Per John’s take-down of their opinion piece, they’re doing a chat at 11 today.
I find the direction Welch has gone in deeply disappointing. He’s written a lot of good stuff in the past.
BTW, the author pictures really are priceless.
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Gold Star for Robot Boy
Welch began losing his mind the winter of 2004/05, after the LA Dodgers didn’t re-sign third baseman Adrian Beltre. No, I’m not kidding.
joe from Lowell
The key to understanding how two such intelligent, thoughtful writers could produce such a steaming pile of fallacy is to realize that they are not trying to describe reality, but to create it.
Universal health care, and the success of the liberal project in general, scares the fertilizer out of these people. Right now, the personal popularity of Barack Obama, and the sense that he has an enormous amount of political momentum behind him, is the most powerful force pushing that agenda forward.
Gillespie and Welch are trying to convince the Village that Barack Obama and his agenda are not as popular as they actually are, in the hope of preventing people from supporting him out of a desire to be on the winning team. Of course, they can’t do this with a plausible analysis of actual political events, so they invoke CD iconography – in this case, the Bad Jimmy Carter that most of the country either never knew, or stopped caring out in 1992.
neff
I’m pretty sure Welch just adopts whatever political view he’s being paid to have; he was a Naderite when he wrote for WorkingForChange.com and he magically became a libertarian when he was hired by Reason. Heaven only knows what, if anything, his real political views are.
John Cole
Looking at those pictures, I’d say I got it right in the title of my post.
jenniebee
I can’t think of anything to ask them, except “could you please explain why Somalia isn’t held up as an example of a libertarian free-market paradise?”
Ash Can
So will you be signing in to ask these geniuses if they were able to accurately predict the failure of the George W administration by July 2001?
And wow, those photos — they were taken in 1967, right? How old are those geezers today??
kay
@joe from Lowell:
6 in 10 independents supporting health care reform is huge. I understand that the media have decided that it is the death-knell of health care reform, but 60% is nice to have.
I feel as if the Washington Post missed a real opportunity. Health care reform should have been their moment to absolutely shine. They know all the players, and they could have offered a real public service, organizing and presenting the massive amounts of information out there. I read the WSJ, and while their editorial page is completely insane, they did a stellar job covering the auto industry melt-down, and the larger financial melt-down, in the news pages. It was in there. They did the job.
The WaPo chose to offer silly, deceptive he-said, she-said garbage.
The news section coverage of health care as an issue sucks.
They’re useless as a source of information, and they could have cornered the market on this. If you want to know what the political conventional wisdom is on health care, with a decidedly right-ward lean, go there. If you want to know anything about health care, skip it. They missed the issue, because they didn’t do the work.
SGEW
@jenniebee: Because they get government subsidies?
Jonny Scrum-half
jenniebee — What makes you think that any Libertarian would view a country with no enforceable rule of law as a free-market paradise? A key to a free market is enforceable property rights, which I don’t think exist in Somalia.
boomshanka
Gillespie and Welch don’t have any actual solutions and don’t care – their niche is to simply oppose the party in power. With Bush in office, they went after the civil liberties angle. When Obama was elected, they just pivoted back to the right to appeal to the no tax crowd. Their market is always from the minority party, because an actual “libertarian” will never be elected to national office.
Mojotron
I’d like to join that chat and say this to them, verbatim, but will settle for this nugget (re: Ron Paul and Reason)
MikeJ
Which is a lovely way of avoiding all responsibility for everything that happens.
I don’t know what they have to say,
It makes no difference anyway,
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I’m against it.
Your proposition may be good,
But let’s have one thing understood,
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it,
I’m against it.
Paul
Has Layne said anything about Matt’s disappointing change-for-the-worse, does anyone know?
calling all toasters
How can this be disappointing? It was inevitable– right-wing ideology eats brains. It’s like having a dementia, only with this no one in Washington or the media notices the change.
joe from Lowell
Matt Welch wrote a column stating that the economy was doing fine and calling the people who noted we were in a recession “fearmongers” – in July 2008!
However, Barack Obama’s popularity has “slipped” to a +25 net, and “only” 60% of independents support what he’s doing on health care, so he’s really in trouble.
Uh-huh.
HyperIon
i seem to have lost the formatting buttons…
DJ wrote: BTW, the author pictures really are priceless.
Nick’s got the jacket on, right?
he must have a closet full of them.
i think he thinks he related to the fonz.
gypsy howell
Why does that Welch guy have a picture of himself from 1961? And why hasn’t Nick Gillespie taken a new photo since 1982?
Tracy
Surprisingly, my question was answered:
Chicago: “Being a small government, pro-choice, pro-open borders, pro-drug legalization, etc. libertarian is for me a pre-political question.”
Yeah, that’s all good, but that’s a pipe dream. How do you respond to the accusation that libertarians are living in a fantasy world?
Matt Welch: Guilty as charged! Which is to say, I don’t wake up every morning agonizing over the gap between my wishlist and the goings-on in professional governance. I prefer the fantasy of my own tastes and instincts — and the collective fantasia of all of us doing/thinking/acting in whatever private/non-violent way we choose — over the “reality” of what is at the end of the day a cartelized racket that aims to professionalize small differences and bum me out with my own money.
(Puts down bong)
At any time, in any government, there is some belief that is so far removed from policy so as to seem impossible. And yet it becomes law within a decade. I think we’re on the verge of that with legalizing pot. When that blessed day comes, we’ll have the fantasy-livers, in part, to thank.
Nethead Jay
@John Cole: Oh yeah, even given the high standard of titles here, you hit that one right out of the ballpark.
liberal
@Jonny Scrum-half:
That might be the key to a “free market,” but it depends on what you mean by “free market” and “property rights.”
The problem with most so-called “libertarians” is that they’re actually crypto-feudalists who despise liberty.
There’s some libertarians who actually do love liberty—my guess is that they’re a distinct minority. They’ve pointed out that at the heart of so-called libertarianism beats a royalist evil.
So the right response to a libertarian referring to “freedom” is almost always to laugh in his face.
liberal
@Jonny Scrum-half:
Fair enough. A true libertarian paradise is a country where the guvmint forces those who don’t own land to pay the bulk of their income to those who do.
And as far as “enforceable property rights” are concerned, once upon a time that included property in other human beings.
liberal
@boomshanka:
The real test of a true lover of liberty during the Bush years is whether they opposed the invasion of Iraq. It’s not just the illegality, etc—some historical libertarians understood the truth that war increases state power.
I’m not sure, but my google search had Welch claiming to have opposed the invasion, but spending most of his time dissing the antiwar crowd.
John Cole
@liberal: You need to visit this thread, this comment in particular.
Jonny Scrum-half
liberal @20 — I tried reading the article you linked to, but I didn’t understand a lot of it. I get the idea that the people on that web site don’t like the idea of private ownership of real property, but I’m not sure what society would look like with that system.
W/r/t your comment @21, I understand that humans once were viewed as property. But that’s not how it is now in America, so I’m not really sure why you’d raise that issue, except to refute an argument that I wasn’t making.
Finally, I generally agree with your comment @22. The lead-up to the Iraq War was the breaking point for me, and the reason that I intend never to vote Republican again.
Jay B.
“Enforceable property rights” can stem in large part by individual initiative. Certainly, the 2nd Amendment fetish covers a healthly distain for the state, but it also means taking your own property rights into your own, armed, hands.
In the Objectivist “thought”, property rights are practically divinely granted. In our current society — and the world in which we live — property rights are hardly sacrosanct, although there is some state guarantee for them.
HOWEVER this social contract is reliant on not simply the police and fire departments, it also — to thinking people — goes far beyond the immediate property and into an exchange of obligations. If the modern day libertarian feels that the state is the guarantor of property through police, the courts, accessors, etc., then it seems to be insanely shortsighted to think that their interests end at the end of their easement.
But of course, they ARE that shortsighted and selfish. And of course the state doesn’t simply exist to protect THEIR property, but also to facilitate an entire civil contract.
If you are saying that they are on board with the massive surveillance and law enforcement division that ensures their property rights — and the taxes it would take to pay for such things — then surely, their anti-statist stance looks like nothing more than a juvenile belief that things matters more than lives.
Which I is what I find so absolutely repellent about libertarians and their infantile philosophy.
cs
One relatively recent incident kinda sums up Reason for me.
When the telecom immunity bill was up for a vote, Reason was content to publish the usual run of articles against it but had no intention of doing anything else. The articles were good enough to get linked widely but, after linking them, Kos called them out regarding actual activism and asked them what they were going to do about it as opposed to just whining.
They were apparently shamed a bit by this and posted the usual list of politicos to contact and made a tiny effort to push their readership to do something.
Someone above accused them of falling for Ron Paul’s schtick, but this isn’t entirely accurate. They posted about as many neutral or negative articles about him as they did positive, much to the consternation of the readership who was mostly in the “Revolution” camp.
Which just goes to further prove their devotion to being lazy contrarians. Ron Paul, with all his problems and checkered newsletter past, was the most prominent and promising libertarian to hit the national scene to date. He is far from perfect or ideal, but he still would have pushed for most of what Reason wanted in an ideology.
And they couldn’t be arsed to do much of anything. It’s easier to chug beer in your leather jacket and snark endlessly than to put your neck on the line and be an activist.
(None of this applies to Balko, who is doing God’s work over there and is really the only reason Reason has a worthwhile existence.)
b-psycho
Had errands to do, otherwise I planned on asking them what they thought of such regulations as limited liability & the idea of corporations as legal “people”.