borrowing from 16 people, the two were only able to come up with 9,800 yuan and it wasn’t until after 10 pm were they allowed to leave the hair salon,” it reported.

It was not the first time that the shop tried to cheat consumers. One was slapped with a bill for 4,776 yuan when she came in for a haircut last September. In December, another customer opted for a 68 yuan haircut, but was asked to pay 5,670 yuan.

The shop was eventually shut down with nearly 100 local residents applauding outside, the newspaper said.

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Latest Fight in the Nationwide Cartelization War

There is a war occurring right now in America. And you probably haven’t heard of it.

Yesterday Radley Balko stepped onto the battlefield and dropped a serious bomb on the bad guys. Who are they? A small faction within the interior design (!) community, called ASID, that has been waging a 30-year battle to cartelize their industry by pursuing totally unnecessary licensing regulations all over the country.

George Will exposed their efforts in the Washington Post last year.

The effect so far has been to put thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs out of work for no other reason than to promote the anti-competitive agenda of the pro-regulation faction. As a result, people (most of them middle-aged or older women) who have been working in the field for up to 30 years are finding themselves thrown out of the profession for the sole benefit of the industry cartel.

In the past few months, The Economist and Forbes have weighed in.

And yesterday, Radley Balko wrote a stirring, must-read column for FOX. He does not hold back on exposing the cartel. And the cartel is pissed! They’ve responded, here.

Most recently, Radley responds to the cartel’s response:

If ASID is really comparing interior design to medicine, I think they’ve proven my point about taking themselves far too seriously. If ASID were merely a professional organization interested in better educating consumers and designers, and were merely offering their good name and accreditation to designers who met some minimum standards, I’d have no problem with them.

But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re asking lawmakers to codify their notion of what interior design ought to be into law, to the point of excluding anyone who doesn’t meet their requirements from using the term “interior designer” under penalty of fines and jail time. That’s textbook protectionism. And they deserve to be ridiculed for it.

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