You know what would be awesome? If they were actually required to turn a profit to spew their nonsense, rather than begging for money to top off the money from the Koch foundation.
And I just love how they are using the market collapse as a Reason to keep them in wingnut welfare. Let the financial market crash, and then deregulate even more! Invisible hand!
mantis
No bailout for glibs!
burnspbesq
Bozos. The lot of them. Can we bind them hand and foot, attach weights to their ankles, and toss them off the 14th Street Bridge?
On a somewhat related note, Andrew is so cute when he is pissed off at the crazy Right.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/fox-news-enemy-of-conservatism.html
Anonymous37
From the now mostly defunct Loompanics website:
I have no idea how anyone can write for Reason and not die of shame.
Vega
They don’t have a revenue problem. They have a spending problem.
Chuck Butcher
Intellectual dishonesty from Reason in a search for dollars? Well, damn, I’m … ah … astonished…
I suppose there is a “market” for a magazine for $1000…in someone’s imagination. Evidently their ideas aren’t competitive in the market at $20.
cleek
Reason doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.
maybe they should quit paying idiots to say idiotic things. idiots will do that for free!
Anonymous37
And here’s a bit more from the same source:
Anonymous37
Note: the bit after the blockquote in comment 6 is also from the Loompanics website — it is not my comment.
Notorious P.A.T.
Love your posts, Anonymous37.
Mark S.
Speaking of the beauty of the free market, this made me scratch my head:
This isn’t some fad like Hawaiian Shirt Day; this is a fad about destroying jobs. Why is this country run by striped-shirt guys who get off on fucking over the rest of the country?
Martin
Reason hasn’t figured out that adding a Bridge to Total Freedom and disembodied spirits will massively help them convert their bullshit ideas into profits.
max hats
the fact that Reason does not (and will never) turn a profit is the funniest thing on that site.
MikeJ
If I drive a BMW, it’s not very impressive if you drive a Mercedes. If you ride the bus, my Buick can be a status symbol. Wall street isn’t just about making them richer, it’s about taking everyone else down.
4tehlulz
Reason shows the Invisible Handjob of glibertarianism in action.
Anonymous37
Thanks, Notorious P.A.T. Just a heads-up for those who haven’t heard of these guys, Loompanics was a hard-core anarchist bookseller. As much as I disagreed with them, they had an intellectual consistency that the Reason guys sorely lacked. I was particularly impressed by their article on corporations and why no true libertarian could defend the notion that corporations should be allowed the status of personhood. It’s a particularly devastating argument, and one that I’ve never heard any libertarian rebut.
Notorious P.A.T.
That’s capitalism for you: other people are doing it, so we better do it too. Better to go broke with everyone else than watch someone get rich while we don’t.
JGabriel
burnspbesq:
Sully:
That would be “no meaning at all”. Welcome to the reality-based community, Sully.
.
Jonny Scrum-half
These arguments are really pretty silly. There’s nothing anti-Libertarian or anti-free market about having a non-profit foundation, or soliciting donations to support a magazine. Additionally, I don’t know why Reason wouldn’t allow Loompanics to purchase ads, but there’s nothing hypocritical about Reason deciding that it didn’t want to sell ad space to certain entities.
I’m not entirely happy with the tone and substance over the past year of some Reason contributors (mostly Gillespie and Mangu-Ward), but for the most part it’s still an interesting site.
Why don’t John Cole and the various posters here think that it’s possible to have a sincerely held, good-faith viewpoint that’s different from their own?
Mark S.
@burnspbesq:
Wow, Andrew nails it. Hannity has always scared the bejeebus out of me. I’m not even sure he is human. He just seems like some robot programmed to churn out Republican talking points. I find him a billion times more creepy than O’Reilly or Beck, who at least buck the party line once in a while.
Notorious P.A.T.
Modern conservatives and libertarians love to quote Thomas Jefferson’s paeans to small government. For some reason, though, they aren’t too fond of his calls to “crush in its infancy the moneyed incorporation”.
Jon H
“If you ride the bus, my Buick can be a status symbol. ”
Depends on the bus. Consider the Harvard Medical School shuttle bus.
Hell, i have a Volvo but I take the subway into work because parking is a nightmare and expensive. There’s a two year waiting list for spaces at the Harvard Med garage, and the other local garages want like $30 a day.
Notorious P.A.T.
Reason believes that people shouldn’t ask for handouts. . . but they, themselves, ask for handouts. And not to survive, like food stamps, but to maintain cushy offices and accountability-free desk jobs. Why is it hard to see why we mock them?
Martin
Perfectly rational market dynamics, bitches.
I had a very extended conversation about healthcare with my relatives recently (health insurance execs). It was interesting, and they pointed out some problems with the proposed bill that I didn’t refute – but it was very obvious to me that they bought into the ‘perfectly rational market’ myth. I pointed out that they just spent an a hour dishing dirt on all of their own corporate fuck-ups, not to mention made repeated contradictory statements on what the markets ‘should’ do vs. what we all agreed they ‘would’ do.
Some progress was made, but the bottom line is that they think the new bill won’t significantly change anything and shouldn’t be done until a model for a working competitive market can be presented by the insurance industry (my uncontrollable laughter at that notion was noted), and I agreed that it won’t significantly change anything and should be done because no such model exists so the only way we’ll get to a functioning non-competitive market is to make incremental moves such as this.
What ultimately stopped them dead in their tracks, after all their complaining about how the public manipulates the system by going to the emergency room and trying to route around all of the insurance roadblocks that they benevolently put in place to try and keep costs down, was my insistence that they tell me who in the health care (not insurance) community wasn’t getting paid and was going out of business due to all of these shenanigans. Nobody they said – everyone gets paid. I demanded they justify their overhead costs for ensuring that everyone gets paid, which would have happened anyway because the endpoints constantly rewrite the rules of the game to ensure that they get what they need – patients usually find their way to care, even if the emergency room is the solution, and doctors and hospitals always get paid, even if they have to massively overcharge some customers in order to subsidize others. They couldn’t – they realized that their free market arguments worked perfectly, and even more efficiently, if the insurance industry itself was eliminated.
They tried the ‘less fair’ argument, that some people were subsidizing others, but they wished they had taken that back when I pointed out that the entire theory behind insurance is some people will subsidize others.
It was fun to beat up my (very dear) relatives for a few days. And for the record, they think that Al Gore is a douche because he won’t give up cheeseburgers. I let them have that one.
JGabriel
Notorious P.A.T.:
Accountability-free jobs? Damn, maybe we should imitate them instead of mocking.
.
Zifnab
@JGabriel:
Check your genetic lottery card. Are you the first born male child of a white billionaire in the good graces of the Republican Party? No?
Well, better luck next life.
Martin
Queue up the wingnut wurlitzer:
Oba Mao? Flaming statue? No possible way they can resist commenting on this.
joe from Lowell
Hold on there. I read that p.o.s. web site for years, and one of the most consistent arguments they made was that only those things that people were willing to pay for deserved to exist. If you can’t convince people to engage in a market transaction for your product, your product is without value.
By their own standards, their magazine doesn’t provide a product that is worthy of existing.
Anonymous37
And if you follow the link, you’ll see that Mike Hoy, the founder of Loompanics doesn’t have a problem per se with Reason rejecting their ads. What he does have a problem with is Reason rejecting their ads and then begging for money because they can’t run their magazine at a profit.
And yes, it is fundamentally hypocritical to extol the wisdom of the markets everywhere except in your own backyard, and I don’t know how Reason or anyone else can argue otherwise with a straight face.
Martin
It’s stronger than that, actually.
Reason said they were ‘too honest’ and couldn’t get anyone to pay for ads, which was a flat-out lie if they were turning Loompanics away.
Rick Taylor
Soooo smug.
b-psycho
@Anonymous37:
Because it’s completely correct.
Anonymous37
Oh God, that reminds me of the magazine during the first years of the Clinton administration. Henry Payne, their editorial cartoonist, had what he thought was a brainstorm and repeatedly drew statues of Thomas Jefferson with selected quotes on their affixed plaques which Bill Clinton would walk by. You get it? Clinton’s middle name was Jefferson, and yet he couldn’t live up to his namesake! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Anonymous37
That’s right — somehow I glossed over that. Probably because I couldn’t believe that anyone would have the balls to make such a bald-faced lie. Thanks for the correction/amplification, Martin.
Liberty60 (formerly Reason60)
OK, I am tired of this- it was a mistake to make a screen name so similar to the glibertarians.
Act in haste, and all that.
My beef with the libertarians is that they are treating free market capitalism and small-enough-to-drown-in-a-bathtub government the way the left used to treat socialist theory; as a religion, unsupported by empirical evidence and immune from testing.
Show me one modern industrialized nation in the world that does not have a robust social welfare system; that does not have a publicly funded infrastructure system.
Corporations are at least as much a threat to liberty as government bureaucracies.
Anonymous37
Goddamn that blockquote! I’ll get it right eventually.
licensed to kill time
@Anonymous37: Your posts are so good, here’s a tip:
Use the underscore (shift and dash). Put two underscores in the empty lines between paragraphs and they won’t fall out of the blockquote box.
Put two underscores directly above a blockquote and it won’t bold.
Extra tip: If you want to type sociaIism, replace the L with a capital I – it looks just the same and won’t trip the WP filter.
Jonny Scrum-half
joe from lowell — I know that you were a frequent commenter on Hit & Run, and I know that I (and many other readers) were sorry that you stopped commenting. But I don’t understand your statement that suggests that Reason’s “product is without value.” It’s obviously of “value” to those who donate to the foundation to keep the magazing publishing. What difference does it make whether Reason sets the price for people, or allows donors to effectively set their own price for the product?
b-psycho and Anonymous 37 — Why do libertarians need to defend the concept of a corporation? Did libertarians invent the concept? I don’t recall any period when libertarians ran the country and enacted statutes permitting corporations to have the legal status of personhood. Moreover, while I’m no expert on libertarianism, I don’t see how corporations (which are nothing more than voluntary collections of individuals) are inconsistent with individual rights. I don’t think that libertarianism rejects the notion that individuals can voluntarily join with other individuals for what they view as their common good
Martin — I don’t understand the concept of “rational markets” to mean that no one ever makes a mistake, or that collectively markets never make mistakes. Rather, the market is simply a system that, ultimately, should reward good choices and punish bad choices. I think that the people who support free markets don’t deny that markets make mistakes, but that over time markets will tend to have better results than bureaucracies that try to manage those markets from the top down.
Nutella
@Mark S.:
By letting Wall Street analysts and hedge fund managers who have never done anything useful give direction to companies that used to do something useful like manufacture furniture we are supposedly rewarding the most productive. But it looks to me like we are rewarding the least productive. Moving money around in a computer simulation, which is what hedge funds do all day, never produced anything.
Wall Streeters telling manufacturers how to run their companies is kind of like Catholic priests doing marriage counseling.
b-psycho
@Jonny Scrum-half:
Then why do they need charters? And limited liability?
clone12
Which is of course why Iceland, with its rational market as advised by none other than Milton Freidman himself, has a free market financial system that makes the old, tired, bureaucratic, socialist Canadian banks look like a bunch of losers.
Oh wait, that’s not how it happened in real life. Back on planet earth, strong government regulations meant that not a single Canadian bank had to be bailed out and libertarian utopia Iceland is now too impoverished to have fast food joints like McDonald’s.
Ruckus
@Mark S.:
This isn’t some fad like Hawaiian Shirt Day; this is a fad about destroying jobs. Why is this country run by striped-shirt guys who get off on fucking over the rest of the country?
One small phrase – MBA (shorthand for Must Be Asshole). This wonderful degree is given to those who’s adhearance to the concept of corporations over individuals is shown to be complete. One doesn’t need any actual experience managing or running a company, one only needs to believe they are the chosen, the privileged. Started in the US around 1900 and building in the 40’s and 50’s, this is now the metric for upper management. It permeates most business but especially big business. Students are taught how to run and control business. The bottom line, the next quarter are important, overtaking all competitors is paramount, the product, the employees, the customers be damned. Viola, the modern business landscape.
Paris
Matt Welch is the dorkiest 13 year old I’ve ever seen. Maybe he’ll improve when he grows up. I hope he doesn’t start hanging around with the Madoff crowd.
Anonymous37
licensed to kill time — thanks, I will keep that in mind for next time.
Jonny Scrum-half — what b-psycho said. For the record, libertarians did not invent limited liability corporations and do not bear any blame for said invention. But LLCs are government-created entities, and unless libertarians can forthrightly say that they don’t believe the government should grant corporate charters, they are hypocrites. It is not true that they “are nothing more than voluntary collections of individuals” because voluntary collections of individuals don’t have limited liability from torts.
Jonny Scrum-half
Anonymous 37 and b-psycho — Thanks for the response. That’s a fair point. Like I said, I’m no libertarian expert — I’m more “libertarian-ish” — so I can’t really give you a good explanation for what the libertarian point of view would be. But I’m wondering if you feel that any libertarian who engages in the government-approved institution of marriage is a hypocrite? If not, why is it hypocritical for a libertarian to take the world as it is (in other words, to accept the corporate form as a reality)?
In short, do you find it hypocritical for any libertarian to accept anything that’s government-created? Should libertarians reject tort laws, because they are a creation of government? Or all laws? Maybe I’m confused about that which is anarchist and that which is libertarian.
Mark
Scrum-Half:
I think everyone knows that libertarians are primarily rich white guys who want the government to stay away of everything except police, fire, road-building, national defense and their freedom to pollute at will…or anything else that they believe is meritorious (ie – want for themselves) but know in their heart of hearts would never be able to operate in a ‘true free-market.’ They also generally favor government restrictions on civil liberties. Oh, and they want a flat tax system – but only on wages, and not on capital gains or dividends, a regressive setup that’s very much in their favor.
Then, just to make themselves a bit more hypocritical, they’ll reflexively support a subsidy or unfunded liability proposed by the Republicans but pillory one pushed by Democrats. (E.g. – my good college friend the libertarian attacked the 220-215 health care vote this past weekend that pays for itself, but has nothing to say about the 216-215 vote that created Medicare Part D and didn’t pay for it.) They don’t want to come out and say that they’re Republicans – that would be uncool. All of 19 Rs had the sack to vote against Part D; Libertarianism is a minimal part of the party that gets their support.
And then, of course, we have the hue and cry that the failure of Bush’s “capitalism” over the last eight years was not a failure of markets and libertarianism, but a failure on Bush’s part to adequately implement free markets…Or even Jimmy Carter’s fault because he introduced sub-prime loans in 1977.
Bottom line: when people act in their own self-interest, we all lose. So-called “Libertarian” Republicans got their chance to demonstrate the quality of their ideas from 2000 to 2008. They failed. Stop telling us that they actually succeeded.
Anonymous37
Look, there’s one area in which I actually defend libertarians, and that’s in their use of government services and protections which wouldn’t exist in ideal libertarian societies. Nozick got a lot of grief for using rent control laws to keep Eric Segal from raising the rent on the condo that he owned. Don’t get me wrong: Nozick was an asshole to do so, but if a libertarian like him is actually willing to abide by all the law, including paying the taxes he or she owes, he also has a (legal) right to be a douche and sic the Cambridge Rent Control Board on his friend.
So to answer your question: I have no problem with a libertarian setting up an LLC if he obeys all of the other laws in this country (in other words, don’t try to evade punishment if the cops catch you with marijuana). But that libertarian should also believe that LLCs should go the way of drug laws and the income tax in a truly libertarian society. If they don’t, they are being hypocritical, and I’ve never met a libertarian who wasn’t a hypocrite on this point.
Mark S.
@Mark:
I’m not a fan of libertarians but that’s not a very fair description. Sure, some guys who occasionally call themselves libertarian (cough-Glenn Reynolds-cough) would fit this description, but the Reason guys are generally pretty consistent on this score.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
More Invisible Hand: Goldman To Private Insurers: No Health Care Reform At All Is Best
Polish the guillotinesRusty guillotines!Jonny Scrum-half
Mark — I’m not going to defend Republicans who call themselves libertarian. I left the Republican party in late 2002 over the Iraq War, and now hope that the Republican party commits suicide, given how poorly it has governed and the shitheads that it gets to represent it.
Regarding libertarianism, I agree with anyone who thinks that it tends to attract immature males in their 20s, who think that they know everything but really don’t have much context for their viewpoints. I haven’t read Ayn Rand, and don’t intend to. But as a general matter, it makes sense to me that government should be small, where possible, and people should be left to their own devices, to either succeed or fail on their own (both economically and socially). I really think that such a system tends to produce better results, overall, than any other system. I’m also willing to accept a social safety net, within “reason” (I’m not making a pun, just can’t think of a better way to phrase it), but I like to think that people end up making better choices if they have to make their own decisions, rather than if someone is making decisions for them.
I may be shortsighted and biased, but I don’t really see how any of this is objectionable. And it seems to me that’s what Reason is advocating, to a large degree.
Chuck Butcher
@Jonny Scrum-half:
I guess that what you need is a bit of education in regards to what succeeding or failing on their own is actually about. The system the libertarians bow down to is a system, it is not some free for all, and it is rigged. The stupidity of claiming libertarianism as some organized anarchy is astonishing. Such a system is always rigged and always will be, the question is in whose favor it gets rigged and that’s the piece they will not address other than to protect their piece.
These people get mocked around here because there is no intellectual honesty involved in their stance.
Notorious P.A.T.
This depends on whether or not you think a person has the right to get what they need to sustain their life, such as a job that isn’t moved overseas or eliminated entirely on a bottom-line whim.
In Bolivia not too long ago, Bechtel got the government to contract out to them rights to all of the country’s water. All of it. Lakes, rivers–even rain. Then they jacked up the price of water and told the people “what are you going to do? not use any water?” For some reason the citizens of Bolivia rioted and toppled the government.
Notorious P.A.T.
There is no such thing as “succeeding on your own”. Or did you teach yourself to read, write, walk, talk, dress yourself, etc? Did you, personally, invent the industry in which you make your living? Do you generate your own electricity, did you build your own computer, your own house? Yes, people pay a fair price for those kinds of things but only because many others sacrificed for a world in which that was possible.
Not saying you should pay your parents for raising you. But just as true, we are not islands, and creating a society that treats us as if we were is folly.
Jonny Scrum-half
Chuck Butcher — Okay, there’s a “system.” But my understanding of libertarians is that they want to reduce the size and power of government as much as possible, which is really the only way to minimize the “rigging” of the system. The more power society gives to government, the more important government will be, which increases the incentive for powerful individuals and corporations to “rig” the system in their favor.
If government has lots of power over who wins and loses in society, who do you think is going to have more influence over the government — the dispossessed, or the Goldman Sachses and AIGs of the world? I think that the past 12 months have given us that answer. If you agree, why, then, would you advocate more power to the government?
Jonny Scrum-half
Notorious PAT — Do you really think that libertarians want a society in which no one can band together or assist one another? My understanding is that they want a society in which government doesn’t tell them whether or not they can band together, or stay separate, or whatever. In other words, they get to make the choices themselves. If they desire assistance, they can get it. If they want to help someone out, they can do it. But government doesn’t require it.
And please don’t respond by taking this to an extreme. I’m not trying to defend extreme forms of libertarianism, which I agree is pretty silly (no schools, no taxes, etc.). I simply think that society in general would be well-served by moving toward the libertarian side on the spectrum of ideologies.
Anonymous37
@Jonny Scrum-half:
If that’s all that Reason did, I wouldn’t object either, but then again, if that’s all they did, there really wouldn’t be any significant ideological difference between Reason’s writers and your average American liberal; they would just disagree how small is small.
Instead, the “rights-based” libertarianism keeps popping up in their magazine when they don’t have a leg to stand on and need a handy bludgeon to knock down a government program, no matter how reasonable. And I have never — never — seen any acknowledgment that once you go down this path, there is no logical stopping point. Why should I have to pay for roads? Hell, I never use them. Why should I have to pay for a fire department — who does the government think they are to tell me that I need to pay taxes for protection against fires? Why should the government grant patent protection? I never agreed not to make a device just because someone thought of it first; let them keep their “invention” a trade secret if they think it’s so novel that no one else could possibly could up with it on their own.
And there’s one other thing about constantly advocating for smaller government. Mike Huben, in his indispensable “Critiques of Libertarianism” website, points out (see sections 13 and 14 here) that there are more than 200 nations in this world, and no functional world government to enforce an uber-federalism over them. So there’s a market of nations and a market of national economic and social policies. There are certainly countries with lower tax burdens and countries with more individual rights than the U.S. If they really believe that libertarianism is viable, why isn’t there already a country that isn’t completely unlivable?
Here’s what libertarianism comes down to for me: why should we have to make a radical change in the world’s largest economy just because American libertarians aren’t willing to vote with their feet?
Anonymous37
a libertarian country, that is.
Chuck Butcher
@Jonny Scrum-half:
Chuck bangs head on wall. The fucking government is not the economic system. It certainly interferes with it but the rigging is held within they system proper. If the name itself doesn’t clue you in I don’t know what the fuck to say to you.
Capital – ism. Capital is the driver of the system and its reward. Ignore that shit at your peril if you intend to be regarded as honest. When labor bands together to make its capital meaningful – they call it names.
There is a reason capitalism has always been managed, from their god Adam Smith on. It would be an unmitigated train wreck and Smith acknowledged it. They do not.
“Fuck you I’ve got mine” is their credo and they’re too dishonest to admit it.
Chuck Butcher
@Chuck Butcher:
If you start from a point as dishonest and inaccurate as theirs you cannot get anywhere. Everything from there on is totally suspect. That you accidently get something right is just that, a fucking accident.
justinslot
I really wish Radley and Jesse Walker could find gainful employment somewhere else at this point. Radley especially does important work, but he’s so maddeningly libertarian doctrinaire on subjects outside of his police abuse/drug war beat that I don’t think he wants to be anywhere else. (It’s starting to be a struggle to read The Agitator daily; Hit & Run has been useless for months and I’ve been basically skimming it and looking for something from Jesse. Mangu-Ward, Moynihan….ugh.)
latts
Meh… I don’t think the glaring inconsistency (or hypocrisy) is in the fact that Reason begs for money– after all, avoiding taxes is at least as important to glibertarians as trumpeting their support of the “free market.” No, what’s beautiful is that they depend on patronage while still boasting about their intellectual honesty, when there’s no business arrangement more historically prone to intellectual corruption.
Jonny Scrum-half
Chuck Butcher — If you have a problem with capitalism (and it seems you do), what other economic system do you advocate?
Jesse
@burnspbesq: Whatever. The word “conservatism” has been utterly, hopelessly hijacked for so long that I would be very surprised if Sullivan and his fellow travelers will be able to yank it from their enemies. The problem is that conservatism’s ideals strike a chord with these people; that they get morphed into Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. shows, in my mind, a problem with the ideals themselves (however intuitively appealing they may be), not a problem with branding.
I’d love to be proven wrong.
Chuck Butcher
@Jonny Scrum-half:
Don’t be stupid, I’m a construction contractor – ie small businessman. Capitalism is what it is and it requires management. That doesn’t excuse abject ignorance of the economic system you live within.
If you’re asking if I have any use for these nitwit’s version of Free Market, yes I have a real problem. It does not exist, never has existed, and when it’s been close to existing the governments have been overthrown or in extreme danger of it because of the social consequences. You get extremes of wealth and poverty and not much in the middle. That’s the short version, if you want more you need to involve yourself in history and economic theory.
slightly_peeved
This position is not supported by recent history. The US government has relaxed regulations on corporations over the past 20 years. The ability of corporations to “rig” the system in their favour has increased as a direct result of this.
It is also not supported by any international comparison. The US system has the most lax regulation of health insurers of any developed nation; it also has the greatest incidence of recission and medical bankruptcy, and has the most expensive system for the end consumer. In countries with heavily-regulated private insurers (Germany and Australia, among others) there are no monopolies held by private insurers. Not the case in the US, where many states have near-monopolies or monopolies in private insurance.
This position is self-contradictory; the reason corporations want to “rig” strong governments is to make them weak governments, and to remove regulation. If you make government smaller, you essentially do the corporation’s work for them.
Not to speak for him, but from my reading of what he said, he has a problem with unmanaged capitalism, as do most economists from Adam Smith onward. This is also the system practiced by the government of every single developed country in the world, and supported by a majority of the populace of every single developed country in the world. Only in the US is there a significant portion of the populace that disagree with it.
Chuck Butcher
@slightly_peeved:
You read correctly. Thanks for the consideration.
slightly_peeved
Just to clarify (damn lack of edit function), the system of government referred to in the last paragraph is managed capitalism, also referred to as a mixed economy.
Jesse
@Jonny Scrum-half: First of all, I sincerely appreciate your effort to engage with the grouchy BJ commenters. Clearly a good percentage of the folk here are not entirely sympathetic with Reason’s behavior or libertarianism, for which you are getting some pushback. But it is a real pleasure to see a thread populated with comments like these, rather than destruction left in the wake of BoB…
That said, I think it’s good that at least one libertarian acknowledges (or rather, does not entirely reject) the notion of a social problem, in general. This is what truly drives me batty about much discussion about values espoused by the GOP and their fellow travelers. I realize I am sounding uncharitable here, but when I hear libertarians or related folk blame the problems that disproportionately affect the poor–which exist in this country to a much wider extent than they do in relevantly similar countries—my head hits my palms when I hear them say or imply that these issues are just a matter of a failure of “taking responsibility”. Of course, the concept of personal responsibility exists and plays a major role in everyone’s day-to-day affairs. What I despise is the apparent implication that things like social safety nets must thereby be wasteful or unjust or “objectively pro-freeloader” or whatever. I think there is a libertarian view of genuine social problems, but so far I have yet to learn of any interesting, politically credible examples (except perhaps M. Friedman’s view on public education and Julian Sanchez’s views on climate change).
andy
I guess they got tired of waiting around for Ragnar Danneskjöld to come ’round with a bar of gold…
slightly_peeved
What I dislike about this is that libertarians are making a moral argument to avoid having to make an economic argument.
If welfare encourages freeloading, you would expect people who got welfare to just stay on welfare. In any country with guaranteed unemployment benefits, someone who becomes unemployed would be more likely to freeload and remain at that income level than work and improve their income level.
So if we had statistics for how long people stay in poverty, people in welfare states should generally stay in poverty longer than people in the US, according to the “freeloader” model. The OECD performs a bunch of research on this – see their report “Growing Unequal?” – and they find that the US has the worst rate of persistent poverty of all OECD countries.
The libertarians fall on moral arguments against “freeloading” because the economic data shows the opposite: the poor don’t want to be poor. The support welfare states give the poor help them become self-sufficient.
Mark
Jonny Scrum-half:
I appreciate your viewpoint. My problem is that those immature males in their early 20s who decide to start an objectivist club in college are now 32-year-old guys with real jobs and families, and even as they partake in copious government subsidies, they have no more nuance in their views. (Actually, that’s not true – the guy who wanted a flat tax on earnings now accepts that it should be on all income. And because his mother-in-law is uninsurable, he seems to have softened his stance on health insurance. But he doesn’t understand that having the government build roads is just as much a subsidy as providing free bus passes would be.)
One thing that troubles me about libertarianism is that it doesn’t even seem to be good for business. A personal example: I have a day job with a small company, and an even smaller business that I’ve been running for six years. The under-regulated health insurance market creates a huge opportunity cost for me to transition to my small business. The same under-regulated market places onerous health insurance costs on my day job, relative to a large corporation.
But the libertarian answer to this – which I have been told many times – is that if my health is so important to me, I should be willing to pay for it. On a micro scale, this makes no sense; on a macro scale, it’s terrible economic policy – health insurance could account for 20% (or more) of our GDP and that wouldn’t be a tragedy, it would just be a rationally-functioning marketplace where people are paying what the market will bear for a product.
I apologize if these aren’t your opinions – they are the opinions of every person I’ve ever spoken to who calls themself a libertarian.
There are many other things that trouble me about libertarians – the refusal to accept how much privilege they have in their lives and what role it played in making them “self-made” men; the apparent refusal to accept the concept of spreading risk through insurance (unless it’s insurance to help them); the unwillingness to pay for the way in which they infringe on the freedoms of others (you’d think a “self-made” man would take responsibility for where his sewage or CO2 ends up). I could go on, but you get my point.
Little Macayla's Friend
Post and comments saved to my Economics folder. Nice job of summing it up.
I go to a libertarian site (among others) just for the graphs and stats in economic news, since they hate on Gov.t stats (though they use them of course), and the blog owner has had the same one sentence solution for at least three years for everything.
Dikwad
I’d like to know what you get for $1000 that he can’t legally say on television. Also, does he know he’s not on television?
Batocchio
Give us a handout so we can continue to smugly lecture you on why government spending is evil.
Beezard
yeah, it’s real easy to mock libertarianism when you conflate their arguments with anarchist and/or corporatist ones.
The basic difference between ” Reason begging for a hand out” and “Special interests begging for a government handout” that looms like an elephant on steroids in the blind spot of your retardo-progressive mindset is that government uses force to obtain and distribute “their” money.
b-psycho
Just to clarify my own viewpoint: IMO, there’s no such thing as “unmanaged capitalism” because you have to make a systematic effort to impose a capitalist economic system. To have a system-wide favoritism of capital is a deliberate political choice. We’ve seen the result of that — corporate entities routinely using political power to subsidize their operating costs on the backs of the general public.
To me, Reason type “libertarians” downplay this dynamic to the point of absurdity. Mainstream liberals, in contrast, are in denial about the ability of the same political elite that benefits from this to act against their own interest. This isn’t a “free market”, never was, and politicians don’t give a shit about “the greater good”, any semblance of such is just to shut you up & keep the system going.
Wile E. Quixote
@Beezard
Yeah, and here I was thinking it was easy to mock glibertarianism because glibertarians were so goddamned dumb, shallow and hypocritical and went on pissy little rants where they said silly things like “retardo-progressive” mindset.
Oh, I also thought that it was easy to mock glibertarianism because for a movement that spends so much time telling everyone what sheeple they are for mindlessly following the government line they sure do spend a lot of time mindlessly following the prattle that Ayn Rand laid down in her various works. There’s also the “I’ve got mine, fuck you!” nature of modern glibertarianism, which a moment’s thought reveals isn’t very conducive to liberty at all. I hadn’t even thought of conflating glibertarian arguments with anarchist ones, probably because I have too much respect for anarchists and as far as conflating glibertarian arguments with corporatist ones, well who needs to since most glibertarians will eagerly sell themselves to the highest corporate bidder?
Matt Welch and the rest of the crew at Reason should get off of their lazy glibertarian asses and get real jobs to support their glibertarian hobby horse instead of just begging for money like so many homeless drunks panhandling for change. It can’t be that hard to work at or write for Reason, let’s face it, most of their articles are poorly written crap no better than what you’d find in the average zine, so Matt and crew should have plenty of time each week to go down and work at McDonald’s to make some bucks to keep Reason going. Or at least that’s what Matt and crew would do if they had some dignity and weren’t just a bunch of lazy, dirty corporate welfare whores looking for a new daddy figure to throw them some cash.
Filby
@Notorious P.A.T.: Exactly! The Bolivian government sold out the people to a corporation. Just one argument for limited government power. In determining which entity is worse, the answer is clear: Bechtel may be blamed for unethical behavior, but at least it produces goods and services people use to their benefit. Big Government has no redeeming values – it taxes us for the purpose of employing coercion to undermine rights and legalize robbery.
Filby
@Notorious P.A.T.: Its not a handout if Reason is asking for money in exchange for well-reasoned arguments supported by fact-based research.
Filby
b-psycho said:
You’re referring not to capitalism but to corporatism, the unhealthy collaboration of special interests and government. (Michael Moore admitted to a student after a campus viewing of his new film that his movie was actually about Corporatism, and not Capitalism. Even his title is a distortion!) Limiting government power to protecting against fraud, harm, etc. is important, whereas broader powers can be a hijacked by special interests, not to mention, the opposing party when its in power.
One current example: without deals offered by the Obama administration to protect market share and revenues, Big Pharma would attack universal health care. Corporatism would be checked, not expanded. If we succeeded further at rolling back the existing corporatism, we’d achieve true health reform: a truly competitive environment not ruled by the biggest insurance companies, big pharma, the AMA