Writing at Reason magazine, Eric Boehm notes two trends revealed in data released by Apple and Foursquare.

Trend One: Americans began reducing their outings and social interactions before, not because of, “shelter in place” orders issued by grandstanding, opportunistic politicians.

Trend  Two: Americans started coming back out and resuming something like normal life before, not because, those politicians started lifting those orders.

In other words, with COVID-19 as with everything else, government policy is a trailing, rather than leading, indicator.

Politicians don’t start parades. They notice parades that we regular people have spontaneously organized, then run as fast as they can to the front of those parades, hoping to be seen “taking charge.”

And yet, for some reason, large numbers of Americans remain devout congregants of what Libertarians call the Cult of the Omnipotent State.

At the beginning of every perceived crisis or emergency, the priests and parishioners of the Cult of the Omnipotent State assert that the only way society will survive is if we all act in lockstep obedience to the commands of the politicians.

And after every perceived crisis or emergency, those same priests and parishioners assert that the only reason society survived is that we all DID act in lockstep obedience to the commands of the politicians.

They’re always wrong, of course. In fact, it invariably turns out that the politicians and their strutting authoritarian commands made the crisis or emergency worse rather than better — sometimes in a big way, sometimes just at the margins, but at least a little, always and every time.

For some reason, though, we always let the Cultists of the Omnipotent State re-write history with the politicians as the heroes. That’s a mistake that costs lives.

As America “re-opens,” we should put our minds to avoiding that mistake in the future.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Remember $2 gas?” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich asked in 2012 as he sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Politicians love to remind us of low gas prices in the past and promise their return in the future.

But in early April, Reuters reports, US president Donald Trump threatened to severely curtail the US government’s military relationship with Saudi Arabia unless the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reduced oil output to drive prices back UP.

Yes, that’s right: Trump wants you to pay more for gasoline, and he’s willing to use the threat of military action of a sort (withdrawing US troops and weapons systems from Saudi soil) to make that happen.

Here’s a dirty little secret of American politics that’s by no means unique to Trump:

American politicians know that regular people want low gas prices, and that we won’t vote for politicians who openly advocate for higher gas prices.

American politicians also know that the American oil industry, which pumps a lot of oil out of the ground and a lot of money into political campaigns, wants gigantic subsidies.

So American politicians talk low prices to the one group while using policy to achieve high prices for the other group.

From the “oil depletion allowance” and other special tax tricks, to taxpayer-funded roads into drilling areas, to much of  the US “defense” budget (why do you think US military policy for the last 40 years has been to keep the Middle East in turmoil and Iranian — and now Venezuelan — oil off the market?), petroleum is one of America’s most subsidized industries.

The American shale extraction processes of recent decades simply can’t compete with old-fashioned foreign drill-and-pump crude at market prices, so American oil lobbyists buy politicians and get them to goose the price back up whenever it falls below $50 a barrel or so.

And who knows? Absent the giant subsidies, oil might have been replaced by much more lightly subsidized “renewables” long ago.

There haven’t been many bright spots in the COVID-19 panic, but for many Americans the lowest gas prices in years were a welcome bit of good news. If you had anywhere to go, you could get there for a lot less.

And that’s how it would be most or all of the time if not for politics. The high gas prices you pay aren’t set by the market, they’re set by politicians on behalf of Big Oil.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On April 28, US Representative Justin Amash (?-MI) launched a presidential “exploratory committee.”  He wants to take on Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic nominee-apparent Joe Biden this November as the nominee of the Libertarian Party.

If this was a “straight news” story instead of an op-ed, the first paragraph above would be known as the “lede” — an introductory paragraph summarizing the most important facts the story covers.

And if this was a straight news story, that opening paragraph’s author — me — would also be guilty of committing the supreme journalistic sin. To “bury the lede,” the good folks at Merriam-Webster tell us, “refers to hiding the most important and relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information.”

What’s important, relevant, and missing from my lede paragraph (and, so far, the lede paragraph of every “straight news” story I’ve seen on Amash’s campaign launch)? This:

For the first time ever, there’s a sitting member of Congress whose party affiliation is “Libertarian.”

Amash formally left the Republican Party on July 4, 2019, becoming the only bona fide independent member of Congress (the US Senate’s two supposed “independents,” Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, caucus with the Democratic Party and are Democrats in all but name).

Amash has displayed libertarian ideological leanings since his days in Michigan’s state legislature, and more prominently and combatively since his election to Congress in 2010. But he’s kept the party dedicated to that ideology — the Libertarian Party — at arm’s length.

Until now.

Since its founding in 1971, the Libertarian Party has won thousands of local elections and put a few state legislators in office on its ballot line, but Congress and the White House have always proven beyond its reach.

Until now.

As a long-time Libertarian Party activist (and as a former Libertarian appointee to federal office and the spouse of a former Libertarian local elected officeholder), I’m grateful to Congressman Amash for planting my party’s flag on Capitol Hill.

I’m less enthusiastic about the congressman’s presidential ambitions, for two reasons.

One is branding. If the Libertarian Party nominates Amash, it will be the fourth time in a row that we’ve nominated a “recently Republican” candidate instead of choosing someone closely associated with our own party. That kind of record promotes the false and damaging perception that Libertarians are just “Republicans who smoke dope.”

The other is timing.

Amash has spent most of the last year flirting with, and teasing the media about, the possibility of running a third party or independent presidential campaign.

While he’s been doing that, other candidates have been actively working to EARN the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination. They’ve visited state party conventions, participated in debates, run in presidential preference primaries. Now comes Amash, swooping in a month before the party’s national convention and apparently counting on Libertarians to  lose our minds and throw our panties on stage like teenagers at an Elvis concert.

Well, maybe we will.

Either way, I’m glad he finally made it to the party.

Welcome, Congressman Amash (L-MI)!

CORRECTION: The original version of this article incorrectly named New Hampshire, rather than Vermont, as the state Bernie Sanders represents in the US Senate. Thanks to Jeanette Burhans for noticing the error and letting me know – TLK

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY