Here is the story. Nick Gillespie says:
"We’re the Sith Lords of American politics," he says, referring to
the "Star Wars" baddies. "We can show up in any group. We’re both
terrifying and devilishly attractive."
Since I’m not either of those things, and I’ve made other claims about the Sith Lords, I said something different:
Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University says
the new breed of Swiftian commentary found on shows such as "The Daily
Show" and "The Colbert Report," though not explicitly libertarian, also
has contributed to the current libertarian moment. "The way to be funny is to make fun of something," Mr. Cowen notes.
There is more by me at the very end of the article (yes, you too can look into my heart). In part libertarianism has become cool because Republicanism has become so uncool, thereby leaving a cultural gap which Hillary Clinton alone cannot fill.
You forgot to mention South Park! By far the most fiercely libertarian show on television. So I guess Comedy Central can be credited in part with making libertarianism cool? Wait, do we want to be cool? I thought libertarianism was a “counter-signal”?
I was surprised to see a fair sized Ron Paul demonstration on a street corner here in Orange County, California. (Any idea why it included a hot chick in a short nurse’s uniform and high heels? She actually, literally, caused a traffic accident while I was waiting for the light to change.)
I guess I’m intrigued. I consider myself a lapsed Republican at this point. I’ve certainly had libertarian leanings over the years, but the Libertarian party was always pretty out there. (I think Luis Rukeyser said in a book, years ago, “I’d be Libertarian if Libertarians weren’t all nuts.”)
So I guess to make the deal, between me and modern libertarians, I’ll ask this question … where are they (you) on science? I could be a libertarian-with-externalities, and an environmentalism in that sense. I don’t think I could be a libertarian-with-denial though.
Ron Paul’s “environmentalism through property rights” seems to be totally silent on externalities.
(I’ve actually got a degree in the sciences, which ‘ruins’ me for a lot of conservative causes, these days. I have to ‘unlearn’ the science to get on board.)
I’d call myself libertarian, but I feel like the term carries a bit of baggage, as most others think libertarians don’t believe market failures exist, that we’re all in favor of a flat tax, want to abolish the Federal Reserve, etc.
I guess “economic conservative” would be more accurate.
Libertarianism, alas, is the flipside of socialism.
Actually, there are plenty of libertarian socialists. They just don’t get the press that the unlibertarian socialists do.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
I agree. That wrong solution is “pass a law!”.
Ron Paul has indeed sparked a revolution. But it was a revolution that was waiting to be unleashed. The whole phenomenon could be explained as blowback from the Republicans getting into bed with the Religious Right.
Oh, and don’t forget Harry Potter:
Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy
I’ve adopted Richard Maybury’s “Juris Naturalist” to more clearly identify myself as someone who believes in the Natural Law and the libertarian policy positions which emerge from that legal process.
Nathanael Snow
http://naturalaw.failuretorefrain.com
A leftist Libertarian is really a Democrat.
A rightist Libertarian is really a Republican.
A centrist Libertarian is really a Moderate.
And a libertarian Libertarian is really nuts!
The GOP doesn’t have the ability to satisfy the demands of its entire power base, including so-called “Republitarians.” Once the GOP started selling out libertarian principles, it was inevitable that Republitarians would start dropping the Repub part of the label.
From my perspective, in the 70s and 80s the republican party tended to have a quite libertarian outlook. That seemed to change when they hooked up with the religious right.
They started riding moral bandwagons and seemed to sell out some of the values of individual liberty in order to win votes from that group (mainly in the south it seems).
They also seemed to lose all perspective on fiscal responsibility (not that they ever really had it).
So now, the republicans represent fundamentalist christions, hawks, and people who belive that government should give businesses big tax breaks. Damn the deficit, full speed ahead!!
The democrats tend to be tax and spend types, but with a more libertarian social stance.
Neither is very satifying to what I would call the American concept of freedom. That leaves the libertarians.
My first reaction to the link was “cool, I’m like a Sith Lord”.
Then I read Tyler’s other link, and realized I was like a countervailing force to the dangerously powerful Jedi Council (even more cool) who fortunately had the right people in office, but clearly that didn’t last, noting that it never does last, thus paving the way for tyranny.
< /geek>
By the way, the opposite of tyranny is liberty. If you’re not a libertarian then you’re a tyrant. Even if you are well intentioned, and do it for the children, you are still a tyrant if you attempt to impose via government force your agenda on innocent, nonpredatory adults.
Also of note (for odograph perhaps, who isn’t sold on liberty it seems) is that just because profit seeking markets don’t supply a desired social good doesn’t mean it is logical to have government try to supply that social good instead.
First off, government has a lousy incentive structure so it usually sucks at producing anything, and sucks up more resources the more it fails to produce what it was intended to produce.
Second, there is a third alternative, namely charity. There is a clear tradeoff between big government and big donations to charity, with people from countries and states with big government donating significantly less than those in countries with more liberty. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that taxes reduce the amount one can give. But more importantly, it seems that people refuse to be suckers. If the government is producing, or supposed to be producing, or thought to be producing, a desired social good, then people astutely use their money elsewhere. On the other hand, when there is a glaring social need, and neither the government nor the for-profit sector is providing it, then people tend to step up to the plate.
Witness the Gates Foundation doing things like financing a vaccine for malaria which governments never thought to do, despite a couple of trillion dollars worth of foreign aid to poor countries over the decades.
Thus big government is not compassionate, it is just the opposite, it detracts from private sector compassion, because people have less ability to give when they are taxed through the nose, and because they wrongly think “someone” (namely the government) is doing something about it with all the taxes they pay.
happyjuggler0:
“By the way, the opposite of tyranny is liberty. If you’re not a libertarian then you’re a tyrant. Even if you are well intentioned, and do it for the children, you are still a tyrant if you attempt to impose via government force your agenda on innocent, nonpredatory adults.”
I thought that the opposite of liberty was government – i.e. the basic idea is that either people make their ideas themselves or other people make them for them. Is every case where someone doesn’t get to decide something for themself tyranny?
I thought that the idea behind a well-ordered society/government was simply that the right people are making the decisions concerning the appropriate things – so that if people aren’t free to make decisions about what is understood to be other people’s property/refuse cooperation in the maintenance of a minimal state/etc. that is properly understood to be a surrendering/limitation of freedom (a giving up of liberty – to a certain extent, people get to make decisions about things concerning things other than themselves), but really isn’t what is meant when people use the word “tyrrany.”
oh, sorry, sluggish brain after the most excellent mountain bike ride on public lands … feel free to comment on next-gen ‘liberties’ in a curtailed world.
odograph,
The reason tuna is in peril is lack of property rights. If fishing rights were owned the same way that farmland is owned, then the owners would take care of it for the long run, the same way they do with their cattle or pigs. There would be no such thing as an impending shortage or tuna crisis, only a shortage at a price.
The lack of property rights is surely in the realm of government failure.
What if the rights owners run a spreadsheet, use Hotelling’s rule for non-renewable resources, and discover that they can maximize the yield during their lifetime with immediate harvest and extinction?
Tuna isn’t nonrenewable. They’d get more money for it by selling the rights than making tuna extinct. Then they can spend all their money during their lifetime if they want to, it’s their money.
Ont he other hand, if you’re worried about the lack of responsibility or insight of a monopoly owner, then you have no further to look than the current owner. Personally what I’d do is divide up the ocean into GPS defined territories owned contiguously by at least three new corporations per (US) coast, and absolve any antitrust rules that prevent them from agreeing to have a no-fish boundary between their territories, or that prevent them from agreeing to quota (on their coast) like a cartel would.
Even taking into account details I’m overlooking, this is radically better than the way the current owner runs things.
The libertarian ideology does has a kind of neo-Luddite subtext to it. Anyone who talks about “going back” to the gold standard (a.k.a., Amish money), clearly doesn’t expect much from the 21st Century.
Yes Cyrus, I wasn’t really backing away from that. All we need conceive is a “minimal stable population” that is large compared to the “maximum seasonal harvest.”
Or as I tried to put it before, the rights owner may choose to treat a renewable resource as non-renewable if the numbers look good (to him, at that point in time).
Really the thing about the property rights argument is that for it to protect resources and future generations in general, it must be a universal rule. The owner must always be force, by nature and reason, on the course of preservation. That’s not our history as I remember it.
FWIW, I’ve heard the fisheries called a “cookie jar” problem. It is in our nature to reach in, and take one more, until they are gone. That makes it a tough thing to solve. I favor marine preserves and ‘no take zones’ because they … lock at least some of the cookie jars.
After six and years of record spending and ballooning deficits under Bush, just about anyone can claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism.
Tuna? Please, making a species extinct is not any way to maximize value. The worth of the last few tuna in existence would FAR outweigh any gains from selling their steaks. The same goes for whales.
odograph, you can call it a cookie jar or a tragedy of the commons, but the result of the same. Without ownership scarce resources cannot be distributed efficiently. With ownership, the value of the last few examples of any important species would always have far more value to the environmentalists, preservationists, and future fishermen than they would as tasty steaks.
Who isn’t for “good” government? Can anyone name a person who’s said “damn, I feel like getting some bad government today”? Not even a libertarian should think so poorly of truly good government. People have been wishing for good government for thousands of years. Lot of good it did them. To say that libertarianism isn’t profitable or practical when it hasn’t been applied since 1776 is absurd. Compare and contrast the success of the American Revolution, Confederation and then Republic with the success of “good government” hopefuls throughout history.
If you’re going to come on here and rag on libertarianism, at least drop the silly straw men. Libertarianism has nothing to do with more or less government. It is a philosophy concerning the use of physical force and violence in society. It so happens that government is a monopoly of force, and so libertarianism concerns itself greatly with government. But it by no means says “less government is good” or “more government is bad”. Instead it tries to answer the question of when and how force should be used.
Bill Maher a libertarian? No, he’s a liberal. He hates Democrats, but he’s a liberal. He wishes drugs were legal, but that’s a liberal position (or it used to be).
He acted like Ron Paul was a nut the first time he was on his program, by mocking RP’s “crazy” plan to gradually abolish unnecessary government departments, like Ed., Ag., the IRS, etc. So liberals can keep Bill Maher; we don’t want him.
The best way to find out how deep the rabbithole goes is to ask libertarians to define themselves. The first thing that happens is that they all fall on each other like there could be only One.
I am kind of sick of many libertarians claiming externalities don’t exist, global warming doesn’t exist (this should be decided by climatologists, not economists), etc. Still, it seems to me better position than the ‘government can solve it by regulation’. Not in theory, but in outcome. (everybody agrees that Smith’s labour theory of value is nonsense, but people following Smith’s would use more reasonable means then Marxists).
Jon wrote:
But Paul IS in the Religious Right. He backed DOMA and a school prayer amendment and is against abortion rights. I’ve goggled at the idea that somebody so against liberty of the bedroom can be consdered pro-liberty.
This is the actual text Paul supported. I don’t find it that anti-liberty though.
Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions. No person shall be required by the United States or by any State to participate in prayer . Neither the United States nor any State shall compose the words of any prayer to be said in public schools.
South Park and the “news” shows on Comedy Central are all probably good, given that some people with opinions I respect say they are, but I refuse to watch a cable channel that allows swearing and dancing pieces of crap on shows it produces, but edits out the fart scene when it shows the classic “Blazing Saddles”!
The hypocrisy is astounding.
odograph: you keep saying that it would be horrible if bluefin tuna were fished to extinction. Why do you say this? Would it be a problem if they were? Well, then, consider Nelson’s Dictum.
Odograph you have absolutely no imagination. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think of 10 different ways that tuna, whales or swordfish can be made property with the use of modern technology. (believe me, it is done with birds, fish are way easier).
As to the fact of business failures, you are incurring heavily in the Nirvana fallacy. the choice is not between an imperfect market with fallible humans and a regulation made by angels…
Andy, I only observe that people that people pound this screw with their hammer.
(Regulated fisheries, “fishing to a limit,” is risky and not just for the reason you describe. But it at least puts a “public interest” voice into the equation. What we really need, given our human flaws and nature, is a system that errs on the side of conservation. We need to make allowances for our poor knowledge of marine systems, our hubris in the face of poor knowledge, and our bias toward harvest. So no, the answer is not as simple as public management.)
People who compare themselves to Sith Lords are not devilishly attractive, they’re geeks.
“I always thought libertarianism was popular among conservatives who want to get invited to cocktail parties in NYC and LA.”
“People who compare themselves to Sith Lords are not devilishly attractive, they’re geeks.”
Very good. Isn’t a libertarian a Republican who doesn’t want to give up sex and drugs?
“The socialists will never cut government, but the conservatives can be persuaded to devolve power.”
Dream on.
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