I feel compelled to respond to Kain’s post not to be last wordist or inflict more blogospheric navel-gazing on you (though commenters seemed to enjoy the gazing so far today), but because I was a bit sloppy with my use of the word “libertarians”. To Kain, it means anyone who calls himself a libertarian, whereas in my usage there, I mean Reason magazine, Megan McArdle, and the CATO institute. In fairness, Kain’s usage is probably more fair/accurate than mine here.
Go peruse Reason magazine and see if you can find a single article about corporate abuse of power. I’m sure there’s one somewhere in the archives, but there are none that I could see on the frontpage. I also suspect that the articles on corporate abuse of power in the archives focus on government-corporation colluding to abuse power, as was the case with the CATO piece ED used as an example of libertarians criticizing corporations.
There’s no point in playing the No True Scotsman game here. I think it’s clear that the libertarian online presence, such as it is, is primarily (though not exclusively) corporatist, as one would expect given that it exists at all in so small part through the beneficence of the Koch family.
Carl Nyberg
Libertarianism is the PR wing of an ideology that is most accurately described at corporate authoritarianism (with Austrian School economics being the associated economic ideology).
Zifnab
Here, at least, I disagree with you. The media-friendly, highly publicized libertarian voices in the Atlantic, Reason, Powerline, and the rest are certainly corporatist. The radio windbags, cable jockies, and newpaper dinosaurs are happily corporatist. But when I actually get out into the internet – surf a bit of reddit, read through some YouTube comments sections, or just peruse the Facebook musings of libertarian friends – I see a lot more True Scottsman than I would expect.
The Ron Paul fans aren’t particularly corporatist. The survivalists and the xenophobes don’t have any particular love for corporate power. And the run of the mill “I hate our two-party system” libertarians I know as friends don’t harbor any more love for Walmart than they do for Washington.
So I think there is a lot more anti-corporate libertarian sentiment than you give credit for. But these guys don’t get the same kind of soap box that Koch-funded blow hards can stand on. So, from the pages of the Washington Post to the web links of the NRO, these guys are invisible. But they’re out there.
Dave
That is the point I was trying to make to E.D. in the last post. I went to Reason and could find many articles and posts on government coercion. I had to use the search bar to find just two pieces on banks illegally foreclosing on homes written in the last 4-6 months. And both (to me) dealt more with how banks should find a way to do it properly as opposed to defending the homeowner.
That is the failure of Libertarianism. It no longer is a philosophy dedicated to defending the individual. Rather, it is just another anti-government viewpoint. This mortgage fiasco should be pissing them off as much as Kelo did, and the anger simply isn’t there.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Zifnab:
I should probably use the expression “professional libertarian” or something like that, because I agree with you that anti-corporatist ones are out there, just not earning a living doing it.
TR
OT, but too WTF to let pass by:
Rush Limbaugh thinks the Democratic Party is rushing to rally around the shooter and make sure he’s not convicted of murder.
Omnes Omnibus
Foreclosures are happening in the courts, so it isn’t corporations’ fault. It is the government or the person who may or may not be current on his payments that is at fault.
Omnes Omnibus
@TR: Huh, as in WTF?
Dave
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s a joke, right? Or are you actually absolving banks that are trying to foreclose on homes they don’t even own, or are using forged documents to try and prove they hold the lien? Really?
Note: my snark meter is totally and utterly shot today. So if this was snark I am just not getting it.
b-psycho
Considering that the Limited Liability Corporation as a concept is itself a regulation, it makes me cringe to see “moral hazard” so casually tossed around while ignoring the Big Chief of moral hazard sitting right there in the open.
I’d rather it simply not exist, at all. Failing that, as a creation of government it’s arguable that the rules for such can be whatever the hell The People want on paper. The problem is in practice it doesn’t matter what any of us think because we’re not in the loop. Which is the entire point.
elm
@Zifnab: Even if those Libertarians aren’t intentionally or explicitly pro-corporate, I’ve not seen them present any solution to corporate coercion and abuses of power.
If your solution to Thalidamide or the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is thousands of individual lawsuits by people who can prove actual harm plus some handwaving about insurance then you don’t have a solution.
Whether or not they have love for corporations, they want to remove government regulation and oversight of those corporations on the theory that markets will somehow solve the problems of drugs that maim, filth in our food, and abusive lending.
sukabi
@Dave: he’s being snarky…. that was the feel of ED Kain’s last post.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dave: I was carrying over an extreme version of ED’s theories from the previous threads. Theories, by the way, with which I disagree strenuously.
E.D. Kain
This is fair, Doug. I think that libertarians should spend a lot more time on the corruption and abuses of private industry. I’ve said this before many times myself. I’ve complained before that libertarians fail to create a compelling narrative because they focus soooooo bloody much on government alone. So we agree, largely, on this.
Regarding the foreclosure issue – I also don’t think that I am so far removed in terms of acknowledging this problem as many commenters seem to think. I have said plainly I don’t know a lot about it, and I’ve asked a number of questions about it, and I still don’t feel like anyone (including myself) has a great answer, especially since the problems vary so much from one state to the next. But yes, libertarians should be very troubled by the property-rights implications of banks easily, and at times fraudulently, kicking people out of their homes. No doubt about it.
eemom
personally I was kind of disappointed you and ED didn’t finish slugging it out the other day over his “speculation for me but not for thee” post.
As I noted yesterday, he was saying the exact same thing as Glenn Reynold in the piece John linked to yesterday, but in more polite words.
Dave
@Omnes Omnibus: my bad.
Violet
Limbaugh mentions the Cato Institute and quotes articles in Reason magazine on a regular basis. So-called Libertarian philosophy is repackaged for the Limbaugh (and other rightwing talker) audience and sold to them as something that is good for them.
As I said in the previous thread, very regularly Limbaugh listeners will decry the tax situation for corporations and agree that CEOs should be paid as much as possible. Then in the next sentence they say they’ve lost their jobs because their former company shipped them overseas. The disconnect is baffling.
So-called Libertarian philosophy is repackaged and touted as “conservative ideas” and sold to the masses.
Rick Taylor
I was a libertarian way back in the 70’s. Back then, there were two wings of the party that co-existed more or less amicably. There was the idealist wing that attempted to take Libertarian principles to their logical conclusions consistently, and there was the conservative wing that resembled the Republican party except on social issues. The idealist wing argued taxation was still theft even when it was used to fund the military, and of course it opposed in restrictions whatsoever on immigration. I outgrew Libertarianism a long time ago, but it seems to me since then it’s become dominated by the conservative wing, at least in its publications and more public incarnations.
BGinCHI
Libertarians of all stripes: All of the benefits of society with none of its responsibilities.
Until they send their messages from caves, I don’t want to hear it.
MikeJ
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
We hold this truth to be so fucking self-evident you say “duh” when you hear it.
Walker
I think Reason is very different now from what they used to be. I had them in my RSS feed sometime around 2004. When were under Republican control, they provided an interesting conservative counter-weight.
They shifted to crazy when Democrats regained control. I left when they embraced the climate-denialists.
pragmatism
ED, you guys have no incentive to bite your corporate masters’ hand. who will feed you then? so you won’t. sure, you’ll throw in a “both sides do it” to achieve a “balanced” illusion, but when it comes down to brass tacks y’all will get to fellating.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dave: Not an issue. It is a remarkably dumb argument, yet people do make it.
E.D. Kain
@pragmatism: That’s all well and good except that I have no corporate master. John Cole does not pay me to do this.
cleek
@MikeJ:
tee hee
Carl Nyberg
@E.D. Kain:
What are the abuses of private industry? Which abuses are most important?
What should be done about these abuses? Can they be prevented?
What role should government play?
morzer
“In so small part” should be “in no small part” surely? Or are you saying that the Koch family are secretly destroying the glibertarians by sponsoring them?
Omnes Omnibus
@E.D. Kain: It is probably just as well that Cole does not pay you. I would hate to see him divert money that could be used to feed Tunch into the pockets of someone who walks away from threads that he starts as soon as he sees that he is losing the fight. YMMV.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Walker:
I think that’s about right. But, again, that was all government abuse.
ChrisS
… especially since the problems vary so much from one state to the next.
So what does this tell you about the problems?
pragmatism
@E.D. Kain: don’t shell game it here. we both know i wasn’t talking about john and you. we’re talking about the subset that doug noted in his post.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@pragmatism:
I’m not sure it’s fair to say “you guys” here, given that ED does not work for the Kochs or anyone else along those lines.
E.D. Kain
@Omnes Omnibus: You take all this much too seriously.
Lee
@Walker:
That is very interesting as I stopped reading them about the same time. I always had the feeling that I was imagining their jump into the crazy.
Apparently not.
4tehlulz
What is the difference between this and capitalism in general?
BGinCHI
@E.D. Kain: If he tries to pay you with a “nice, well-behaved” JRT, just jump out of the car, no matter how fast it’s going.
mistermix
In addition to the issue of corporatism, another characteristic of the Reason is the smug superiority of a crew that wears their obscurity and political irrelevance like a badge of honor.
Which is weird, because on one hand they’re taking all these corporate dollars to supposedly make some kind of political difference, and on the other hand Matt Welch is penning explanations for their conscious decision to remain irrelevant. Why do the Koch brothers or whoever funds them even bother if they can’t even try to be relevant?
NobodySpecial
I repeat: 71 percent voted for Walnuts over Obama in 2008.
That’s not ‘Libertarian online presence’. That’s Libertarians, period. They will throw over everything for a tax cut.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: As far as we know…
/snark
E.D. Kain
@pragmatism: In a response to me you said “you guys”.
Omnes Omnibus
@E.D. Kain: You whine a lot.
E.D. Kain
@Carl Nyberg: Really – you want me to list all the abuses that private companies commit? I’m not quite understanding your question here.
mistermix
@Omnes Omnibus: Hmm, I just looked through the other threads and found ED commenting a whole bunch. More than I normally do, that’s for sure.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@pragmatism:
Actually, it wasn’t clear, especially in light of DougJ-and-so-ons splitting of the two in the post.
@pragmatism: Was that really necessary? Could you not just make your argument?
Warren Terra
@elm:
This is the thing that pisses me off. If these libertarians were the slightest bit sincere about creating a society centered on individual rights, they would love trial lawyers and class-action lawsuits, because there are basically three possible checks on the power of corporations and the wealthy: government regulation, private lawsuits over infringements, or anarchic violence.
The truth is, of course, that Institutional Libertarianism (as opposed to Zifnab’s alleged silent plurality of sincere Libertarians) is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporations and the wealthy; their failure to note either it’s abuses or possible remedies is a feature, not a bug.
PS I am so tired of hearing Radley Balko cited as the exception, the Institutional Libertarian Who Cares About Poor People. All power to Balko, he often comforts the afflicted. But he’s damned selective about which comfortable he’ll afflict, either because those are the issues he cares about (which would be fine but would reduce his value as a counter-example) or because by standing up for victims of abusive state power (mostly in the realm of drugs) he doesn’t discommode his paymasters, who aren’t bothered so long as the abuse of corporate power isn’t mentioned.
sukabi
@E.D. Kain: maybe a couple would be nice, to get a feel for what you consider actual corporate abuses.
E.D. Kain
@Omnes Omnibus: So do you – funny that.
b-psycho
@NobodySpecial: Why any would vote for either, or even at all, is a puzzle. They’re giving the position of power whoever they do vote for is seeking a legitimacy that their claimed philosophy implies should be withheld.
Zifnab
@elm:
:-p This would actually be a step in the right direction, from where I’m at. The insurance fund set up in the wake of the Valdez disaster wasn’t nearly big enough to handle the BP Rig explosion. The individual lawsuits against BP are going to be tied up in court indefinitely and will likely suffer the same legal war of attrition that companies like Exxon and RJ Renolds employed against Valdez and Smoking Cancer lawsuits of ages past.
But I don’t really see libertarians embracing their own favorite options. After all, when was the last time you heard a libertarian oppose tort limits or tout mandatory insurance rules? Just one more reason why it is so damn hard to take libertarians seriously.
Violet
@sukabi:
I second this request. E.D. Kain, could you provide examples of what you consider corporate abuses? That way we’ll have a foundation for understanding if we’re talking about the same things.
pragmatism
@E.D. Kain: you can still be a corporate shill who runs rhetorical cover for the right regardless of whether john pays you to guest post. i would say that in becoming more familiar with your writing you aren’t a shill all the time. but, again, if it came to brass tacks on an issue (and the incentive to appear balanced didn’t trump the incentive to shill), we could all guess which side you’d be on. its nice to say that libertarians should take on their corporate masters, even in the limited sense you advocate, but its a fantasy. ’tis a recurring theme with y’allz.
E.D. Kain
@sukabi: Well there’s the whole housing bubble thing, where lenders basically signed off on any loan they could get their hands on, then sold them off to investors. That whole thicket of private industry abuse. And there’s the blatant disregard for safety standards exhibited by BP and Halliburton. I mean, there’s tons of examples. And often they do trace back to some sort of government involvement, but it would be a smart thing for libertarians to show both sides of that coin more clearly – and not to immediately suggest that less government is always the answer. Sometimes, as with banking regulations, better government is the answer, and more accountability. Sometimes not.
One idea to make regulatory capture less widespread would be to make regulators more akin to FBI agents. Make the job more respectable, better pay, more of a career rather than as one side of the revolving door.
Barb (formerly Gex)
I’ll repeat here what I said in EDK’s thread.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@BGinCHI: LOL.
morzer
@pragmatism:
How about some evidence, rather than assertion and abuse? Or would that sully your fine and noble mind with excessively mundane concerns?
geg6
Anyone who takes money from the Kochs is nothing but a whore with no ideals and morals whatsoever. Thus, anyone who works at Reason is nothing but a whore for Koch cash.
E.D. Kain
@pragmatism: Do you think liberals do not have connections to big corporate entities? I’m pretty sure the Democratic party gets a ton more corporate funding and donations than any libertarian organization. The two mainstream parties are the big corporate entities here. Which is only natural.
Zifnab
@4tehlulz:
Seriously?
Capitalism (of which I really don’t have much of a problem) is an economic policy based on free trade and unregulated entrance to the marketplace.
Corruption and abuse by private industry typically involve moneyed interests restricting civil rights, property rights, trade rights, and marketplace rules for their own advantage.
It’s the difference between “I sell you milk from my cow, you sell me wood from your lumber yard” and “I run you out of business, run you out of town, and have my government / private industry friends steal all your shit so I don’t have to pay for milk or deliver you my lumber”.
scav
@E.D. Kain: Liberals =/= Democratic Party. Can you agree to that, cause I assume you differentiate between Libertarians, the GOP and the Tea Party.
Allan
Libertarianism suffers from the same blight as do all non-Democrats and/or Republicans. There’s no path to electoral power for them, therefore they become think-tanky social critics tut-tutting about government rather than articulating a vision for actually achieving political power, organizing citizens around it, then governing.
jeffreyw
Feel free to skip this food pr0n.
maus
In that case, there is no tea party, only “libertarians”, as 99.999999% of the teabaggers claim to be.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@E.D. Kain: Yeah, it’s not like it is all that tragic if someone loses their home unnecessarily. It’s a big deal to us, because we can see those families as real people.
ChrisS
@E.D. Kain:
Make the job more respectable, better pay, more of a career rather than as one side of the revolving door.
Which involves government funds, stolen collected from the taxpayer. And probably unions. And a bureaucracy. Plus, these agents would have to be familiar with 50 different sets of laws that were enacted in 50 different states. A massive bank, or group of banks, can certainly afford to get a significant presence in state legislatures through lobbying.
Uh, oh, this is starting to get out of hand.
So, back to DougJ’s post: Why do you think the institutional libertarians aren’t spending more time on this? Is it because DougJ is correct in that they just don’t give a fuck because it doesn’t affect their paymasters, or is it because of …
schrodinger's cat
@Barb (formerly Gex): EDK got mad when I pointed this out, in this last thread. That
DougJ drank his milkshake. Compared my statement to Sister Sarah’s map with the targets. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Oh well, I have to go now, will check back the thread later in the evening
E.D. Kain
Barb:
I admit to playing a bit of the devil’s advocate here re: moral hazard. I honestly wanted to know what the proposed alternative was to the foreclosures we’ve been seeing. And I think – as I said previously – that the moral hazard cuts both ways. In any case, I do think foreclosures are horribly tragic, and I would like to see a much greater effort to keep people in their homes even at a loss to the bank since banks will end up losing money in a foreclosure anyways.
Stillwater
@E.D. Kain: You take all this much too seriously.
And you apparently don’t take it seriously enough. Simple intellectual honesty, or integrity, should preclude you from bloviating on topics which you know nothing about. Or alternatively, if you simply like writing, why not expand your subject matter to include other types of fiction than your current genre?
Zifnab
@E.D. Kain:
Firstly, Democrats != liberals.
Secondly, I don’t think anyone ever said Democrats don’t have their own corporate cronyism problems.
Thirdly, the Democrats are one branch of a two party system that has dominated American politics since the nation’s founding. Libertarians are an ideological group with little weight at the state levels and virtually non-existent weight at the national level.
Try at least comparing folks in the same weight class.
aimai
@E.D. Kain:
“Often they do trace back to some kind of government involvement?” As someone pointed out upthread the very notion of a limited liability corporation depends on government involvement–that’s an involvment that the corporations demanded in order to be able to do what they want to do. After that, however what “government involvement” produced the BP spill? Frankly, the government and its guns are all that stand between BP and angry fishermen looting BP’s assets on the ground by force or shooting BP’s workers as they try to drill new holes. Corporations crave government involvement and taxpayer money when it comes to protecting their assets then whine to suckers like you about how the government hurts them with nasty regulations. But still I’d like to hear just what part of cutting corners and blowing up the ecosystem derives from “govenrment involvement.”
aimai
Gus diZerega
@Rick Taylor:
Like Rick Taylor I was a libertarian in the 60s and into the 70s. I was fairly close to Big Names such as Murray Rothbard, until I started asking too many probing questions about difficult problems in the ideology, and then, like Taylor describes, I out grew it, growing from libertarian to classical liberal to liberal.
His depiction of libertarians as falling into two broad camps is accurate to my memory. I think of libertarians today as comprised of two groups, those who do not believe anyone should be “coerced” and those who believe they since they cannot be King, no one should be King. This second group has no problem with business power over others because they think they may get to exercise it someday, or already do. It has grown to dominate the movement and, being authoritarians at heart, they fit seamlessly into the Tea Party.
The first group has some interesting ideas, some very important, some naive, some willfully blind, but is always worth talking with. They are almost extinct, however.
The second group is an enemy of civilized life.
E.D. Kain
@scav: Absolutely.
@ChrisS: I’ve never once said that taxation was [email protected]Zifnab: Very well put. There is a difference between capitalism and crony capitalism and I think it’s important to make the former flourish while doing whatever we can to discourage the latter – including at times government intervention! Like better paid regulators who make a career out of it instead of running straight back to Wall Street!
b-psycho
@E.D. Kain:
If the foreclosure is tied up in the fraudulent/non-existant paperwork mess, then just void it & no one has to move out.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: We need some photos of Tristan, how is our handsome boy?
matoko_chan
@E.D. Kain: Have you no shame you woeful scrub?
shaddap already.
its just embarrassing at this point.
haay John COLE.
how many times does this human punchline have to beclown himself before you give him the boot?
do you know why this blog has become the lowrent Atlantic circle jerk?
because u are Kain’s bitch, just liek Sully is Douchebags bitch.
E.D. Kain
@aimai: If I recall correctly, BP had made some pretty serious steps toward capturing the regulatory body employed to oversee it, as had its contractor Haliburton.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@E.D. Kain: Still the point remains. You didn’t assert you were being devil’s advocate, you entered the fray with that. And it was really quite some time before you could be bothered to even address the corporate side of this stuff.
THAT’S the point. Your main concern is anything but corporate malfeasance. You may be concerned about it. Just not in the first 200 or so comments worth of discussion.
E.D. Kain
@Zifnab: I agree liberals are not Democrats – but libertarians are not necessarily Libertarian Party libertarians or Think-Tank libertarians either.
pragmatism
@E.D. Kain: true that re “liberals”. i think that its not “natural” as much as it is perpetuated and creates a false norm.
@morzer: see 99% of the oveure of one mcardle, megan.
E.D. Kain
@Barb (formerly Gex): Not true at all. I think corporate malfeasance is exceedingly common. I just think that we have created a system whereby the government enables it and entrenches it rather than does much of anything about it.
Stillwater
@E.D. Kain: If I recall correctly, BP had made some pretty serious steps toward capturing the regulatory body employed to oversee it, as had its contractor Haliburton.
So, since regulatory capture allows the corporate PTB to do whatever they want, the problem is the regulatory agencies and not that corporations will, unless regulated, do whatever they want?
Dude, maybe it’s just me, but you continually continue to make no sense.
sukabi
@E.D. Kain: that’s a very nice list of everything that’s gone wrong in the last 8+ years or so and has blown up disastrously in the last 3.
It would be nice if there was an acknowledgment somewhere that the constant drumbeat from the right and self-described libertarians to “deregulate industry, defund regulatory agencies, and gut regulations” has had a major impact on where we find ourselves today, and is a direct contributor to our current situation wrt all the corporate issues you mentioned.
I’ll agree that there is government involvement, in so far as the regulatory agencies have been more or less captured by the corporations. The same can be said of much of the legislative process.
You say you want better regulations, better enforcement of the regulations, but you aren’t offering any ideas on how to pry the power from the corporations. Instead it comes back to the government.
When does corporate responsibility come in for you?
eemom
lame-ass variant on “liberals got no sense of humor.”
Zifnab
@E.D. Kain:
I think that’s a silly question.
The choices aren’t “foreclosure” or “no foreclosure”. The foreclosure process requires that a set of rules be followed to completion before a foreclosure can be attempted. If a bank isn’t following said rules, why on earth should foreclosure be on the table at all?
Should AMEX be allowed to send repo men to your house if you have an outstanding balance with Mastercard? Should I get a bill from Holiday Inn for staying in a Marriot? If not, why the hell does BoA or Citi get to foreclose on a house if they don’t possess the note?
Here’s your alternative. Follow the fucking law. The banks mucked this shit up. The onus is on them to clean it up. If they don’t have the note, they need to go out and get it. Then we can talk about foreclosures.
ChrisS
@E.D. Kain:
Guess I should have left that out. But thanks for skipping over the main thrust of it.
You’d be the first libertarian advocating for the creation of a regulatory agency with well-paid agents.
Awww hell, it’s obvious that libertarianism can’t be failed, so why don’t we agree to disagree and call it a day, eh? Who wants a cocktail?
MikeJ
@eemom: My thought exactly. Why would anybody want to discuss something with somebody who *doesn’t* take the subject seriously?
matoko_chan
@E.D. Kain:
then could we pay you to GO AWAY perhaps?
you are a coward, a liar, a poseur and an intellectual whore.
you just abandoned your own thread because you were gettin an asswhuppin, like usual.
and this isnt the first time.
you sir, have no honor.
arent you ashamed? how many chances has Cole given you to defend your (indefensible) ideology and you FAIL epically EVERY FUCKING TIME? then you cut and run and whine like a bitch about how mean we are.
stand and deliver, you fucking WATB coward.
if you can.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@E.D. Kain: And, as you have been repeatedly asked, what is the alternative to having government regulate corporations? You have had no answers. You seem to be implying that government is making this worse. So what is your answer. Oh yeah, a government investigation of wrongdoing. But only after you’ve allowed people to lose everything.
scav
m_c, do you really want to get into the whole idea of being paid to go away? I can envision two plates with two names on them and . . . connect the dots.
aimai
@E.D. Kain:
Uh, so your answer to regulatory capture of the government is to–what? Get rid of regulation by the government? Surely more and better regulation would be what you would want. Since we can’t get rid of the government–and I should know since I am actually the descendant of honest to god anarchists who tried–what really are you proposing?
This focus on regulatory capture as the problem when the corporations (Kochs etc…) who pay for Reason and the other libertarian think tanks are really concerned to get rid of regulation tout court seems to me to be like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic in order to distract the lower classes from noticing that the upper classes have gotten into the lifeboats. Or, to paraphrase a famous line about democracy: a captured regulatory system is the worst thing in the world except an unregulated system.
The solution to having Dick Cheney as vice president is not having no vice president. Its electing better Vice Presidents who are more constricted in the ways they can help their friends. The country exists, is huge, and has needs as a society and an economy that have to be met and can’t be met by some kind of fantasy of an acephalous libertarian paradise.
aimai
meh
@matoko_chan:
a bit much, no?
sukabi
@scav: lol
Zifnab
@E.D. Kain: Libertarians as a political party don’t have much presence. It’s worth distinguishing between a liberal and a Democrat because there’s some space between party loyalists and ideologues. There’s a lot less space between libertarian party loyalists and libertarian ideologues, because libertarian party loyalists rarely have to worry about winning elections.
Omnes Omnibus
@mistermix: I wasn’t saying he wasn’t involved in the comments. I was saying that, as soon as it was clear that he was incorrect and person after person was pointing it out, he left the thread to either start a new one or comment in this one.
@E.D. Kain: On another note, I may take this particular issue quite seriously, more so than others. This is probably because I represent clients whose lives are affected by these situations. I have a client who was a week late with her car payment, so her finance company processed, without her authorization, two payments on her debit card. This caused an overdraft. As a result, she nearly lost her home, did lose her job, and her car was ultimately repossessed. These things are directly traceable to the fact that money was taken from her account without her permission. Sure, she owed money, but the direct result of this company’s actions damn near ruined her life.
Midnight Marauder
@E.D. Kain:
Um…whoa, whoa, whoa. There is an entire political party whose sole mission in life is to create a “government” that enables corporate malfeasance, and you know damn well which party that is. You also know which party always ends up trying to do something about the corporate malfeasance and government culpability in that malfeasance.
So it would appear that, in your world, corporate malfeasance is enabled by the government, but there is no need to highlight who is in control of government during such times of rank corporate malfeasance, right? Because that makes no difference at all in the approach of government towards corporations, right?
les
@E.D. Kain:
I think that’s an evasion. You can say you have no “corporate” master, so you’re not a “corporatist.” But the issue is not specifically, or at least not only, corporations. It’s the (never been true in human history) libertarian notion that economic power is not a threat, only gov’t power is a threat. The (idiot) notion that consumers can and will, if only the gov’t will get out of the way, readily balance the abuses (I’m sure rare and minor) perpetrated by the holders of economic power. Today, in the U.S., it’s corporations and the ridiculous extension (by conservative, libertarian leaning courts and legislatures) of the notion of corporate “personhood,” an idea initially espoused so that corps could be sued rather than be totally insulated from the individuals they screwed. But, in spirit if not in absolute literality, you are of course a corporatist. Your initial leap is always to defend the holder of property (economic advantage) from attack or regulation. And anyone who disagrees is always tarred as wanting “bigger government,” that evil to end all evils.
mds
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Well, I’d go with Luxemburgist-inspired workplace democracy, but libertarian Marxism, or virtually any left-libertarianism, doesn’t show up on the radar at all. In the US, the term “libertarian” has been co-opted by right-libertarians, glibertarians, and paleoconservative Republicans, even as many of them simultaneously insist that no one lives in Scotland.
geg6
@MikeJ:
I have decided that I will only make snarky comments directed at no one in E.D. Kain’s threads and those pertaining to him. I mean, it might be good to have a conversation with him some day as he seems not completely unintelligent. However, he needs to grow up and become an adult before I feel any need to engage him. This thread makes it all that much more obvious to me that he’s too young and hasn’t lived much life at all to even think about discussing the ways of the world with him. He’s experienced none of it.
Annelid Gustator
@E.D. Kain: Hmm. It seems to me that the banks are breaking THE LAW. The homeowner is in almost all cases, at worst breaking A CONTRACT. Since the law holds that the parties to a contract police its terms, the bank better prove it IS a party. Further, they should prove the person it is suing or foreclosing upon is the counterparty (since they also seem to have a boner for just locking folks out of their houses, sometimes paid for in cash, to a different buyer). So, orthogonal problems, one of a much more fundamental seriousness. Guess whose?
eemom
@meh:
au contraire. She didn’t even call him a cudlip!
matoko_chan
@meh: no. mere words are inadequate to describe my loathing for ED, Douchebag, McMegan and their ilk. they are far more toxic than Rush and Palin because they perpetuate the mythology that there are such things as reasonable conservatives and principled libertarians. there are not.
conservatism is a failed paradigm.
libertarians are just intellectual whores that sold out to the jeesus humpers (socons).
pass the plates scav.
id love to see what im worth.
Culture of Truth
Now that E.D. has embraced government, I’m unclear how libertarians’ belief system “separates them from many other liberals who see government as a solution to corporate abuse.”
Villago Delenda Est
Here’s the thing:
E.D. sides in this with the side that has money.
Every.single.time.
The banks have money, therefore he’ll side with them in a dispute between a bank and a homeowner. Without knowing the facts (the bank can’t prove it has a claim on the house in question) he’ll side with the bank.
Every.single.time.
bloodstar
Haven’t you figured out that Libertarianism is closer to the Judea People’s Front in organization?
The term is almost meaningless at this point.
Splitters.
matoko_chan
@eemom: Kain is a whore. You are a cudlip.
He doesnt believe his own bullshytt– you do.
geg6
@matoko_chan:
Despite the flames regularly sent your way (and often deserved), this is exactly right. And pretty much what I said higher up in the thread.
You can tell because so many of them like to suck Kochs.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@ChrisS:
Me! Me! Me!
Stillwater
@Culture of Truth: By embracing cognitive dissonance?
schrodinger's cat
@Villago Delenda Est: Comforting the comforted, how very comforting.
pragmatism
2011 is the year of tu quoque.
les
@E.D. Kain:
Jebus. Do you have someone to help you breathe? You list some corporate overreach–ignoring the law, ignoring regulations, cheating, lying, engaging in criminal behavior to maximize profit–and you say it traces back to government involvement? WTF? If the government hadn’t been involved, there’d have been no law so the activity wouldn’t have been illegal? Of course the consumer, environment, little guy, whatever, still would have been screwed but it’s somehow better?
Do you even know what regulatory capture is? It’s the regulator being on the side of the regulated. Why does that happen? Couldn’t have anything to do with decades of libertarian/republican chanting regulation is bad, government is the problem could it? When the top bush regime banking regulators got to gather to compete, promising each to be the most lenient, I doubt you had a problem. “Government involvement” in corporate abuses, my ass–government permissiveness, and refusal to regulate in the first place, resultant to a pervasive libertarian/republican chant of get government out of business, rather. Are you deliberately shallow, is it confirmation of my bias about libertarianism in general, or can you just not help it?
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat: Homer is becoming quite the food critic.
Allan
I find it interesting that the only solution ED has offered up is more and better-paid regulators regulating things better. That’s not Libertarianism I can believe in.
Also too, I’m sure that Esperanto will be catching on any time now.
schrodinger's cat
@ChrisS: Martini, shaken not stirred, with gin not vodka.
Kthx.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Wow, he has really grown! The pie looks delicious. I am making shrimp pilaf with basmati rice tonight.
Villago Delenda Est
@E.D. Kain:
OK, great.
How do you do this? Remember, you have to PAY for it. The money to compensate these regulatory supermen at rates that will dissuade them from being whores to the industries they regulate has to come from someplace, you know.
We used to have an entire infrastructure of these regulatory types. But they kept, um, getting in the way of the profits of the Galtian overlord types. With all this insisting on selling unadulterated food, safe toys, autos that don’t fall apart 15 minutes after the warranty expires, those sorts of things…
stuckinred
@matoko_chan: what’s up loser?
hey, mornin joe said his son has aspergers, maybe you two outghta hook up and have a litter of idiots.
matoko_chan
@geg6: unlike that WATB Kain, im fireproof.
i can take the heat, an’ i know how to play my class.
Griefer feral druid.
:)
Georgia Pig
@Midnight Marauder:Yeah, that’s the beauty of anti-government political philosophies, it relieves you of responsibility for anything. When Republicans, aided by a lot of self-identified “libertarians” and “independents”, take control of the government, they defund everything but defense or turn it into a puke funnel to corporate interests, doing everything possible to create a self-fulfulling prophecy of “failed government.” Republicans have effectively sabotaged almost every agency in the Federal Government outside of the DoD, all the while keeping up a steady drumbeat of “government failure.” Libertarians have bought most of this hook, line and sinker, either because they’re corrupt (e.g., those owned by Koch) or because they suffer from confirmation bias. BTW, ED, your positions are losing coherence, at least if you want to keep thinking of yourself as a libertarian. I mean, paying government regulators more? You sound like a garden variety “good government” liberal.
Catsy
Well, on the plus side, I see that E.D. Kain is involving himself in the comments of the threads that concern him. That’s an improvement.
On the minus side, he still doesn’t appear to know what the fuck he’s talking about.
His last post ended with the line, “all that being said, I don’t have enough knowledge of the actual proceedings in these rocket-docket cases to say much more.” His post should’ve begun with that line and stopped there with the awareness that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, rather than coming at the end of a post filled with demonstrably ignorant and misinformed opinions.
I took a gander through Doug’s last thread, and the majority of Kain’s comments about foreclosure proceedings and fraud can be fairly summed up as: “fucking foreclosures, how do they work?”
stuckinred
@matoko_chan:” then could we pay you to GO AWAY perhaps?”
now that would be a money maker to get you to vansish.
ChrisS
@schrodinger’s cat:
Done, I’ll be having a low-ball with three ice cubes and four ounces of Jim Beam Rye.
So, have we figured an alternative to DougJ’s and mistermix’s assertion as to why the reasonoids and glibertarians don’t give a fuck about foreclosure fraud? Or as suspected, they’re not true libertarians and anyway, it’s probably the government’s fault that lazy people don’t pay their fucking bills.
stuckinred
@matoko_chan: you don’t know jack
matoko_chan
@stuckinred: from what i have read the reproductive progeny of an aspie-only mating would have a high probability of full blown autism.
you are likely correct.
matoko_chan
@stuckinred: are u a Playah, stuck?
E.D. Kain
@les: Actually I think the problems were worse before the deregulation of the 1970’s and 1980’s (Carter/Reagan). And much worse back in the day of huge corporate/government entities like GM and GE and the like. If you have less economic intervention and fewer regulations, you can afford to pay regulators better because they have less to do. Regulate for safety and fraud and leave the rest up to competition. Besides, efforts to close the revolving door between industry and regulators will save money in the long run, though I’m not sure exactly what it would take.
One can believe in free markets and a general belief in low levels of government regulation and still believe in the need to have rules and regulations in place. A country like Denmark or the Netherlands has very little government involvement in the economy and they do just fine. It’s not about all or nothing, it’s about how to focus priorities. Often “more regulation” just means more red-tape, more opportunities for capture, etc. What we should be looking for is less regulation, but more where it counts.
Davis X. Machina
@pragmatism: Sez you.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@E.D. Kain:
I agree with this. It’s what my friend who complains about lack of financial regulation says, pretty much on the nose. Unless you get good people doing the inspecting, companies will find ways around your rules.
scav
@ChrisS: and I’ll suggest a lot of people take the red wine as we’ve just found evidence that it’s a 6,100 year old tradition.
WereBear
Funny thing is: In a sane world, I am a libertarian.
I think we should marry whomever we please. The Drug War is a waste of time and money and lives; legalize it already. Stop subsidizing certain food industries; let people support the food they want to eat (free markets, dude!) Of course people should own guns; as long as they haven’t screwed up their citizen duties like being a felon or have mental issues that precludes it for safety reasons. Humans have a right to health care. Total freedom of all religions. Censorship must die.
But the personal liberty grail I embraced in my youth, (partly influenced by Sophie Tucker: ain’t no body’s business if I do) has been twisted and tormented and Koched up.
So I can’t say, anymore, that I am a big “L” libertarian.
And I think that sucks, and my rights are being trampled upon.
Midnight Marauder
@ChrisS:
I think we figured it out back here when Kain wrote the following:
That’s why libertarians don’t care about property rights, silly! Because they’re actually just confused, misguided liberals trying to make government function more effectively!
I’m sorry? What’s that? E.D. Kain did not specify who would be footing the bill for those generously paid regulators? Surely, he is aware–? No, he isn’t?
Oh…I see. Well…this is awkward now…
stuckinred
@matoko_chan: nah, simple person making chicken and dumplings waiting to watch “Dogs Decoded”.
Davis X. Machina
Disraeli Tory, more like. Infinitely preferable to the ones we’ve got today, but still a Tory.
pragmatism
@Davis X. Machina: winnar. this is central to my point.
licensed to kill time
matoko_chan saying she could take the heat made me think of this graphic from Hyperbole and a Half which then made me think that it illustrates how E.D.Kain probably feels when he ventures into the comment threads here ;)
stuckinred
scav
@Davis X. Machina: It’s gone all Humpty-Dumpty now: libertarianism means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
dmbeaster
I struggle to understand what libertarians actually believe. You are either an anarchist or you believe in the classical notion of the social contract. We can talk endlessly about what the parameters of the social contract should be, but I sense that libertarians miss the boat on this basic question. Hanging together as a society, as a fundamental paradigm, requires some restrictions on individual liberty pursuant to some version of the social contract. Our culture has spent over 100 years struggling with the question of how to do this in a capitalist society – do libertarians understand the history of conflicts and trade-offs that got us where we are now? I sense not as they mindlessly rant about “government control” as if it is some independent evil, rather than a byproduct of the debate about the social contract.
As for capitalism, anyone who knows any history understands that unregulated capitalism destroys free markets which allegedly make it so wonderful — it is prone to massive corruption. It rigs markets, creates combinations that kill free markets, and otherwise does what it can to get what it wants – damn the rules. The reason government struggles to control its excesses is because fundamentally, capitalists seek to pervert the controls imposed on them by government. There is next to no ethos in our culture of responsible corporate power – or whatever does exist, is always understood to be largely subservient to shareholder interests.
A belief in the inherent goodness of unregulated markets and capitalism is simply wrong-headed and naive. The argument should always be about what system of rules, or social contract, works best overall, as opposed to simply ranting about the rules and regulations.
Omnes Omnibus
You guys have fun. I am going to go teach a class on choosing the correct corporate form for your business.
ChrisS
Regulate for safety and fraud and leave the rest up to competition.
The rest would be … what exactly? Because the first two aren’t well regarded by libertarians and take up quite a chunk of change.
Or is this like balancing the budget by cutting all the funds that go to welfare queens with Cadillacs?
schrodinger's cat
@ChrisS: Thanks!
ETA: You are wrong here, EDK, for example, if you take the case of bank defaults the period between the 1950’s and 1970’s has the least number of defaults, this was when the regulations regarding banking and the financial sector were the strictest.
E.D. Kain
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: Quite right – but you can’t afford and never will be able to afford too many really good people. So you have to pick and choose how you want the regulatory burden to fall. I think regulating finance is one such place. What you want to avoid is piling more and more regulations on top of one another, or just throwing money at the problem. The trick is getting good people who will stick around and won’t be too over worked to do a good job. Where does the money come from? Well I think the government should tackle less and do more with fewer, better-paid people. And hell, pay them with some of the fines they accrue by doing a good job.
Dusty
So what specifically do you want to stop regulating?
Barb (formerly Gex)
@E.D. Kain: Oh, you would like better, more efficient government. Nice. Now, give some detail on how you would regulate to prevent banks from foreclosing on homes they have no paperwork for using your suggested solution.
les
@E.D. Kain:
Sorry, but I just don’t buy it. For starters, as many have noted, your first response is to defend economic privilege. Next, your concern seems always with size of government–big is bad. And your knee jerk is always that if there is a gov’t entity anywhere in the chain of circumstance, then gov’t is the problem. You apparently haven’t noticed that the world of business is huge, massively interrelated and immensely complex. It is simplistic in the extreme, and as far as I can tell purely ideologically driven, to suggest a small gov’t enforcing a few simple regulations will result in some magically efficient market that will not abuse its power. It is laughable to think that vast economic power is balanced by consumers, or that vast capital concentration won’t simply ride over labor.
Difficult as it may be to believe for a libertarian, gov’t regulation of business wasn’t invented out of thin air as an intellectual exercise by a determined band of liberals who loved big government as an ideological construct. Forever–and in our own particular history, starting with the Magna Carta–regulation has been the response of the less powerful to real abuses by the powerful. Concern over size as some meaningful metric is shallow at best.
Government is not the problem. Corrupt gov’t, coopted gov’t, gov’t hobbled by people who are either beholden to economic power or who resist gov’t just because it is gov’t is the problem.
Don
The overt abusiveness from some of you towards ED is embarrassing and unpleasant. I suspect I disagree with him about as often as you do yet I somehow still manage not to engage in outright abuse.
If you really think he argues in bad faith then the best thing you could do is to ignore him completely. Instead of one supposed bad-faith posted in a thread you’re stinking up the whole place. It makes participating here unattractive.
elm
@E.D. Kain:
Congratulations on working your way up to unrealistic idealism.
Here’s the thing. You’re about 100 pages behind the rest of us.
Good (accountable, unobtrusive, transparent, and efficient) government is what progressives want too.
The difference is that we have policy proposals, research, and evidence that could achieve that (or at least move create concrete improvements). You’ve got handwaving and exhortations for government to work smarter, not harder and do more with less. It’s a nice sentiment but totally useless.
WereBear
Apologies for jumping in at the end of a looooong comment section I haven’t entirely read yet, but let me indulge a pet peeve:
You can no longer say “I don’t know much about it.”
Not when you are front paging a blog. Not in a friggin’ BLOG POST.
Mmmmm, ‘kay?
There this wild thing called the Internets, which is a system of tubes. And here’s the crazy part; you search for information and you find it!
There are experts lying around, just waiting to be poked with sticks and belch forth expert opinion and solid knowledge and real world experience.
It takes about half an hour to pick some virtual brain out there and have a clue.
Anyone else is pulling a “Doughy Jonah” and we can’t have that.
We’re trying to get a civilization going here!
E.D. Kain
@Dusty: Let’s take the health insurance industry for starters. I think we could scale back regulations there quite a bit and be much better off for it – interstate sale of insurance should go, the employee tax exemption should go, there should be an effort to break up the supply side cartels which are largely products of government protection.
sukabi
@E.D. Kain: that might work in a small isolated community, but when corporations are playing on the world field is pretty unrealistic. It’s about as useful as wishing for a unicorn.
Culture of Truth
People do leave the FBI. And some spend their careers in agencies.
dmbeaster
The foreclosure problem is easy to describe. In the crazed mania to create derivatives which created big up-front profits for origination of home mortgages (and a desire to make loans no matter what the credit risk of the borrower), the lenders scattered the actual ownership of the mortgages far and wide. The recordkeeping for that was atrocious – in part because of the crazy volume of derivatives that were created.
Now a record number are defaulting, and foreclosure requires the person conducting the foreclosure to demonstrate actual ownership of the debt in question in order to conduct the foreclosure. Defaulted homeowners have been able to forestall foreclosure because reckless lenders now can’t find the paperwork or determine who owns what. There is no “moral hazard” here – its just basic rules. One of the crazier versions of the problem is that ownership is scattered far and wide amongst many investors, with no one really in charge. There was a servicing agent typically but many of them have gone bankrupt, or their paperwork is atrocious. You literally cant find the owner as the only person dealing with the loan has been a servicer.
To circumvent the problem, lenders have been caught faking the paperwork. They are overwhelmed to deal with the problem both because of the number of defaults and the scope of the effed up paperwork for the loans. They clearly can deal with it correctly, but it is expensive to do so, and made more expensive by the insane paperwork problems they created for themselves. So they have cheated and cut corners.
Foreclosure has been around and been properly supervised according the the rules for a very long time – it makes zero sense to somehow look to “moral hazard” to find fault with debtors on this problem. The problems are 100% created by the lending industry from the initial crazed decision to make many of the loans, to the screwball recordkeeping for those loans, and the bizarre scattering of ownership in complex derivatives.
elm
@E.D. Kain: Where has this worked as a model for providing health care in the modern world? What’s your evidence?
How big should insurance cartels be allowed to be? What agency should regulate their acquisitions? Should that agency have the power to force a too-big insurer to divest properties? How will you get this proposal through Congress and the Senate? What mechanism will prevent the (smaller) insurance cartels from colluding in secret?
maus
@E.D. Kain:
Just to note, I believe most of where BJ gets annoyed with you is when you overuse devil’s advocacy and do not identify it as such, or preface the opinion as a logical exercise, and therefore unintentionally imply that the loathsome idea(s) come from your person.
IM
So it’s Denmark and the Netherlands now, countries with almost no government involvement in the economy?
That is a peculiar description of two christian democratic or social democratic countries.
Bye the way what happened to the libertarian examples of yesteryear, Ireland and Iceland?
Tonal Crow
Just to add fuel to the fire, E.D., what do you think of take-it-or-leave-it contracts for vital or important services (such as banking, cellphone service, internet service/domain ownership, credit scores, software…) that include such things as:
1. Broad indemnification clauses requiring the person to defend and indemnify the business for pretty much any liability arising from the contract (these are wellnigh universal);
2. Mandatory arbitration clauses requiring the person to submit all disputes to arbitration before a panel chosen by the business, before or rather than taking the case to court (these are very common);
3. Site audit clauses requiring the person to open his computers to inspection by the business to search for evidence of piracy (these are not uncommon in software licenses);
4. Use-of-personal-information clauses requiring the person to permit the business to use her personal information for purposes unrelated to executing the contract (sometimes found in credit-related contracts).
And if you think any of these are problematic, what do you suggest doing about them?
Barb (formerly Gex)
@elm: My view of libertarianism is that it is one giant thought experiment.
sukabi
@E.D. Kain: one of the reasons the health insurance industry is as abusive as it currently is, is not because of regulations, it’s because it has been exempted from the anti-trust regulations that cover the other areas of insurance…
WereBear
BULLSHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gee, hope I don’t get moderated…
But geez, it’s the only way I could express my (+4 blended Scotch admittedly,) dismay at this Utter Crap polluting my beloved Internets.
You are wrong.
They are any number of Fine, Upstanding, Highly Moral, and Just Durn Fine People who are willing to sign onto a civil service job where they make people play fair. They are the backbone of civilization and this is how you get them.
Jimminy Christmas! (I’m trying to cut down on my swearing) that part is NOT HARD.
WereBear
@Barb (formerly Gex): So sorry about you. Been thinking about you all day. And hugging my kitties.
Damn.
les
@E.D. Kain:
This problem was solved decades ago. It’s called the civil service system. Combined with public service worker unions, we had a stable, well trained and reasonably compensated (well, if you think the American middle class of the last half of the twentieth century was reasonable) government workforce. Not perfect, any more than the private sector; but subject generally to individual, not systemic, corruption. Gee, what happened? Decades of systematic abuse and attack by political “theories” that government is inherently bad, regulation is inherently bad, the magic market is inherently good, government has no business in regulating property rights–sound vaguely libertarian to you? What’s the “intellectual underpinning” to the “conservative” (read bought and sold by big business) attack on government?
And here we are. For 8 years the bush regime waged full on war to gut government–to recruit political allies, to fill civil service with people who believe in neither, to limit effectiveness, to assure that agencies were taken over by the regulated; cheered on by libertarians and other deluded. And your solution? Whoa, get rid of those regulators, get rid of regulations, get smaller, get simpler, blah blah blah.
It is to laugh. Or cry.
Midnight Marauder
@E.D. Kain:
Is that very little government involvement including or not including The Danish Act on Financial Stability, which was their own version of a bank bailout?
Right. Because they have no regulations with which to “regulate for safety and fraud and leave the rest up to competition.” That is generally why they have so little to do. Because regulators need regulations in order to regulate. Sounds complicated and crazy, I know, but trust me–it just might work if you give it a chance.
Because that is definitely what people are clamoring for when they rail against the revolving door of regulatory capture? Saving money? Are you sure it isn’t something like “We need independent regulators who aren’t in the pocket of the industry they are in charge of overseeing, so that we can avoid catastrophic tragic disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Massey mine explosion!” Because I am pretty sure that is what it is actually like.
Or, it could mean increasing regulatory authority after a multi-decade period in which Republicans and Libertarians waged unholy war against regulations of any kind for any industry almost. Flip side of the coin, and all that jazz.
So where, exactly, does the regulation count? Because you sure as fuck haven’t given any credible examples of that yet.
joe from Lowell
They like to pretend otherwise, by very occasionally using someone being harmed by a corporation, but only when that corporation is acting in concert with a government, and only to push an agenda that would ultimately advance the interest of their corporate sponsors.
For instance, their pretense of giving a shit about Suzette Kelo. Sure, the Institute for Justice left enormously useful arguments lying on the table, because they weren’t helpful in advancing their campaign, but really, they just wanted to help the poor lady.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@WereBear: Thanks. Just got back. What a sweet boy Simon was. I’m content that it was the right time though.
E.D. Kain
@Barb (formerly Gex): Nope. It’s quite easy to change the rule – and we could do it for credit cards, too – to make regulations apply to the state of the customer rather than the state of the issuer.
Dusty
@ ED Kain Leaving aside the merits of these particular suggestions, you would propose regulating the healthy insurance industry less and giving those resources to regulating the financial industry? Wouldn’t the more likely outcome be that the resources currently dedicated to the health insurance industry would just be eliminated?
schrodinger's cat
The regulations regarding banking and financial sector were put in place after the Great Depression as a part of the New Deal, they worked. It is the gutting of that infrastructure that is a major reason behind these financial crises. Even after the meltdown of 2008 it is amazing that EDK and his ideological brethren advocate for less regulation of the financial sector.
Warren Terra
@Tonal Crow:
This.
And, sure, government shares some blame for the problem of corporate power, both by not stopping it (although to the Libertarian, this is a feature, as the Gummint is not interfering in private contracts) and when it’s captured by the firms (who are the ones paying attention, and organized to seek changes). A great example was yesterday’s New York Times story about abusive bail bondsmen with deeply unfair and opaque twenty-page contracts they impose on the least empowered members of our society at a uniquely vulnerable moment.
But at the end of the day, over my lifetime the government has gained some more power over me (mostly through really stupid laws written to respond to politically exploited panics about drugs and Terror) but it pales to the amount of power corporations have gained. At least I have various means of recourse with respect to government abuses.
WereBear
@Barb (formerly Gex): That’s a blessed relief.
Move them on to their next life. It’s all any of us ask. Blessings on you and Simon.
I once lost a kitty named Simon.
E.D. Kain
@les: Actually I feel the same way about law enforcement and security agencies. How many do we need? Does having more and more and more security and intelligence agencies actually make us safer? Or would we be better off with fewer, better-paid agents?
Villago Delenda Est
@dmbeaster:
One of the classic parodies of libertarian idiocy is “social contract? I didn’t sign any steenking social contract!”
The fundamental concept that human beings living together have to form an understanding of how they’re going to live together is so often missing. Someone’s rights, hell, everyone’s rights, are going to be curtailed, to some extent. The issue then becomes how do we go about doing this in a fair, open manner that preserves the maximum possible liberty for EVERYONE, not just a small elite of Galtian parasites?
Libertarians are under the notion that things will be great when THEY are the lords of the planet. Well, great for them. Not so great for everyone else. C.S. Forrester used to write about the “unlimited freedom” of the captain of one of His Majesty’s Ships during the Napoleonic Wars. That “unlimited freedom” for one man came at the price of wretched servitude for everyone else on His Majesty’s Ships.
Midnight Marauder
@schrodinger’s cat:
Fixed and such.
Same as it ever was.
scav
@E.D. Kain: For Credit Cards: State of the customer or the state where the purchase was made? How do we deal with Internet sales? OK, you said easy, not simple, but still. Insurance might be easier, but we’ve still got the problem of which law to apply if someone is injured and requires medical attention out-of-state.
Tonal Crow
@E.D. Kain: Or would we be better off if we limited both government’s and business’s power to spy, and removed every victimless crime from the books (e.g., the War on Drugs)?
Midnight Marauder
@E.D. Kain:
This is just really fucking weird. Why does every issue with you have to go through the filter of “does this make government bigger or smaller?” Do you not find it odd in the least that you never respond with “Does this make the organization more or less effective?”
Unless, of course, you are not concerned with the effectiveness of the organization, and are rather concerned about making it cease to exist in any legitimate and substantial form.
Culture of Truth
We should have more good things and fewer bad things. Or something.
E.D. Kain
@Tonal Crow: I think all of those are pernicious practices, much as I think payday lending is pretty pernicious, and as I’ve said I’m perfectly fine with tighter rules for credit cards and finance. While I do argue in defense of libertarian ideas, I’ve never claimed to be a big L libertarian. I have a lot of sympathy for free markets and small government, but I’m not a true believer when it comes to a lot of these questions – especially finance regulation and safety net issues. Someone upthread said I’m more of a Disraeli Tory and that may very well be. I think limited government is a good guiding light, but there are definitely times when government needs to step in and intervene on behalf of citizens either to protect them from corporate abuses or local government abuses or poverty or old age. We should try to achieve as much of this as possible without government, but we aren’t going to ever be able to achieve it all without government, not by a long shot.
E.D. Kain
@Midnight Marauder: You’re very adept at twisting my words. I didn’t say my concern was with government being bigger or smaller here. I asked, does adding more layers of security bureaucracy actually make us more secure….
E.D. Kain
@scav: It would depend on the state he resides in, not the state he was visiting, I would imagine. You buy your policy in Arizona from a company in Minnesota, you get the AZ regulations. A guy in Idaho buys it from the same company, he gets his Idaho regulations. Thus the regulations are accountable to the people. You go visit family in Texas, you still have your insurance purchased under AZ regulations. Ditto for credit cards and buying stuff with those credit cards online.
schrodinger's cat
@E.D. Kain:
How about sympathy for real people instead of some abstract ideals. I am also wondering how exactly you define a free market, and what is ideal size of this small government, that you speak of?
ETA: Free markets, perfect competition etc are abstractions economists use to simplify the math. It would be ridiculous to say that I am sympathetic to frictionless planes and point objects, if I were an engineer.
E.D. Kain
@elm: I am confused by your question. There should be no insurance cartels. There should be insurance companies in competition with one another – not acting as cartels and fixing prices. I think you misread me.
And actually, a number of countries use a far more free-market system of insurance than we do in America. Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. They have other rules and regulations obviously. I don’t buy the notion that healthcare can be solely left to the free market, even if we can make market reforms that can help contain costs.
E.D. Kain
@schrodinger’s cat: How about you stop taking quotes out of context and argue with a shred of intellectual integrity.
elm
@E.D. Kain:
Really? This has to be a joke.
Try looking at government expenditure as a percentage of GDP or health care in Denmark and the Netherlands.
Alex S.
I would guess that the reason Reason and other outlets receive money from right-wing billionaires is to prevent them from actually establishing an alternative to the GOP. I suspect that this also happens in the Democratic Party, for example I suspect that Howard Dean only pretends to be the left alternative to keep the inevitably frustated liberals within the democratic tent.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@E.D. Kain: Well, we can’t figure out what you would do about this foreclosure problem. There’s a very specific problem being discussed, and you come with generalities. Too much regulation should be less but better regulation. Well done! Who doesn’t agree?
You seem to be saying you don’t know what should be done, but opposing anything anyone else suggests. Wait, you did suggest a government investigation. After the fact.
There’s a much greater harm to the families who would be vindicated in that investigation than there is for the banks who could simply PROVE THEY OWN THE PROPERTY being foreclosed upon. And this is exactly why libertarians were being accused of having no problem with corporate abuse of power. I guess you are more for allowing abuses and punishing them rather than preventing it.
scav
@E.D. Kain: Fine, but I still don’t see it as decreasing regulation, merely transferring complexity. The whole original point was to scale back regulation, no?
Dusty
It depends on whether you think there are agencies that have more resources assigned to them than are necessary to accomplish their specific charters in addition to whether you think there are any charters that not only should be but can be eliminated in the current political environment. Then you can look at whether those resources can be reassigned to improve the effectiveness of other areas. Without that information, this is a purely philosophical query about what what the limits of the government should be.
schrodinger's cat
@E.D. Kain: How about answering the points that I made in my earlier comments, see 167 and 139. You say that less regulation is always better. I have given you a concrete example where it is not so. Why don’t you address my point instead of name calling.
elm
@E.D. Kain:
I read you just fine. I understand what you want to achieve, what I don’t see is a mechanism to achieve it or evidence that it’s going to work.
1. Deregulate (of course)
2. Break up the insurance cartels (in an unspecified manner)
3. ???
4. Everything’s great
WereBear
@Barb (formerly Gex): I see this as simple. If a person can show they are still paying the mortgage, they are still paying the mortgage!
To whomever. That was, after all, what was asked of them in the first place.
Too simple?
les
@E.D. Kain:
You feel what “same way” about security agencies? That smaller is necessarily better? That in any instance of abuse, if a government agency is in the picture then government is the problem? I described why you can in fact have an effective civil regulatory structure instead of 6 highly paid experts enforcing 2 plain and simple regulations, and your response is you feel the same way about criminal law?
Fer fuck’s sake, you should have all the government you need, unconstrained by purely political and ideological ideas of proper size. What you need would, in a progressive world, be determined by the governed based on readily available information on transparent government processes, and able to and interested in balancing costs and benefits–unfortunately, at this stage of American history, that may be as pie in the sky as libertarian magic markets or galtian superman society. Libertarians would hate this society, because you’d actually have to educate all the citizens and not just leave it to economic chance; you’d have to respect your fellow citizens, not just your personal property rights; you’d probably even need a few politicians who cared more about governing than pandering for power. You’d have to concede that government has to regulate property rights. And you’d have to give up premising every fucking argument on some notion of the god/market ordained raw number of government employees.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@elm: Even worse, insurance works best with fewer, larger players. Risk pooling. So the area where he proposes a solution is one of the few industries where it makes less sense to encourage smaller companies under fewer regulations than it does to have larger companies that are regulated.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@WereBear: Shit. So after we pay off our house, should we refinance just so we can prove we own the house?
ETA: Maybe I should just set up a shell company right now and route my mortgage payments to myself and not the bank. After all, I’m making payments. That’s proof enough that I shouldn’t be foreclosed.
E.D. Kain
@schrodinger’s cat: I said no such thing. Less regulation is not always better. Sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse.
E.D. Kain
@elm: It’s not about the level of expenditures necessarily. It’s about the level and type of government regulation into these economies. If you look at even very conservative (Heritage) ratings of these countries, they score often as high or higher than the US does in terms of their economic freedom, despite high tax rates.
pragmatism
sully brought up a quote the other day from yuval levine criticising the gop about their lens of smaller government. libertarians shouldn’t exclude themselves from that advice.
“[If I could change one thing about the GOP] I would make it so that every time we are tempted to talk about the size of government we talk also (and more so) about the purpose of government. This would make us more focused on policy particulars than on vague abstractions, better able to offer an alternative to the left’s agenda rather than just slowing the pace of its implementation, and better able to speak to the aspirations of the larger public,”- Yuval Levin, Conservative Home.
E.D. Kain
@Barb (formerly Gex): Actually deregulation and interstate sales would likely lead to several major players competing nationally with very large risk pools. As it stands, you have many regional monopolies not competing with smaller risk pools.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@E.D. Kain: At last! Interstate sales!
So South Dakota can do what they did with credit cards? Have little to no regulations and lure every insurance company to be based there. So you can buy insurance in any state, but only one state sells it.
We’ve seen this proposal before. It didn’t achieve it’s goals. Why would it work this time?
ETA: And how would you address the problem when the larger insurance companies use their size to under cut the small ones until they can no longer stay in business, only then to jack up rates?
schrodinger's cat
@E.D. Kain:
__
This is what I said.
So do you agree with me, that deregulation of the financial and banking sector has been a disaster?
Midnight Marauder
@E.D. Kain:
If by “twisting your words” you mean “following the trajectory of your thoughts and paying attention to the context of your words,” then yep, guilty as charged. You don’t have to explicitly state that you’re concerned about government being bigger or smaller for that concern to be reflected in your writing, E.D. Because, sure, while one of the points you were making was about additional layers of security bureaucracy (and what agencies are we talking about here, for the record? CIA? FBI? NSA? DHS? TSA? Why don’t you actually start naming real world entities instead of sticking with meaningless platitudes like “security bureaucracy?”), you clearly failed to notice how you framed the issue:
Do you notice how you tied the effectiveness of the “security bureaucracy” to its relative size? Because I certainly did, even if you didn’t. Everything with you always comes back to the relative size and involvement of the government, and you can’t fucking wave it away by trying to highlight another point that does nothing to mitigate your fixation on the size of government.
Funny story. This was proven to be total bullshit. Very funny story.
Sure, one can believe that. One can also believe the following two sentences later:
Do you notice a theme there, E.D.? Any kind of a pattern at all with your rhetoric regarding the size and involvement of government in practically any area?
“IT’S A FIRE SALE! ALL REGULATIONS MUST GO!“
les
@E.D. Kain:
You’d be closer to say you have a small number of national players, each with near monopoly market domination in a number of regional markets, and little if any effective competition in any market. Your notion of interstate sales with policies governed by the insured’s jurisdiction is essentially what we have now–the only motive for industry to care about interstate is to forum shop.
Midnight Marauder
@E.D. Kain:
Is this the same Heritage Foundation that ranked Ireland 5th in economic freedom in April 2010?! The same Heritage Foundation that wrote the following about Ireland’s “economic freedom”?
You can’t be serious, E.D. The Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom rankings?! What a fucking joke.
Villago Delenda Est
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Can anyone say classic monopolist behavior?
Suuuure you can!
sukabi
@elm:
1. Deregulate (of course)
2. Break up the insurance cartels (in an unspecified manner)
3. ???
4.
Everything’s greatProfit!!fixed it. Underpants Gnomes to the rescue.
WereBear
Know whut?
I’d prefer Big Footed Government to Rapacious Corporatism.
Any Day.
Of Any Week.
Davebo
Well, it looks like we can add the regulatory framework of The Netherlands and Denmark to the list of things E.D. is woefully ignorant of.
Seriously dude. Do you just make this shit up as you go along?
Open a business in The Netherlands and initiate a contract with a customer. Let me know when you’ve done it and I’ll read it for you word for word.
And how much of the red light district in Amsterdam still exists? And where did the rest of it go?
Alex S.
@Midnight Marauder:
Maybe some countries rate higher because of their stronger protection of property rights…
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: We can has Tristan? How is he?
pragmatism
@Alex S.: did some other country find julian sanchez’ PS3 that was stolen??????
elm
@Midnight Marauder: I agree. I’m not about to take the Heritage Foundation as a serious source for anything. It’s a right-wing pressure group and propaganda outlet.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Am I no longer being engaged? Again, we’ve seen how that whole “interstate sales” solution works. It doesn’t. At least not to make industries competitive. There’s always some state that will drop the bottom out on their regulatory standards, at which point they all move there.
So how do you, EDK, propose to solve the problem inherent in your proposed solution?
WereBear
He’s actually good when he’s sleeping.
He’s scheduled for his neutering this coming Tuesday. I hate the “what did I do? I’ll be good from now on!” looks I always get from the carrier slits.
But it’s better than the alternative.
WereBear
@schrodinger’s cat: Ah, bless you.
You may have Tristan.
He is one loooooooooooooong Looney Tune.
He loves his Brig Brudder, Reverend Jim.
I am eeeeeeeeeeevil. I had more than 2 links.
Catsy
@Don:
There are few things on the Internet more comical than someone who wades into a contentious thread and self-righteously admonishes everyone to ignore those who are behaving badly, and in the process completely fails to ignore those he thinks are behaving badly.
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: Thanks, I has seen these photos. Can I has new ones?
Kthx
ETA: He is adorable!
HyperIon
@E.D. Kain:
Um, GE is sorta the archetypal huge corporate entity TODAY.
So, dude, what IS your point?
aimai
@E.D. Kain:
You don’t seem to know the first thing about free markets, markets, and barriers to entry. Absent *regulation* and *government intervention* cartels will *always form.* Economies of scale, vertical and/or horizontal integration: look them up. These are important concepts. They are also not new. You, however, seem to have been born under a cabagge leaf yesterday.
aimai
sukabi
don’t think he really has one.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@aimai: He briefly responded to some of my criticism on his take on insurance by offering up interstate sales. So I immediately pointed out the obvious flaw with his proposal. And it’s not like we don’t already have experience with those types of solutions. I think that may have been the end of the discussion for some reason.
Libertarians are so tedious. Everything has to be proven from first principles in a thought experiment because they can’t be bothered to know what is happening in the real world.
sukabi
@aimai: even without knowing a thing about business, knowing something about human nature should give a couple of clues about what would happen without regulations…. thought that was why Moses was handed the 10 commandments…
The Populist
@aimai:
To add to your point: There ARE NO FREE MARKETS in this country. To anybody who thinks there are – Show me how, for example, big companies buying up smaller companies to own a market makes it free and competitive?
A free market means we have real competition. The oil companies are a cartel, drug companies are few and are a cartel.
If there is real competition, it’s from new business areas but sooner or later those companies will sell out to the big boys.
When Roosevelt busted the trusts, he opened up the marketplace. I own a decent sized small business and I can tell you that the obstacles to overcome the money and power the big boys have are almost insurmountable. I had a rich fella want to buy a piece of my company and I told him where to go. He wanted to buy my expertise and it just isn’t for sale.
The Populist
The Populist:
I should also add that regulations insure that the game known as business is fair to all players. Taking away regulation means the big boys can pound the rest of us into submission.
No regulation is the equivalent of a guy like Carl Icahn buying his way onto the board of a cash rich, struggling company. Guys like him want to get seats on the board and then vote to divvy the cash up to investors even if it is not the time to do so from the perspective of the company.
Dividends being voted on by guys like Icahn means they want the cash. No different than when an LBO firm takes a public company private, loads it with debt and puts it back on the exchange. The problem here is that our system encourages bigger is better and this concept of moving paper around over productivity and patience.
WereBear
@schrodinger’s cat: I appreciate your enthusiasm! However, that’s my latest. More soon!
Paris
This is retarded. The Repugs assumed power and turned gov’t into shit. Kain is arguing that gov’t is shit and therefore the problem. Are ‘libertarians’ the mental equivalent of thirteen year olds by definition?
gerry
It is impossible for corporations to persist in bad behavior because they are subject to the discipline of the Market.
Johannes
@E.D. Kain: OK, here’s my second effort at it, E.D.
First, you seem to be right back where you started–moral hazard on both sides, in essence an “in pari delicto” position. This viewpoint strikes me as both ill-founded factually (and yet one you cling to with surprising tenacity despite the efforts of several attorneys on-site (sorry!)) and lacking in a willingness to have a genuine debate.
First, the factual component. Several commenters have tried to acquaint you, via links to articles, case studies, and primary sources, with the extent of fraudulent filings by purported creditors in foreclosure cases. They have also told you that the lenders sell the loans quickly, cashing out, and the paper changes hands many times. In fact, the individual loans are merged into a pool, subdivided by risk level, with the income stream from loans being subdivided among those various risk levels. All of which is a long way of saying that there is no single, real “owner” of the loan in the sense that property law contemplates assignment to a discrete owner.
When a loan must be foreclosed, the servicer essentially creates a fiction, falsely swearing that a series of assignments took place leading to single party with the right to foreclose. They are often obviously faked–made out in favor of “Bogus Assignee” for example (that really happened), or dated after the foreclosure was commenced. So, having disregarded the legal steps required to transfer the note, the servicers have come up with the answer of systemic fraud, and make up a party in interest. Moral Hazard Score: Huge. Covering up assumption of risk, and essentially extinguishing the security interest they hold by, uh, defrauding the courts, the homeowner, and the investors, as well as suborning perjury by low level employees too uneducated to understand the risks they are now assuming for minimum wage.
Homeowner: May have been driven into default by servicer adding fees, or by predatory lending, or by servicer refusing to modify the loan despite having agreed to consider such requests as part of the HAMP program. Also, many refuse to accept short sales which would recover the principle, but not the fees the servicer charges. In other words, the servicers do not make reasonable decisions in the interests of their investors, they squeeze as much vig out of the homeowner as they can, and throw them into foreclosure.
Here, read an expert: ttp://www.macdc.org/research/Servicer-Report1009.pdf
How do I know this? I’m a NY lawyer with a very little experience in foreclosure cases; my SO is a specialist in them.
Moral Hazard Score for the Homeowner: Infinitesimal. I mean, really, there may be a few cases where people are skiving off and hoping to win a free home, but damned if I’ve run across any, or the SO either. Also, their credit is ruined, the efforts most of them make to pay the loan is herculean.
This is why those of us who are familiar with the issue are irritated with you, ED. You don’t seem interested in the human cost and you don’t seem willing to hear what we’re saying. You just nod, say yes, and then go back to “the moral hazard…”
Ailuridae
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Thanks for saving me some typing here.
: Even worse, insurance works best with fewer, larger players. Risk pooling. So the area where he proposes a solution is one of the few industries where it makes less sense to encourage smaller companies under fewer regulations than it does to have larger companies that are regulated.
Suggesting further fragmenting the insurance market would help control costs demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding how pricing pressure works for health care. With more players in any given state each would have lessened bargaining power and the cabal that is doctors and providers could demand higher compensation from each as they are the only game in town. You want some competition in each state but each insurer has to be big enough that a provider can’t be overly obscene with pricing to any one insurer; the average insurer’s risk pool has to be large enough that losing that insurer for your network would cost you money.
But then again, when you start from inviolate first principles as ED Kain does who gives a fuck about the salient details?
There are a lot of obvious solutions to the health care crisis and even some from a libertarian perspective. And, ED even managed to elude to the provider and doctor cartels. Our ED is learning!
Carl Nyberg
@dmbeaster:
Word.
lovable liberal
I’m with you, Law Firm. Libertarians believe that “corporate abuse of power” is a contradiction in terms and literally impossible (in the old-fashioned literal sense of literally). It’s their right to buy anything they want and can afford. Or even think they can afford.
Carl Nyberg
E.D. Kain, I have a request.
Pick one subject and learn about it. Get the facts. Learn the public policy options, including the pros and cons. Figure out what you believe. Then come back and argue your thesis from a position of knowledge.
You seem to know less than half about many things and have glib ideas and sound bites to create the appearances of discussing the issue.
But in reality, you simply avoid dealing with your critics arguments by spewing more of your less than half-baked ideas and insights.
You really need to learn how to argue a position without resorting to defending yourself by changing the subject.
Also, it’s a bit frustrating that you take position A. Then when position A is show to be wrong and foolish you shift to position B. But soon after you’re back at position A again.
I don’t know if this reflects insufficient training in critical thinking skills or if this kind of mendacity is hard-wired into the ideology you call “libertarianism”.
matoko_chan
@Carl Nyberg: heres my request.
let Cole/DougJ/mistemix/idontgiveafuckwho give me a post to PROVE Hayek WAS WRONG.
EDK can debate me, defend “Hayekian Principles” like the glibertarians are forever babbling about.
Stand and deliver, libertarian bitches.
I know they can’t.
Conservatism is the reeking roadkill of the Econopalypse.
It got run over by the future.
those dishonest assclowns ALL KNOW THIS….but they just keep babbling about the road to serfdom and the “free” market.
guess what? Hayekian principles just punched american working families in the face, and i can prove it.
matoko_chan
@Barb (formerly Gex): YES! it is because they are ideological dinosaurs– first culture intellectuals.
Third culture intellectuals actually incorporate science and empirial data into their philosophy.
there is a book about it.
That is why ED makes circular counterfactual arguments always returning to his original position.
Modern glibertarian thought is nonempirical.
eg, Big government is evil because they say it is– argument from first principles, both neccessary and sufficient.
elm
@Carl Nyberg: That’s a good proposal, Carl. I second that.
I’d also add the following:
E.D. Kain: present evidence for your arguments. Rhetoric, first principles, beliefs, and thought experiments do not go far. Evidence can. Evidence isn’t always perfect or perfectly clear, but without it you can only preach to your choir (and BJ commenters are not your choir).
Neil S
Maybe because governmental abuses of power are both much more common and much more dangerous than corporate abuses of power; or because corporate abuses can be controlled and punished by the government, but abuses by the government are not so easily checked?
One could alnose flip this around and wonder why it is that the progressive left is so obsessed with corporate power and enamored of governmental power.