I have to confess: I’ve never read Ayn Rand. Not once.
But I still think this is pretty amusing.
E.D. Kain wrote for Balloon Juice from 2010-12.
by E.D. Kain| 93 Comments
This post is in: Going Galt
I have to confess: I’ve never read Ayn Rand. Not once.
But I still think this is pretty amusing.
This post is in: Crock Pot Craziness
Republicans in the Arizona state legislature, not content to twiddle their thumbs whilst SB 1070 navigates the courts, have introduced new legislation challenging birthright citizenship:
The aim is “to trigger … a Supreme Court review of the phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ in the 14th amendment,” said Rep. John Kavanagh, one on the backers of the legislation.
It ultimately seeks “to deny citizenship to any child born of parents who are not citizens of the United States, be they illegal aliens, or foreigners on business or for tourist purposes,” he added.
A total of four proposals were introduced, two in the state House of Representatives and two in the Senate, where Republicans have a majority.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Joe and Steven Seagal took to the streets with deputies and a posse to round up the illegals:
In Phoenix, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Thursday kicked off a sweep to crack down on illegal immigration.
Aside from his deputies, Arpaio also relied on volunteer members of a newly formed Illegal Immigration Enforcement Posse, who took to the streets in a two-day countywide operation targeting drop houses, drug activity and human smuggling, said sheriff’s spokesman Sergeant Jesse Spurgin.
Action flick star Steven Seagal is a member of the sheriff’s posse, and he took part in the operation, Spurgin said. Twenty-two suspected illegal immigrants had been arrested by late Thursday, he said.
The legislation Arizona lawmakers introduced on Thursday is part of a coordinated drive by Republican legislators in several U.S. states that seeks to deny birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.
Truly, the inmates have taken control of the asylum.
These are the same people who want to cut 280,000 thousand poor people off the Medicaid rolls in Arizona, who want to slash education funding from K-12 and public universities – all because it’s impossible to pass any tax hikes beyond a measly, temporary jump in the state sales tax. Jan Brewer wants to create a state college system to run alongside the University system to offer a lower cost alternative (along the lines of California’s parallel institutions). But this is no fix to an immediate budget crisis! This is a long-term plan that certainly may have its merits – I’m skeptical given it comes from the governor’s desk – but it’s no short-term fix. If anything, it’s a disguised attempt to pull more funds from the existing higher education system and funnel them into a theoretical state college system. I have my doubts those funds will end up where they say they will. This is not the first time the legislature has attempted to rob the coffers of other state programs – attempts that have been rejected time and again by Arizona voters. The same voters who, inexplicably, keep electing these people to office.
But hey, at least Arizona students and faculty will be able to carry guns on campus.
What bloody madness.
I think Arizona is a wonderful state. It’s sunny, diverse, has quirky artsy towns like Gerome Jerome (I always misspell that) and Bisbee, and the super-quirky Arcosanti. We’ve got legal medical marijuana and soon will have a dispensary system. The state is actually quite a lot more diverse than reports like these would have you believe – bordering purple, and trending that direction (which may explain the reactionary nature of its current government). But these bills that keep coming up just get crazier and crazier. Nothing has done more to push me leftward politically than watching the consequences of these red-meat politicians and their paranoid, revanchist legislation.
This post is in: The Wingularity
Will Bunch has a truly heartbreaking, infuriating post up on the murder of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in Arizona in 2009. Brisenia’s mother survived by playing dead.
The killers were newly minted Tea Partiers and fledgling Minutemen, and I think it’s safe to say they were influenced by at least one Tea Party rally in Arizona before carrying out their murders. Shawna Forde, the mastermind of the operation, had apparently cooked up an idea to murder and rob drug dealers to fund her anti-immigrant activities. She and her accomplice, Jason Bush, broke into the Flores home on May 30, 2009.
[A warning (better late than never) this next bit is graphic and disturbing]The Murder of Brisenia FloresPost + Comments (117)
According to testimony, Bush shot Flores, then Gonzalez. Gonzalez was hit in the shoulder and leg and slumped to the floor. She testified that she played dead as she heard Bush pump more bullets into her husband as Brisenia woke up.
“Why did you shoot my dad?” the girl asked, sobbing, according to Gonzalez’s testimony. “Why did you shoot my mom?”
Gonzalez said she heard Bush slowly reload his gun and that he then ignored Brisenia’s pleas and fired.
People like Forde and Bush are life-long losers, criminals, racists. Forde has an erratic past and was described as unstable. Bush has ties to the Aryan Nation. These are scummy people, and they’d be scummy people without Glenn Beck or the Tea Party. But having a cause based on fear and hatred and bigotry just fuels these sorts of bigots. It gives them a moral edifice, however bizarre, to justify their actions. Murder and theft aren’t crimes – they’re part of the revolution! Gunning down a nine-year-old girl is part of the resistance, it’s patriotic! And Beck and others, including members of the Arizona government, who are fomenting fear and paranoia over immigration are at least partly to blame.
Maybe this is what Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was talking about in the wake of the Giffords shootings. Maybe he was so quick to denounce heated rhetoric because he’d seen what it had already led to in his county, in his state and his country. It’s not just rhetoric, after all. It’s rallies and talk of revolution. It’s people up in arms, passing laws to get the Mexicans out, and when that fails, arming themselves and taking the vigilante route. And if Brisenia’s story doesn’t break your heart, nothing will.
by E.D. Kain| 37 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
Alex Knapp is blogging Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” Liberty and Tyranny (here, here, and here so far – he’s only gotten through chapter two). This is good for me because Alex is the one who gets to suffer through Levin’s book, and I get to read Alex make fun of Levin instead. Saves me time and sanity.
Here’s Alex riffing off of Levin’s claim that – because of ‘statists’ – we are living in an age of “diminishing liberty”:
This is an incredibly simplistic way of looking at the world. In most ways — not all ways, but most ways — Americans are freer now than they’ve ever been. Consider the country’s state at the Founding — only landowners could vote. Women couldn’t own property. Blacks were property. Native Americans were being murdered and having their land stolen from them. Asians were prohibited from immigrating into the country. Trials were short, provided very few protections for defendants, and most people accused of crimes were on their own when it came to representation. Most trades were locked down by guilds, which were protected by law. State chartered corporations dominated the economy. Government jobs were determined by who was in favor with the local party bigwigs. You couldn’t have a business open on Sunday or overnight. Blacks, Germans, Irish, and Italians were forbidden from even entering certain towns, or at least staying overnight in them.
Almost 250 years later, can you honestly tell me that people are less free than when the country was founded? The economy is enormously freer. Civil service is determined by merit, not political bootlicking. (Thanks for that, James Garfield!) Women can own property and their husbands can’t rape them. Slavery has been abolished. Equal treatment is the law of the land. Immigration is no longer determined by race. Defendants have much more protection from the depredations of the State. Every citizen can vote regardless of whether they own land.
There are a lot of problems, to be sure. And the federal government, in the name of the “war on terror” has adopted an enormous number of illiberal, unconstitutional policies. But I’ll take today over 1790 in a heartbeat when it comes to personal liberty. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a freer country than it was in 1790.
Absolutely. The rest of the three posts are well worth a read. Not because Levin deserves your attention, but because mockery of Levin deserves your attention. Surely now, Alex will join the ranks of the world’s most deranged bloggers….
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Ever since Jane Mayer’s infamous Koch-brothers article last year, one of the quickest ways for progressives to write off libertarians is to say “the Koch-funded Cato institute” or “Koch lackeys at Reason” or some similar dismissal. And while DougJ did indeed include non-libertarian think-tanks in his indictment of Big Money yesterday, the focus has still been on the libertarian think-tanks in particular, using their ties to the Koch brothers as a reason to cast doubt on anyone affiliated with them. This is silly. This is like dismissing a reporter at The New York Times because it is a “liberal rag”. Or dismissing Matt Yglesias out of hand because George Soros indirectly signs his paycheck.
Actually, if you follow this line of reasoning you’ll discover that you can pretty much no longer trust anyone who is writing and getting paid to write in any capacity by anyone with a political bias. All the writers at The American Prospect are suspect now because they are on the payroll of liberal publishers, ditto National Review and so forth. Yes, the money does matter – especially when heads roll at a think tank for no stated reason or you see some concerted effort to toe a party line, but for the most part these institutions operate with stated bias and are funded by people who share this bias. There is nothing nefarious about that. A healthy distrust of media is a good thing; using the Koch brothers or George Soros as a way to write off your opponents is just lazy.
Kochtosoros-RexPost + Comments (223)
There was some disbelief expressed in the comments to DougJ’s post when I mentioned that all mainstream political coalitions have think tanks. Commenter J Michael Neal wrote:
The point is that the funders of libertarianism bring a lot of money to the table. The funders of liberalism, on the other hand, fall into one of two categories:
1) They aren’t very liberal, or
2) They don’t have a lot of money.This means that the political discourse is constrained, because it’s only going to go where the money is.
Well, according to The American Prospect this isn’t entirely true:
Some of the biggest fortunes in America now tilt left, and that can be seen in the vast sums of cash pouring into Democratic coffers and progressive organizations. Billionaires like George Soros and Peter Lewis have given tens of millions of dollars each to liberal 527s and have also helped to bankroll a greatly enlarged progressive infrastructure that includes groups like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters. David Gelbaum, a successful investor, has given remarkable sums to two flagship liberal organizations — $94 million to the American Civil Liberties Union and more than $200 million to the Sierra Club. The Democracy Alliance, a funding umbrella formed in 2005, now has approximately 100 partners who collectively give millions of dollars a year to progressive groups. Nearly half of the groups it funds did not exist a decade ago.
I find this entirely plausible, especially given the fact that a progressive sits in the White House, and Democrats recently passed a shit ton (pardon the technical expression) of progressive legislation over the past two years (not every last piece of progressive legislation, but healthcare reform, financial reform, and the repeal of DADT are nothing to sniff at).
Commenter Xenos wrote, “Surely you can’t be serious” in response to my assertion, and commenter maus pointed out that “Conservative “Libertarianism” is centralized. “Liberalism” is not, unless you actually believe George Soros/MoveOn run modern Democrats, which I’d love to hear.”
I don’t believe they do, any more than I believe the Koch brothers run modern libertarians. But then again, Democrats represent a huge demographic and are one of the major parties in our political system. Libertarians represent a small minority of voters and have never even seated a president. If libertarianism is truly centralized – and I question that assertion – it is because it is a much smaller political movement in comparison to liberalism. Neither libertarians or progressives have the lockstep achieved by the conservative movement.
And finally commenter PIGL challenged:
name me three “liberal” think tanks that have any influence on bobble-head chatter or policy direction.
Almost all the major think tanks are libertarian or neo-conservative, and they push agendas that have distinctions without differences. And guess what: there is a reason for this. They are all funded by the same interests.
I’m not sure how we can properly gauge policy direction or at least the amount of influence various think tanks actually exert over it. As I mentioned above, the progressive cause has progressed at a nice clip under President Obama, and I suppose some progressive think tanks and media groups had something to do with it, such as:
Other well-organized and well-funded progressive groups include MoveOn.org, Media Matters and a host of magazines and newspapers including The American Prospect and The New York Times (others like the Washington Post and The New Republic are admittedly more hawkish and play host to a variety of neoconservatives); and if you look at the list of top federal donors or “heavy hitters” at OpenSecrets.org you’ll notice quickly that the third largest donor since 1989 is the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees.
Here’s the top ten list of the biggest federal-level givers since 1989:
ActBlue is an organization dedicated to advancing the agenda of the Democratic party. The American Association for Justice is comprised of trial lawyers. Then you have, in the top ten list alone, five big labor organizations, mixed in there with Goldman Sachs, AT&T, and the realtors. Check out the full list – number eleven is the Teamsters, followed by a bunch more big labor outfits and financial institutions.
With all this money finding its way to progressive causes and the Democratic party, I have a hard time believing that the Koch brothers and the Cato Institute (and the various other libertarian think tanks) pose such an enormous threat or are by comparison somehow more in the pockets of special interest groups. If you look at this OpenSecrets report on Soros and the Koch brothers you’ll find that both have donated ridiculous amounts of money to political causes. And both have donated ridiculous amounts of money to other causes as well, such as cancer research.
Now, this doesn’t mean I’m walking back on my previous critique of libertarians and their major political operations: I do think priorities should shift, and I think that a lot of the corporate money and revanchist philosophy that’s worked its way into libertarian thought over the years has had a profoundly negative impact on libertarianism writ large. But this whole notion that progressives are getting out-funded by libertarians, or that the simple fact that wealthy people contribute to libertarian think-tanks should somehow invalidate libertarianism or prove, once and for all, that libertarians are merely puppets of big business is lazy argumentation. It is assertion masquerading as argument. Nor is it some exercise in High Broderism to point out that libertarians, conservatives and progressives alike have a great deal of money pumped into their various political and policy pursuits.
This post is in: Open Threads
Jason Kuznicki links approvingly to mistermix’s last post and points readers to this Cato Unbound series on corporatism which he says “may be the most important thing Cato Unbound has ever published.”
I agree, and highly recommend anyone interested in thoughtful libertarian discussion of corporatism to go check it out. Jason also has a really good explanation of his own libertarianism here.
Corporatism etc.Post + Comments (109)
As I said in the comments to mistermix’s post, I think a lot of the problems with current libertarianism boil down to its priorities. Rather than focusing so much on tax rates, welfare programs and so forth, libertarians should be focusing on crony-capitalism and how it distorts the markets and creates an uneven playing field, and on the security/police state (the Wars on Drugs and Terror) and the military-industrial complex. Libertarians do write about these things (Julian Sanchez and Radley Balko both leap to mind) but they aren’t nearly close enough to the top of the priorities list. This may be because a certain strain of right-wing revanchist philosophy has captured libertarianism in this country. Left-libertarians and liberaltarians are seeking to unravel this, but at this point the damage has been done.
I think libertarians would do well to focus on those issues which most aversely effect the little guy – the new healthcare law may indeed be an example of the government benefiting private corporations (vis-a-vis a mandate to purchase health insurance from a private insurance company), but it is hardly as liberty-destroying as increasingly militarized police forces or powerful multi-national oil companies whose carelessness leads to epic environmental disasters, let alone a military-industrial complex which foists one war after another on the American public at nearly a trillion dollars a year. Indeed, there are many ways the new healthcare law will help average Americans in spite of its many flaws. The libertarian narrative, in other words, needs to shift or come into focus – to differentiate itself, at the very least, from the Republican narrative.
This post is in: Domestic Politics
“Wouldn’t it be great to have a system that met people trying to do the right thing halfway?” ~ Mike Konczal, putting several bullets through my speculation that a foreclosure slowdown could result in moral hazard on the part of homeowners.
So I’ll just come right out and say it: I was wrong yesterday. I was being combative and got into an argument on a topic which A) I hadn’t put a ton of thought into and which B) I took a lousy position on. I let what I viewed as an unnecessary swipe at libertarians get in the way of my better judgment on the more important topic at hand, the issue of foreclosure fraud.
One more post on foreclosuresPost + Comments (156)
Now, I’ve self-described as a ‘reluctant libertarian’ and a ‘liberal-tarian’ and a Cameroonesque Tory and a heterdox conservative and a number of other things in my long (and aggravating to many) journey to figure out just exactly what it is I believe, but what I am most assuredly not is a card-carrying big “L” Libertarian. So when I come to the defense of libertarians I’m not out to defend the think tanks or magazines and certainly not the Libertarian Party, but rather the many thoughtful, nuanced libertarians I know and whose work I value, and who do not fit the stereotypes at all.
I’m not really anti-government so much as I am anti-power. I’m suspicious of all large institutions and the centralization of power within those institutions, whether we’re talking about government or corporate or labor or military power or whatever. Power is a threat, and I think it’s important to find ways to limit it in both the public and private spheres. And mistermix is absolutely correct that libertarians haven’t spent enough time on the foreclosure issue. All these tidbits of government abuse – no larger, compelling narrative to tie them into the real world.
But there are things about government that are truly frightening – such as its ability to invade and bomb the hell out of countries thousands of miles away, and then capture and torture its citizenry. (The military-industrial complex is one of the worst forms of crony-capitalism, after all, as Eisenhower warned us of long ago.) This doesn’t mean we should abolish government, and I’ve never said we should – but it does mean we should hold it accountable far more than we do these days.
We should also hold accountable the banks and other corporations which wield so much economic power – we should probably not be bailing them out, for instance, when they gamble away our money, pensions, investments, entire economy and so forth. We should also not let them use fraudulent paperwork to oust homeowners from their homes. People were right to say that questioning the moral hazard of homeowners was the wrong position to take on my part, and I agree. I was wrong.
The story of the fraudulent foreclosures is pretty extraordinary (yes, I’ve brushed up on the subject a bit more since yesterday) – this mad dash on the part of the banks to squeeze as many pennies out of as many people as they can before public outrage builds enough to halt their momentum. Hopefully more cases like the Massachusetts ruling will slow them down.
This is what I mean when I talk about corporate/government crony-capitalism:
The reality is that banks can no longer meaningfully be called private enterprises, yet no one in the media will challenge this fiction. And pointing out in a more direct manner that banks should not be considered capitalist ventures would also penetrate the dubious defenses of their need for lavish pay. Why should government-backed businesses run hedge funds or engage in high risk trading, or for that matter, be permitted to offer lucrative products that are valuable because they allow customers to engage in questionable activities, like regulatory arbitrage or tax evasion? The sort of markets that serve a public purpose should be reasonably efficient and transparent, which implies low margins for intermediaries.
Of course, the banks can continue to invest as unwisely and with as opaque a process as they like because they are not legitimately private enterprises any more. They, unlike most Americans, have a blank check from the federal government to cushion their fall should they once again face systemic collapse. Corporate welfare makes truly functioning markets an impossible fiction. It is far more damaging to a free market economy than welfare for individuals in the form of healthcare, food stamps, and so forth. Corporate welfare protects companies against failure, making the whole point of markets moot, whereas safety-nets help average people pick themselves up when markets do fail, resulting in unemployment, or from devastating illness and other unforeseeable occurrences that individuals may not be properly equipped to deal with on their own. The former breaks the system while the latter ensures that the system doesn’t end in destitution or outright revolt.