That’s what Tony Campbell, a former Republican Party official from Baltimore County, is saying.

If Paul wants to continue his campaign, he has the right to do so as a third-party candidate. Ron Paul is NOT a Republican and certainly is not a Conservative. The sooner Republicans figure out that the Ron Paul of 2012 is no different from the Paul of 1988; the sooner Republicans can get to the business of deciding our nominee without distractions from fake Republican candidates dressed up in elephant clothing.

This line of attack might have a bit more traction if there was some substance to back it up.

The substance of his objections lies in large part on Paul’s 1988 campaign for president as the Libertarian Party’s candidate, during which he criticized Pres. Reagan’s record and the fact that in this campaign he has not attacked Romney the way he has attacked Santorum, Gingrich, and others.

As for the first, it might cost me some of friends in the MDGOP, but Reagan was no perfect president. He did raise taxes (something even conservative stalwarts like Grover Norquist have acknowledged as a big mistake), he displayed a less than stellar commitment to cutting government spending,  and he probably could have employed better discretion as concerned foreign affairs. It’s a dishonor to Reagan’s legacy to recognize all the good he did but gloss over his mistakes.

And as for the second, why is anyone surprised that Paul has attacked Romney less than Gingrich and Santorum (and yes, it’s a matter of less, Romney has been criticized by Paul too)? After all, both have displayed significantly more hostility to Paul and his candidacy than Romney has.

Remember this bit from Gingrich?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=N2Sm9KpLsLE#t=116s

And then there’s Santorum who has been quite open about his hostility to the libertarian project within the Republican Party.

“I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement…I’ve got some real concerns about this movement within the Republican Party and the tea party movement to sort of refashion conservatism, and I will vocally and publicly oppose it.”

In contrast, Romney has been incredibly respectful of Paul even as he disagrees with him. Given a field where most of the candidates have been open with their disdain for the libertarian congressman while one has been gentlemanly, where do you think his attacks would be focused?

Of course, Campbell thinks otherwise and uses a Huffington Post article as evidence that there’s a backroom deal between Romney and Paul, with Paul undermining Romney’s competition in exchange for Paul’s son Rand being named the VP candidate.

It seems that the only reason that Paul is still in the race is to assist Mitt Romney is bullying his way to become the nominee of the Republican Party. If that was not enough, it seems that his sonSenator Rand Paul has publicly said that he would accept the Vice Presidential slot on the Romney ticket.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t say what Campbell thinks it does. Rand Paul never said he would accept the nomination, only that he would be honored to have it offered. And really, is there anyone who wouldn’t be honored to be offered the Vice Presidency of the United States, regardless of whether or not they accept the offer?

But if you’re a Republican, you probably ought to be eager to see one of the Paul’s on the Republican presidential ticket. Why?

Gov. Gary Johnson.

Johnson was an extremely popular two-term governor of New Mexico, a former Republican, and the presumptive nominee of the Libertarian Party for the upcoming election.

As a former governor, he is probably the most credible candidate the Libertarian Party has ever fielded. More importantly, he already polls at 9% in hypothetical match-ups against Pres. Obama and various Republican nominees, putting him in close range of qualifying for debates.

Now I happen to think that while Johnson’s candidacy will do more to hurt Obama by highlighting his hypocrisy on medical marijuana, gay rights, and foreign policy, he has a fair amount to offer disaffected Republicans as well.

And who will be more disaffected amongst Republicans than Ron Paul supporters if one of the Paul’s isn’t on the ticket? If you’re a Republican think about this possibility for a moment:

• A former governor, with more executive experience than either of the major party candidates;
• Calling for more aggressively right-wing policies on taxes and spending;
• Backed by Ron Paul’s army of supporters and getting tons of media attention from it;
• Qualifying for the debates;
• And then being on the ballot in all 50 states

If that’s a scenario you’re comfortable with as a Republican, then by all means, continue to be disdainful of Ron Paul’s candidacy and dismissive of the idea of Rand Paul as VP. On the other hand, if that worries you, it might be worth reconsidering how the Republican Party engages with its libertarian wing.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I am the former Maryland State Director of Gov. Gary Johnson’s presidential campaign. I am also a member of the Queen Anne’s County Republican Central Committee. From the point at which Gov. Johnson left the Republican presidential primary I have endorsed no presidential primary candidate.)

In light of the same-sex marriage bill recently getting voted back out of committee and to the Maryland House of Delegates, it seems like a good time to consider the issue.

In particular, I find myself drawn to the (quickly withdrawn) words of Catherine O’Malley, our governor’s wife, on the bill’s failure last year:

“We didn’t expect things that happened to the House of Delegates to occur, but sadly they did, and there were some cowards that prevented it from passing.”

Contrary to many on the Right, I’m going to come out and say it – even if she’s claimed she regrets her remarks, I think she’s right. The same-sex marriage bill was killed by cowardice.

• First and foremost, it was killed by her husband’s cowardice.

Last year Gov. O’Malley was effectively silent on the question of same-sex marriage. As the top Democrat in the state, he could have easily rolled out the Democratic machine on behalf of the bill, leaning hard on wayward Delegates of his Party and twisting arms as necessary to ensure the votes were there. But he took the easy route and cravenly kept quiet and let the bill die.

• Secondly, it was killed by the cowardice of Democratic legislators.

Del. Arora

Over the process of the same-sex marriage debate, multiple Democrats in the state legislature, such as Del. Tiffany Alston and Del. Jill Carter who both sponsored the House version of the bill, only to back away as soon as it became controversial (Carter ended up supporting the bill, Alston voted against it).

Also, Del. Sam Arora gets double points for cowardice – after campaigning in large part on his commitment to same-sex marriage, he started backtracking on his promises (even scrubbing references of support from his Twitter account) only to then get even squishier when discovered, committing to vote for the bill while encouraging it’s ultimate defeat.

• Thirdly, it was killed by cowardly churches that worked against the bill.

For all the talk of being opposed due to religious principles, the fervent church opposition, particularly in Prince George’s County, I don’t think they’re so deserving of credit.

Two reasons for this. First, if the churches truly had the courage of their convictions and faith in the superiority of their views, they wouldn’t care if government recognized same-sex marriages. The differences between traditional and same-sex marriages would be so stark that no person would equate the two, even if government did. Seeking to use government to maintain the illegality of same-sex marriages, that’s the action of a coward who doesn’t think he can win in the marketplace of ideas.

Also, I think it is equally cowardly because it meant cravenly hiding behind religion while pushing mere personal preferences. As I’ve pointed out before, civil marriage and sacramental marriage aren’t the same thing. The first is a contractual relationship recognized by government, the second is a compact with and before God.

And what were the words of Christ concerning the relationship between man, state, and God?

They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

It seems abundantly clear to me that as the two are separate entities, one clearly in the domain of the state and the other the domain of God, that honoring Christ’s command requires not attempting to use religious faith as a justification for opposing same-sex civil marriage.

• Fourth, and finally, it was killed by at least a few callow Republican legislators.

A bit after the 2011 legislative session I was talking with one of the Republican members of the House of Delegates (I won’t name names) and it was clearly intimated to me that the Delegate thought my position in support of same-sex marriage was the right one but it wasn’t one said Delegate could support due to the constituents of the district.

Politically sensible? Certainly, but just as certainly cowardice. Real courage means bucking the demands of your constituency and the consensus of your Party in order to what you know to be right.

Sen. Kittleman

Sen. Allan Kittleman deserves huge amounts of credit for this. I don’t think there is anyone who has demonstrated more courage in this debate than he has in being the lone elected Republican in Maryland to stand up for same-sex marriage.

• The question remains though – will cowardice once again prevent same-sex marriage in Maryland from becoming a reality?

It seems clear that Gov. O’Malley plans to push the bill this time. While I think this is a matter of political opportunism rather than any principled stand, at least that’s one thing in the bill’s favor.

Del. Costa

Also on the positive side,  rumours that some Republican legislators were on the fence have turned out true, with both Del. Bob Costa and Del. Wade Kach coming out in support of the bill.

Del. Kach

On the other hand, I’m skeptical much will change for the other two factors.

Looking at the recent committee hearing vote tally in the House, it seems that Carter is sticking firm in support of the bill, while Alston remains cowed and Arora is even more craven than last year, refusing to vote yes or no.

I certainly don’t expect any Road to Damascus moment from the churches who lead the fight against the bill and will really be the biggest stumbling block to passage.

On the balance though, I suspect the Democratic machine that Gov. O’Malley can and will bring into play will be enough to overcome the obstacles to passage, but it will probably still be close.

But watch for a referendum, where the bill in all likelihood will be killed, setting back civil freedoms even further in our supposedly liberal state.
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In Part I of this series we explored what a pencil could tell us about land use policy and the limits of human knowledge.

With Part II we built off of that, exploring how attempts to plan in little ways have inevitably lead to efforts to plan in even bigger, more intrusive fashion.

Here in Part III, I want to explain why that all matters and why you should care.

I’m a libertarian, so I’m strongly predisposed to be skeptical of exercises of government power. And contrary to some people’s thoughts about libertarians, I don’t hold to my beliefs to justify my own selfishness, or because I hate poor people, or because I’m a Republican who likes pot*.

The reason that I’m a libertarian is simple – where government has power that power has consistently been employed in the interest of the powerful, not the powerless. This is true in case after case and is certainly true when it comes to land use policy.

It’s true in obvious ways. For example, government control of land use policy works to the benefit of existing property owners and the detriment of would-be owners.

Most people want to live where people already live. They want access to a variety of commercial and entertainment options, they want to be reasonably close to where they work, and they want other people to interact with.

The natural way to meet this demand is to create more housing where housing already exists. But by letting government control the housing supply instead of the market, that is prevented from happening. Per Matt Yglesias, formerly of the liberal Center for American Progress:

If you go up to the Columbia Heights Metro station and then walk east just a block east you’ll be struck by the hard transition from the large-for-DC new apartments on 14th street and the low density structures right around them. What’s going on, you’ll wonder. What’s happened, simply put, is that you’ve moved out of an area zoned C-2-B and into an area zoned R-4. In R-4 areas, (including almost everything north of Euclid between 14th Street and Georgia Ave, pretty much the entire square between P, U, 14th, and 7th and many other parts of the city) you can’t build a house taller than 3 stories (or 40 feet), you can’t occupy more than 60 percent of your lot, and you can’t build apartments smaller than 900 square feet per bedroom.

As a result, even though these places have become much more desirable places to live, they simply aren’t allowed to accommodate very many additional residents. Instead of seeing new, denser construction to allow more and more people to live where they’d like, we see zero sum battles over “gentrification” as working class residents can’t afford new, higher rents. Meanwhile, the central city’s inability to accommodate all the people who’d like to live there puts enormous price pressure on the closer-in suburbs, pushing people who want the suburban lifestyle ever-further from the city center in search of affordable housing.

It’s also true in less obvious ways, such as how government land use policy benefits the well-off over everyone else. Skeptical? Just look at the evidence.

That’s a chart mapping the FHA’s Housing Price Index from 1992-2011 for Texas and Maryland. Why Texas? Because Texas doesn’t do state level zoning, counties are legally prohibited from having zoning laws, and only some municipalities have implemented zoning codes.

Back to the chart. The data clearly shows Maryland, with all its land use restrictions saw massive growth in housing prices during the boom. As Texas shows, that price skyrocket was artificial, the product of restrictions setting the housing supply well below the housing demand.

The effect of that increase was singularly bad for everyone not well-off. Even if you didn’t want to buy a house, it pushed up rents. If you did want to buy, either you couldn’t afford to, or you ended up with a mortgage that was likely more than you should have borrowed.

Now look at the chart again. Not only did Texas largely avoid the bubble inflating, it also pretty much avoided the burst, something Maryland can’t boast. As before, those least able to afford it were hurt the most by the crash.

Why? It’s pretty simple. If you weren’t that well-off but owned a home you were likely to have all or most of your assets tied up in a suddenly unsellable house. So if you lost your job, which was more likely if you’re on the lower end of the spectrum, then you were far more likely to lose your house since you didn’t have other assets to rely on. And even if you avoided losing your home, you’d still be stuck, unable to sell and unable to move without selling, thus pretty much unable to travel to better work opportunities.

Finally it’s true in downright vile ways, like how it’s been used in the favor of the majority against unpopular minorities. Courtesy of The Objective Standard:

Zoning laws are not limited to construction and development. They can control the smallest details and nuances of an owner’s use of his property, and they can be used for nefarious purposes even beyond the immediate violation of property rights, such as “banning” unwanted individuals. For instance, the city council of Manassas, Virginia, passed a zoning ordinance that restricts residence in households to immediate relatives, thus excluding aunts, nephews, cousins, and other members of the extended family—and the council acknowledged that the ordinance targeted Hispanics, who apparently were not wanted in the area.

Now, to be clear, with the exception of that final example, I don’t think these things happen because people are looking to get one up on other people.

They happen because the people who benefit have the time and resources to understand the system and work it to their advantages. This, coupled with a human tendency to fight harder to avoid a given loss than to gain a positive of equal value creates an environment where government control of land use policy will inevitably be tilted against would-be residents, the less well-off, and unpopular minorities.

And that is ultimately why I support returning land use policy control to the people. All of the other arguments are important, but the fact is that it’s wrong for existing home owners to be able to game the system to their own benefit and to do it on the backs of those least able to afford it and least able to fight back.

Taking back control of land use policy will lead to more robust property rights, reduce government intrusion into our lives, create a more efficient economy, and enable housing that better suits people’s needs and desires, but more than anything, the real benefit is that it will put everyone on equal footing to participate in the housing market instead of letting the rich and powerful use government to enshrine themselves as the winners.

But I’m open to hearing arguments for why government should be working on behalf of the privileged and the powerful and against the weak and the powerless.

*For the record, I don’t think I’m any more selfish than the next person, I don’t hate poor people, and I’ve never smoked pot.

In the previous installment, I made clear the unbelievable amount of arrogance it takes to think that the production of a single pencil could be centrally planned, much less the land use policy of an entire state.

However I also made the more controversial claim, that Gov. O’Malley doesn’t deserve all the blame for implementing such a foolish plan, that we all need to take ownership of this folly.

To understand why, look back to our friend the pencil. Remember how complex the process of his manufacture is? And think about how much more complex it is therefore to make something much more complex, like a house or a community.

Your browser may not support display of this image. Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek had many great insights, but his greatest insight was with regards to the astounding complexity of our economy, the ways in which it spontaneously ordered itself, and the folly of trying to centrally plan that economy.

Simply put, Hayek’s great insight was that the economy, and even small sectors of it, are too complex to be centrally planned. The myriad needs and desires of all the individuals who make up the economy simply present too many variables to be accounted for by any person or board.

As a result, when such central planning is attempted, it will inevitably fail. Planners will allocate too little in one area, too much in another, ignore people’s desires and instead force their own preferences. And when the planning fails, how do the planners respond?

Once in a blue moon, they recognize their mistake and roll back their initial planning, allowing the spontaneous ordering of the market to address the issue. More often though, they insist the failure was not theirs, that all that is needed to fix the problem is yet more planning.

In this way, planning begets yet more planning, and what started as relatively minor and benign escalates into massive assaults on individual liberty.

The situation is no different here in Maryland. PlanMaryland did not emerge out of whole cloth from the ether. It is the product of a natural evolution that began the day Marylanders accepted government planning of land use policy via zoning laws and other ordinances controlling land use policy.

Had we protested earlier, refused to accept the lesser invasion of private property rights, then we would never be facing the much larger assault that is PlanMaryland. But it’s not too late, we can fight off PlanMaryland, but we can’t stop there, we need to continue to push forward and rollback zoning ordinances, comprehensive plans, and all the other intrusions on the free exercise of private property rights in Maryland.

Now, that’s all a little bit dense and dry, so if you’d prefer a way to hear the arguments I’ve made in Parts I and II of this series with more style, I highly recommend checking out this video:

The song is about central planning in general, but the points are equally valid when applied to the specific example that is central planning in land use policy.

The video also conveniently highlights some key points I want to address in Part III about how relying on market processes will not only work but in fact lead to better results.
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Now that Gov. O’Malley has implemented PlanMaryland via executive order, more than a little ink and plenty of angst has been spilled over it.

It’s been declaimed as part of a War on Rural Maryland, an example of executive overreach, an assault on private property rights, and an effort to undermine local planning boards. All of these are true characterizations of PlanMaryland, but they’re also all wrong.

Alright, they’re not exactly wrong. But they miss the real problem and in doing so the obscure the real issue with PlanMaryland. Simply put, the real complaint against PlanMaryland isn’t what it proposes to do, it’s that it proposes to do.

Take a moment and pick up one of the pencils that is undoubtedly on your desk. Consider it for a moment. Just how did it come to be there?

This is a question explored in the famous essay “I, Pencil.” As Leonard Reed, its author explains, not a person in the world knows how to make a simple pencil. Simply obtaining the raw wood alone is a monumental task, requiring the coordination of hundreds of people and skills – not just to cut the wood, but the mine and smelt the saws and other tools, to grow hemp and make it into rope, to run and maintain the lumber camp, even to make the coffee the lumberjacks drink.

As a simple a task as that would seem, it only continues to grow more complex. To transport the wood, to mill it, to fill with graphite and finish the pencils, to ship it to stores across the world, to produce the energy that powers all of this and to generate the capital that finances it all – all of this involves the unplanned coordination of untold thousands and thousands of people.

With such awe-inspiring complexity, what person in the world could ever make a pencil on their own. And in a vacuum, without the way having been shown first, what person or even group of people could ever centrally plan the process? What minds could ever conceive of, much less manage such an intricate and intertwined system, one that spans not just countless humans across the globe but across time as well.

The answer is simple, none could, and only a fool would think they could.

But if the creation of a pencil is such a complex process, how much more complex is a whole house. And how much more complex a community, or the network of communities we call counties? And for someone to think that one person or even a committee could mastermind the collection of counties we think of as a state?

What hubris. What bald-faced arrogance.

But, in spite of his egotistical belief that government is up to the task of capably managing a system of such infinite complexity, Gov. O’Malley doesn’t deserve all the blame. We all need to accept our share as well. I’ll explain why in Part II.

The Spy is pleased to welcome Kevin Waterman as a columnist. Kevin was born and raised in Queen Anne’s County, attended Saints Peter and Paul High School in Easton, and graduated of Seton Hall University in 2009. After college, Kevin retured to the region to join the family’s real estate firm, Coldwell Banker Waterman Realty. He has contributed to such periodicals as The Journal of Liberty and Society, Star-Democrat, and the Gloucester County Times.
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