Cato fellows Nat Hentoff and Penn Jillette have just been profiled in major publications — Hentoff in the New York Times and Penn in Vanity Fair. Warning: the Hentoff profile is mostly about jazz, and the Penn interview contains lots of four-letter words, obscene imagery, and harsh language about religion. So if you have a low tolerance for jazz or for obscenity and blasphemy, be forewarned. But it’s no surprise that both of them talk a lot about the importance of free speech.

This is not a story from The Onion…

The Associated Press reports that a school in Rhode Island prohibited eight-year-old David Morales from wearing a hat that he decorated with toy soldiers that…gasp…had tiny little plastic weapons. According to school administrators, the hat violates a “no weapons” policy.

Here’s the relevant section of the report:

Christan Morales said her son just wanted to honor American troops when he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag and small plastic Army figures. But the school banned the hat because it ran afoul of the district’s zero-tolerance weapons policy. Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns. “His teacher called and said it wasn’t appropriate,” Morales said. Morales’ 8‑year-old son, David, had been assigned to make a hat for the day when his second-grade class would meet their pen pals from another school. She and her son came up with an idea to add patriotic decorations to a camouflage hat. Earlier this week, after the hat was banned, the principal at the Tiogue School in Coventry told the family that the hat would be fine if David replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn’t have any, according to Superintendent Kenneth R. Di Pietro.

I’m not sure what to say about this, other than to link to Neal’s PA.

In case you missed yesterday’s excellent Hill Briefing on the DISCLOSE Act and other recent developments in speech restrictions, next week I’ll be debating Citizens United and the future of campaign finance regulation. The event, cutely titled “Citizens United, Republic Divided; Campaign Finance Law After Citizens United,” takes place June 24 at noon at American University’s Washington School of Law, Room 401. That’s 4801 Massachusetts Ave. NW here in Washington. 

IJ’s Steve Simpson and I will be up against American U’s Jamie Raskin and Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen (who has also blogged this notice). RSVP to Michael Vasquez at mv5786a@​student.​american.​edu so there’s enough lunch to go around.

For Cato’s take on the DISCLOSE Act, see John Samples’s latest podcast, blogpost, and op-ed. See also NRA board member Cleta Mitchell’s stunning op-ed about that organization’s cynical Faustian bargain. Finally, here’s the piece John and I published in January in the wake of the Citizens United decision.

Thursday night at 8 and midnight, John Stossel debates the war on drugs with Sean Hannity. Check it out on the Fox Business Network.

John’s other guests will include Jeffrey Miron of Harvard and Cato and Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal.

And for more Stossel, don’t miss last week’s classic episode on Milton Friedman and Free to Choose with Tom Palmer, Johan Norberg … and me.

The Center for Immigration Studies recently put out a study arguing that immigration has had negative effects on California. One of their measures was a comparison of how many people in the state were receiving some form of welfare compared to other states. I found that data (see Table 3 of the report) very interesting, but not because of the immigration debate (I’ll leave others to debate that topic). Instead, I wanted to get a better understanding of the variations in government dependency. Is there a greater willingness to sign up for income redistribution programs, all other things being equal, from one state to another? The “all other things being equal” caveat is very important, of course, since the comparison produced by CIS may simply be an indirect measure of the factors that determine welfare eligibility. One obvious (albeit crude) way of addressing this problem is to subtract each state’s poverty rate to get a measure of how many non-poor people are signed up for income-redistribution programs. Let’s call this the Moocher Index.

A few quick observations. Why is Vermont (by far) the state with the largest proportion of non-poor people signed up for welfare programs? I have no idea, but maybe this explains why they elect people like Bernie Sanders. But it’s not just Vermont. Four of the top five states on the Moocher Index are from the Northeast, as are six of the top nine. Mississippi also scores poorly, coming in second, but many other southern states do well. Indeed, if we reversed the ranking and did a Self-Reliance Index, Virginia, Florida, and Georgia would score in the top 10. Nevada, arguably the nation’s most libertarian state, is the state with the lowest number of non-poor people signed up for welfare.

Let’s now emphasize several caveats. I’m not an expert on the mechanics of social welfare programs, but even I know that eligibility is not governed solely by the poverty rate. Indeed, some welfare programs are open to people with much higher levels of income. This means that a more thorough analysis at the very least would have to include some measure of income distribution by state. Moreover, states use different formulas for Medicaid eligibility, so this index ideally also would be adjusted for state-specific policies that make it easier or harder for people to become dependent. There also are some states (and even colleges) that actually try to lure people into signing up for welfare, which also might affect the results. And I’m sure there are many other factors that are important, including perhaps immigration. If anybody knows of substantive research in this area, please don’t hesitate to share material.

Here’s yet another example of government programs that are total nonsense, collectively, if not individually.

First, news that a Federal panel of experts has issued a new report on what you should be eating.

[The report’s] findings: People should consume more vegetables and whole grains, and less fatty meats, salt and sugar…The guidelines in turn will form the basis of the USDA’s updated food pyramid, scheduled to be released in spring 2011. They also determine the nutrition standards for all federal nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, which feeds more than 30 million children a day.[emphasis mine]

I’ve emphasized the “less fatty meats” part because that news comes hot on the heals of this article that hit the wires yesterday:

The U.S. Agriculture Department plans to buy as much as $14 million worth of dark meat chicken products to help producers facing a glut in stocks and decreasing prices, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Tuesday…The government purchase… will be used by food banks, school lunch programs, and other food assistance programs.…

So let’s get this straight: the Federal government is on the one hand encouraging people to eat fewer fatty meats, but on the other is buying more of said fatty meats to appease a special interest. And they can’t even use “inter-agency coordination problems” as an excuse.

Even though the Obama Administration claimed that squandering $800 billion on so-called stimulus would keep the joblessness rate below 8 percent, the unemployment rate today is almost 10 percent. There are many reasons for the economy’s tepid performance, including a larger burden of government spending and the dampening effect of future tax rate increases (tax rates will jump significantly on January 1, 2011, when the 2003 tax cuts expire).

A closer look at the unemployment data, though , suggests that minimum wage laws also deserve a big share of the blame. In this Center for Freedom and Prosperity video, a former intern of mine (continuing a great tradition) explains that politicians destroyed jobs when they increased the minimum wage by more than 40 percent over a three-year period.

Mr. Divounguy is correct when he says businesses are not charities and that they only create jobs when they think a worker will generate net revenue. Higher minimum wages, needless to say, are especially destructive for people with poor work skills and limited work experience. This is why young people and minorities tend to suffer most — which is exactly what we see in the government data, with the teenage unemployment rates now at an astounding (and depressing) 26 percent level and blacks suffering from a joblessness rate of more than 15 percent.

In a free society, there should be no minimum wage law. From a philosophical perspective, such requirements interfere with the freedom of contract. In the imperfect world of politics, thought, the best we can hope for is that politicians occasionally do the right thing. Sadly, the recent minimum wage increases that have done so much damage were signed into law by President Bush. It’s worth noting that President Obama’s hands also are dirty on this issue, since he supported the job-killing measure when it passed the Senate in 2007. When the stupid party and the evil party both agree on a certain policy, that’s known as bipartisanship. In the real world, however, it’s called unemployment.