Roughly overheard moments ago on CNN: Bush, re: the “stimulus package”:
“This bill shouldn’t be held up, it’s important. The sooner people get their check, the faster the stimulus can work”.
The unspoken assumptions in this are so big they make Deelishis‘ ass look small in comparison. Yeesh…
First off, consider where that money is coming from — tax dollars. How exactly does giving back money that was taken help the economy any more than simply not taking it in the first place? Sure, psychologically some people are happy as hell when they get a refund when they do their taxes, but the conventional wisdom is built on a foundation of ignorance; a refund means the government got interest off of something they never should’ve had. Being happy about that development strikes me as a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
As if this isn’t enough, consider what is meant by “stimulus”. To our alleged representatives, the problem with the economy is that people aren’t spending enough. One look at the amount of debt we’re holding explodes that one. More than likely, most of the stimulus money is going to be used to pay bills — that is, unless we wish to court even more disaster. Funny, because the one other thing that would make sense to do with it, saving the money, would render their whole plan moot.
Of course, the worst of all the implications here is that the current downturn is a minor fluctuation, rather than systemic in nature. This actually contradicts itself, as if it’s a minor thing then why is legislation being proposed at all? The only answer here is that it’s yet another face-saving move, as image is more important than results in politics.
If there’s no expectation of privacy in a public bathroom, then why are there locks on the doors? Hell, why do the stalls even have doors at all?
Yeah, I’m kinda late with this, but it’s been grating at me this long. All things being equal, I’d rather endure the remote chance of someone fucking in the next stall than open the door for the flourishing of toilet-watching warrants.
I did.
Me, last April, re: the Fred Thompson hype:
I hate it when people cite polls about non-candidates as if it’s indication they’d win if they did run. See, the speculators in the media don’t realize that people who aren’t active politicians virtually always have elevated positives […] When someone isn’t going through the standard song and dance to get elected they come across as somewhat human, people like that.
AP via MSNBC today:
Republican Fred Thompson, the actor-politician who attracted more attention as a potential presidential candidate than as a real one, quit the race for the White House on Tuesday after a string of poor finishes in early primary and caucus states.
“I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort,” Thompson said. “Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”
Thompson’s fate was sealed last Saturday in the South Carolina primary, when he finished third in a state that he had said he needed to win. […] Thompson, best known as the gruff district attorney on NBC’s “Law & Order,” placed third in Iowa and South Carolina, two states seemingly in line with his right-leaning pitch and laid-back style, and he fared even worse in the four other states that have held contests thus far. Money already tight, he ran out of it altogether as the losses piled up.
Oh well. Onward with the confusion! If the writers strike lasts long enough & the results of these primaries keep splitting like they have, the GOP convention might be the best show on by then. Train wrecks, fuck yeah!
Found this amusing:
Sympathizers submitted hundreds of questions to al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri’s “on-line interview” before a recent deadline. Among them: Why hasn’t al-Qaida attacked the U.S. again, why isn’t it attacking the Israelis and when will it be more active in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria?
So far, there have been no answers.
Al-Qaida’s media arm, Al-Sahab, announced in December that al-Zawahri would take questions from the public posted on Islamic militant Web sites and would respond “as soon as possible.”
More than 900 entries - many with multiple questions - were posted on the main Islamist Web site until the cutoff date of Jan. 16. After the deadline, the questions disappeared from that site and no answers have yet appeared.
One thing is clear from the questions: self-proclaimed al-Qaida supporters are as much in the dark about the terror network’s operations and intentions as Western analysts and intelligence agencies.
Some of those posting questions sound worried: Does al-Qaida have a long-term strategy?
One, allegedly a former Arab al-Qaida fighter in Iraq, complained about Iraqi fighters discriminating against non-Iraqi mujahedeen. Others wanted advice: Should followers be focusing their jihad, or holy war, against Arab regimes, or against Americans?
This would be yet another example of how wildly off the mark the image of jihadi terrorism is in the minds of our self-anointed protectors. Clearly there’s a lot more sympathizers than there are actual al-qaeda members, this isn’t the monolithic all-engulfing wave conveniently led by Hitler-in-a-turban that’s so colorfully thrown about within right-wing shouting circles.
“If you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band.” -Murray Rothbard
Shorter Sudhir Venkatesh: “…and vice versa, for that matter.”
The link above is to the Amazon listing for Sudhir’s book “Gang Leader for a Day”, which I recently bought. I remembered the story mentioned in “Freakonomics”, about how somehow through the course of his grad studies he ended up on the inside with a Chicago street gang and the projects they operated out of, saw his book at the store (LOL @ the B-Boy stance on the cover, btw) and couldn’t pass it up.
As cliche as it sounds, the review blurbs are right: it really is in turns sad, yet funny in others. One thing I came away with though that particularly amused me was how the gang actually operated. Their self-portrayals — sometimes as misunderstood businessmen (the gang sold crack), other times as if they were community organizers — were understandable and delusional at the same time, downplaying the negatives and playing up the positives. They even at one point started joking about Sudhir being their director of PR. However, the one comparison that fit best was the one that the gang never brought up, and even Sudhir himself only glanced at: government.
Laid out in the book are details of the responsibilities the gangsters took on beyond selling drugs. It seemed like most of the tenants were running black- or grey-market businesses out of their apartments, everything from selling food via a side-deal w/ a local grocer, to fixing cars in the lot outside, to renting extra space to squatters and prostitutes, and every single one of them had to get prior approval from the gang. There were fees paid to the gang members for the right to operate, and for security purposes, with penalties if anyone hid their activities. On top of this, the drug dealers expected favors as well. Combine this with the fact that, due to the reputation of the projects, ambulances weren’t even worth calling in an emergency & police generally stayed away, and you have in the form of this gang a self-anointed authority that extracts rents and taxes from people, who they treat with disdain mostly, except for the occasional display of condescending paternalism for their own purposes. They rule by fear, and consider whatever the hell they feel like taking as proper payment for “protection” and for mediating disputes. They constantly worry about conspiracies to take them down from rival gangs, when most conflicts start because of some random idiot and not a plan. The gang members that actually live there being largely mere foot soldiers taking orders from outside, the gang has no legitimate claim to the property that they make rules for, their only recourse being “well, we have guns”.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Considering the factors that contributed to such an environment — the escalating “War on Drugs”, the promotion of suburbanization & funneling of poor people into ever-shrinking areas, the political intersection of paternalism & elitism — it’s highly ironic that in response these people basically formed a mini-state. Definitely something to chew on for awhile…
Apparently even the FBI can’t keep up with their bills:
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.
In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation “was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.
“We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,” according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.
Excuse me while I roll around on the floor laughing maniacally.
Props.
Due to the existence of Ron Paul this election cycle, Michael Kinsley decides to put out an “examining libertarianism” column (a few months to late, if you ask me). He starts off awkwardly friendly at first:
The libertarian perspective is useful, and undervalued. Why does the government pay farmers not to grow food? Why are medications for fatal diseases sometimes held off the market in case they aren’t safe? (Compared to death?) Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether some government activity or other expands freedom or contracts it.
Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny of the majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring that people with odd Social Security numbers have to give $1,000 to people with even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what the government does is essentially like that.
A realization that even people who he thinks of as kooks may have a point? Who are you, and what have you done to Mike?
After this, he says “alright, enough with the pleasantries” and gets to aggressively missing the point:
So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want. We have to decide that together.
The type of libertarians that still vote aren’t calling for an end to the concept of national defense anyway, they just oppose how it’s done. That he mentions this shows he sees no real difference between limited-government libertarians and no-government libertarians. Ironic thing about that is, the deeper you look into what the military is actually used for, the more the end-the-state types have a point: when was the last unprovoked war that was purely for self-defense reasons? The decision making mechanism for whether or not collective force is necessary seems to have a severely stuck “yes” button”, thanks to weapons manufacturers & oil companies slamming it so hard. If this is “deciding together” then I’d hate to see what unilateral nuttiness looks like…
Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. Hey, let’s issue stamps, y’see, and use the revenues to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to user it — and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency. (emphasis mine)
Um…WTF?
I have NEVER heard any remotely serious libertarian propose this, ever. The minarchists wouldn’t bother with such a radical departure since it’d be even more roundabout than preventing war the usual way, and the anarchists would have alarms going off in their heads at the word “corporation” in that phrase and ask what the hell the difference would be.
Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection). (emphasis mine)
Only if by “libertarian” you mean Neal Boortz. Actual libertarians have generally come to see conservatives as the greater evil these days, since they tend to see everything in terms of “tradition” & maintaining their personal definition of order at all costs. Hell, in the short term, even anarchists acknowledge the tradeoff.
Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: you are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation — to make inconsistent decisions in different cases. And usually there is no one “right” answer: There is a spectrum of acceptable answers, involving tradeoffs (dirty air versus fewer jobs, etc.) that ought to be made democratically — that is, through government.
Of course, if Mikey dug deeper he’d encounter many libertarians that would argue the reason there is more pollution than is acceptable is because of systematic subsidizing of it. I’m not doing his research for him though, so we’re moving on…
Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land, private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competition with other routes keeps it all efficient.
Or you could take a Rothbardian approach to it: consider property taken via tax dollars as abandoned, and acknowledge legitimate ownership via occupancy & use. Rather than being corporatized, the roads would be owned by the people that live by them. Say what you will about the feasibility of this approach, but you have to admit there’d be a HUGE incentive to keep things in working order.
And what about, um, intersections? Well, markets would recognize that it is more efficient for one company to own both roads at major intersections, and when that happened the company would have an incentive to strike the right balance between customers on each highway. And stoplights? Ultimately, the author had worked his way up to a giant monopoly that would build, own, and maintain all the roads, and charge an annual fee to people who wanted to use them. None dare call it government. (emphasis mine)
Please Mike, tell us who this “libertarian” is that proposed this pointless parallel monopoly so they can have their head examined.
Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn’t people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the maze at the FDA. The Terry Shiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism’s greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.
The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to a right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you’re allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren’t you allowed to drive without a seat belt? (emphasis mine)
Let me guess: because the costs of your potentially more severe injuries in the case of an accident tend to be passed on to others? Or because the feds threatened to withhold highway funding from the states if they didn’t require them, like they did with speed limits & raising the drinking age?
The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on others. I would pay good money not to have to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam, or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right like the right to die may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or irresponsible is not.
Well, I was half right. His bit about motive is awkward though: you mean to tell me that an act that virtually guarantees death is OK, but an act that merely raises the likelihood of it isn’t? Of course no one skips a seatbelt because they want the extra risk, IMO they do it because either they find it uncomfortable or they’re just lazy. I personally wear one every time, and I still don’t see where an adult should have to be told this. If an act simply being reckless, solely to the person doing it, is enough to justify criminalizing it, then how long until we start locking up skydivers?
Llibertarians are quick to see hidden costs of ignoring libertarian principles and slow to see such costs in adhering to them. For example, Tucker Carlson reports in the Dec. 31 New Republic that Ron Paul wants to end the federal ban on unpasteurized milk. No one should want to drink unpasteurized milk, and almost no one does. Paul himself doesn’t. But it bothers him that the government tells people they cannot do something they shouldn’t do. Libertarians would say that if most people want pasteurized milk, the market will supply it. Firms will emerge to certify that milk has been pasteurized. These firms will compete, keeping them honest.
So yes, a Rube Goldberg contraption of capitalism could replace a straightforward government regulation. But what if you aren’t interested in turning your grocery shopping into an ideological adventure? All that is lost by letting the government take care of it is the right of a few idiots to be idiots. That right deserves respect. But not much.
In case you hadn’t noticed though, containers of milk at the grocery store have these things on them called “labels”. They say relevant things like the fat content, amount of sodium, carbs, and oh yeah whether or not it’s been pasteurized. This despite the fact that selling unpasteurized milk is so strictly regulated that it might as well be illegal, so one can assume that if you see milk at the store it’s been pasteurized. Sure, the labels are a government thing, but it does not follow that the information would suddenly disappear if raw milk were legally no different form the current kind. More likely, raw milk would be an enthusiasts niche, a higher cost product for the few who care that much about it, and the rest would go about our business like usual — kinda like how w/ beer most people just get Bud or Miller, meanwhile I’m looking for something from here.
A similar flaw affects libertarian thinking about government-mandated redistribution. Extreme libertarians believe this is immoral or even unconstitutional, and even more moderate libertarians disapprove of government social welfare programs as an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers.
If this is still seen as such a huge split, then he hasn’t heard of Georgists or Mutualists — or, for that matter, taken a look at the federal budget. By far, the majority of redistribution is not for the poor, but for the rich to get even more money — corporate bailouts, subsidies, narrowly targeted tax breaks that end up being more than they paid, the constant goosing of the housing market, the watering down of the dollar for the benefit of Wall Street…oh yeah, did I mention those weapons manufacturers?
The way Michael Kinsley reacts to libertarianism makes me think his exposure to it begins with Ron Paul (an inaccurate representative, in that he’s more of a constitutionalist conservative who happens to make some libertarian points) and ends with John “hack artist” Stossel. I’m sure he has the time to dig deeper, as his column doesn’t seem particularly labor-intensive.
I notice during the speeches with loyal supporters, every candidate makes reference to winning “with your help”, addressing the crowd. This makes no sense whatsoever, and here’s why:
Now, relatively few people vote in elections at all. Even fewer vote in primaries. A number smaller than THAT actually pay attention enough to actively support a candidate and show up at those damn rallies. Regardless of their reasons, these are inherently folks who have made up their minds — the converted, if you will.
Among the reasons people have for voting for someone, whether sensible (support their policies, find them to be the most capable person for the position) or not (reflexive support of their particular tribe in the Culture War), none are controllable by the dedicated supporters at all. As such, they are functionally irrelevant to whether or not their pick wins. No doubt they’d respond to that with “but we’re spreading the word, getting the message out!”. However, depending on how you define the communication, they’re either being passively dragged along in denial (donating to a campaign doesn’t mean they’ll use it to communicate what you think they will, if anything. Besides, it doesn’t require showing up in person.), or they’re the political equivalent of Amway salesmen.
