Today is his last chance to stop an ObamaCare Exchange.

My new piece at Daily Caller looks at how the Democratic Party’s approach to tax policy has changed over the decades.

The piece was prompted by a recent article from Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann claiming that needed bipartisan reforms are being blocked by the new “ideologically extreme” Republican Party.

Baloney. It’s the Democrats who have changed. The party’s leaders have moved far to the left on economic issues.

As evidence, I point to this Cato Journal article from 1985 by Democrat Richard Gephardt, who was a leader on tax reform. As a free-market guy, I agree with the great majority of what Gephardt said, yet I agree with virtually nothing that modern Democratic leaders say about tax policy.

Regarding ridding the tax code of special breaks, Gephardt says, “I confess that I am not qualified to act as a central planner and I do not know anybody on either committee who is.” Amen!

And Gephardt says, “We in Congress take pride in the free market system.” When was the last time you heard a Democratic leader say something like that?

Today, the Institute for Justice released a 200-page, comprehensive study on occupational licensing in the United States. The report details the plague of occupational licensing that has swept the country over the past 60+ years. According to the study, “In the 1950s, only one in 20 U.S. workers needed the government’s permission to pursue their chosen occupation. Today, that figure stands at almost one in three.”

Fifty years ago, in Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman warned against the dangers of professional licensing. At that time, Friedman quoted a previous study on licensure by Walter Gellhorn:

By 1952 more than 80 separate occupations exclusive of ‘owner-businesses,’ like restaurants and taxicab companies, had been licensed by state law; and in addition to the state laws there are municipal ordinances in abundance, not to mention the federal statutes that require the licensing of such diverse occupations as radio operators and stockyard commission agents. As long ago as 1938 a single state,North Carolina, had extended its law to 60 occupations. One may not be surprised to learn that pharmacists, accountants, and dentists have been reached by state law as have sanitarians and psychologists, assayers and architects, veterinarians and librarians. But with what joy of discovery does one learn about the licensing of threshing machine operators and dealers in scrap tobacco? What of egg graders and guide dog trainers, pest controllers and yacht salesmen, tree surgeons and well diggers, tile layers and potato growers? And what of the hypertrichologists who are licensed in Connecticut, where they remove excessive and unsightly hair with the solemnity appropriate to their high sounding title?

The Institute for Justice’s study found that licensing has only become more wide-spread and more absurd. But an increase in licensure is expected when interest groups are allowed to capture government and violate our economic liberties. Public choice theory predicts a growth in licensing if the anti-competitive interests of trades are not checked by constitutional rights. As Friedman observed,

In the absence of any general arrangements to offset the pressure of special interests, producer groups will invariably have a much stronger influence on legislative action and the power that be than will the diverse, widely spread consumer interest. Indeed from this point of view, the puzzle is not why we have so many silly licensure laws, but why we don’t have far more.

There are significant real-world effects to these laws. In a world of nine percent unemployment, barriers to work should be the last thing we want, particularly if those barriers do not make us safer or better off. The study found that the average license forces would-be workers to pay an average of $209 in fees, take one exam, and complete nine months of training. In the four places in which they are licensed (three states and DC), interior designers have the highest barriers to entry, apparently to save us from shag carpeting and misuses of the Pottery Barn. In the face of such requirements, particularly the months of training, it’s easy to see how someone can be discouraged from even looking for a job.

In addition, out-of-control licensing has other, more human costs, such as the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey, who were prohibited from building caskets in their monastery unless they obtained a funeral director license. The Institute for Justice won that case. Here’s hoping the new study gives IJ’s attorneys the data they may need to defeat other unconstitutional licensing regimes.

Below is the video announcing the study:

Today is the 113th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, perhaps the most subtle social thinker of the 20th century.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. He met with President Reagan at the White House, and Margaret Thatcher banged The Constitution of Liberty on the table at Conservative headquarters and declared “This is what we believe.” Milton Friedman described him as “the most important social thinker of the 20th century,” and Lawrence H. Summers called him the author of “the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today.”

He is the hero of The Commanding Heights, the book and PBS series by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. His most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, has never gone out of print and sold 125,000 copies last year. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker that “on the biggest issue of all, the vitality of capitalism, he was vindicated to such an extent that it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the 20th century as the Hayek century.”

Last year the Cato Institute invited Bruce Caldwell, Richard Epstein, and George Soros to discuss the new edition of The Constitution of Liberty, edited by Ronald Hamowy. In a report on that session, I concluded:

Hayek was not just an economist. He also published impressive works on political theory and psychology.

He’s like Marx, only right.

Cato published two original interviews with Hayek, in 1983 and 1984.

Find more on Hayek, including an original video lecture, at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

Sunday’s New York Times featured a front-page article by Thom Shanker on the U.S. military’s presence in Central America. In Honduras, American Special Forces operate out of three outposts—modeled on forward bases in Afghanistan and Iraq—providing support to Honduran Special forces. 600 U.S. troops operate across Central America and try to maintain a “discrete footprint” and do not, it seems, engage in many offensive operations. Nonetheless, the ease with which U.S. military personnel can be deployed practically anywhere is disturbing (though not surprising, given our recent experience). That some simply presume a need for having the U.S. military deploy to the jungles of Honduras is equally troubling.

Shanker explains that the U.S. military is implementing many of the lessons learned from counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as our presence in those countries was supposed to bring stability—along with democracy, economic development, human rights, and the rule of law— so it goes in Honduras:

“By countering transnational organized crime, we promote stability, which is necessary for external investment, economic growth and minimizing violence,” Colonel Brown said. “We also are disrupting and deterring the potential nexus between transnational organized criminals and terrorists who would do harm to our country.” (emphasis mine)

According to Colonel Brown, the U.S. military has deployed to Honduras to encourage foreign companies to invest there. It is hard to square this with the military’s core mission to “provide for the common defence.” Some in Washington still perceive a connection between economic development, drug eradication, and U.S. national security. But the most recent scholarship has largely debunked the belief that Americans must build/​rebuild foreign countries in order to be secure here at home.

It isn’t enough to learn lessons from our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is equally important that we learn the right lessons. Until we do, it appears we are doomed to repeat our nation-building follies again and again.

Farm families, along with the cause of liberty, won an important battle last week when the Obama administration scrapped plans to prohibit kids from doing a wide range of jobs in agriculture, even on farms belonging to their own family members. The rules would have barred youngsters under 16 from working with animals, storage bins, power-driven equipment, and various other things found on farms; perhaps most significant, they took an exceedingly narrow view of the so-called parental exemption provided by the law, so that (in the rules as proposed last year) kids would have been forbidden to work on an uncle or grandparent’s farm, or any farm less than “wholly” owned by their own parents. The Department of Labor was inundated by upwards of 10,000 comments, overwhelmingly negative, from farmers and ranchers; playing out in press outlets like the Custer County, Neb. Chief, the controversy was mostly ignored by the Eastern press, though NPR did do a report in December.

Commentator Ira Stoll has connected the dots about the Obama administration’s tendency to press ahead on extreme regulatory measures, then back off after a public outcry builds:

Examples include the mandatory automobile back-up camera rule, the ban of all cellphone use, even hands-free, while driving, the ban on 100 watt incandescent light bulbs, the NLRB’s action preventing Boeing from opening a factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, and the IRS’s cumbersome Form 1099 requirement as part of Obamacare.

Last fall I noted the same pattern, including retreats on EPA standards on dust, smog, and cross-state air pollution, and a misbegotten rule on lead abatement that could have made it prohibitively expensive to rehabilitate older homes. As I said at the time:

This, then, seems to be the new Obama administration compromise position …: they’ll hold off for now on saddling the economy with at least some potentially ruinous regulations — but they’ll make sure you know they’re not happy about having to take that stand.

More on the Obama administration and regulation here.

What the media blare:

Levinson Snags $515 Million in Health Care Fraud

More than 100 Charged in Massive Medicare Fraud Busts in 7 Cities in Scams Totaling $452 Mil

What I hear:

Drip .… .… . . drip … .… .… . .

Why? As the latter article notes, “authorities have targeted fraud that’s believed to cost the government between $60 billion and $90 billion each year.” So add up those two figures, which include frauds that occurred in multiple years, and you get somewhere between 1.1 percent and 1.6 percent of the amount that Medicare and Medicaid enable criminals to steal from taxpayers in a single year.

Neither article makes it clear how paltry these anti-fraud efforts are. But at least the former article asks:

So what is it about the government’s health care programs that make them such inviting targets for white collar criminals?

I answer that question here, and in this video: