Warning, the images in this video are not suitable for children or the faint of heart. Real images of stoning, genital mutilation and honor killings are shown so be prepared. While I’m actually opposed to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I also think that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about what the Islamic faith is about. The treatment of women depicted in this video is supported by mainstream Islamic doctrine – these are not “radicals” – these are mainstream  Imams in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere upholding these practices. Why should we be tolerant of this? I’m not tolerant of a religion that oppresses women so horribly, are you? Shar’ia is not just religious – it is also a governing structure for society, hence it is not comparable to other religions we “tolerate” in the U.S. Political Islam is a movement that seeks to expand the Muslim world and Shar’ia along with it. Are you actually prepared to say that this belief system is an alternate way of life that we should accept? I’m not, it’s pre-modern and horrific in its very nature – no thanks. No tolerance here for this repressive, violent, authoritarian and totalitarian belief system – how about you?  If you are “tolerant” of it, well perhaps you should watch this video again…

For those of you who don’t know, Libertarians are in principled alignment with the so called ‘Austrian School of Economics’ and F. A. Hayek was an Austrian School Economist who made major contributions to our understanding of free enterprise. Okay, bye for now – I hope you all like this.

Technorati Tags: Hayek, Keynes

A bit more on the Progressive movement is probably in order. The fact is that Progressives have gone to great lengths to build up a philosophical foundation for their beliefs and policies. Their moral justification is exquisite in fact, and is probably most rationally justified by John Rawls’  Theory of Social Justice. As well, many of their criticisms of capitalism and U.S. society are based on Critical Theory, which attempts to unify sociological and philosophical threads of theoretical work, and is an entire discipline of thought. Critical Theory has a strong, well defined epistemology all of its own, and many Progressive ideas lean on it heavily. Progressivism, in fact, is the very foundation of modern sociology and a belief in it is considered axiomatic in those circles as the only viable way to improve a capitalist, free society. Their policy recommendations flow from these well formed intellectual foundations. So, when I see proposals to ‘reform health care’ with a strong hand from the federal government, I’m not surprised and I don’t see it as part of some Trotskyite revanchist movement. Quite to the contrary, in fact, I expect it, as they have talked about this policy for decades, they run on this platform plank and the current slate of candidates in the Congress – and Obama himself – were very up front about their desire to reform health care in the way that they have proposed. I don’t agree with them, but I also can’t claim surprise, or that this is some rash, crazy move on their part. They won the right to do so, and if they succeed, it can rightfully be seen as a consequence of democracy in action, despite what the opinion polls of the moment say.

So pardon me if I’m not freaking out. My anger is actually focused on the Republicans, who for years have promised smaller government, a reliance on free markets and fiscal responsibility but have failed to lead the country in that direction. With respect to our health care system, which currently isn’t really any kind of unified system at all, and in its current state is a rather chaotic mish-mash of public-private entities that is certainly not sustainable based solely on it’s spiraling costs, the Republicans have offered little of substance to counter the very real problems we all face. They occasionally mumble about privatization of some entitlement programs, but their actual policy initiatives have been half-hearted at best, and looked at dispassionately, don’t add up to much. Worse yet, the Republicans have held power in significant ways in the past 30 years but have failed miserably to build a competing theoretical worldview to what is on offer from Progressives. Instead, they rely on a melange of patriotism, feigned fiscal responsibility, the illusion of small government and fierce opposition to the march of Progressivism; a battle they’ve fought poorly and have almost continuously lost ground in. Make no mistake, the cause of individual liberty, as it is constructed by classical liberalism, is losing ground in our country, and in Western democracies in general (Rawls’ theory is in many ways a rejection of it). I love when I hear Progressives complain about the sway of conservatives over society, as though I’m not going to notice that government in all of it’s forms now takes 46% of our GDP, compared to 6.8% one hundred years ago. The Progressive impulse has taken root in every level of government and one can daily see its relentless march – and its dire consequences in cities like Cleveland and Detroit, for example. They are winning and are continuing to win. The Republicans are left to negotiate the terms of the reduction of our liberties and nowhere are they succeeding in turning back the tide. Under Gingrich, there was a bit of an anomaly with welfare reform, but even now, despite the wild success of that initiative, welfare reform is being rolled back by Progressives.

The root cause of my anger is at the timidity of the Republican’s defense of liberty and free markets. There is a reason for this. It’s because they’ve sold their souls to crony capitalists, religious fundamentalists and other bigots, and if they were to actually stand up for liberty and free markets, they would need to turn their backs on the agendas of these special interests.

Let’s take the corporate interests first. If they really thought long and hard about our current corporate society, with the protections corporations have, they would have to question the very existence of them. If you’ve never thought about it, here’s a quick primer. The corporation, as an entity, enjoys limited liability for its actions, in the sense that shareholders cannot be held liable for the actions of corporations in any way, other than losing the value of their holdings. Compare this to say a sole proprietorship or partnership in which the owners are legally and financially liable for the actions of corporations. Consider, for example, how the shareholders of AIG would have reacted if they were held accountable for AIG’s losses. Imagine their own net worth was at risk – they would certainly not have been nearly as blind to AIG’s activities. In political philosophy terms, it’s called the agent-principal problem. Management and boards are supposed to act as agents of the shareholders, but in fact quickly develop interests of their own that subjugate the actual interests of shareholders. The shareholders are protected from this insanity because owning shares in a corporation is a kind of option in that downside is only limited to the capital one invests but the upside is unlimited. To take this a step further, our protected and highly regulated banking and securities industries hold monopoly power over the credit and equity markets, so they manipulate them to keep shareholders at bay while creating wealth for themselves and corporate managers (who are board members of other corporations). Politicians of all stripes are bought off along the way – and the truth is that most Republicans or Democrats don’t even understand this problem well, but it’s just as true that Republicans are their willing apologists. I don’t blame the Democrats – they don’t claim to believe in free markets as a core value. But the Republicans do, and either through stupidity  and/or venality, they choose to turn a blind eye towards the insanity of modern corporate America and its enablers in the legally corrupt financial services sector. If they were really proponents of free markets they would address these problems straight on, promoting free banking, eliminating the Federal Reserve, change corporate structures to reintroduce accountability to owners and a host of other policies. Ask any Republican about these and other like-minded ideas and he will just kind of dimly smile, barely able to understand what is being discussed. Again – the Democrats don’t either – but they don’t claim to be the protectors of capitalism, do they?

Okay, so what about their defense of individual liberty? Well, it’s clear that the Republicans made some of deals with the devil along that road. By making common cause with conservatives who are anti-drugs, anti-gambling, anti-gay, anti-porn, pro-religion – you get the point, yes? – they support government intervention into the private lives of humans in many ways that violate one’s natural rights. So, when they try to argue with the Progressives about individual rights, well they often get hung by their own hypocrisy. As well, they don’t understand that Progressivism has already accounted for and resolved these conflicts in theory.  On another front, and worse yet, Republicans have also bought into a bigotry that moral majority types accept as revealed truth – that faith in a Christian god is at the core of what makes our country great, in order to mollify and activate their most enervated supporters. And why not? The sanctimony and self-righteousness of a Neo-Con-Gelical, who believes that he is doing God’s work is a powerful political force. It’s a big part of the Tea Party movement, and they are the Republican’s answer to ACORN and union activists. I get it, it’s the crass politics of power – but when they do this, they quite clearly lose any legitimacy to their pretense of support for individual liberty. Also, perhaps by default, and some would say by design, they’ve become the comfortable home for the racists in our society. The “Southern Strategy” of the post civil-rights era has made folks who are “good Americans”, you know, white, very comfortable in their assumption of moral superiority. This isn’t overt, but it’s very real – and I was a life long Republican until about 2003, I have seen this firsthand. Let me put it another way. The average white racist (who is in the minority in the party) is much more comfortable with the Republican party than the Democratic party. You can call this an accident, but without Republican resurgence in the south, it would not be competitive nationally. The party doesn’t speak loudly about equality and doesn’t intentionally make those who aren’t really for liberty for all Americans uncomfortable. I’ve only really come to terms with this as a libertarian, which, as “The Party of Principle” makes one really look head on at liberty, making any tolerance of racial or ethnic hatred impossible. This is why the Republicans are so suspect when they talk about immigration or affirmative action – they don’t get the benefit of the doubt, fairly or unfairly – but regardless, they haven’t earned the public mantle of standing for equality the way the Democrats have.  All of this and more make their bleating about individual liberty fall on deaf ears to anyone outside of their most rabid base – and the funny part is they don’t even know it how silly they look to anyone outside of their echo chamber.

So now we come to health care and suddenly the American public, who was just subjected to 8 years of George Bush and Tom Delay, are supposed to believe that suddenly the Republicans actually have workable policy solutions to the problems in our health care sector? After ceding any legitimate moral high ground  in terms of really supporting individual liberty or free markets, they don’t even realize how ridiculous they sound by railing for these ideas. It’s made even worse now by the likes of Beck or Palin – who personify the self-styled political activists in the Tea Party movement. After never bothering to even study history or political philosophy in any formal way, and while completely ignoring the need to build a foundation of a counter-political philosophy to Progressivism, they suddenly just pour out into the streets and the halls of our nations capitol – or onto our TVs, crying foul. If you listen to their complaints, they are barely rational. I heard a caller to Rush Limbaugh the other day complain because when she called into the congressional switchboard and asked the operator if she should complain to him/her only, she was told a bit snottily that she needed to give him the name of her representative so she could put her through. She didn’t even know that she had to talk to her specific representative to lodge a complaint. I’ve seen countless scenes like this while traipsing around on the blogosphere. David Frum had one of his reporters do an informal survey of Tea Party protesters in DC  on tax issues, asking simple questions about whether Obama has actually raised taxes (no – he cut them) or what percentage of GDP the Federal Govt takes (most said for 40% or greater – answer: 20% and that’s not a record either). I’m not taking cheap shots at these folks for the sake of belittling them, btw, I’m trying to point out that the unintellectual posture, or perhaps better said, the intellectual laziness of the Republicans is biting them in their own posteriors. They have not done the hard work of building a real movement that relies on a strong, well defined philosophy that they actually have supported with real policies. No, they just cherry pick the aspects of classical liberalism and free market economics which suit their current issue, rally the troops into a frenzy with half truths and then wonder why the rest of us don’t take them seriously. At all – really, if you’re a Republican and you’ve actually read this far, know that virtually nobody outside of the Neo-Con-Gelicals – about 20%  – of the population can listen to your hysteria without laughing or getting angry. You are winning nobody new to the cause. The only reason that there is hope for the Republicans in the next election cycle is because the Democrats are ridiculous in their own ways. The truth of our current political reality is that when either one of the parties gets power, the citizenry immediately turns on them out of just plain old common sense. There is no swing to conservatism now and there was no swing to Progressivism in the last election cycle. Both parties are incredibly screwed up in their own ways, and the American public quickly gets sickened by either of them as soon as it assumes power.

Libertarians actually stand for such things as free markets and individual liberty, and brook no quarter from those who don’t adhere to these ideals. We are working very diligently at building up real intellectual support for our philosophy, and libertarian academics are spreading out through the intellectual world elucidating it in growing numbers. In twenty years, when we have a solid base of support and are winning elections, the Republicans won’t understand why. They really need to stop being such whiners, and instead build a coherent movement that can attract principled people who insist on policies and strategies that make sense, instead of vague, unbelievable tropes and populist rhetoric with no basis in principles or philosophy. But see, they can’t because they’d have to shake off most of their base, and they would never risk power to stand on principle. But in the meantime, the Republicans should stop whining about the Democrats  – it’s really quite pathetic.

Technorati Tags: health care reform, libertarian, libertarian thought, libertarianism

Libertarian philosophy at its core can be described as a radical view of the property rights of human beings. Essentially, we state that one owns oneself and accordingly, there is no justification for an external authority to breach your full ownership of yourself. We make an exception in that the use of force is justified to protect your natural rights when they are breached by another. Owning oneself includes the freedom to do as one pleases with the property one owns. Since human beings create things and labor to do so, the  product of those efforts or what is gained through free exchanges of the effort or property with others is yours to keep and no external authority has any right to either. I like to think of it as individual sovereignty, which means that essentially that there is no higher authority than me in society, except in those areas in which I agree to cede that authority for our mutual benefit. Btw, hard core libertarians would argue with that approach and that is why they recommend anarchy. I’m not willing to go that far as I believe we need a state to protect everyone’s natural rights, to defend our nation and that we can agree to act together in other ways collectively to improve all of our lives. For example, I differ from many libertarians in that I think we should have public support for education to guarantee every citizen the ability to understand their natural rights and the world around them before they are actually cast out into the great game of fending for oneself that we heartily believe in. I think, as Thomas Jefferson did, that “information is the currency of democracy”, that freedom stems from reason, and that a person must be trained to reason before he/she can adequately appreciate what being free necessitates.  But, in the main, I and most libertarians agree that government interventions into the free market are unnecessary encroachments on our natural rights and, accordingly seek to reorder society into a much freer place with far less government.

This is why many libertarians push back at government regulation of environmental issues. However, there are aspects of our principles that actually would support government intervention and I think the environment is an area where government intervention is not only desirable but in fact implied by our principles. The simplest way to describe it is via ‘The tragedy of the commons’, a theory that lays out how property which is not owned will not be cared for. Essentially, since current depletion affects later users, current depletion of a resource is encouraged because there is no penalty for the immediate user. If the ‘commons’ were privately owned, the owner would ensure that the ‘commons’ were used in sustainable ways so current and future consumers could be satisfied. An example of this is how farmers rotate crops to ensure the long term health of their land versus just depleting it’s capacity as quickly as possible.  Many libertarian theorists claim that this argues for the privatization of everything, but I can’t see how that could be applied to the air, water or the effects that the polluting of either have on property that is privately owned. The Libertarian Party mumbles some vagueness about this in its platform and it’s clear to me that this view is insufficient theoretically to deal with the fact that these ‘commons’ of air/water aren’t owned by anyone currently.

Given this analysis, it seems that libertarians should support government intervention to protect the environment, or better said, to manage it. In terms of what policies we should support, clearly policies that rely on the free market to develop effective solutions is what we should be supporting. Certainly, policies that pick the winners and losers by selecting one technology or another should be strongly objected to. For example, the rubric of ‘Green Jobs’ has to be fought tooth and nail, as it simply is a cover for subsidies to favored groups. In fact, these approaches are economically costly and will distract us from creating real solutions. I recently  wrote a post about great work being done by Craig Ventner at Synthetic Genomics which may solve the entire problem for us – and it is doing so with no government funding. The free market will drive all the innovation required if there is a need to be met – there is no need for some bureaucrat, or even worse, a sanctimonious do-gooder, to figure it all out for us. As far as actual regulations, it seems the best approach is to regulate emissions as we have with say CFCs (with great success – that’s  why you don’t hear much about the ozone layer anymore) or other pollutants. Both a carbon tax or cap and trade schemes seem to have merit and I’m fine with either as long as they impose as little friction as possible on the economy which can be done by making them revenue neutral. This means that any revenue the government receives from these regulatory activities must be offset by givebacks in income taxes for tax payers. Expanding government’s GDP footprint is unnecessary to accomplish our environmental goals, and I think we can do so in a way that is both effective and consistent with libertarian principles.

In closing, I must mention that the support in some libertarian circles for AGW skepticism is very wrongheaded. Any serious inquiry about the science shows that C02 drives warming and that we are producing more C02 which will lead to warming. There is no debate about this from any climate scientist (Lindzen, Michaels or Spencer, for example). There are legitimate questions about the extent and rate of the warming and the likely impacts, which we should try to understand and advocate for a non-politicized evaluation of the correct policies to address the challenge. The AGW fetishists should know that when they gave Hugo Chavez a standing ovation in Copenhagen, they reveal an ugly thing about the politics of the Green movement that does them no favors. Libertarians should avoid being drawn into the highly politicized food fight that AGW deniers and hysterics are having at this time. We should also be sure that we aren’t distracted from other important environmental concerns that all the talk of AGW squeezes out of view. Clean water should be high on our list to, for starters.

The bottom line is that libertarians should hold themselves to a standard of reason and science, as liberty is a gift that arose from both, and not descend into polemical fist fights for their own sake. Leave that to the neo-con-gelicals and the lib-gressives. It doesn’t seem to be working out too well for them,  and we should not allow ourselves to be drawn to the side of anti-intellectualism because of our reflexive dislike of government.

Technorati Tags: climate change, libertarian principles, libertarianism

Okay, so I went to the movies, undecided as to whether I was going to see Crazy Heart or Green Zone. Truthfully, I was in a pretty grumpy mood having been cooped up for too many days in a row in my southern headquarters, so I made a last minute decision to go for some blood pumping action. I knew it was going to be an anti-Bush administration movie, which isn’t a big problem for me. I knew it was going to be dealing with WMD and figured Hollywood would sensationalize it a bit. I can quite enjoy a thoughtful send-up of our country and government, as long as it’s done well, and, like I said, I was kind of in the mood for a ‘shoot ‘em up’. In the back of my mind I guess I was ready for something along the lines of War Inc, which in hindsight made no sense because War Inc. set out to be a satire, and was a brilliant one. I don’t know what critics have said about it, but my advice is that you’d be far more entertained and thoughtfully engaged by renting War Inc rather than the hackneyed and ham-handed Green Zone.

Bottom line, it has no regard for the facts as it meanders through the ridiculous fantasy adventures of a rogue Army Chief Warrant Officer, played by Damon,  who is tasked with finding WMD in Iraq after the invasion based on intelligence supplied to the military. First,  the action isn’t remotely believable. Damon just barrels around, going off mission and putting his men in way too much danger on a regular basis in ways that even I can see are ridiculous. Even less believable, Damon, operating apparently free of any operational command, develops his own intelligence source, is seconded to the CIA and then hunted down by our own special forces. Right, that’s exactly how things go down in the real world of military operations. He ultimately single-handedly discovers that the intelligence is entirely fabricated and then apprehends a senior Iraqi general, the commander of the Iraqi army, who subsequently tells him that he provided intelligence weeks before the war to the U.S. that there was no WMD in Iraq. This general is then shot by special operations forces under the command of the administration’s minion in Iraq. Right, yeah, that’s how it was under Bush.

Okay, what’s going on here? First, the feel of it reminded me a bit of the Generation Kill mini-series,  so, okay, and in recreating the feel of Baghdad, it seemed to work well – but that’s it. I think the director/writer stopped trying to engage in reality right then and there. One of the most ridiculous elements of the plot is that the CIA was actually trying to stop the administration’s puppet from behaving so badly, that somehow the CIA doubted the intelligence in the run-up to the war. I mean there is no mention of a CIA director telling  the President that it’s a “slam dunk. The entire story comes off like something a superficial, liberal wing-nut would scribble out in a single evening after smoking some fine weed.  It wasn’t even a thoughtful satire or a critique of the real situation, nope, it just made a story up with stick figure caricatures of characters. These characters lack depth, believability and aren’t even likable. It also makes overuse of the shaky camera, fast frame changing action effect of the Bourne movies which makes the action completely unintelligible. So, all in all, it simply doesn’t work on any level.

So, okay you say, another bad hollywood movie, big deal, why are you so ticked off, Glenn? Well, it’s because when treating a subject like this, so recent in history, with an authentic feel, I think the authors have a responsibility to have a basis in fact for their storyline. It’s not like Avatar, in which – as science fiction – I’m perfectly happy to ignore the corporate use of military forces to extinguish indigenous species because the story, characters and special effects are so captivating that I just don’t care about the politics. Green Zone seems earnest to be taken seriously and Damon is certainly trying hard to be taken seriously with his sternness and military rigor. But it just fails miserably to deal with any of the complexities of this issue.

You see, I’m a troublemaker. I actually read stuff like source documents, when I can. And guess what, there is a great document on WMD in Iraq and there have been several studies of the intelligence failures on Iraq. The Iraqi Survey Group, headed by David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector and no Bush administration lackey, did an in depth report of what we actually found and didn’t find in Iraq. First, WMD capability is about much more than just stockpiles of munitions. It also requires significant infrastructure of men and equipment to manufacture. In the concluding remarks by David Kay in his report, he claims that in significant ways Saddam was more dangerous than we thought and that he had substantial WMD operations in place. While there were no stockpiles of weapons found, when analyzed in it’s totality, there is no doubt that Saddam was a danger with respect to WMD. Second, after three separate investigations of the intelligence leading to our invasion of Iraq, not a single ‘smoking gun’ of politicization was found. Instead, the thoughtful critics have concluded that this was an epic intelligence failure. Also,  the entire scenario also reflects the grave difficulty of gaining intelligence in totalitarian, despotic regimes. It also should makes us all think about the very difficult nature of making decisions about what  acceptable levels of risk of this sort are. But these more nuanced and complex ideas, only arrived at after analyzing the facts involved, don’t even try to peek out from anywhere in this movie. Instead, we are treated to a Manichean story line in which the dumb, ambitious administration lackey, played by Greg Kinnear,  ignores or kills everything in the way of his agenda – an agenda which is never explored, btw.

I think that one of the biggest risks we face as a society is the pre-eminence of politics in our public discourse. Our entire public debate is politicized now – from global warming to health care reform, it’s all polemic and bashing the other, and the actual issues and facts aren’t even discussed that much in our media anymore. We are in real danger as a society if we all don’t try and catch ourselves more. Ask yourself, am I just railing for my side or am I adhering to a set of principles and looking at the facts to make my decisions? What are your principles? I think this is the core problem – neither the Republicans or Democrats have a fixed set of principles that I can discern. This is why I love the Libertarian Party – “The Party of Principle”. We work from clearly elucidated first principles that we’ve carefully examined and developed, and then make our minds up on issues based on those principles.  The lure of the outrageous polemic has less effect because we start from a different place. You should check it out at :  www.lp.org/platform . Most people will find themselves agreeing with our principles, but then start to have trouble with some of the positions/policies that flow from them. If that’s the case, you should ask yourself, am I willing to govern my views by principle or not? If the answer is yes – we are the party for you. If not, well, good riddance – you are the problem in our society.

Technorati Tags: green zone, libertarianism, libertian principles

So what is this twist? In a nutshell, it’s that Beck is actually intellectually curious about the world and this is very engaging to a group of people who are sick of being treated to very simplistic polemic every day. Beck’s popularity is a rejection of the ‘talking points’ hectoring of major conservative talkers – folks on the left just don’t get this, btw. He tells his own story enough, so I won’t repeat it all here but essentially he claims that he woke up after 9/11 and really began trying to inform himself about the world. He’s an everyman that regular middle class Americans can relate to, and he’s taken his viewers on an intellectual journey through history, philosophy, economics and political thought in a way that no college professor or pointy-headed intellectual could ever do. He brings along with this a set of traditional values which can loosely be described as ‘faith and family’, that give great comfort to his audience. His self-styled political philosophy mirrors that of the Tea Party in that it is hard to articulate the actual differences between him and traditional Conservatives or Republicans in both rhetoric and substance. He often makes reference to libertarianism and at one point actually claimed that he should have voted for Ron Paul, although this admission was primarily based on Ron Paul’s critical view of our rigged economy, not the rest of his philosophy.

So, what’s wrong with that? Well, first, it’s painful to watch if you actually know something about the subjects he’s exploring. Let’s take one recent example of how he gets it so wrong. He’s been trying to understand the epistemology of left and right, communism, fascism and progressivism – but notably not conservatism. He’s put together a spectrum of political belief with anarchy at one end and totalitarian government at the other, rightly concluding that Fascism is totalitarian, as well as Socialism. However, he completely neglects the fact that Socialist theory (admittedly, not most of the practice of it) is democratically based, and in fact calls for all industry/business to be run by democratic cooperatives and have elected leadership. This is the problem with a one dimensional analysis. He gets totalitarianism correct but completely neglects the idea of authoritarianism. He then throws them in the same bucket, and at this point loses all serious students of the topic. Fascists and Communists were arch enemies in Nazi Germany, and the communists saw themselves as the proponents of freedom, which the Fascists had no interest in.  I will stop detailing a critique of his specific thinking at this point because I don’t listen to most of what he says. But, from a broad standpoint, I think it’s fair and accurate to say that he really misses the intellectual underpinnings of the enlightenment and how classical liberalism has driven political philosophy forward. More directly, I think that if he’s going to posit himself as trying to understand and explain political thought and the history of it to us, he needs to do a much better job. Fyi, if you are tempted to think I’m sympathetic to communism due to the previous statements, you couldn’t be farther from the truth and in fact you are falling into the same pseudo-intellectual trap as Beck. Check your facts, Marx and his ilk based their entire theory on advancing their version real freedom for people – however wrong they were. It is utterly different from Fascism. You should also know that socialists play the same trick on capitalists, identifying fascism as a form of capitalism. Essentially, Beck is engaging in a combination of Red-Baiting and Nazi-Baiting – it’s intellectually invalid and not even new. Any undergraduate student of the topics he’s discussing would be able to easily identify the flaws in his thinking.

It must be said that much of what he’s wrestling with is understanding the canon of what used to be referred to as a ‘classical education’. Four years in an undergraduate history program that focuses on western civilization (unperverted by Critical Theory, admittedly hard to find) would do him wonders. It’s painful to watch him try to sort this out on his own, and between his radio and TV show, he does this for four hours a day. It requires a certain arrogance to put yourself forward as an authority while one is so self-admittedly ignorant, and also begs the question of why wouldn’t he spend his time putting people forward who know the subject far better than him. Yes, he does have many thoughtful guests, but really, if he wants to educate people in the way he claims he wants to, he would put them front and center to actually teach instead of using them as props. What Beck does instead is continuously move back and forth between polemic and inquiry in a chaotic way, with the ultimate aim of aggrandizing the world view he holds a priori.

Special criticism is deserved for his treatment of religion. Having had the hackneyed ‘spiritual awakening’ that only the ‘recovering alcoholic’ can have, he fervently promotes a brand of ill defined spirituality that he has absolute faith in. I stopped drinking with the help of AA 15 yrs ago, successfully, and adopted it’s spirituality for a few years, so I can speak of this authoritatively.  Apparently this week he’s going to discuss the role of ‘faith’ in our nation’s history. He teased it on his radio show today as showing how our countries values and, by implication, its radical adoption of individual liberty arise from the teachings of Moses, as embodied in the Ten Commandments. This just isn’t so, and in serious intellectual circles, again,  it can’t even be taken seriously. Here are a few reasons why, for those of you under his sway. First, The Enlightenment and the concept of individual liberty – better described as individual sovereignty, meaning that one owns oneself – arose in direct opposition to man’s previous state in society which was being the subject of God and King – and the King’s authority derived from God in the first place. Clerics of various religions were very powerful and the state used this power to visit and justify merciless depredations on its subjects. The idea that you were born into something other than this condition was a radical departure from the ‘faith based’ world of pre-enlightenment history. This is not debatable – it is an accepted fact. Go study this and you will find I’m correct. Second, the many of the founders of our country weren’t religious people. Key ones, including Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and others rejected Christianity and all religion, thinking of themselves as deists, at most. While it is without a doubt true that there were many Christians involved too, they all agreed to put in writing a prohibition of the state establishment of religion in attempt to stop the imposition of religion on man. It needs to be pointed out that while the Declaration of Independence has liberal mention of a God/Creator,  it is not the founding document of our country or government – it’s the document that separated the colonies from England’s despotism. The U.S. Constitution, which formed our nation, makes no mention of God and requires no such belief to adhere to its principles. I could go on – many have – but Beck, and many other Conservatives are so wrong in this assertion that it’s breathtaking.

Last, but not the  least of his failings, is Beck’s co-opting of the libertarian mantle in some people’s eyes. Yes, he sees the corruption of our monetary system by the Fed, yes he sees the abrogation of freedom that flows from the Progressive movement and yes he understands the importance of the rule of law but that does not add up to being a libertarian. Libertarians are for a radically different relationship between the state and individuals, one in which our current militarism is unthinkable and where your gay next door neighbors might sit on their front lawn doing bong hits with no fear of intervention by force.  The Libertarian Party is “The Party of Principle” and we are unafraid to go to the places that these principles will take us. I’m not saying he has to agree, but the phenomena of Conservative Christians adopting the rhetoric of liberty is not new and when you really boil down Beck – and the Tea Party for that matter – both are very hard to distinguish from the the Neo-Con, Christian Republicans.

I do think that there is hope for him and his followers. My general sense of them from their calls to his radio show and my encounters with them in the blogosphere is that most  have never really studied political philosophy before encountering Beck, and as such,  make some simplistic assumptions about the world that undermines their reasoning. Unlike snarky elitists on the left and right, I’m okay with that. Most of these people have been busy building good lives for themselves and their families, and in many ways are the backbone of American society. Not everyone can spend years reading Locke and Friedman, Mao and Rawls and reflect on them thoughtfully. As well, many self-styled liberal/progressives don’t understand the foundations of their philosophy either. That said, this does not let Beck fans off the hook – if you want to argue political philosophy, you need to actually study the topic, otherwise you will end up sounding like an ass. So, be true to Beck’s call, educate yourself, hold yourself to the principles you espouse and learn for yourself. Encourage your children to be educated in the classic canon and push your educational institutions to do so.

As for Beck himself, he should engage more true intellectuals on his show. I’d love for him to have say Christopher Hitchens on for an entire hour or even a week to discuss the epistemology of classical liberalism. He should sponsor more debate on his show between intellectuals, say a Tom Palmer from CATO versus the current head of the Socialist party. He should spend more time on ideas like ‘Social Justice Theory’ by John Rawls, and give air time to criticism of it. Progressives think they are serving a higher purpose, justified by these lines of thinking and Beck could do real intellectual damage to their cause if he stopped the Red-Baiting. Sadly, mostly what he’s doing now is talking to the same folks the conservatives have always spoken to, and with only a slightly better message. In fact, it may be worse, because many people think they are being educated by Beck, when,  they’re just mostly being subjected to agitprop. It’s sad because Beck comes close to doing something much more profound, and as such, it’s a real missed opportunity.

Technorati Tags: agitprop, classical liberalism, glenn beck, libertarianism

I think that one of the problems which pervades the social sciences is the lack of valid testbeds for their theories, and the fact that they don’t often like to digest negative results. Take Marx, who is held as one of the three fathers of the field of sociology; despite the observable fact that dialectical materialism doesn’t predict outcomes in the real world or that the “Proletariat” hasn’t risen up in revolution, Marxism still holds great sway in leftists political circles. These are two central tenets of Marxism that most honest adherents of Marxism has admitted are not valid. It’s like believing the world is flat after it’s been proved otherwise, but that doesn’t stop them.

The internet is uniquely able to connect us, both individually and collectively.  I think it provides great insights about our nature which do real damage to the assumption that people aren’t well equipped to run their own affairs much more readily than the average leftist would have you believe. Lets take two examples that just scream out for notice. eBay and Craigslist. eBay is an absurd business, if you just stop to think about it. You bid on stuff that you can’t physically see and send the person money, hoping they send the stuff you bought, and that the stuff actually works. When eBay was going public, it had real difficulty convincing investors that the business model could scale because many investors reacted with real doubt that people would trade with each other fairly. Yet look at the reality, eBay is a multi-billion dollar business in which millions of buyers and sellers continuously do just that, with very low levels of fraud. eBay does some policing of the site, but in fact has a predisposition against overly regulating buyer and sellers, leaving it to the community to police itself in many regards. I have to note that there is bad behavior, but as both buyers and sellers adapt to this new model of transacting with each other, they have developed habits to protect themselves.

Craigslist is an even more extreme example. My first real experiences buying and selling over Craigslist were tentative, but I quickly became a fan. The first thing you notice is that it’s so simple to buy and sell. Either browse for what you want without any registration, or simply write your ad, upload your photograph and you’re off. You choose how you want to be contacted, there are no bidding rules and nothing is binding. Typically you meet the buyer after having negotiated over the phone or on email, in many cases they come to your home to pick up the goods. My experience was nothing more than shocking. Having sold  and bought motorcycles, guitars, electronics, furniture and household goods on CL, I have yet to have a single bad experience. I’ve never been ripped off or been misrepresented to. Never, and this experience is common (at least to the people I’ve asked about it). eBay itself records ridiculously low levels of fraud, one tenth of one percent, while other studies put it higher with broader definitions of fraud, but still they are low enough where users make wide use of these exchanges, indicating that the risk reward is favorable.

This is shocking to those who make their living based on telling us we can’t look after ourselves. But they control most of the media and virtually all of educational apparatus, so is it any surprise that after, say, a government caused financial meltdown (predicted by Austrian economics) people would look to the government for solutions? In the case of the economy, it’s even more bizarre because Keynesian economics was disproven in the late ’70s, but many still cling to it. For those of you who don’t know much about economics, the stagflation of the late ’70s isn’t a condition that the Keynesian model would allow to exist. This hasn’t dampened the current crowd’s enthusiasm in claiming its authority, howeve. Btw, a better explanation for their failure to adapt to the facts on the ground is that all they really seek is to be seen ‘doing something’ about our problems and unfortunately, the politicians don’t know enough about economics to understand how bankrupt their theories are. But I digress…

What conclusions can be drawn from these experiences and phenomena?

1. Trustworthiness is common  – People are much more trustworthy than we think, at least in our society. Even more to the point, individuals and private institutions are quite capable of optimizing all of the trade-offs involved to maximize security and trust, with no governmental involvement other than the normal enforcement of laws that preserve our security and property.

2. Cooperation is innate in us – The emails that go back and forth between buyers in these systems are instructive. Both parties inform themselves directly and indirectly about each other via overt communications and signals drawn from the interaction by the participants. The quality of the ad language, the pictures and one’s responsiveness to an email question all say something about the sellers and buyers, and new participants quickly pick up on it. How many pictures are optimal? What kind of language is attractive? All of the behaviors and communication evolve to help buyers and sellers manage their interests quite effectively, with various levels of oversight. eBay has much more structure, whereas CL is a free for all. Amazon is a third model which is really oriented as a web based storefront versus a pure auction site, and represents yet another private take on the approach. All of this evolves without any coercion from the state, and works very well. This is a key point: it doesn’t just work, it works incredibly well. If you use one of these sites, I’m sure you can attest to it. People are generally very accommodating and a pleasure to deal with.

3. Bottom up innovation works best – Both CL and eBay let their community drive how it evolves. They are fanatical about understanding what their customers want and when they develop a new feature or policy, often it is an option, not something that is uniformly imposed. Customers are free to use them if they want to. When they don’t want to, if those policies don’t work well for them, customers can go elsewhere. My experience, for example, using eBay’s auction structure is not particularly attractive for me. I also think they charge too much. Taking into consideration that I negotiate for a living, I’m much more likely to sell or buy a product on CL than eBay. But that doesn’t mean its right for everyone. The person who doesn’t trust their negotiating skills or doesn’t ever want to meet the person they’re buying from may like what eBay does (and apparently do). This is the exact opposite of how the federal government attacks problems. It coerces participation, and its instruments are rules and bureaucracies which have no chance of matching the efficiency of free exchanges, open communication, trust, price signaling and provider competition – all of which run without any supervision from government.

What is most amazing about all this is how many people go around believing that the first place we should go for solving societal problems is the government. In fact, if you look at the biggest problem areas in society, for example, education and health care, you see that these areas are flooded with governmental regulation, institutions and money. But if you look at the areas where government isn’t that active – say food distribution or personal computers, those marketplaces of individuals acting freely without coercion are working so much better. Put plainly, I can get thirty different brands of toothpaste twenty four hours a day within a fifteen minute drive from my house, and can get a laptop that has the power of a twenty year old multi-million dollar supercomputer for six hundred dollars, but still, I’m continuously met with the a priori assumption that government is the answer to our disastrous health care system.

This view simply doesn’t comport with the observable facts and it needs to be treated with incredulity by those of us who believe in free markets and free people. One of the most endearing and frustrating aspects of being human is our ability to confuse ourselves, but knowing this only places a greater burden upon us to examine our beliefs and compare them with the available facts. Sadly, I’m not at all sure most people actually want to figure things out as much as they just want their side to win.

Technorati Tags: free markets, individaul freedom, libertarian econo, libertarianisms

There are lots of problems with corporations as legal entities in our society. In my estimation, they all stem from the limited liability that a corporation enjoys, which protects owners from the consequences of corporate action. In conjunction with the agent/principal problems introduced by government created securities trading monopolies, and voila, all kinds of whacky stuff happens. This is standard Libertarian fare, the Libertarians actually have a great solution to these kinds of problems – so don’t reject us as defenders of the status quo in our crony-capitalist system. But the fundamental problems with corporations inhere to all forms of corporations, including unions and non-profits. The corporation is by no means solely a tool of the right, as so many would have you think.  A great article on Cato goes into some depth on this topic http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/22/if-you-prick-a-corporation-does-it-not-bleed/

Here’s an excerpt:

“… we can happily declare that journalists enjoy full freedom of the press … as long as they don’t plan on using the resources of the New York Times Company or Random House or Comcast, which as mere legal fictions can be barred from using their property to circulate unpatriotic ideas. You’re free to practice your religion without interference — but if it’s an unpopular one, well, let’s hope you don’t expect to send your kids to a religious school or build a church or something, because those tend to involve incorporating. A woman’s right to choose is sacrosanct, but since  clinics and hospitals are mere corporations with no such protection, she’d better hope she knows a doctor who makes house calls. Fill in your own scenarios, it’s easy.”

This issue is really about the limits we place on government, not the status of corporations in our society and legal system. It’s a great win for free speech because is recognizes that the First Amendment to the constitution actually means something, that the federal government cannot attenuate free speech randomly. Who is doing the speaking is another legal issue.

Technorati Tags: first amendment, liber, libertarian, libertarian thought

Okay, back to the fray. It’s great to see that the ignorant, independent “moderates” have actually woken up and realized that they gave a group of people with a radical ideology a majority, and that their policies may just ruin what’s left of our already weakened country. But just as they were rolled by Obama, I suspect they are now being rolled by the Republicans. I cringed as I listened to Brown’s acceptance speech last night. He really just seemed happy to be part of the Senate, to have a seat in the ‘big game’. He took time to be particularly complimentary about Ted Kennedy and trying to live up to his legacy, which immediately disqualifies him from being a sentient human being. Let’s be clear – Ted Kennedy was a drunken lecher who killed a young woman due to his irresponsibility and craven love of power. The “lion of the Senate” stuff is laughable – in fact, Ted’s rise to power reveals what is wrong with the institution itself. The Senate dispenses power based on seniority solely (not unlike a ‘union shop’), so just by being around for a while gives one power and Ted Kennedy exercised this power loudly and regularly to support many dip-shit ‘progressive’ causes such as “Head Start”, which in a recent study by the Dept of Education was shown to confer absolutely no lasting advantage on children who participate in it. The only advantage was observable in the first year of school, after that, participants were undistinguishable from non-participants.  None. Didn’t see that in the press did you?It’s only been in place for 45 years, but hey, we’ve got to give it a chance! This and many other bad welfare-state government programs are his legacy. It deserves to be criticized and dismissed, not praised by someone who supposedly opposes what Ted stood for.

What Scott Brown should have been talking about was what he will do. If he really represented those who reject the vision of the Collectivist-Utopians, what are his alternative ideas? Cut taxes, don’t proscute terrorists in court and oppose health care reform? That’s it? It’s this kind of insipid thinking by the Republicans that made me leave them. They have no big ideas, they can’t even speak up to defend free markets or the importance of individual liberty and sovereignty effectively! Don’t be fooled, he’s just another cog in the political machine of the Republicans, and if you want more of what George Bush and Tom Delay gave this country, go right ahead and cheer for him but don’t kid yourself, you are cheering for the destruction of our country – just by different means.

Technorati Tags: brown, kennedy, Politics

Bernanke gave a speech this morning in which he called for more regulation to prevent prevent ‘bubbles’ from occurring. He went on to say that he didn’t believe that the Fed’s monetary policies were the cause of the recent housing bubble. For those of you who have been keeping track of this, I imagine you are as astounded by these statements as I am.

Let’s start with a reprise of other statements Ben Bernanke has made, to get a sense of how well the man who controls our monetary policy, and now also invests in private companies and securities (unlawfully), understands the economy. I know, it’s a bold statement, I mean, I’m just some blogger here, I haven’t shaved in a while, and I don’t have a degree in economics. However, I can read, which seems to give me a leg up on Bernanke.

Bernanke being questioned about the possibility of a housing bubble in July ’05

“I guess I don’t buy your premise. It’s a pretty unlikely possibility. We have never had a decline in housing prices on a national basis, so what I think is what is likely to happen is that housing prices may slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumer spending a bit…I don’t think it’s going to drive the economy from it’s full employment path though.”

“I am confident that the bank regulators will pay close attention to the kind of loans that are being made, making sure that loan underwriting is done right.” “I do think that this a localized problem and won’t affect the national economy.”

Bernanke on mortgage secuirites market in February ’07

“There is no indication at this point that the subprime mortgage issues have seeped into the broader mortgage market which still seems to be healthy.”

Yeah, uhh, okay, well, Ben, I really think that you might just want to revisit your economic model in light of your complete failure to understand what is actually happening in our economy, but once again, what do I know?

Ben went on to say, as he often does, that predicting bubbles in the early and middle phases is hard to do (I’m paraphrasing here, but am doing so accurately). The fact is that the economists of the Austrian school (in other words, Libertarians, for those of you just joining the fray) were predicting the meltdown that occurred, so one might ask Ben to consider if his perspective is somewhat skewed. Of course, as all social scientists do these days, he has some data to support his contention that the Fed didn’t actually create the incentives for mal-investment that the Austrian’s predicted. He’s no dummy, but the analysis doesn’t seem to hold up. Click on this link to see the Austrian case, with a criticism of the technical fig leaf Ben is hiding behind. http://mises.org/story/2936

I think there is a deeper lesson here for Libertarians. No matter what happens, the current institutions we’ve created are not going to change their behaviors. Regardless how completely we expose the failed policies of politicized, fiat money and monopolistic, fractional reserve banking practices, both politicians and technocrats won’t be swayed from their beliefs in these practices. Why is that? Well, many on the right suspect a great, corrupt conspiratorial cabal of supra-national bankers, corporate titans and politicians gaming the system to their advantage, but always, somehow, they are just out of our view. Others claim vast personal corruption is occurring, which of course impugns the character of many folks in positions of power, claiming they are enriching themselves. I think both of these claims simply aren’t supported by the evidence.

Rather, I believe we live in the  ‘Age of the Social Scientist’ wherein the last one hundred years many very smart people have become convinced of the unlimited power of government as THE tool of societal management.  It’s so seductive to those who want to change or run the world to believe that the instruments of governmental power can help them achieve their goals, that along the way, somehow, the actual results of their failed policies don’t seem to dissuade them from their strongly held beliefs. Critical to this effort is the underlying weakness of the “science” being used. Economics can hardly be called a science, although many treat its aspirations to such as revealed truth. For my money, the Austrian school of economists has been correct about the current crisis and this should bolster its credibility amongst economic oracles, but sadly, this doesn’t seem to be so. If they were to admit the weakness of their models, many institutions and players in the policy making apparatus of government would cease to have value. These institutions have become so detached from reality that they now serve themselves primarily, rather than the people. I believe that this is an ideological corruption that is much more dangerous than lining one’s pockets, and is a symptom of a much greater intellectual corruption. Theoretically, I’ve seen rights/entity analysis which lay out this case very nicely, and point to its inevitability. Simply put, at a certain point, government and its attendant institutions exist to serve themselves and break loose of any constraints we try to impose on them.

I’m coming much closer to the position held by many of my Libertarian brethren that financial collapse is the only possible way we’ll rid ourselves of these horrific practices. However, I’m not at all convinced that what will replace it is desirable at all. I believe there are those on the Left, who hold much greater power than Libertarians, who are preparing for this eventuality, and that some true radicals are hastening it. Given this, I have to conclude that it’s much more likely that we’ll see a more totalitarian state emerge, not a lesser one.

Technorati Tags: ben bernanke, Federal Reserve, libertarian, libertarianism