ED’s post about Cato flunkie Julian Sanchez’s quest to get his Creedence tape PS3 back got me thinking: is there anything more quintessentially libertarian than fantasizing about using the dark powers of the surveillance nanny state to open some whoop-ass on the punks who stole your gaming system?
We are all young bucks now: a very emo post
Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was…
–Denis Johnson, “Jesus’ Son”
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the need for “takers” to stop taking so much and start showing more gratitude towards the Galtian “makers” who keep our economy humming. When people write this, it’s clear that they see themselves as makers rather than takers, that they believe that churning out predictable conventional wisdom, curating glibertaria and (admittedly excellent) joke videos for a “neocon guy’s” money-losing vanity project, and doing whatever it is that the guys at OTB and League of Ordinary Gentlemen do for work (they have day jobs, right?) are all highly productive activities that benefit our society. That’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with professional pride. But it’s strange that they’re so sure everyone would agree with them about this, that Real Murka will never condemn them as moochers and looters and send them off to reeducation camps in the Yukon (something that I think may happen to me eventually).
The image of a young buck buying T-bone steaks with food stamps is the most potent image in modern American politics. Its brilliance is that it turns the embarrassment of having to use food stamps at a grocery store into the revenge of the non-white underclass. When I’m in line and the person in front me uses food stamps, it slows things down, some people roll their eyes and I think to myself “I’m glad I can pay for groceries with a credit card.” When I read about an African-American woman being kicked out of a hotel lobby for no reason, I think “that could happen to me too”.
I say this not because I’m especially empathetic or because I’ve ever suffered any terrible injustice in my life, but because based on my experiences with human beings, as well as what I’ve read about them on Wikipedia, I think that they often make illogical value judgements about each other and then use these value judgements to justify humiliation and cruelty, if not slaughter and imprisonment.
Do some people honestly believe that their high place in our awesome meritocracy is so secure and so well-deserved that they have no reason to fear and no reason to feel guilty about their privileges? What on earth could have gone on in their lives to make them feel this way? Would we all be much happier if we thought the same way they do?
We are all young bucks now: a very emo postPost + Comments (91)
Fiat monopoly
Should John really contract the site rebuild out to a single company? Why can’t each commenter choose a provider to service his or her own comments?
Consider this an open thread.
Today’s Tom Sawyer
I don’t have a strong opinion about single-contractor trash collection versus free market trash collection, but this made me laugh:
One of my earliest blog-buddies, Kip Esquire, used to have a running feature called “Kip’s Law Sighting.” Kip’s Law is simply described as: “Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.”
This paragraph, in only a few sentences, demonstrates why libertarians will never be anything more than conservatives’ nerdy younger brothers. Nobody wants to listen to somebody named “Kip Esquire” run a regular feature about a wordy law he named after himself, just as nobody wants to listen to an extra from “Cruising” expound about Austrian economics. I know, I know, several of you will tell me that Kip Esquire was a minor character in The Fountainhead or Neal Peart’s pen name on some early short stories. If so, that would be central to point. And why the double always? With laws, as with WordPress comments, -hyphens- dashes should be used sparingly if at all.
I don’t dislike libertarians. The ones I know in real life are all thoughtful people. But it’s no wonder that, even with all the Koch money, they have to run constant fundraisers.
This should be a time of great hope for libertarians, what with Drew Carey hosting the “Price Is Right’ and all. And I think they have something to contribute to contemporary debate, especially on the topics of incarceration and drug laws. But they’re going to have to ease up on the eponymous laws, noogie-inducing screen names, and overuse of Latin (“premia”, “status quo ante”, “fiat money”) if they’re ever going to appeal to a mass audience.
(No Longer) Brief Sideswipe On The Great JC/ED Trash War
So, John (rightly, imho) points out that the crazy is full upon us when our fellow citizens spy the dead claw of Marx/Lenin/Obama bearing down on suburbia in the decision of some town to hire a single trash hauler.
Then E.D. comes along and says, no, this is what sanity looks like, in the sense that choice is always and everywhere an unfettered good. (His words: “the Tea Partiers are right this time: having choice is a good thing, even for trash collection.” — italics in the original)
Then E.D. takes some lumps here and there and responds forcefully.
[Boy, have I got to stop doing such extraneous crap like reading to my son. Now John’s gone and weighed in again. I give up. I’m just going to post this sucker and live with its irrelevance.]I’ve a couple of thoughts on that latter post of E. D.;s, which I’ll deal with first, and then I’ll dive into my larger objection to his original argument, which seems to me to make a naive error on the nature of markets.
Please jump the jump for the rest of this. And remember: I never promised you either brevity or wit.
(No Longer) Brief Sideswipe On The Great JC/ED Trash WarPost + Comments (122)
How the GOP Governs (Badly)*…or A Few Bumps in the (Rail)Road for our New Randian Overlords…
This caught my eye on one fine New England Monday morning (snark, for those of you not enjoying our rain/wind/grim a.m.). (h/t Midwest Energy News).
Money quote on the rash of GOP cancellations/dissings of transportation projects:
The $810 million from Wisconsin, $400 million from Ohio, and $3 billion from New Jersey will come back to Washington and be awarded to other states instead. California was one state where the anti-train candidate, Republican Meg Whitman, didn’t win. Some of the money could end up there, to help launch the Golden State’s Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail dream.
John Mica, a Republican from Florida who will run the House transportation committee starting in January, thinks that the Northeast corridor is the best target for high-speed rail money. Newly elected (or re-elected) Democratic governors in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland would presumably be happy to take the money.
I guess I should say thanks, Wisconsin et al.
I was stuck on the “high speed” Acela yesterday between New Haven and Boston which as scheduled is already ludicrously slow — 2 hours to cover about 120 miles, to which track and traffic f/ups added more than half an hour. I would love to see our Northeast Corridor routes achieve intercity timings routinely achieved in Japan in the late sixties.
Cuomo’s already on the case, and I sure hope that my home state hero Deval Patrick joins him.
Except…well two things. First, this note from the Economist article at the link above:
It will be interesting to see whether the Obama administration can convince the lame-duck Democratic congress to reassign the money—or whether the GOP-run House will try to cancel the spending entirely next year.
Well, yeah. Stupid, ignorant, short-sighted bad governance has gone national, again, and there’s no telling just how much badness we’ll endure before we get our next chance to beat back the tide in two years. From here, we get to the other point that emerges from my attempt at a little schadenfreude above.
Which would be that while the proximate losers in this instance are the folks who in some sense deserve to pay a price for electing folks who do exactly what they say they will do, their losses are likely much larger than just the foregone federal cash. Worse, this kind of stupid costs the rest of us too, especially if the money is not swiftly reprogrammed.
The first half of that claim is already becoming clear to the Wisconsin electorate. A $28.5 contract to build bridges for the project has already been cancelled, and, as the Wisconsin Builder website pointed out, “high speed rail is no longer just talk at the capitol; it’s turning into real jobs paid for with real money.”
Just to make the folly worse: as of the most recent statistics I could dig up in haste, WI gets eighty six cents back on every dollar of federal taxes paid. That’s quite a loss, year over year. Why not hand back yet more Fed spending?
Hell, the good folks of Wisconsin must be so rolling in it that they don’t mind imposing on themselves what acts as a kind of tax hike. Shoot, the good folks of Massachusetts need it more, right?
Again, I say thanks, sort of. May the voters of WI voters enjoy that warm glow of giving.
Except for this, as reported in the WSJ:
if Wisconsin backs out, the decision will endanger a larger planned rail network that would connect Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago. The line between Madison and Milwaukee was intended to be an extension of the popular Chicago-to-Milwaukee “Hiawatha” route.
It’s OK, I guess, if one crowd wants to be poorer, with fewer tools — which, after all, is what infrastructure is — with which to generate wealth.
But these decisions don’t just make the good citizens of a state noted for its rotted bovine lactation products less likely to prosper. They screw millions more, and ultimately, to the extent that the US really does function as a national economy, perhaps all of us.
Morans.
*I’m urging a meme here. I think that we in the reality based community have to start making some serious communication/framing efforts right now. We’ve plenty of recent evidence that the GOP is a disaster as a party of governance — but that was one idea that had a lot of trouble breaking through over these last several months. So I think, as we begin the 2012 campaigns (right now) we should be hammering home the notion that these folks screw up all the time. We should frame every piece on every blog and at every media outlet we have access to as the GOP are the spoiled, clueless children of politics, great at raising a ruckus, but no one you would want near the actual levers of power. Again and again and again, with every failure, large and small.
As you all have figured out by now, I don’t do pithy well, and that’s what’s needed here. But the basic idea is pretty clear. Lots of labels that in one form or another mark stories in memor as “another GOP f**k up.”
Update: Sorry for all the missing line breaks between grafs. I’ve been trying a bunch of stuff — drafting in word processors, using the html view on the blog tool and so on, but can’t get the final post to reflect the formatting of any of these approaches. FYWP — and if any of you know what I’m doing wrong, please inform.
Images: Stephenson’s Rocket, in Mechanics magazine, 1829.
Ynknown artist , Nemunas crossing in Kaunas, c. 1864
Real Murkins love soshulized liquor
This is interesting: there was a ballot measure in Washington state to end the state monopoly on liquor sales. It went down to defeat because of heavy opposition in the conservative parts of Washington, but it won in the liberal areas.