We have free speech because of the First Amendment of the Constitution. In our book Free to Choose, we listed the amendments we would like to save to the Constitution. They’re much broader than that. Such as, Congress shall make no laws prohibiting any trades between consenting individuals with respect to goods that it’s legal to trade. Now, that would eliminate all tariffs. It would eliminate the sugar quota, that you may not see off-hand that it would. But it would if you think about it a little because individuals includes foreign individuals and not only domestic individuals.
I would really like much broader constitutional limitations. There are many other things you can think of. For example, you might have a constitutional amendment that nobody can be elected to Congress and Senate unless he’s more than 60 years of age. That would eliminate the people, the possibility of people being elected to Congress in order to be able to get benefits after they leave Congress. You see, that’s the defect — I happen to be in favor of term limitation proposals simply because maybe that’s a possible thing you can get. But the defect of term limitation proposals is if you have young people who enter Congress, and they’re limited to 12 years, they’ll use those 12 years to get brownie points with people on the outside who will give them a job later. So it would be much more effective to limit the legislature to people [over 60] or to make it a part-time job or an unpaid job.
Anyway, there are lots of solutions. I’m not going to go through the solutions here. Our books, Free to Chose, and an earlier one, Capitalism and Freedom, are much better from that point of view than what I can say here. But what I will say: you will not solve these problems by taking them up on a one-by-one basis. You will never get rid of the sugar quotas by having sugar consumers testify against it. You might get a constitutional amendment that there shall be no tariffs or other interferences with foreign trade, which lumps everything together so people can see that they have a real interest in it. But if you’re trying to do it piece by piece you’ll get killed every time.