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

I just saw an interview with J. Craig Venter, famous for his participation in the human genome project and now CEO of Synthetic Genomics, in which he stated that he is creating a microbe which eats C02 and creates hydrocarbon fuel. That’s right, you heard me correctly. Using genetic engineering, they essentially assemble this little bug and it does this biologically. HOLY *^&%!

The interview is incredibly telling. Venter describes how this work is feasible and scalable, and how energy companies are investing to develop it as commercially viable. He describes how the resultant fuel would be usable in current combustion engines with no modifications. As I listened, I began to get angry though. First, you’ll note the questioner’s insistent tone when asking has about whether the current inaction in Washington, DC is hurting him and his obvious disappointment at Venter’s answer, which is essentially that he doesn’t need any help from the government. I can almost hear the gasps from AGW fetishists who believe the AGW is more evidence of the flawed nature of capitalism.

I then went to the web to research this topic and found myself a bit stymied. The green type of sites reporting on this interview focused on one comment, taken utterly out of context, in which Venter says that without scale, the companies working on this are ‘just playing’. They completely downplay the fact that he claims he has the funding to move ahead already from private industry, including 600 million usd from Exxon Mobil. There was very little other reporting on this topic. Can you believe that? I think that this is due to the fact that Venter isn’t singing from the AGW hymn book about needing to completely change our societies, economies and lives in order to survive. Rather, he proposes a solution that negates fossil fuel dependency and consumes vast quantities of C02 in one fell swoop, a solution that is at once breathtakingly elegant and simple, and that works with our existing industrial infrastructure.

Wow. Okay, I don’t want to get too excited because obviously this has a ways to go. But if he’s right, and look for yourself, he’s not claiming this is some whacked out idea, no, he has the science down pat and he’s a legitimate, credible serious person. He’s already rolling out a significant pilot program. So this isn’t just some hope – it’s real and viable. Do you realize what this means? First, all govt spending on ‘Green Everything’ is unnecessary. Worst case, from a public policy standpoint, we might want to put a carbon tax in place (I love the revenue neutral idea being proposed, btw, if we have to have one at all) to create stronger incentives to adopt it, although I don’t think it’s needed. But that’s it. We are done. No more IPCC, no more green proselytizing from every progressive political hack – no more teaching our children that doomsday is coming! We can stop giving vast sums of money to oil producing countries that prop up their evil regimes with petro-dollars. Okay, you get the picture.

My biggest question is why this isn’t leading every newscast in the world? Answer: Because the AGW issue is so politicized that it’s no longer about the environment. They simply couldn’t take it if their crisis was actually solved by the free market, not government, and all of their rent-seeking, anti-capitalist garbage was invalidated. Check it out – tell your friends, this could be the ‘game changer’ we’ve all been hoping for.

Technorati Tags: capitalism, global warming

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

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

The triumphalism of the right-wing chattering classes over the Brown-Coakley race, exchanging knowing, insider comments about what this means for the Democrats is premature. It only means that the American people are as sick of the Democrats as they are the Republicans. This is the same country that threw them out of office over the past few years, but somehow they want to forget that.  I think it’s worth reviewing how we got to the state of affairs that put the Democrats in charge in the first place.

Only a few years ago, the Republicans held all the reins of power. Many Republicans who aren’t Bible thumping reactionaries were sickened by the likes of George Bush, his ideology and incompetence, as well as Tom Delay’s brutish political machine. We were in two wars, with both showing signs of being terribly led. In case you’ve forgotten , remember how we took over Iraq and let it sit there until a hostile power could take over and then start fighting us, costing thousands of American lives. Or how we undermanned Afghanistan, letting the conflict there stew until the Taliban could re-emerge to set up shadow governments in every province? We were running up deficits then too, with business as usual corporate cronyism running policy. Bush never questioned the Fed, and while he pushed back at Fannie and Freddie weakly, he lacked the confidence to take a stand against their recklessness and in fact backed some of it with his “ownership society”. We’d failed to capture or kill Bin Laden – I could go on, but I have hopefully jogged your memories a bit about what it was like to have Republicans running the show. It made me leave the Republican party.

In fact, one can make the case that the Republican’s failed leadership gave rise to Obama. He drew sickened moderate Republicans, independents and young people who (while mostly poorly informed) were embarrassed by George Bush, who so debased the value of being a Republican that the populist promises of Mondale and Dukakis seemed fresh and new. The best the Republicans had to offer to oppose Obama was an old crank – McCain – who’s lack of critical thinking skills made him seem like an independent thinker in the hackneyed field in which he ran. Oh, btw, who was the only candidate talking about financial ruin via the housing bubble, the criminal behavior of the Federal Reserve or the truth about the consequences of our military adventurism? Ron Paul (which Glenn Beck recently admitted he wished he’d voted for), who was roundly dismissed by the powers that be as a whack job. His silly talk of constitutional government, individual liberty and responsible government fell on deaf ears – but isn’t that what everyone is so pissed off about now?

I’m not here to promote Ron Paul. What I want to ask you to do is think about  what problems we face as a nation? If you think it’s out of control government which incessantly reaches into our lives, our wallets and our children’s wallets, do you really think that the Republicans are going to solve this problem? If you think that maybe we should re-examine our foreign policy which has our military in 130 countries, do you think the Republicans will change a thing? If you have started to realize that the Federal Reserve and our entire banking system is systemically corrupt, do you think that the Republicans will reform it? Have you been woken up by Glenn Beck to see what it really means to be free? Are you beginning to understand the revolutionary (but peaceful) change of our government that is required to actually make a difference? Remember, ACORN got a lot of money under Republicans! The Republicans have made a deal with the devil to try and hold on to small bits of power, but dare not take on the out of control monster that our Federal government has become. They don’t want to, because the thing that Beck won’t tell you is that they have built their own institutions and money machine to fund their own pet causes, that they are fine with Wall Street playing it’s rigged game, that they are in the pockets of large insurance companies who have learned to make the existing government interventions work for them and just want to go on with business as usual. They won’t admit that Fox is feeding you pablum, exciting your furies to be nothing but tools for Republican power. I mean, do you guys know who Roger Ailes is? Do you for a moment not think that he’s about supporting the Republicans?

The Tea Part movement gave me some hope last year, following that trader’s plaintive call from the exchange floor in Chicago. But now I see that Sarah Palin is going to be speaking at the Tea Party convention? Let’s call a spade a spade – she is a populist with a very poor understanding of government, economics, history and foreign affairs. Anyone who thinks she is qualified to be president has let their ideology trump their reason. Did you watch the press conference where she resigned the Governorship of Alaska? I swear, afterwards, I wasn’t actually sure she resigned. She was so bumbling and imprecise, I say this reveals her weak mind. Did you see her admit on Fox this week that up until being briefed for the Vice Presidential debates, she thought that Saddam Hussein was likely involved somehow in the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11? Do you have any idea how ignorant that is? Btw, she basically admitted recently that she believes she’s on a mission from God! Maybe that makes the evangelicals out there happy, but those of you who don’t think that teaching intelligent design as an valid alternative to evolution is a good idea should exit the doors of the Tea Party movement immediately.

No, this is the canary in the mine shaft for the Tea Party movement. They have been fully co-opted by the right wing fundamentalists of the Republican party. If you vote these guys in again, our country will still go down the tubes – just a little bit slower, that’s all. Those of you who are concerned should stop falling for the Republicans games – they don’t care about you, they only want the power back.

There is a real alternative out there – the Libertarians! I know, Rush Limbaugh is telling you that a third party is bad for the cause, but I say this is the only chance we’ll have. If enough people support Libertarians, we have a real chance of pulling people from the left and right by the time the next presidential election comes round. There is a Libertarian running in Mass, his name is Joe Kennedy (no relation to the drunken killer, Ted Kennedy, may he burn in hell). He polls at 3 percent, which is a miracle in and of itself, given his meager resources. The Libertarian Party is working very hard to put up viable candidates all across the country – so take a minute, look at what they stand for and ask yourself, which candidate has the best chance of dealing with the problems as you see them? Stop, think – Libertarianism is what it really means to be conservative anyway.

Ronald Reagan said it best: “If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”

Technorati Tags: libertarian, libertarian politics, libertarianism

I’ve seen the ranting on right-wing sites about Obama’s executive order granting immunities and privileges to Interpol. The line of thinking is this is just another step in subjugating the U.S. to international law, and that the “police officers” of the Interpol will be free to operate with impugnity, in the U.S. , out of the reach of our courts and will be the enforcement arm of the ICC when Obama signs the U.S. up for it.

The entire argument is wrong, meaning factually incorrect. First of all, the same privilege has been given to the International Red Cross and seventy other NGOs and international entities, so really, they should calm themselves. Second. Interpol has no police officers and doesn’t operate under the color of any law other than the country in which it is present. It’s “agents” are police officers or special agents from member countries whose only authority is that granted to them in their home jurisdictions. In other words any law enforcement activity undertaken is by law enforcement in a member country, under that countries control, jurisdiction and discretion.

It gets worse. Interpol’s mission is intelligence and record keeping, essentially operating as an interchange between countries and a clearinghouse for warrants and other criminal records and information. If you bother just going to its website, and read its charter, that’s as plain as day. Interpol does have some core competencies, including art theft and it will advise local law enforcement on cases from time to time. Oh yeah, the worse part – Interpol has never arrested anybody, so the right wing paranoids once again have taken a kernel of truth and turned it into a lie.

As a Libertarian, of course I’m concerned about U.S. sovereignty, but sadly, by continuously raising the alarm over this issue, the right is only diminishing their credibility which is needed for truly substantive issues. By ranting and raving without apparently any fact checking, or by intentionally lying, how can they expect to be taken seriously?

Technorati Tags: libertarian, libertarianism

Perhaps our federal government is just too busy meddling in health care, or energy or making sure that bailed-out bankers can still get huge paychecks, but really, I cannot believe what I’m reading about the terrorist attempt that barely missed killing three hundred or so Americans on Christmas day!

We need to be outraged by this. Apparently there were numerous operational failures by DHS and possibly some other agencies. It’s one thing if the attack circumvented our security measures, but in this case, it seems we just screwed up – again! Did our government not learn anything from 9/11? Below I categorize the screw-ups that we know about already. In and of themselves, they are damning evidence of failure by those who are supposed to protect us.

1. The Brits had already banned him from their shores in May of this year. Check here for deets. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1950280,00.html

2. He was on a ‘watch list’ that contains 500k names. Tell me this, what good is a list with half a million names? This brings up the bigger mess of the ‘no fly list’, which has become so full of false positives that it regularly breeches the rights of completely innocent people who cannot seem to get themselves off the list. Btw, that list costs us about one hundred million dollars per year to maintain! How can the underwear bomber not have made it on that list? Here’s a link for more on the list. http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/03/nofly-list-100-milli.html

3. There was an interview of an eyewitness of Abdulmutallab’s boarding process in Amsterdam on Breitbart.com today. This eyewitness claims, very credibly, that Abdulmutallab was escorted to the final ticket checkpoint in Amsterdam by a well dressed Indian man in his 50s, telling the gate attendant that his companion, Abdulmutallab, didn’t have a passport, was from the Sudan and that he needed to get on the airplane. See the link here http://www.breitbart.tv/interview-witness-says-sharp-dressed-man-aided-terror-suspect-onto-plane-without-passport/

4. He traveled that day on a one way ticket purchased with cash and no checked luggage. That alone in the U.S. will get you excess scrutiny before boarding any flight, even if you are a crippled grandmother. How come we don’t have systems in place to catch any international passengers with these characteristics? If we do, how come this guy wasn’t interviewed and discovered before boarding? If he was interviewed, who did the interviewing and what transpired?

5. His father warned us about him over a month ago. A well known Nigerian banker, he had great credibility and clearly was going against his own personal interests by warning us that he felt his son’s radicalism had become a danger. What happened to that report? What did we do about it? I would like to think that the close to a trillion USD or so we spend on intelligence, defense and federal law enforcement would result in his father being immediately interviewed by capable operatives, with his son at least being interviewed, if not being put under surveillance immediately. I mean, if we aren’t put on alert when a credible person comes to our embassy and reports a threat, what are we doing?

Where is the accountability on these failures? Who is losing their job? I know for a fact that Janet Napolitano’s focus at DHS is political correctness – not our security. Her office communicates to DHS employees all the time – but rarely about national security. She is a bureaucrat – not a warrior! We need a warrior in charge of our battle against these terrorists.

This is what happens when we empower government to do so many other things than just protect us. Secondary concerns, administrivia and internal politics get cloudier and cloudier as the organization grows larger – and DHS is a huge mess. We need congressional hearings on this immediately and we need personnel changes as senior levels of DHS – starting with Napolitano to make sure everyone there knows that this is their number one mission. If we can’t nail terrorists like this, with so much foreknowledge, then nothing else they do is worth talking about.

Technorati Tags: homeland security, libertarian government, libertarianism

I’ve spent years trying to understand the case for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and the substantial criticisms of it. I’m a skeptic, so I’ve listened to the criticisms, hoping to find the truth and while I’ve seen valid criticism by the likes of Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen (to name but a few credible climate scientists who are highly critical of the IPCC science), I’ve also seen the rebuttals by AGW proponents that seem to be sensible – but I truly don’t have the scientific training to really evaluate any of it. I’m sure many of you find yourselves in the same boat. Worse yet,  it seems that actual dialog has broken down. The AGW camp has closed off debate, saying for years that the science is settled, and at this point, I’m only sure of one thing; the science isn’t settled. Even the IPCC report from ’07 states that the probability of their predictions being correct is 90% and in science, 10% leaves a lot of room for doubt. It certainly means things aren’t settled. Gravity is settled (sort of), thermodynamics is settled – and even these fields are subject to further refinement. It’s the height of arrogance for the scientists, politicians and activists to keep repeating this lie.

Furthermore, the politicization of this issue, at first from the left and more recently from the right has me deeply suspicious of all comers. I mean, Al Gore is a very poor spokesperson for AGW as he is a partisan and is not a scientist, and his movie was a filled with inaccuracies and exaggerations. For those of you not aware of it, the only impartial review of his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, took place in a court in the UK and the fact based evaluation of its content concluded that the movie was filled with hysterical exaggeration and outright lies. Just as appallingly, as of late, the loudmouths on the right have taken to saying that AGW has been disproved and that it’s all a hoax with, frankly, less credibility than Al Gore. For me, when I see a ‘true believer’, flushed with his/her righteousness about a topic like this, I run for the hills, particularly when they are a partisan and non-scientist. To make matters worse, many greens have blended this cause with their socialist/communist leanings and conclude that AGW is proof that capitalism is ruining the world, with the likes of that thuggish despot, Hugo Chavez getting a standing ovation in Copenhagen for dissing capitalism. We’ve managed to make this a left/right issue and it’s pretty scary for those of us who actually want to know what’s going on.

And yet, and yet  – this is really serious stuff, right? I mean, if the AGW folks are right, well we are in desperate straits.  Indeed, if their worst predictions are correct humanity itself is threatened when you look out over the next several hundred years, with some impacts being felt much closer such as ocean acidification, to name one. This issue is far more important than many of the issues that get the attention of our leaders but by allowing this issue to become so politicized, they have insured that creating consensus will not be achieved, preventing us from moving forward with policies that are sober and meaningful. As a Libertarian, I’m very nervous about the breadth and width of proposed government interventions that are being proposed, as once again, the left has conflated issues, continuously prattling on about ‘green jobs creation’ when the real examples we have of such policies in Spain and Germany have been abject failures (even though some people are brash enough to simply ignore the facts and claim victory). For those of you who don’t know, the Spanish program, in place for some years, has only created 1/8th the jobs it was supposed to yield. This again makes the policy prescription of many on the left about AGW solutions very suspect to me as a Libertarian. Btw, any free marketeer could have predicted the failure of these initiatives. Now we are embarking on a similar course, and there is no reason to think that our results will differ.

I also have witnessed outright hostility to those who suggest that we look at engineering solutions to solve the problem, which again makes me wonder, why? I mean, if we could reduce CO2 via technology while we gradually reduce emissions too,  this would be a ‘silver bullet’. Now the technology isn’t there yet and there is no guarantee that it will be, but one would think a dispassionate analysis of the solutions to this problems would conclude this is certainly the most desirable path. I’ve also witnessed this dialog morph into a familiar Manichean dyad, with the U.S. and the rest of the west owing the developed world payment for our CO2 glut. This is now being referred to under the rubric of ‘climate justice’ by the likes of that bleating idiot, Naomi Klein, as well as many others. If we are tallying up global financial scores, I do ask myself what are we owed for fighting back the tyranny of Germany, Japan, Russia and China in the last century? What is the west owed for the over one trillion in aid it’s spent in the ‘developing world’ over the past 40 years? Mind you, I’m not getting into whether we should have given the aid (my answer is a resounding NO) but when we are doing a financial accounting, it does seem that the ‘climate debt’ we supposedly owe the undeveloped world comes from pretty strange accounting. Once again, it reeks of anti-capitalist, anti-western, anti-development worldviews and while that may be a valid perspective, it diminishes the credibility of those claiming science is on their side.

So, given all of the above, my suggestion is that we should do the following:

1. Sponsor independent verification of the IPCC science – The recent CRU email scandal is only one of many episodes that have led a large number of scientists to question the validity of the science underlying the IPCC findings. I think that even if you wholeheartedly agree with everything that the IPCC claims, you should realize that to create government policy of this magnitude,  bipartisan and public consensus needs to be achieved. At this point, without some policing of this effort and independent verification, folks like me who want to do the right thing, as well as those ‘deniers’ out there, will never get on board. If the problem is as dire as its made out to be, and the necessary solution is as drastic as proposed, then spending a bit more time by opening this up to get more people on board is warranted.

2. Have a real debate – I wonder why major media outlets, policy institutions and others haven’t shamed both sides into publicly debating these issues. One would think that a PBS series or CNN forum on an ongoing basis would draw a solid audience. I would stipulate that no hacks or politicians can participate and rather, would only allow scientists to participate. I think we all would quickly realize that there is serious disagreement about AGW and it’s impacts, but I also think the right course of action would become apparent to a majority of policymakers and the voting public.

3. Adopt a ‘precautionary’ stance for policy – Given that the consequences of ignoring AGW are devastating,  even if the probability that the AGWers are right is low, we should be taking sensible steps that are low to moderately disruptive/expensive to gird ourselves against AGW as a precaution. I know, you true believers already claim ‘it’s too late’ and the only solution is massive policy shifts now, but the reality is that these policies will not be implemented until the AGWers bother to get the majority of folks on board. So until that time, government should be prudent by taking some significant actions, but stop short of destroying the economies of the West.

Can you imagine if Obama came out and called for this approach? His approval would skyrocket, but more importantly, he would signal that he understands the there are legitimate concerns about AGW, and that he realizes the case needs to be built based on facts, not rhetoric. It would be consistent with his campaign promise to be post-ideological and the right would be frozen for good on this issue, but unfortunately, I think Obama is going to go full steam ahead. The recent EPA decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant presages AGW reduction policies being implemented via fiat versus legislation. This may turn out to be a huge mistake, because it opens up all AGW science to legal challenge and it will likely not hold up under a finding of fact in a court of law.

As a Libertarian, I think the underlying problem with all of the environment is the ‘tragedy of the commons’, wherein the lack of private ownership stakes in this outcome causes the neglect in the first place. Accordingly, I think that our approach should focus the following.

1. Fighting the corporatism that creates truly stupid solutions like ethanol subsidies and the other hundreds of pork projects being funded by the Federal government.

2. We should support mechanisms such as ‘cap and trade’ which have worked in other problem areas, once a real scientific finding is reached, as in intermediate step to monetize environmental outcomes.

3. In the end, we should support policies that encourage the most local and voluntary solutions, which take advantage of individual actions from the bottom up instead the top down model we have, which are hugely wasteful, coercive and usually wrongheaded.

Most of all, Libertarians need to speak up loudly on this issue because we are mostly not really participating yet. One could make the case that a Libertarian society would not suffer from these problems in the first place, but that is the topic for another article.

Technorati Tags: global warming, libertarian, libertarian thought, libertarianism

That’s right, just in case you had any doubt whether federal bureaucrats were out of touch with the rest of us, here comes this gem.http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/12/11/federal-salaries-explode/ Anyone with a libertarian thought in their head should see this as a ‘canary in the mine’. It is mostly due to the unionization of government labor, which in term has created the civil service pay system that escalates ever upwards. In addition, people game the system to their own benefit with professional gusto that would make most in the private sector blush. It’s now outrageous and should be curtailed – but it won’t be. Most of these people, btw, are unemployable in the private sector – except as consultants who will charge the government double what they cost when they were employees. Happens every day.  I wrote a piece on it a while ago, here it is for those of you who care. http://libertariancomment.com/government-workers-are-the-new-rich/

Technorati Tags: federal government, government employment, libertarian thought