How to increase liberty in America: ten suggestions.

CLINT BOLICK 

OUR nation's K-12 public education system is the most bloated, ossified, bureaucratic, hidebound, monopolistic, special-interest-driven example of central planning aside from Communist China or perhaps the U.S. Postal Service. If our schools do not improve, millions of schoolchildren--particularly from poor families--will continue to be consigned to lives of poverty and dissatisfaction.

In an era of great technological innovation, we never would design from scratch the type of brick-and-mortar, one-size-fits-all system that we have today. We have the capacity to personalize instruction to the individual needs of every child and to deliver on the promise of opportunity that is every child's birthright. The solution is to apply the same economic principles that have succeeded in so many other realms: choice and competition.

School choice has a seismic impact for two reasons: First, it transfers power over basic education decisions from bureaucrats to parents; and second, it forces schools to compete for students and for dollars. School choice once was merely a figment of Milton Friedman's fertile imagination. Today it is flourishing in Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., among other places. Far from the Chicken Little predictions purveyed by doomsayers devoted to the status quo, the sky has not fallen. To the contrary, it has brightened.

Wherever we have school choice, the private education sector has prospered. But remarkably--yet not surprisingly--competition from school choice has forced public schools to improve as well. Forced for the first time to serve the demands of consumers rather than politicians, public schools are adopting long-overdue reforms: They are creating unique curricula, spending a higher percentage of their money in the classroom, and giving principals more power to fire poor-performing teachers. As Friedman predicted, the rules of economics are not suspended at the schoolhouse door.

Slowly the system is evolving into one in which the government's main role is funding education, instead of monopolizing its delivery. With the proliferation of deregulated charter schools, education governance in the public sector is finally being decentralized and returned to local communities. Meanwhile, public funds increasingly are following students to wherever they find education opportunities. Despite all this, there are still those who are fighting school choice tooth and nail. Teachers' unions, which can instantly raise millions of dollars with small dues increases, are a force to be reckoned with: Where they cannot squelch school choice in the legislative arena, they are happy to resort to the courts.

In the face of such powerful special-interest groups we must remain tenacious. The freedom movement needs to make school choice its top domestic priority, for school choice both improves education and expands freedom. As a nation we simply cannot accept the status quo: Our children, and our nation's future, depend on the outcome of this battle.

Mr. Bolick is president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice.

SCHOOL CHOICE

ROBERT H. BORK 

LIBERTY in America can be enhanced by reinstating, legislatively, restraints upon the direction of our culture and morality. Censorship as an enhancement of liberty may seem paradoxical. Yet it should be obvious, to all but dogmatic First Amendment absolutists, that people forced to live in an increasingly brutalized culture are, in a very real sense, not wholly free. The moral and aesthetic chaos into which we are descending is primarily due to the cult of radical individualism or liberationist philosophy bequeathed to us by the Sixties and enforced by cultural "elites." That philosophy infects all aspects of our culture, but it would not be so powerful had it not captured a majority of a Supreme Court that has illegitimately assumed the power to strike down democratic efforts to curb the worst of these trends. The Court has, to take a single example, thrown First Amendment protection around computer-simulated child pornography.

Liberty, it has been said, is the space between the walls. When the walls are leveled, the unrestricted behavior of others lessens our liberties. As Leszek Kolakowski has put it, "Where there are no laws to impose restrictions on liberty, there can be no liberty either." Our culture and relations with others are progressively coarsened. Irving Kristol has written that "sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos ... that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers." That it can and is doing. Relations between the sexes are debased by pornography (now the leading American industry) while taboos against incest, pedophilia, and homosexual behavior weaken or disappear altogether. Large parts of television are unwatchable, motion pictures rely upon sex, gore, and pyrotechnics for the edification of the target audience of 14-year-olds, popular music hardly deserves the name of music--even Mick Jagger called his performances "noise." Abortion, even the infanticide known as partial-birth abortion, is sanctified for no better reason than convenience. Almost all traces of religion are scrubbed from the public square. The list could be extended.

Much, perhaps most, of this is caused by the Supreme Court's embrace of the liberationist philosophy. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent, "Day by day, case by case, [the Supreme Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize." It is past time that a Court be selected that will allow the re-erection of the walls that make liberty possible.

Mr. Bork is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

A Just Censorship

WARD CONNERLY 

WE often think of race-based "affirmative action" as a practice that conflicts with the concept of merit; or we think of it in the context of the value of "fairness." Rarely do we consider race preferences as something that infringes on liberty or personal freedom. Yet, in the purest sense, "preferences"--applying differential treatment based on the color of an individual's skin or ethnic background--are a form of discrimination against those who are treated less favorably.

This is precisely why the great civil-rights movement of the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King Jr., was designed around and drew its strength from those haunting words in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Racial discrimination limits the ability of an individual to pursue happiness, because it restricts one's choices in the public arena. Thus, racial discrimination is an infringement on personal liberty. Whether to achieve "diversity," to "level the playing field," or to correct past injustices, race preferences decreed by the government are a means of discriminating against some while advancing others.

The anti-liberty effects that race preferences have on personal liberty do not flow merely from preferences themselves. Their genesis is in the classification system that undergirds preferences. There is, perhaps, no more culturally corrupting influence on America's civic life than the practice of sorting and classifying Americans on the basis of skin color and the country from which their ancestors originated.

The centerpiece of American culture, economics, and politics has always been the individual. The genius of our way of life is the fact that we attach so much value to the individual. We believe that, left to their own devices, individuals will work hard and collectively improve the nation for all of us. It is no coincidence that the term "rugged individualism" has often been used to define the American spirit.

Liberty flourishes best when Americans view themselves as individuals, rather than when they identify themselves as representatives of a group. The very term "racial equality" diminishes the individual, because it promotes consciousness about "race" rather than about one's individuality. It is inevitable that when people have been encouraged to be conscious of their "race," they will view their circumstances in the context of their group. The result is often racial paranoia: All things are viewed through the prism of how the group appears to be treated. This is the lesson of Hurricane Katrina.

To advance individual liberty, we must end official government classifications. That journey begins by ending race preferences and other distinctions based on "race." To advance personal liberty, we must return to the national vision of colorblindness--an America where the "content of one's character" and individual merit are the guiding forces, not whether one contributes to "diversity" based on a factor as ridiculous as the color of one's skin.

Mr. Connerly is chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute.

COLORBLINDNESS

DAVID FRUM

SO there you are, standing in a line snaking 45 minutes deep into the airport, shoes in hand, coat and laptop in plastic bins, your briefcase and carry-on bag elaborately balanced. Right behind you, a grandmother in a wheelchair is waiting her turn for the same treatment. As you are scanned, searched, and prodded, you wonder: Does any of this make any sense?

What if airlines or airport authorities offered you a contract that gave you the option of an abbreviated and accelerated search, if you would in turn provide them with a dozen publicly available, non-ethnically-specific pieces of information: your age, the number of years you have lived at your current address, the credit cards you carry, your military service if any, your residency or citizenship status, your police record. Together, a dozen such pieces of data could very reliably establish that you as a traveler present a very low security risk. When you got to the airport, you would walk to the security checkpoint, show your "trusted-traveler card," submit to a retina scan to confirm your identity, and proceed directly to your flight. Every hundredth or so traveler would be pulled over for a random search. Would you take that deal? Would you at least like the option of such a deal?

It's often observed that the lack of a reliable personal-identification system complicates national security. It's equally true, though, that this lack burdens individual liberty to come and go with minimal interference.

There have also been many troubling stories of law-abiding Americans' being halted, or worse, by police because they share a common Arab or Islamic name with a suspect on the terrorist watch-list. The ability instantly to prove that one is Abdul Izaz Rahman of Citibank and Rye, N.Y., not Abdul Izaz Rahman the hunted killer, can translate into very practical freedom from delay, search, and detention.

Louis Brandeis famously described privacy as the most precious form of liberty. But in the modern age, the zeal to protect privacy often compromises liberty. Because we can never be quite sure that people are who they say they are, both governments and private actors must take elaborate precautions against imposture and deception. Just as our ability to bind ourselves by contracts enhances our liberty, so too would the ability to establish our identity beyond doubt or fraud.

The idea of a national identity card goes against the American grain. But Americans are accustomed to filling out lengthy and detailed income-tax reports listing every dollar they earn. Almost everybody already carries a driver's license with his face, name, and address on it. But the idea of replacing that card with a tamper-proof modern card that would hold a computer chip that could reliably match your name and face with your retina scan, or discreetly prove that you are indeed over 18, a lawful resident of the U.S., and so on--this seems to many an outrageous intrusion.

It just makes you wonder: When we say "liberty," do we mean the things that truly make us free? Or do we just mean the intrusions that we happen to have become used to?

Mr. Frum, a contributing editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, is the author of The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bushand (with Richard Perle) An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror.

SENSIBLE DISTRICTING

ARTHUR B. LAFFER

THE lyrics of "Me and Bobby McGee" got it wrong: Freedom is not just another word for nothing left to lose. Poor people are never free, nor are people who have been deprived of the right to vote. The more choices--economic or any other kind--you have, the freer you really are. The concept of freedom, as Milton and Rose Friedman put it long ago in the title of their classic book, is to be free to choose. Meaningful choice in politics, including the right to vote, is the sine qua non of freedom.

Today in California there are 80 assembly districts, 40 state-senate districts, and 53 U.S. House districts, all drawn up by our state legislature and signed into law by our former governor. In the last election all 80 assembly seats, all 53 U.S. House seats, and one half of the 40 state-senate seats were up for election--and yet not one of these 173 elections resulted in a change in party affiliation. That's gerrymandering of the first order, and what's frightening about it is that it means the votes of individuals really don't matter in these races. There's one district running along the coast of California above Santa Barbara that's over 200 miles long and around 100 yards wide at several points. They say that at high tide it becomes several districts, which would be funny if it weren't so serious.

The reason the district boundaries are so contorted is that the outcome of these elections is very important to the people who actually draw the district boundaries--the very same people who are elected in these districts. These officeholders are following their own self-interest, and will go to any lengths to ensure their reelection. This is the height of conflict of interest, and has resulted in California voters' losing their say in general elections.

Ted Costa's Proposition 77 in California's recent election would have taken the power to design districts away from the officeholders and would have put it in the more neutral hands of a panel of retired judges. The governor backed this measure, which was decided by the voters on November 8: It was defeated by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent. A similar initiative in Ohio also failed.

The freedom to choose politically doesn't stop at fair competitive districts. It includes campaign-finance reform, which was also voted down in California. Union bosses can still spend their members' dues on campaigns without the explicit or even implicit consent of those who pay those dues.

Liberty has many important aspects: a free press, free trade, minimal regulations, etc. But there is no way to ensure the future of freedom better than to have politicians sensitive to the electorate. We should be worried.

Mr. Laffer is the founder and chairman of Laffer Associates.

POLICING

MYRON MAGNET

POLITICAL liberty begins with the limitation of everyone's freedom to hurt others, since liberty, as Rousseau taught us, is valueless if the first stronger person we meet can take it away. The primary function of government, therefore, is to keep citizens safe in the streets and in their houses, with policemen and, when necessary, soldiers. The 1960s denied this truth, asserting that men hurt and invade one another only if deformed by an unjust society, whose oppressive agents are the police and the army. In that era's trans-valuation of values, the criminal became the victim, the cop the villain. Black criminals were doubly victims. Cities stopped policing, and crime exploded.

The policing revolution that New York mayor Rudy Giuliani engineered was the greatest advance in urban liberty in our time. People who had been, as we used to say, "prisoners in their own houses" could stop huddling behind triple-locked doors and could go out--even at night!--without looking with pounding hearts over their shoulders. Businesses could flourish. And the liberation was most dramatic in minority neighborhoods that crime had turned into places where families ate on the floor to avoid stray bullets, where children could be shot down on the way to school, where civil society had shriveled, where citizens lived under the primitive tyranny of "a banditti of ruffians." (The phrase is Tom Paine's.)

It would be a boon to liberty if activists stopped--and officials ignored--the cries of racism that still handcuff police in many U.S. cities. It would be a boon if such activists remembered that many more residents of black neighborhoods are the victims rather than the perpetrators of crime, and that it does them no favor to keep the police from protecting them. It would be a boon if activists stopped seeing racial profiling where it doesn't exist: Professional police departments don't do it. And it would be a boon if the U.S. Department of Justice stopped hampering urban police forces by requiring them to monitor arrests by race, which discourages cops from doing their job.

For an instructive comparison, look at Britain. When Prime Minister Blair's government told Scotland Yard that its first task would be "combating racism," crime (except for murder) rose to higher rates in London than in pre-Giuliani New York. Ask Londoners if they feel freer.

Mr. Magnet is the editor of City Journal and the author of, among other books, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass.

The Fiscal Constitution

STEPHEN MOORE

FOR the most part, the size and scope of the federal government has expanded at a breathtaking pace since the era of FDR and the New Deal. Defenders of liberty have been subjected to great despair as a result, but how to account for this mighty expansion in the powers of the state? The answer lies in the breakdown of what I call our fiscal constitution. In particular, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution (the "enumerated powers" clause) says that Congress, which controls the purse, can spend money only on select priorities--national defense, roads, a post office, the courts, and a few others. But thanks to a perverse and politically convenient interpretation in the 1930s of the term "general welfare,"

the restraints on government were eviscerated. Congress and the president at once began to believe that the federal government had authority to spend money on anything it wished, as long as the expenditure could garner a majority of votes in the House and Senate.

The budget numbers tell the whole depressing story. This year Bush has proposed a budget of $2.5 trillion, which is more than the total spent from 1787 to 1930. More than 20 cents of every dollar produced in America will go to pay for government, which is up from 4 to 5 cents on the dollar in the pre-FDR era.

Consider how the attitude in Washington has changed: Just over 100 years ago Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill that sought to give relief to thousands of drought-stricken farmers; he said in defense that he could "find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution" authorizing such spending. Earlier this year, after the terrible hurricane ravaged New Orleans, George W. Bush announced that the feds would spend "whatever it takes" to help the victims. That is truly a sign of the times.

Throughout the 50 years that NATIONAL REVIEW has influenced public policy, many conservatives have labored under the belief that a Republican majority would surely bring spending and regulatory excesses to a screeching halt. As the modern entitlement state continues to spiral out of control, however, few people now believe that fairy tale. Democrats and Republicans are equally feckless in repelling special-interest groups' pleading for ever larger mountains of taxpayer largesse. As the old saying goes, Any program that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul's support. And there are many Pauls today who are "entitled" to one benefit or another.

Conservatives should embark on a crusade to resurrect our fiscal constitution. Congress, the president, and the courts should ask anew where the authority is to spend each and every dollar. The Constitution provides the roadmap to a smaller government and increased liberty--if only we will follow it.

Mr. Moore is a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

ASSUMPTION OF RISK

WALTER OLSON

A COUPLE of years ago the rock musician John Fogerty, of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame, was sued by an audience member who alleged that the volume level at one of his concerts was so unreasonably loud as to have damaged his hearing. But a New York judge dismissed the case, ruling that such a complaint was "not an appropriate means to impose an unlegislated noise code upon performers," and specifically that the suit was barred legally by the long-established principle of assumption of risk.

In liability law, that doctrine is a crucial bulwark of individual liberty. If you choose to attend a ball game, you face a slim but real danger of getting beaned by a foul; if you get out to enjoy the wide open spaces, you have to reckon with the chance of an encounter with a rock slide, mountain lion, or gopher hole. So if it happens, don't run to court, okay? That was the old law's logic.

Two groups, however, are broadly hostile to the principle of assumption of risk: trial lawyers, since it gets in the way of lawsuits they'd like to file; and liberal thinkers in the law schools, since it inhibits the courts from assuming the progressive role of regulating social risks and putting money in the hands of accident victims. And so for decades now litigators and legal academics have been urging courts and lawmakers to chip away at the old doctrine, if not ditch it altogether.

They've had a good bit of success in that campaign. Over the years many states have curtailed or eliminated the doctrine, to the great legal detriment of ski-slope operators, youth-sports organizers, and sellers of such products as guns and chainsaws. And the result? Providers of risky services, goods, and activities pull back from their former willingness to deal with consumers. It's now much harder to find a swimming hole in the Northeast, climb a mountain peak through private land in Colorado, or come up with a skateboarding venue in California.

Two years ago a panel of appeals judges in Britain reaffirmed the principle of assumption of risk, calling it a bulwark of "the liberty of the citizen" that helps prevent the imposition of "a grey and dull safety regime on everyone." That's exactly right. How could America, of all risk-taking countries, have ever forgotten?

Mr. Olson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of, among other books, The Rule of Lawyers. He edits Overlawyered.com and PointOfLaw.com.

Tax Reform

JOHN STOSSEL

TO increase liberty, one must reduce the power of the state. The problem is, most people don't appreciate the size and scope of today's state. When the people of Israel demanded a king, the Bible says, God warned: "He will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers" (I Samuel 8:15). A tenth? What kind of puny threat was that? Now government (federal, state, and local) takes about 40 percent of what we own.

Americans don't realize this, because so much taking is hidden. People don't know what they pay in excise taxes, corporate taxes passed on to us in higher prices, and our unintelligible income tax. I no longer read my tax forms. My accountant always says, "Read this before you sign"--but why? There's little I would understand.

Even professionals don't understand it. When we, at ABC News, put tax questions to commercial tax preparers and to the unhappy people answering IRS phone-help lines, we get totally different answers.

Civil society thrives on predictable rules everyone understands. "No single factor," Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, "contributed more to the prosperity of the West than the relative certainty of the law." But our tax law is unintelligible, and unintelligible law leads to politicized selective enforcement, or, eventually, tyranny.

The tax system distorts our lives. We invest for tax reasons rather than growth, link vacations to business conferences, grow fat on business dinners, and have tax-subsidized medical insurance that limits our choices and raises costs for others.

When the tax code and its explanations grew to 46,000 pages, I handed the teetering pile of volumes (just 11 of the 25 actually, I couldn't hold the entire set) to then-Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. He said he planned to "simplify it." We're still waiting.

There isn't much a Treasury secretary can do, of course, because Congress keeps giving us "breaks." Periodically I make videos of the pandering. There's John Baldacci, Democrat of Maine, shouting on C-SPAN, "We're gonna make sure that families, family businesses, and farms have the breaks that they deserve!" Jim Ramstad, Republican of Minnesota, pops up to say, "No more taxation for survivor benefits for police officers or firefighters!" Then the congressmen applaud themselves.

It's a good way to suck in campaign contributions: Give breaks to those who lobby hardest. The tax code funds half the lobbying in Washington. "No lobbyist left behind," Steve Forbes quips. His flat-tax plan would help. Anything simpler and understandable would help.

In 1986, Congress did eliminate some brackets and some shelters. A good start--but since then, they've amended the rules 14,000 times. Today the code exceeds 60,000 pages. Over a lifetime, the average taxpayer will spend four months working on tax forms. The GAO says the cost of compliance exceeds $100 billion--1 percent of GDP. All that money, time, and creative energy could have gone to building a better business, curing diseases, or spending quality hours with the family.

Our tax code is an enemy of freedom. It has to be simplified.

Mr. Stossel is co-anchor of the ABC News program 20/20.

DRUG LEGALIZATION 

JACOB SULLUM

SCIENTISTS at the National Institute on Drug Abuse are very excited about anti-drug "vaccines" that use the immune system to neutralize psychoactive chemicals. Although the products developed so far seem to be only modestly effective, the ultimate aim is to prevent drug use by taking all the fun out of it. NIDA sees the vaccines as a potential drug "treatment" tool, which raises the possibility that they could be forced on people arrested for drug offenses as an alternative to jail. British politicians, meanwhile, are looking forward to the day when drug-use preventatives are added to the list of mandatory vaccinations for children, ultimately protecting all citizens from addiction by rendering them incapable of enjoying forbidden pleasures.

This Orwellian scenario is a logical extension of what federal appeals-court judge Richard Posner aptly calls the government's "quixotic campaign ... to prevent people from consuming an arbitrary subset of mind-altering drugs." The government has been trying to control our minds indirectly for close to a century, since Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914. Why not take the fight directly to our bloodstreams?

The pleasure-suppressing injections drug warriors dream of exemplify the prohibitionist mentality, which seeks to promote virtue by eliminating temptation instead of fostering self-control. The same arguments that we hear for banning the currently illegal drugs can be applied with equal or greater force to alcohol: concerns about addiction, violence, acute poisoning, long-term health damage, accidents, impaired productivity, and reckless sexual behavior. Yet somehow we manage to address these dangers without prohibition; in fact, we've concluded that they can be addressed more effectively when alcohol is legal.

The costs of trying to substitute government control for self-control are even more pronounced today than they were during the heyday of Al Capone. Aside from the direct government spending it entails (totaling some $40 billion per year in the U.S.), drug prohibition leads to black-market violence, increased property crime, police corruption, and heightened health hazards. It undermines privacy, property rights, religious freedom, freedom of speech, individual responsibility, and respect for the law. It strains our relations with countries that supply the intoxicants Americans demand. It causes unnecessary suffering by blocking access to effective medicines. It produces egregious injustices, such as asset forfeiture without proof of wrongdoing and draconian sentences for nonviolent drug offenders--not to mention the more routine injustices of making 1.7 million drug arrests a year (almost half of them involving marijuana) and keeping a half-million Americans behind bars for catering to politically incorrect recreational tastes.

The most plausible way out of this mess is a path that Congress has blocked with help from the Supreme Court: policy experimentation at the state level. If Congress respected the Constitution, it would step back and allow the states to try different policies regarding drugs produced, sold, and consumed within their borders. The results could help allay fears about life without prohibition and enable Americans to reclaim their minds and bodies from the pharmacological dictators eagerly eyeing their veins.

Mr. Sullum, a senior editor at Reason and a syndicated columnist, is the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.