Standing Athwart History Yelling "Go!"

How then do we change libertarianism?

2010-03-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

Given the necessity of changing libertarianism to accommodate a larger role for the government than we've typically given it, how do we go about it? We are still intending to be libertarians when it's all said and done, not liberals, socialists, or anything else.

Well, first, we need to ask, what is libertarianism? The definition offered by implication by the Libertarian Party, via their pledge, is that a libertarian (or at least a Libertarian) is someone who does not advocate the initiation of force on anyone else for any reason. This is obviously bullshit, because the Libertarian Party participates in a system of government, and government requires the initiation of force (taxes) to exist. Even voting is force, in a sense, because you're legitimizing and partaking in government. At the very least it's defensive force; at the worst it's an initiation of force.

The LP Pledge is essentially an anarchist pledge. To take it in good faith in the manner intended, you really have to be an anarchist. And if that's you, fair enough. Libertarianism is big enough to include anarchists under its big tent. But there are many more libertarians that aren't anarchists, and they too must have some kind of underpinning political principle that is the essence of their beliefs.

If you are a libertarian that believes in the existence of government, you are (among many other possible things) a minarchist. Generally the idea is that you believe that everyone inherently possesses the rights to life, liberty and property (possibly also an equal share of the commons if you're a geolibertarian like me). Government is acceptable to a minarchist only because it can protect those rights more efficiently than the free market.

Minarchists therefore universally accept the necessity of public militaries, police forces, courts, and usually roads and fire departments too. These are all things that governments do better than the free market, it is reasoned by us-that is why we accept them. Our consent is utilitarian in its nature. We call it a limited government, and we willingly pay taxes to it, but begrudge anything above and beyond those necessary purposes.

Well then, all that needs to happen, really, for a minarchist libertarianism to accept national healthcare of some sort is to demonstrate that utility is definitely increased by it. As I believe I aptly demonstrated in the last post, this is indeed the case. Libertarians have endeavored for a century to prove it to not be the case, and come up short. So it's been weighed and tested with all vigor, and we can reasonably conclude that governments ought to provide healthcare to their citizens somehow.

Therefore, you can be a minarchist libertarian and a supporter of limited government, and accept that the government ought to have a role in healthcare, and really in anything else that can be demonstrated to be more effectively done by government than private industry.

Why we need a new libertarianism.

2010-03-24T04:34:00.000-07:00

WHO Health Rankings By Country

Look at this list. If America's system was anywhere near the awesome Commie-demolishing cureall that its supporters claim, we wouldn't be getting our asses kicked by the likes of Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Costa Rica, or Dominica. Nevermind that the entire First World (except for New Zealand, somehow) is kicking our asses without even trying. Nevermind that Communist Cuba, which lets its senior citizens rot to death in their own poo juices, is only two places behind us.

Of course, it could just be a function of spending. Maybe we get shoddy care because we don't spend anything on it? Ha. We spend more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare than anyone but, occasionally, some Pacific islands whose economy is whatever Robinson Crusoe left behind and whatever aid they get from the rest of the planet.

What this means is that we pay more than anyone else for a healthcare system that's shit. If this is the free market, we're being sold a bill of goods. If this is the free market, we'd buy the system that's cheaper and better, I'd think; which would mean a government system of some kind.

The fact (and yes, by the above, it is not really opinion but fact) that government healthcare systems are beating our half-free system (no I haven't forgotten about Medicare, but even with Medicare our system is more capitalist than anyone else's) means that libertarianism needs to be updated. Well, maybe it doesn't, but that's assuming you're okay with an underperforming system that routinely lets people die because they're being poor and bleeds everyone else of an increasingly larger share of their paycheck as time goes on. And I for one am NOT okay with that.

So we know that libertarianism must be updated. Now, the question is, how? How can we meaningfully adapt libertarian theory in a way that will allow for some kind of government healthcare system, while still remaining recognizably "libertarian"?

Looking for blog authors.

2010-03-22T01:33:00.000-07:00

I know I'm not the only libertarian struggling to redefine the movement. If you sympathize with the efforts of this blog, and you feel you have something to add, come talk to me. I need blog authors.

Leave a message in the comments, or email me, or hit me up on Facebook. (BTW, we now have a Facebook group.)

An interesting conversation with someone from the RLC.

2010-03-22T01:18:00.001-07:00

This is from Facebook. I don't know if this'll go anywhere but if the libertarian wing of the GOP comes out in favor of single-payer there'll be nothing really stopping the rest of the GOP from getting in line behind it either. It's brilliant politics though, so it may just happen. It kinda reminds me of the time in Britain when the Tories blocked the Liberals from expanding the vote so that they could do it themselves and earn the support of the voters for it.

And yeah, it's intellectually dishonest, like all politics ultimately is, but if it gives us single-payer I dunno if I care.

Text of the conversation after the jump.

HIM: Democrats seem to have never really understood the opposition to Obamacare. It's not single payer or even the public option most Republicans object to. It's the mandates and the taxes and the massive bureaucracy. The bill was created to pay off special interests. It has never been about health care. It's about payoffs, growing government, taking away rights and raising taxes.

ME: Those look to me like a bunch of talking points. There's no single payer in the bill; I wish there was. There's not even a public option.

We have cut taxes more than we can afford; it's either raise taxes or go deeper into debt. Paying down the debt like this bill will do will eventually let us lower taxes one day.

There is no massive public bureaucracy to administer this bill; anyway administrative costs are like 0.6% of Medicare, for instance, so there's no reason to guess that there will be a huge bureaucracy here either.

The mandates are there, but since single-payer was off the table from the get-go due to conservative pressure some kind of public/private partnership was the only real option to get this done. And that requires an individual mandate, unfortunately, and I don't like it either. But if you really are opposed to an individual mandate, the answer is single-payer. Assuming the Republican Party is telling the truth that they're not really opposed to single-payer (which I doubt) hopefully the GOP will join with liberal Democrats to replace this bill with single-payer next year. But I doubt it, because I don't think the GOP really believes in single-payer and I think the Tea Parties would go nuts.

HIM: I know, Stuart. I support a single-payer system. I'd even support some sort of public option. What I do not support is forcing people to buy insurance they cannot afford or face fines or even imprisonment, nor do I support forcing businesses to insure workers or worse, fire them because they cannot afford to insure them.

ME: I agree with that.

If you really think there is support in the GOP for single-payer, then please, for everyone's sake, do everything you can in the RLC to make that party policy. I've been pretty disappointed with the GOP's behavior for the past year but I would gladly support them in this.

HIM: The RLC does not support single-payer and I oppose it on principle, but it's something I'd personally be willing to accept as a compromise to reach a more equitable solution to this problem. I also think it is something many Republicans would support, but it's too late for that now. On to nullification, legal challenges and a fight to the death.

ME: Well, given that the healthcare bill is reality now, single-payer is no longer an expansion of government, but a contraction. Instead of subsidizing massive corporations and imposing restrictions on people, it basically takes the school voucher principle and applies it to healthcare.

I think the GOP could probably sell its base on single-payer if they came at it from that angle, and even if they're in the minority they could probably get enough votes from the Dennis Kuninich wing of the Democratic Party to pass it if they held onto their united stance.

It would be a political blow to the Democrats and would instantly kill the perception of the GOP as the "party of no."

HIM: Stuart, your first paragraph is exactly my thinking on the subject. Now we just have to figure out how to sell the GOP on it.

Rebooting the blog.

2010-03-22T00:39:00.000-07:00

I stopped blogging not because I grew bored of it but because I found I had nothing worth saying. As a classical believer in libertarian precepts, I found that my beliefs were increasingly ill-equipped to explain and fix the world around me. I wrote a seven-part series where I tried to offer a more "libertarian" stimulus but ended up just re-tweaking some policy proposals offered by Obama and the Democrats. Even as I wrote it, I was consciously wondering why I was bothering.

It was the healthcare debate finally did me in: confronted with an intractable problem that couldn't be solved by the free market, I started reading the news secretly rooting for the Democrats. Of course, the proposed healthcare bills were an affront to the libertarianism I believed in. Of course it involved more taxing, more spending, and more regulations. And I was still a libertarian, God dammit. But more and more I came to accept that it was necessary.

Aside from being a libertarian, I am also a utilitarian. I believe, like John Stuart Mill, that government policy ought to secure the greatest utility for the greatest number of people. And free market healthcare was not only not doing that, it could not do that. Furthermore, "socialist" single-payer healthcare in Canada was not only doing that, but it was doing it cheaper than us and the country enjoyed a better level of healthcare that they were more satisfied with as a result.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party struggled for answers. Usually the libertarians give them answers, but the libertarians had no answers for them this time. So instead the GOP launched its standard talking points about liberty and the free market, but this time it was wholly divorced from reality. Those few Republicans dealing in reality ended up supporting completely un-libertarian things like the individual mandate, calling it "personal responsibility."

An interesting thing happened though. The libertarian movement, which had been surging after 2006 gave them a reformed Libertarian Party and successes dethroning the GOP in the West, split over healthcare. Some wandered away and became Democrats and liberals. Some plugged their ears, hoping that chanting the Non-Aggression Principle enough times would make reality go away. And some schizophrenically and quietly accepted the necessity of healthcare reform while taking a hard libertarian stance on everything else.

All of these things are ultimately self-defeating. What we really need is a new conception of libertarianism, a new idea to guide us, a living philosopher to pick up the banner of liberty dropped with the deaths of Rand, Friedman, Rothbard and Hayek. We need a new libertarianism conceptualized for today.

In a way, I subconsciously realized this when I supported the work of the Libertarian Reform Caucus in Portland in 2006, but I didn't take it to its full conclusion. But it seems not only obvious now, but necessary. And it is the main reason I have come back to this blog, indeed the only reason. I don't fancy myself a great or profound thinker. I got Bs and Cs in philosophy class in college. But nobody's thinking these thoughts, and for all of libertarianism's valid and laudable accomplishments it risks consignment to irrelevance and even abandonment if some current thinkers do not animate its body. In lieu of anyone else, I will hesitatingly pick up the banner dropped by our philosophers of old and attempt to march it forward until someone qualified comes along again that I may hand it off to.

Bah, spiders...

2009-05-30T16:52:00.001-07:00

Summer's an awesome time of year here on the Great Plains, you get thunderstorms and things are green for like three weeks. But the bane of my existence rears its ugly head this time of year: spiders.

I'm not a lumberjack or anything, but I do consider myself fairly manly in general. Reasonably so. But put a spider near me, and I am a little girl. There's the initial shriek of recognition and terror all wrapped in one, and then my mind jumps to ways to contain the situation. Typically containing the situation involves calling for help, but four years at college battling the eight-legged menace has taught me more self-reliance in general. I have my trusty golf club at the ready, my own personal 4-iron exercise of the Second Amendment. I have bug spray in my room (the difference between bug spray and spider spray is minimal-neither can really kill spiders, they just drive them away). You're not supposed to spray it indoors, but I'll take cancer over icky things in my bedroom any day of the week. I have a copy of von Mises' "The Causes of the Economic Crisis" I've been rereading that happens to be excellent at smashing spiders dangling on webs between its pages.

So after that initial girly squeal of Lovecraftian terror, I assemble my wits and think up a plan. This is usually the quick part-a plan is never more complex than "spray and then bludgeon to death"-then the long wait sets in before I muster up the courage to actually do it. I stare the spider in its multifaceted, tiny eyes, its very existence a challenge to my being. There is no room in this bedroom for both of us, I keep reminding myself. Thoughts, nagging, evil thoughts, go through my mind-what happens if I miss?-that don't help my final strike but only serve to delay it. The spider, heaving Dow chemicals through its book lungs and not yet aware that the bipedal ape in the vicinity has discovered its very excellent hiding place, continues in its thoughts of wreaking havok and destruction on innocent humans everywhere.

And then down it comes. Maybe it's von Mises, striking yet another blow for the freedom of humankind. Maybe it's the 4-iron, that has felled many a spider, both great and small, in its day. Maybe it's a shoe or a newspaper. But down it comes, over and over, until it's not just not moving, but in several jellied parts, an avatar of devastation and a message for arachnids everywhere.

God I hate spiders.

My Common Sense Is Tingling

2009-05-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

The whole argument started on Facebook, as these things are wont to do. My old pal from the old days on LFV, Robert Mayer, posted a link to a LewRockwell.com article suggesting that Memorial Day is a shill for state power and America's never fought a single just war. I can imagine what all three of my readers are thinking right now, because it was my same thought. Because Facebook's system is ill-suited for linking, this is what I said:

...I would imagine that the Revolutionary War was for the purpose of defending the freedoms that would later be enshrined in the Bill of Rights. I could be wrong though-it could have been a ploy by the CIA, in bed with the tricorn hat-industrial complex to sell copies of "Common Sense."

I realize the point LRC is trying to make but the absolutism of the statement is preposterous.

The words I snipped out were just me ignoring the inevitable Civil War debate that always happens whenever you ask libertarians about history. That raged, and then Mayer asked me if I thought any American wars since WWII were justified. Now THAT, I can get behind. And I suspect that's what the LRC article's author intended to say, behind the needless sensationalism.

And that's the big issue, in my mind: needless sensationalism. Honesty is the best policy. I have seen plenty of people in the libertarian movement get absolutely fucking hysterical over nothing, or overstate their case, or categorically deny reason and common sense if it doesn't support their argument. I've seen it elsewhere too, but I think we as a movement have drunk way too much conservative Kool-Aid for the past 30 years. We have ceased, in many respects, to be rational. We watch Glenn Beck throw temper tantrums about socialism on national television and, except for the few of us that recognize him for the cynical snake he is, we're right there going "me too." If someone bitches about public fluoridization of water, the bulk of libertarians are right there talking about the Man keeping us down, and someone will inevitably compare it to the civil rights movement. We've even let our brains go to the point where conspiracy theorists are practically synonymous with "libertarian" and a friend of mine, upon discovering that I was a libertarian, was shocked and amazed that I wasn't actually insane.

I'm not advocating statism or the government taking your cheese. I'm advocating common sense. It's so rare in our movement, it's a goddamn super power. Which means that, before you accuse the feds of conspiring with Canada and Mexico to form a North American Union, you first actually check the facts. Which means, before you categorically state that America is an empire, you look into it. Dave Nalle did just that, and, lo and behold, we don't actually have military bases in 130 countries around the world. It's more like 30 or 40, depending on the definition.

Looking into the facts doesn't mean we suddenly become big-government liberals or anything of the like. It means that we can now say "get the troops out of the 30 or 40 countries they're stationed in and reduce all foreign military postings to 20 or so Marines guarding our embassies abroad" instead of blathering on like idiots and cloaking our good ideas in a mantle of oversell and mendacity. It's a lot easier to defend a bad idea against untruth than it is to defend it against truth. Our hyperbole does us no favors.

Ron Paul, for all his general asskickery, is guilty of this. One of the biggest reasons I like his son Rand better as a politician is that he retains his solid core of libertarianism without dabbling in hyperbole and conspiracies like his father does. And I hope to God that the libertarian movement starts taking its cue from his example.

At the risk of creating yet another label for our ever-fracturing movement, I think "common-sense libertarianism" is probably the best term for my political views.

Portugal proves decriminalization works

2009-04-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

Time Magazine had an interesting story today. It investigated the Portuguese success in combatting drug addiction via decriminalization. From Time:

Portugal... in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

That's not full-on legalization, since later on in the post it seems that the Portuguese government is still going after major drug traffickers. However, assuming you can get your hands on some drug, you don't face any penalties for it.

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

It looks like this is going to be the next step in the evolution of drug policy, though. The numbers seem to suggest that this soft-on-users policy does save money in the prison system, as well as reduce abuse rates... which means that the intellectually bankrupt status quo will move to this system. It's a perfect way for them to save face, as well as saving the rent-seeker jobs in the DEA.

It will constitute an improvement, but I fear that the majority of this country will stop here. Obama's laughing denunciation of marijuana legalization indicates that he's not quite ready to legalize the drug on the federal level; just turn a blind eye to states that legalize it. But that blind eye is easily reversible should the next President be an ardent Drug Warrior.

The True Meaning of Sodor

2009-04-22T00:37:00.000-07:00

As of right now, I live in a house that has a toddler in it (not mine). His name is Harry, and he likes it when his Uncle Stu pretends to be a dinosaur and chases him around. But he loves Thomas the Tank Engine with an unholy passion.

I had watched "Shining Time Station" growing up, which featured some Thomas shorts, but I guess nowadays they just cut out the annoying bits with Ringo Starr pretending to be a conductor and it's now all semi-anthromorphized trains, all the time. At any given moment in this house, there is usually a Thomas DVD going. I have the theme song burned into my brain, as well as the basic plots of most of the episodes, all absorbed by osmosis as I was busy doing Important Shit on the Internet.

After a while, I started noticing just how Orwellian the world in which the trains lived really was. I brought this up in a conversation with my brother a few days later, and he apparently had come to the same conclusions months before I did. So, for the benefit of anyone living around small children, I now present to you a more realistic take of the island of Sodor.

First off, we have to understand the nature of the existence of the trains. They are, evidently, sentient. As sentient beings, they are largely trapped in a tiny world: they can only advance along certain pre-determined routes (with the exception of Bertie the Bus, Harold the Helicopter, and other such non-train characters, who are freer in their movement). They don't have any real means of manipulating the environment around them, other than ramming into it or asking a human to do it for them. They can't even have sex (in b4 someone Rule 34s this topic).

So, what joy is there in their existence, just on the face of it?

However, the limitations imposed on them by nature are reinforced by a despotic government. Sir Topham Hatt (or the Fat Controller for any Britons in the audience) has unquestioning, godlike authority over them. He can change their routes, dictate what trains they work with, all to suit his own purposes. He can threaten trains with being bricked up in a tunnel if they don't comply. He also, in true totalitarian fashion, creates divisions among his subjects in order to further control them. In a classic example of totalitarian race-baiting that I can't seem to find on YouTube, he exploits the ethnic hatred of "steamies" for "diesels" to get some steam engines to do more work on their own, instead of accepting the help of a diesel they hate. Of course, like any totalitarian attempt to create divisions among its people, it occasionally backfires.

The engines have no say in their future, no vote to elect the Railroad Controller, and they aren't even paid for their work. They are automatons whose only capability is to do the jobs assigned to them, harried and bullied by a totalitarian government that sets them upon each other for its own ends, and threatens them with even worse fates for noncompliance. Therefore, is it any real wonder that in just about every single episode, the engines (all of them) seem to manifest an unconscious desire to commit suicide? They crash, get buried in landslides, fall off bridges, over and over and over again. Sentience in such a context would be a curse, a bitter joke of God. I'd certainly prefer death to that.

The Obama "cuts"

2009-04-21T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to do the LP's work for them, but the gist of it is that they called the Obama cuts out as bullshit in their latest Monday message. And indeed it is:

Obama’s budget calls for around $11,755.00 in spending for every man, woman and child in America. But his “cuts” -- which aren't even new reductions -- come out to only around 32.7 cents per person.

That much isn't really news-the time has long since passed when the word "millions" as applied to the federal budget lost any real importance. However, what did catch my eye, after the usual dime's-worth-of-difference propaganda, was the list of 12 specific items in the budget suggested as cuts (see them after the jump):

Here are just a few of the reductions we back. You can find more in the Cato Institute’s “Handbook for Policymakers, Seventh Edition.”

• Avert the oncoming fiscal crisis in Social Security by indexing initial benefits to changes in prices, instead of wages. Saves $47 billion annually by 2018. Without reforms like this, the program will go bankrupt or force trillions of dollars in destructive new taxes or borrowing.
• Turn Medicare into a block grant and freeze federal spending, forcing states to pursue cost-cutting reforms. Saves $227 billion annually by 2018.
• Eliminate the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration, a $352 million corporate welfare program.
• Eliminate the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, another $369 million in corporate welfare.
• Eliminate the Energy Department’s nuclear energy research programs, $695 million in welfare that should be undertaken by nuclear energy investors.
• Turn Head Start over to private charities, saving $687 million annually. Since its inception Head Start has shown no substantive increase in inner-city literacy rates.
• Eliminate the Bureau of Indian Affairs, saving nearly $2.5 billion a year.
• Eliminate funding for the United Nations and other international programs, saving nearly $1.6 billion annually.
• Eliminate the Legal Services Corporation, saving $350 million annually.
• Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, $278 million a year in welfare for wealthy arts patrons.
• Eliminate the Small Business Administration, $530 million in welfare for businesses.
• Eliminate the $935 million a year in Postal Service subsidies and force them to further privatize operations.

Those are just a few cuts, a “twelve step program” if you will, which alone save taxpayers $282.3 billion. That comes out to $921.78 in savings for every man, woman and child in America, and there would be a lot more savings than that to come with even more reductions.

Compare that to Obama’s piddling 32.7 cents.

That's not bad, but I would submit that the math is a little fuzzy there. You can't know exactly what the Medicare reform would save, especially since there would be fifty different solutions to how to deal with those block grants. Some states might choose to supplement falling federal funding with more state funding, keeping the net amount of taxation even or even increasing it as far as that state is concerned.

Also, I don't particularly care how much a given plan saves me in 2018, I want to know what it saves NOW. I also want to know whether those numbers are accounting for inflation... is that $282.3 billion in today's dollars or 2018 dollars?

Also, not every last one of those cuts is a good idea from a libertarian point of view. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is the price we rightfully pay every year for the intermontane West. The treaties concluded with those tribes guarantees them various payments in exchange for the cession of land. All I'm gonna say is that if you're a libertarian and you believe in keeping your word, you can cancel that funding but be prepared to hand North and South Dakota over to the Lakota, Arizona to the Hopi and Navajo, etc. Those treaties are law, not polite suggestions to be ignored when they're inconvenient for the budget.

I'm all for a general reformation of the way we treat Native Americans in this country, namely restoring to them whatever land and sovereignty we can via new treaties with their tribal governments. But that's going to take a lot of research and a lot of negotiation and is beyond the scope of a single unilateral budget cut during a recession.

But anyway, my main point is that it looks like the Cato Institute is aiming to become the next Center for American Progress. CAP did a lot of homework for the incoming Obama administration, giving it several well-articulated policy proposals to implement. CAP won the war of ideas against the neocon think-tanks sometime in 2005, and more and more that intellectual reality became reality for the rest of us.

It is said that in the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; but in the long term it is a weighing machine. In that same sense, in the short term American politics is a battle of parties and personalities; but in the long term it is a battle of ideas. You can win for a time without ideas, so long as you have a well-oiled propaganda machine. The GOP proved this for the past 8 years. But you cannot hope to win in the long term without ideas on your side.

The Cato Institute has seemingly appreciated CAP's role in the ascent of Obama, and is positioning itself to be the thinktank responsible for the eventual GOP comeback. I think this would be an excellent development, especially as the neocons are in disarray. I do believe that Obama will eventually discredit himself if he allows the spending to spiral out of control, and at that point, we have our moment, our victory in the war of ideas, and it's just a matter of letting reality catch up.

(Crossposted at Next Free Voice)

Rick Perry advocates Texas secession, then abruptly backtracks

2009-04-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

Rick Perry has recently spoken out about Texas seceding from the Union. From the New York Times:

“When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “My hope is that America, and Washington in particular, pay attention. We’ve got a great Union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that?”

Democrats have already begun making disapproving noises:

State Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat, said Mr. Perry had not only opened himself to ridicule but also evoked a time most Texans would rather forget. “Texas has become a hotbed of right-wing political activity,” Mr. Ellis said, “but I think even those folks on the far right think this is over the top.”

And Perry has already begun to backtrack:

After the rallies, Perry downplayed his secession comments, amending them in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to say, "I'm trying to make the Obama Administration pay attention to the 10th Amendment."

So what's the whole point of this? It's just another Republican establishment figure going out on a limb to try to grab the Ron Paul constituency before what looks to be a nasty primary fight. Of course, the fact that at least part of the GOP now has to sound like hardcore libertarians on what used to be considered fringe issues can be considered encouraging to the movement.

I don't know a whole lot about Perry's record in Texas, so I don't know if he's a worthwhile politician and therefore worthy of our support. I would tend to suspect he's not, just on general principle when dealing with Republicans.

But this, and the broader 10th Amendment movement in general, does represent a sea change in libertarian thought. Back in 2006, the Libertarian Party had a vicious fight between the Radical Caucus and the Reform Caucus. Reform ended up winning, but it seems like a lot of the people in the Radical Caucus ended up reappearing in Ron Paul's presidential bid in 2008, in the GOP. And now, as an effective component of the Paul wing of the GOP, they are sounding more credible and wield more political power than they could have had by winning the fight for the LP in 2006. Maybe Michael Medved was right.

Economic stimulus, Keynesianism, and pragmatism: Part 7.

2009-04-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

Go back to Part 6

So then, now that we've figured out a better way to pay for it all, what do we good libertarians spend this huge stimulus package on? So far, the Obama administration has spent money on:

-transportation infrastructure
-sewer infrastructure
-alternative energy tax breaks/subsidies
-energy conservation
-healthcare reform
-unemployment insurance
-public education
-environmental cleanup
-food stamps
-tax cuts
-block grants to states

These do not fully reflect libertarian priorities, but we shouldn't expect them to. We share this country with many other ideologies. However, a compromise solution that this libertarian could definitely live with would involve the following, in addition to what's been mentioned in previous posts:

Transportation Infrastructure: This needs to be a priority, perhaps the highest priority. Transportation infrastructure in this country sucks hard. We've let it fall to shit. Moreover, it's an investment that, if made, will let us lower our budgets in this area for years to come. But we should invest more intelligently.

The car culture is expensive, more expensive than the rail culture in Europe. Railroads and mass transit are not only cheaper for consumers, they're generally cheaper for governments as well. Less cars on the roads means less oil imports means less money going abroad means more money being invested here. Mass transit, when designed intelligently, means denser urban construction, which makes cities more livable, hits hard at inner-city poverty, and encourages more efficient energy use in buildings.

Railroads, especially the high-speed rails being encouraged by the Obama administration, are actually faster than cars, are less stressful than cars, are safer than cars, are cheaper than cars for the average citizen. Think about how much money you spend on cars every year-thousands to buy it depending on how much you're willing to pay, about $1000-2000 a year in insurance, at least a thousand a year in various and sundry repairs, and anywhere from $20 to $80 for a tank of gas, depending on the price of oil. Mass transit passes are typically less than $100 a month, and railroad tickets were actually cheaper than the gas required for the average American car to travel the same distance last summer during the oil spike. Obama's invested $8 billion in high speed rail. We should increase that, and increase the amount of money being spent on mass transit. If you believe that the government has a moral right to maintain public roads, it isn't that big of a stretch to believe that it has the moral right to maintain other forms of public transportation.

That's not to say that we should abandon our road infrastructure. We shouldn't. Any transition back to rails will take decades, and rightly so. And even then, our interstate highway system should remain well-repaired and well-used. However, we shouldn't go building any new roads; we should just repair those roads and bridges we already have.

Sewer Infrastructure: I'm not an expert on this, but I do know it's a problem we've been letting slide for years. It will have negative environmental effects soon enough if we don't fix it, and I'm not just talking about the effect on animals or plants. I'm talking about the effect on humans who don't have adequately clean drinking water.

Therefore, an investment to repair our existing sewer infrastructure, as well as to build new water purification plants, is eminently appropriate. Also, we should invest in systems to supply more drinking water to the American Southwest. Los Angeles alone is sucking the region dry, and without some kind of additional drinking water supply, the new development in Arizona and Nevada is unsustainable in the long run. What exactly should be done is too complex for our purposes here, but suffice it to say that all the serious options involve a massive outlay of money.

Environmental Cleanup: The Superfund has been underfunded for years. This is one of those things that needs to be done sooner or later. Environmental cleanup provides temporary jobs, so we might as well put a decent down payment on it.

Public Education: Probably the method of furthering public education that's least offensive to libertarians would be federally-subsidized student loans for college. At least then, the money (or a good chunk of it) gets paid back. The Republicans were right in sticking to their guns and getting education largely removed from the stimulus bill. This should be handled at the state and local level, or at least in the normal budget appropriation process.

Block Grants: I liked the idea of making these loans instead of grants. A lot of states have out-of-control budgets, and they shouldn't be rewarded for their profligacy with free money from the rest of the country. However, emergency shutdown of many government services overnight isn't a real solution either. A federal lifeline tied to a regular repayment schedule is probably the best way to go. If the states have to repay the money, chances are it'll encourage greater fiscal discipline. Plus, it means that the federal government will see this money again someday, and can use it to pay down part of the debt.

Tax Cuts: The tax cuts, which ended up being 40% of the Obama stimulus, are probably the most libertarian-friendly part. The most stimulative tax cuts, however, will be targeted on the poor, who are more likely to spend any extra money they have. So, establishing a basement for the payroll tax, say for the first $20,000, would be a good move. Progressive tax cuts like these have been Obama's focus overall, and it's effective stimulus policy.

Anyway, I think that would make for an effective stimulus, a more effective one than what we have now. And while it isn't solidly libertarian, it's more libertarian than the one we have now, in that it involves less spending and less borrowing.

Economic stimulus, Keynesianism, and pragmatism: Part 6.

2009-04-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

Go back to Part 5

Of course, we can't (or at least shouldn't) borrow the kind of money that Obama would like to. Though Keynesian economics does work, there is a limit to what can be done. Massive government spending in downturns is only viable when it's paid back in good times. And that spending hasn't been paid back for years. Consequently, we are going to run up against a wall of what we can borrow before we have to hike interest rates to unsustainable levels to attract investment.

Already, the Chinese are using their holdings of around $2 trillion in Treasury bills as leverage to influence United States policy. They are threatening ill relations if we print money, because it would reduce the value of their savings. They are also threatening to start selling off their T-bill reserves, which would send the value of the dollar plummeting. Even if we could continue borrowing forever, it would be excessively unwise to do so. Every trillion dollars of T-bills held outside of the US is another trillion dollars of sovereignty we lose.

We are, in all likelihood, not far from the "borrowing wall" at which the price of borrowing skyrockets. With the credit crisis, that wall has moved closer to our current financial position, as liquidity in the global marketplace has dried up and there's less money available to loaning anyone, not just the United States Government. Indeed, many long-term market analysts don't expect the borrowing to be able to continue much longer.

Therefore, the funding of any stimulus plan becomes a lot trickier than Obama has made it out to be. It is my honest belief that Obama's stimulus plan, combined with his massive budget, will push us past that borrowing wall, and beyond the wall lies another Great Depression. When consumers and businesses can't spend to stimulate demand, and the government is so deep in debt it can't spend either, and when taxation or inflation will just exacerbate the problem, we will be in what economists call "deep shit."

So, any stimulus plan will have to cobble together funding partially from borrowing, partially from printing money, by raising taxes, and partially from savings elsewhere in the budget. Savings can be achieved in several different ways: by cancelling truly pointless programs, or by administering a simple regulatory fix that will save billions. (Yes, while it is true that libertarians are against regulation in general, I think we'd be against the complete meltdown of the entire economy a little more. Besides, these things can and often are reversed after the crisis is over.) Combing through the budget, these things could be cut:

-$6.5 billion in various parts of the federal anti-drug budget dealing largely with the issue of marijuana-based interdiction, trial and imprisonment
-$21 billion by repealing the unpopular, counterproductive No Child Left Behind Act
-$100 billion in various cuts in the defense budget
-$4 billion in foreign military financing, most of which goes to either Israel or Egypt
-$1.5 billion in international peacekeeping efforts
-$12 billion by de-funding two underperforming and counterproductive parts of the Department of Homeland Security: the TSA and FEMA
-$11 billion by cutting NASA's budget by two-thirds: while space exploration is cool and all, it's a "want to have," not a "need to have." Cancelling Bush's moon push and focusing on exploration probes is cheaper and generally renders better science anyway.
-$1 billion in various counterproductive energy subsidies: hydrogen (which is, in all reality, too volatile and difficult to store to be viable anytime in the next few decades), corn ethanol (which has a negative EROEI), and fossil fuels R&D (which, even now, gets a whopping $754 million in subsidies)
-$23 billion in axing the Small Business Administration. The government is not a bank, it doesn't need to act like one. If the government is truly worried about certain minority groups not being serviced by the private banking industry, they can just strengthen anti-discrimination laws in the banking sector.
-$70 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest members of society. It wouldn't truly be a tax increase, it would merely be letting part of the Bush tax cuts expire. Taxation is theft, but as it stands, the refusal to pay for government now just increases the burden later on down the road, resulting in an even larger bill for society to pay later on. The true culprit isn't taxation as much as spending. Higher taxes on those who can most afford it in order to avoid this greater evil seems to me an excusable deviation from libertarian ideology, so long as it's phased out later on down the road.

That's $250 billion in savings just by cutting parts of the budget, and that's a conservative estimate. But there is more that can be done, far more.

The Social Security fund has long been a source of T-bill investment for the rest of government, but its receipts have been going down. This means that the share of T-bills held by America will go down. However, lifting the upper cap on the payroll tax, so that the incredibly rich pay taxes on all their payroll, has been promoted as a potential fix for Social Security for quite a while. Moreover, it's a fix that could add money to the fund today instead of slowing the rate of payouts several years down the road. And, because the money is eventually given back, with interest, it's one of the less egregious taxes we have, although most libertarians will still consider it philosophically unjust. I don't dispute that point, but I would consider that since the system is in place already, and since it does provide this unintended but vital financing service to the rest of the government, it would be a slight improvement to make it more progressive and thereby end an indirect subsidy to the rich, and thereby reduce the amount of money we need to borrow from abroad.

The Cato Institute estimates that lifting the cap will generate $1.3 trillion dollars for Social Security over 10 years, and the change would only affect the richest 6% of Americans. I'm not entirely certain about the year-to-year breakdown, but the left-wing thinktank Citizens for Tax Justice says it would generate around $124 billion dollars a year. All the same, that's $124 billion dollars more invested in Treasury bills without increasing foreign ownership. It's still debt and it still will need to be repaid, but as this is a one-time stimulus that will not be renewed in the future if libertarians have anything to say about it, it will be repaid quite shortly.

So with that, we're up to $374 billion dollars we can spend on a stimulus package, or about half of what Obama's stimulus actually was. But wait! There's more. The United States dollar is the most widely-used reserve currency in the world, and so more of the world's wealth is denominated in dollars than any other single currency. That gives us more wiggle room for inflation and money printing. I'm not advocating a wild Weimar Republic-esque inflation spree, but there is plenty of room to maneuver here.

This image represents the total amount of US dollars in circulation in the world. The green section, referred to as "M0" by economists, represents the amount of actual paper and metallic money floating around the United States, used in daily transactions. M1, the white part, represents M0 plus everything in checking accounts denominated in US dollars. M2 is M1 plus savings accounts, money market accounts, and certificates of deposit under $100,000. M3 is M2 plus certificates of deposit over $100,000, plus any non-Treasury bill accounts denominated in dollars outside of the United States of America and therefore out of the direct supervision of the Federal Reserve.

You'll notice that M3 cuts off after 2006. That's because the Fed stopped tracking it. Their excuse was that it wasn't a relevant figure to track in determining the immediate money supply, which is most closely related to inflation. That's true enough as far as that goes, but for various reasons I won't cover right now, it's also an excellent way to cover up any inflationary schemes the Fed might be compelled to try. That's largely irrelevant to our purposes here, but it does illustrate that the federal government has gotten increasingly nervous about the level of debt we've taken on and has considered large-scale inflation as a potential solution to the problem. Indeed, the amount of money stashed away in M3 accounts has steadily increased since the inflationary 70's.

Now, looking at the graph, you'll see that there is about $7 trillion in M2 circulation, which the Fed still considers relevant to inflation. The Obama administration's $700 billion stimulus represents about 10% of that figure. Of course, it won't all be paid out at once, and a lot of that is just moving 0s around in bank databases instead of cold hard cash. Nonetheless, if the entire stimulus were paid by inflation, the real value of the dollar would probably drop by around 9%. Most of the time, the Fed and the Treasury Department try to keep inflation at around 3-4%. Creating $70 billion out of thin air would represent 1% of the money in M2 circulation, and so would only inflate the dollar by 1%-certainly not the stuff that Chinese T-bill runs are made out of.

That brings our stimulus total up to $444 billion without having borrowed anything beyond the $124 billion from Social Security. The remaining amount of money Obama wanted in his stimulus, some $300 billion, could probably be raised by T-bill sales, and that's assuming that the stimulus even needs that kind of money. It may not.

Plus, if a cheaper fix can be found for the credit crisis, all that money that was loaned out in TARP funds can be collected on down the road, and the remainder spent on this. I won't delve too much into that, as it's a completely separate issue, but TIME Magazine had an excellent piece proposing such a fix: an automatic, across-the-board reduction of mortgage principal by 30%. It's estimated that that would let the vast majority of homeowners pay their bills instead of foreclosing, reducing the nonperformance rate for subprime mortgage bonds, and it wouldn't cost the government much more than the ink to sign the bill. Yes, it would represent a dramatic government intervention into the real estate market. Yes, it would be incredibly unfair to those who have already paid off their mortgages. But, it would be cheaper and simpler than most of the alternatives, and most importantly it would permit home values to fall, which is where the unfettered free market would take us anyway.

Some of the healthier banks (like Wells Fargo) are overeager to pay back their TARP loans and thus get out from under the thumb of extra government regulation. According to Fox Business, all but around $135 billion of the TARP funds have been committed to one project or another, but $371.3 billion of it hasn't actually been spent yet as of April 9th, 2009. If the remaining funds were de-committed and repurposed to the stimulus package, then we would arrive at a total of $815.3 billion waiting around to be spent. That's more than Obama's stimulus package amounted to, and all without a single extra foreign T-bill sale.

Continue on to Part 7 in this series.

Ann Coulter: The Official Libertarian Response - 4/17/2009

2009-04-17T02:10:00.001-07:00

This is the first week of the Official Libertarian Response. Predictably, this week Ann has for us a piece on the tea parties.

She starts off accusing liberals of widespread homosexuality for giggling over a gay joke. Then she giggles over Barney Frank's sex life, again:

On MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been tittering over the similarity of the name "tea parties" to an obscure homosexual sexual practice known as "tea bagging." Night after night, they sneer at Republicans for being so stupid as to call their rallies "tea bagging."

...

But if the Republicans were calling them "tea-bagging parties," the MSNBC hosts would have a fantastically hilarious segment for viewers in San Francisco and the West Village and not anyplace else in the rest of the country. On the other hand, they're not called "tea-bagging parties." (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour at Barney Frank's condo in Georgetown.)

BADA-BING! Oh, that's comedy. She continues with the flow by fitting in the obligatory Hillary Clinton joke, reminds us that Democrats like taxes, and then gets into the meat of her message: trying to outrun the rest of the GOP establishment to the front of the tea party parade.

She raises one valid point...

All Democrats for the last 30 years have tried to stimulate the economy by giving "tax cuts" to people who don't pay taxes. Evidently, offering to expand welfare payments isn't a big vote-getter.

...and then loses any goodwill generated therein by immediately talking out her ass:

Raise taxes and the productive will work less, adopt tax shelters, barter instead of sell, turn to an underground economy -- and the government will get less money.

In all reality, making tax cuts refundable is just a nicer term for welfare. It's good to see the Democrats get called on that bullshit-call it what it is. But by the same token, don't go lying and fearmongering. Raising certain taxes does encourage the things above, in certain situations, but not in most cases. Different levels of cigarette taxation in different states has encouraged an underground economy, but that's a question of taxation differences by state, not a question of basic tax levels. Not that I'm advocating it, because believe me I'm not, but if cigarettes were all taxed $5 a pack everywhere in America, we'd have a far smaller underground market than we do now, even though the tax is larger.

Tax shelters are also the results not of taxation levels, but of taxation complexity. A simpler tax code would largely eliminate tax shelters, even if taxation levels were higher.

The barter economy happens in three instances, as far as I can tell; two of them are as follows: frontier conditions where goods and people are few and far between, and inner-city bartering shops flocked to by trendy anarchists, hippie kids and gun-toting libertarians alike. The first is too desperate and remote to ever really be in the purview of taxation, and its participants too poor to ever really contribute anything to the government in the first place. The second is already taxed and regulated by the government, like any sufficiently large transaction of goods will inevitably be, no matter what foolproof legal trick you think you've come up with. And the third is just another name for the black market.

Black markets are usually not the result of taxation levels as such, but of bans and inept regulation, and occasionally honest-to-goodness criminal activity viewed as illegitimate even in libertarian eyes. The black market for drugs is caused by drug bans, the black market in guns is caused by over-regulation of guns, so forth and so on. The only times in history that black markets have become widespread and for otherwise innocuous items is when regulation of prices or production takes hold. The price controls of Diocletian, Truman and Nixon all saw surreptitious black markets emerge for everything from beef to gold, because the white market was unable to supply the good in the quantity needed at the prices dictated by government. And then we have the Soviet Union, which layered inept price controls over inept production efforts and ended up supplying itself largely through robbing its satellites blind until it fell.

Anyway, all that and we're not even past the first half. Fortunately, it gets better before it ends on a stupid note. She's got some very valid things to say about the Democratic record in California. Particularly this bit:

In just a few years, Democrats had turned California into a state -- or as it's now known, a "job-free zone" -- with a $41 billion deficit, a credit rating that was slashed to junk-bond status and a middle class now located in Arizona.

I lived in California for three years growing up. I have friends that have lived there all their lives. It's true-the Democrats have soaked not the rich of that state but the middle class. As a result, California's been sending out its mouth-breathing yuppies everywhere between San Francisco and the Great Plains, where shit is still affordable. The area from Cheyenne to Boulder is disparagingly called "Colofornia" by the ranchers I went to college with. Arizona was one big latte-sipping suburb before the economic crash... now it's a latte-sipping suburb with no future.

For all that, though, I would make a distinction. California's Democrats represent the Democratic Party at its absolute idiotic worst. There is a significant difference between what they've done and what Obama's trying to do. California's policies were grounded in liberal idealism of the kind that only makes sense in Hollywood films. Obama's are grounded in utilitarianism-a more liberal conception of it than what I hold to, sure enough, but utilitarianism all the same. He isn't asking what makes liberals happy, but what works. He seems to be intending to try liberal solutions first because that's his background, but he's shown an uncanny willingness to embrace conservative, libertarian and populist ideas if it can be demonstrated that they work better.

All of which robs her closing statement of its sting:

California was, in fact, a laboratory of Democratic policies. The rabbit died, so now Obama is trying it on a national level.

That's what the tea parties are about.

That's only half the story, anyway. The tea parties are also about a "fiscally conservative" administration that lied us into a war and jacked up the debt by 5 trillion dollars. But I don't suppose that makes for a good GOP puff piece.

My dad and Ann Coulter

2009-04-17T01:25:00.000-07:00

My dad is a fairly conventional conservative. He was a Reagan supporter back in college, and he's supported them ever since, as far as I can remember. He's part of the reason I became a libertarian: the small-government notions of the Reagan Republicans, if taken seriously, lead you nowhere else but to libertarian ideology. He and I parted ways around the time of the Iraq war, as I became more consciously libertarian, realized the war was bad, and woke up to the hyperpartisan he said-she said bullshit that has become our public discourse. (Of course, the shitstorms over the Glorious Libertarian Party Line can rival any O'Reilly hatefest I've ever seen, but I didn't know that then.)

He is a pretty intelligent sort of guy, usually pretty insightful even when I disagree with him, but he has a weakness that I've given him crap for: Ann Coulter.

Now, as any good libertarian can tell you, Ann Coulter is a hack that makes a living telling jokes about the Democrats. She's pretty good at parroting the GOP party line, but outside of calling people liberals and communists, she doesn't really add a whole lot to the national debate. And that is exactly why I am going to start up a regular feature here, every Thursday, combing through her posts as they appear on Townhall.com and offering the Official Libertarian Response, Bobby Jindal-style.

lolwut? you may be asking yourself. The answer is quite simple. She is a blogger. That is what she does. That is what all of us do, plus or minus a few jokes about Barney Frank's sexuality. The only difference between her and us is ideology; she pretends to care about small government and we pretend to care about winning elections. Plus, having gone through just about the entire rest of the libertarian blogosphere in my time, I haven't yet seen one blogger issue a regular rebuttal to Ann Coulter.

So it'll be a welcome respite, I hope, from the libertarian-leaning circlejerk, where we all hat-tip each other and crosspost the same five libertarian news articles that week in our own words and pat ourselves on the back for being Awesome Fucking Journalists. And with any luck, all ~~five~~ six of you that read this will get a chuckle out of it.

Economic stimulus, Keynesianism, and pragmatism: Part 5.

2009-04-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

Go back to Part 4

The defense budget is insane. According to this thing, the Department of Defense has a budget of $515.44 billion dollars. That's about half the entire budget. Like the War on Drugs, any "libertarian" stimulus would by necessity have to tackle the immense waste in this part of the budget in order to fund more effective stimulus measures elsewhere.

The myth that war is good for the economy is blatantly false. Assuming a world where something like free trade exists, even a successfully-waged war only reduces the amount of resources available to a society, by destroying some of the sunk capital of the enemy that could have been used in producing peacetime goods for trade. Obviously we can't be naive of our enemies' intentions and we need a military strong enough to protect us. Also, having blundered into Iraq, and having a mission to complete in Afghanistan, we need to fulfill our obligations there as quickly as possible-in Iraq by financing a withdrawal and certain civilian infrastructure projects, to compensate Iraq for the infrastructure we destroyed; and in Afghanistan by completing a successful anti-insurgency campaign and then withdrawing once the country is stable.

Just about everywhere else, though, we should begin looking for an exit. Except for staging operations for our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to reduce our presence in Europe, and once those wars are done we need to end it altogether. That includes Kosovo. And the proposed missile shields in Poland and the Czech Republic. We also have no business staging troops in Japan, Korea or in any part of the Pacific that is not actually American soil. We don't belong anywhere in the Middle East, including Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, once our two current wars wrap up. We don't belong anywhere in Africa, with the possible exception of the Gulf of Aden. And even there, we would be far better off employing privateers to end the pirate threat instead of sending the US Navy.

The empire abroad is wasteful, but just about as wasteful is the multiple defense pork programs here at home. The likelihood of the United States fighting a major symmetrical war is quite small. However, you wouldn't know it by the amount of money we've shelled out on symmetrical war-fighting capability. We have a huge research and development budget for new planes, which is made necessary because we keep selling our most sophisticated weaponry to other nations. (Which might be okay if those weapons sales more than paid for the cost of research and development, but they don't.) If we stopped public-sector weapons sales to other nations while cutting back on the DARPA budget, we could save considerable money without sacrificing our technological superiority on the battlefield in any meaningful way. I can't provide an exact figure, but the current amount of money spent by all branches of the military on research, development and procurement outside of the "War on Terror" currently runs to something around $170 billion dollars, annually. If just half of that were cut (mostly from Navy and Air Force budgets for R&D and procurement of big-ticket items like fighter jets, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines), it would give any stimulus efforts $85 billion to play with, to be invested into healthcare, infrastructure, alternative energy, or tax cuts.

Not all the money cut from these existing programs should be taken out of the defense budget, though. We need to increase our readiness to fight asymmetrical wars. To that end, humvees with extra protection against IEDs, more body armor for troops, better guns (like the EXACTO program recently started by DARPA, which is expected to produce a sniper gun with an effective mile-long range by 2015), more robotic minesweepers, and better equipment for the wars we're fighting would be a smart investment. And, of course, a pay hike for our soldiers would be the best investment of all, for moral and practical reasons. Anyone who risks their life for this country should be well-rewarded for their valor by society, and better pay attracts more and better recruits.

However, even with those additional programs, the Department of Defense will be saving enormous amounts of money with its budget cuts in other areas. If the R&D and procurement budgets were halved, efficiencies in other areas (mostly administration, in all likelihood, although we could probably get Iraq to pay for more of its own security) could in all likelihood scare up at least another $15 billion dollars. Given that this represents funding for a military that's sprawled out across the world, the figures for a military that's come home would likely be significantly smaller, but not immediately calculable. So, the conservative figure for total estimated savings would run to about $100 billion, or 1/5th of the defense budget, or 1/7th of Obama's stimulus.

Continue on to Part 6 of this series.

Economic stimulus, Keynesianism, and pragmatism: Part 4.

2009-04-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

Go back to Part 3

Healthcare is a clusterfuck. There are several things driving up the cost of healthcare and decreasing the amount of people covered. Fixing just one won't solve the problem; they all need to be addressed or the problem will continue to haunt the economy. And the price is real: employers increasingly export jobs overseas because it's cheaper to free ride off a public system than to pay the healthcare of all their workers; Medicare is our fastest-growing entitlement and as it stands is more expensive per-capita than the fully-socialist healthcare systems of many modern countries; and of course there's the small matter of 49 million people not being able to afford health insurance.

The tie between employment and healthcare is a problem. It raises costs for employers, driving them abroad where the state picks up that cost. Besides that, it introduces a perverse incentive. If your employer pays for your healthcare, price signals in healthcare usually no longer affect you, and you may "consume" more healthcare than you may actually need. It also makes you dependent on a job for healthcare. The Medical Savings Accounts proposed under the Bush administration and now being debated favorably by the Obama administration would ameliorate some of these problems. Someone (be it the government, your employer, or yourself) would put money into an MSA, which would be tax-deductible, and from which you could then purchase health insurance or pay other health-related costs. It doesn't directly lower costs for employers, if they contribute to the MSA. But, because the money is yours first before it gets paid out for healthcare, it removes the perverse incentive and restores price signals, and is fully portable between jobs. It would also facilitate the smoother operation of government-funded healthcare, by preserving some aspects of market-based rationing and making socialist healthcare as simple as depositing money in an account.

The spiralling cost of prescription drugs is also a problem. Research and development is expensive, true enough. It might be made cheaper through streamlining the FDA approval process, but I'm not entirely certain just how much the FDA adds to the overall cost. It's a typical libertarian solution to healthcare, though, and one that probably has more than a grain of truth to it. However, there are other parts of the pharmaceutical business model that could be streamlined, although it's not an entirely libertarian proposal. Advertisements, perhaps. Asking your doctor about Zyrtec (or whatever) is almost guaranteed to be pointless-he likely knows far more about it than you do, and if you needed it he would have prescribed it to you in the first place. Advertising in peer-reviewed medical journals and the like is one thing, but television ads are another. They add to the expenses of drugs without really driving too much new business. Banning advertisement would be an incredibly unlibertarian thing to do. However, the government could simply refuse to deal with companies that spend over, say, 2% of their budget on advertisements in non-healthcare professional media. There's nothing inherently unlibertarian about a government exercising its right of association. And even without socialist healthcare, there is plenty of economic reason for pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily adhere to this standard: government procurement contracts for military hospitals, as well as government health insurance contracts for its employees immediately come to mind as places where the government can exercise its clout in the marketplace instead of passing a law.

Also, the greater legalization of generic drugs must be achieved. Pharmaceutical companies often resort to tricks like ceasing to produce certain drugs once a patent lapses, and then producing the same drug, but with an inert compound added so it's legally considered to be a different drug, worthy of a different patent. If the public will cannot be mustered to relax our rules on generics and patents, it must be found to import drugs from countries that have, such as Canada and India.

There also needs to be a focus on preventative over restorative medicine. First off, a libertarian is probably not going to accept any attempt to legislate personal morality by levying "sin taxes" on cigarettes, alcohol, fast food, etc. So that is being left aside, although many approaches to preventative medicine insist on sin taxes, if not outright bans, on those things. Even ignoring those, there are still plenty of areas where preventative medicine can deliver results for pennies on the dollar over restorative medicine... provided the government is willing to foot the bill. Which is normally a turnoff for libertarians, but if the money comes out of Medicare and replaces some restorative programs there, it will save us money in the long run without hiking spending.

Postnatal care and counseling is one such preventative program. Mothers who are given basic instructions on childrearing by a nurse often have children with less health problems down the road. It's estimated that every dollar spent on these programs eliminates six dollars of healthcare spending down the road.

Vaccinations are another. It's alleged that vaccinations are a prime cause of autism in children, but these findings haven't been proven, and most evidence only points to a handful of vaccines. All the same, widespread, free vaccinations for all basic diseases often cost mere pennies per child and lead to massive savings-think how worse the healthcare crisis would be if, on top of every other disease, we still had to treat smallpox and polio.

Ending abstinence-only sex ed in schools will also help prevent healthcare costs. Abstinence-only sex ed has repeatedly been demonstrated not to work by various studies and reports. A more scientifically-sound sex ed program, which included access to condoms, would help slow the rate of transmission of STDs, as well as lower teen pregnancy rates. STD treatments and the public support of often-destitute teen mothers are a drain on public resources and insurance companies, while condoms are generally fairly cheap. And, if we're paying for sex ed in schools anyway, we might as well pay for a version that actually works.

Specifically authorizing healthcare tourism, as well as more firmly establishing the regulatory infrastructure for it, would also be a step in the right direction. In addition, analyzing the factors that make such tourism desirable in the first place and seeking to emulate them here at home would be a good idea. Doctors in India perform much the same quality of work as doctors here in America, for a much smaller cost, even with travel expenses taken into account. It may seem like a gimmick, but it would help control surgery costs.

One final thing, and it doesn't directly have to do with the finance aspect of the healthcare discussion, but it could help finance the above. Scaling back the War on Drugs could help finance any new healthcare programs. Legalizing marijuana, especially for its medicinal purposes, could have a minor impact on healthcare costs, as marijuana is a cheaper alternative to certain drugs used in cancer treatment. But it would also cut the cost of the Drug War in half. Prison pork would be lost, but it could be rerouted to more effective stimulus programs. Ideally, I'd support legalizing all drugs, but the political will for that just isn't there. However, we could finance rehabilitation efforts, so long as those rehabilitation efforts were tied to results and were strictly secular in nature.

Continue on to Part 5 in this series.

Economic stimulus, Keynesianism, and pragmatism: Part 3.

2009-04-16T19:00:00.001-07:00

Go back to Part 2

Alternative energy, and energy efficiency in general, is another important part of any stimulus program. Leaving aside the global warming debate, I think it's in our national interest to get off of oil for many non-Al Gore-related reasons. The most immediate one for our purposes here is that it represents a huge check we write to the Middle East every year, and we only ever see it again when they loan it back to us in the form of Treasury bills. Government intervention (on their end, mind you, but it's our problem) has drained America of her true wealth slowly but surely. So, some government intervention to reduce the size of the check we write to the Middle East will help probably help to solve the problem.

The cheapest way to reduce the amount of oil we use is ultimately energy efficiency and proven alternatives like wind. Coal's out because of external costs and nuclear's out because it's so expensive. Solar is temporarily out but it's probably going to be in soon as more development comes online. Biofuel is also semi-out because corn ethanol is worthless, but they're doing some promising things with algae and synthetic gasoline made with bacteria that might be viable within a decade or two. So, it makes sense to set up the public infrastructure that wind power would need to compete equally with fossil fuels, as well as subsidize research into solar power and biofuels. Considering the tiny cost of these programs versus the massive subsidies we've given the oil companies over the years, we could probably pay for it just by clawing back the subsidies we've given Big Oil in the past.

But energy efficiency is also a huge part of it. It's currently the absolute cheapest way to reduce oil use. It can be encouraged indirectly through a carbon tax, and can be made revenue-neutral by slashing payroll taxes an equal amount. It can also be encouraged directly, by issuing tax credits for buying a more energy-efficient car, tax credits for weatherizing homes, and by weatherizing federal buildings. Libertarians are usually for tax credits, so that's not a hard sell. The carbon tax thing shouldn't be too controversial; it's not progress in "starving the beast" but it's not lost ground either.

However, we can go further. CAFE standards should have been raised a long time ago, as should electric appliance energy usage standards in general. Yes, it's government meddling in the economy. It's also proven to work, at little cost to government, business, or society in general. If anything, CAFE standards save money for the consumer. It's like a reverse tax, but it works best if these standards are enforced on everyone. Since the whole purpose of government in the first place is to improve the lives of individuals through common management of common interests, this seems like an eminently justifiable thing to do. Moreover, from a geolibertarian viewpoint, since oil is an especially finite and uncreated common resource, it's perfectly acceptable for the government to regulate its production and use. The loss of economic liberty is minute compared to the increase in individual wealth, and may even be justified in certain conceptions of libertarianism.

Continue on to Part 4 in this series.

Stephen Gordon on the Rachel Maddow Show, 4/15/2009

2009-04-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

Former LP Political Director Stephen Gordon was on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, addressing the attempted neocon hijacking of the tea party movement. He did an excellent job at making his point, and given the amount of play that the GOP's attempted hijacking has gotten, I'd say that any further confusion of the neocons with these events in the public mind will cease.

These events will not and should not be a boost to Johnny-come-lately neocons who ran out of ideas and now need to steal ours. Instead, they are-as Maddow presciently noted-the emerging opposition to Obama. If we can keep the GOP neocon establishment from getting in front of this parade, and if we can keep up the organizational rallies and pressure through groups like the Campaign for Liberty, then the neocons will have nowhere to go but back to the Democratic Party from whence they came. And, wouldn't you know it, they've already started putting out feelers.

My Email Inbox

2009-04-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

Ever since 2006, when I joined Hammer of Truth, my email inbox has been cluttered and full. I would get my inbox filled with messages from various political entities. There would be news tips, there would be press releases from campaigns, there would be state LP newsletters, and there would be plenty of conspiracy mongering too. It didn't let up any with Last Free Voice, either.

Well, I've just spent a good chunk of my day cleaning up my inbox. Everything's filed away or deleted, and it's clean again for the first time in years. It's kind of liberating, I suppose, but there was also something exhilarating about being in the loop. Maybe in time I'll get back in. We'll see.

UPDATE: I'm on Next Free Voice.

Economic stimulus, Keynesianism, and pragmatism: Part 2.

2009-04-16T04:23:00.000-07:00

Go back to Part 1

As mentioned in my last post, the fact is that dumping money into active circulation stops (or at least pauses) recessions. Completely ignoring the liquidity trap/financial sector part of this crisis and focusing instead on consumer spending, the more money that's spent in an economy, the healthier it is. Consumer spending takes money from consumers and gives it to various and sundry companies that use it to produce goods and services, and in the process of that production it finds its way back to the consumers again, who are generally also workers.

Throughout the years, through various means (mainly involving us lowering our trade barriers to Asia while not requiring them to do the same for us), America's consumers have become the engine that pulls the world's economy. We borrow money from Asia to buy goods from Asia, which generally invests that money right back here. This is, obviously, unsustainable. However, it is the current reality. The current global economic infrastructure is set up to around this system, and the most painless way to change this system is to keep it running just long enough to switch over to something else.

This means government involvement of some kind. However, it's temporary government involvement to fix the government involvement that caused the problem in the first place, because if we left the free market alone to do it itself it wouldn't get done nearly as quickly.

The goal is to stimulate the economy in the short term while making structural adjustments that will improve our outlook in the long term. This means government spending. As good libertarians, we should probably limit government spending to stuff it should do, wherever possible. So, repairing our rusting road infrastructure? Great. Road construction and maintenance generates a lot of jobs in a really short period of time. And God knows, our sewers have been a ticking time bomb for years. These are widely considered to be legitimate tasks for the government to take on. However, the rest of it is kind of iffy for libertarians in general to swallow.

Extending unemployment insurance has the greatest stimulating effect of all the line items, but in general libertarians don't think it's a valid function of government. Fair enough, but it's here already. Let the liberals get their way on this one for the time being while we pontificate on a better idea for unemployment insurance later on down the road.

We'll need to revamp the way we use energy-we're currently bleeding money to the Middle East, and saving money on oil will help shore up consumer spending by redirecting consumer dollars at other goods and services. I'll delve more into the hows and whys of this in my next post.

We'll have to do something about healthcare. This is probably the single biggest clusterfuck in politics right now, because there's like five different things going wrong here at the same time. Moreover, the guys in charge got there promising a nasty-sounding socialist fix that will, most likely, just make things worse. However, there's wiggle room here to make things better, and the Obama administration looks more flexible on this than when they first campaigned.

We'll also need to tackle the defense budget. Stimulus shouldn't just be throwing money out of helicopters, or throwing money into helicopters. It needs to serve a greater purpose. And right now, a big chunk of our defense dollars really aren't. We can slash some waste and redirect the rest to more effective uses. This really won't be controversial for most libertarians, especially Ron Paul supporters who really, truly wonder why we are supporting an unnecessary empire.

Continue on to Part 3 in this series.

Economic stimulus, Keynesianism, and pragmatism: Part 1.

2009-04-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

Let's get wonky, dudes!

As I mentioned below, this is one of those areas where I have come to disagree with accepted libertarian doctrine. This does not mean I agree with Obama's plan, however. In fact, I think the libertarian action of protesting the stimulus is the right one, but for the wrong reason.

In this post, I'll talk about why stimulus is, in general, a good idea. Next, I'll talk about where stimulus should be applied. Then I'll dwell specifically on alternative energy's role. Then I'll talk about healthcare's role. Then I'll talk about the defense budget. Then I'll explain why it's a bad idea to go through with all of it, and what an effective, libertarian-leaning stimulus plan would look like.

Let's start with what should be obvious. Stimulus works. If you doubt this, well, essentially all of history disagrees with you. Our genteel monarchist forebears were staunch Keynesians before Keynes was even born. They believed it was their noble obligation to spend their wealth on new things during economic downturns, in order to provide employment to those who depended on them for a living. Even before economics really evolved into a science, the very existence of pork-barrel politics throughout history, all the way back to ancient Rome, is testament to its efficacy. After all, each and every pork program is a miniature stimulus package for whatever area gets it. It could not endure so strongly as a political institution unless it really worked.

Sure, the classical libertarian critiques hold true-the money spent as stimulus is often spent on wasteful and pointless things, or mismanaged somehow, and even if spent as intended by intelligent, earnest people usually does not represent the ideal allocation of those resources in a purely free market. But when Buttfuck, Mississippi gets its new high school football field, it's not their resources that are misallocated-it's OUR resources. The benefits are localized and the costs are widely distributed. They have a stronger economy than they would have without the pork/stimulus.

Moreover, there are some common goods that simply cannot be purchased easily, if at all, by individuals. Some of these common goods-defense, transportation networks, courts-are widely accepted by libertarians as legitimate. I take a slightly more expansive view on this, as a geolibertarian, but that will be discussed later. Assuming the stimulus money somehow purchases badly-needed common goods while also providing a one-time stimulation to the economy, it's being spent efficiently and as well as a libertarian could hope for.

Continue on to Part 2 in this series.

Hi internet!

2009-04-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

So I'm back in the blogging game. Those of you who don't know me, hi. Those of you who do probably want an explanation.

I started Last Free Voice two years ago because Hammer of Truth had gone offline. I stopped blogging there around the time that the 2008 election really got going.

Why? Several reasons. First off, my personal life got busy. I was going to college, literally working five jobs at one point to make ends meet. Went through a bunch of personal relationshipy drama. However, I had the good sense to graduate at the beginning of Great Depression 2.0, so needless to say I suddenly have a lot of free time on my hands once again.

Also, I'm not as doctrinaire as I used to be. I know anyone out there that knew me that's reading this is probably laughing; I was never doctrinaire. I got into blogging in the first place at Tim West's "The New Libertarian" and I was a staunch defender of the Reform Caucus. I've always been kinda fuzzy to the radicals. Well, I'm even fuzzier now. While I did support Paul in the primaries, I didn't vote in 2008. I was happy that Obama won, though; mainly because he too is a pragmatist, albeit a liberal pragmatist and not a libertarian pragmatist. I find myself in agreement with more of what he's doing than I thought I would, even if it doesn't always employ libertarian means. Doesn't mean I agree with all or even most of it though. Just means that he's probably the best Democrat we could've hoped for.

But the main reason I stopped blogging for a while was I noted that I wasn't really producing anything of value. My average post (and really, the average posts of most bloggers, regardless of site or ideology) could be summed up as follows: snarky title, link to story by Real News Outlet, throwaway opinion somehow connecting story to Glorious Libertarian Cause, shitstorm in the comments section. Occasionally I did break some interesting stories, or create posts with sufficient value in and of themselves: usually either policy proposals, interviews, philosophical musings, or humor pieces. But by and large I was just reposting shit that Time, Newsweek, Fox or some actual news organization had already gone out and reported on, and slapping the party line over it. It was a repost of a repost of a repost. The only thing separating it from /b/ was the lack of dickgirls. The only thing separating it from Komsomolskaya Pravda was that communists can't afford the internet.

But with more free time on my hand, and with the very interesting political times we live in, I think I'm going to blog again. I'm back at Last Free Voice, in fact here's my first new article for them in about a year. Last I checked, I was still at Third Party Watch and pauliecannoli's blog, I'll have to see if that's still the case.

At any rate, this is here so I have an outlet that's for me specifically, not just the libertarian movement or even a whole bunch of people. I'll post about my life here, in addition to politics. As far as politics goes, I'll save my more rambunctious how-dare-defy-thee-the-edicts-of-Rothbard posts for here. Last Free Voice has finally emerged as a great center of libertarian action, big enough to rival Hammer of Truth in its day. I'm incredibly proud of their accomplishment and I don't want to take away from the staunch libertarian views expressed there. All the same, I do want to express myself fully, so I'll do that here.

So yeah, that's me. And that's this blog. I'll look into making a better scheme after I've put some more content up in this bitch.