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| Charles Koch reveals the true power of the Dark Side... |
Given my history of critiquing libertarianism, it would hardly be surprising if I felt a flash of gleeful schadenfreude to see the dismay with which so many movement libertarians are reacting to the Koch takeover of the Cato Institute. But I don't. I just feel sad. Here are a bunch of smart people who truly, honestly believe in their worldview - a worldview that shares some key elements with my own - discovering for the first time that they are in fact merely a proxy army for people who don't take them or their worldview seriously at all.
To those of us outside the movement, the fact that libertarians are a proxy army has always been painfully obvious. The key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize. Most Americans share the belief that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, and high taxes are bad. But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place. Should we really be more afraid of turning into Sweden than turning into Singapore? The contrast between libertarians' continual jeremiads against taxes and their muted, intermittent criticism of things like warrantless wiretaps, executive detention, and torture was a huge tip-off that the movement was really just some kind of intellectual front for America's right wing.
The thing is, the soldiers in this proxy army didn't seem to realize they were a proxy army. They appeared, and appear, to truly believe in their synthetic ideology; they seemed deeply convinced of the Rand/Nozick idea that taxes and environmental regulation represented a more dire threat to human freedom than the authoritarianism that had been the bane of earlier freedom advocates since Enlightenment.
Now, however, they are beginning to understand:
[T]he Kochtopus...threatens to swallow up libertarian scholarship in order to regurgitate it as fodder for the social activist tail that seeks to wag the GOP dog in the 2012 elections.Readers should not expect many free market think tanks to speak out against the Koch assault. Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch through their various well-funded foundations. That pocket money comes at a significant cost. I can assure you that there is no such thing as a free Koch luncheon.
How much did libertarians blind themselves to the true motivations of the people who were throwing money at them? We may never know. But it's certain that the blinders are off now. People working at more explicitly Koch-funded think tanks (such as the Mercatus Center, headed by the econ blogosphere's own Tyler Cowen) must be experiencing some serious cognitive dissonance right about now.
Because the superpower bankrolling America's libertarian movement is simply our version of the right-wing oligarch-and-racist coalition that crops up in every nation from time to time. The American conservative movement wants a strong executive who wields many of the powers of a tyrant of old, in order to "protect" us (from "terrorists," subversive elements at home, or outsiders in general). It wants a justice system oriented toward protecting tradition, group rights, and the social order (like Japan's system). It wants to restrict immigration by nonwhite racial groups. It wants heavy government regulation of personal morality. And it occasionally wants wars of choice.
In other words, it is deeply anti-liberty.
Some libertarians are belatedly recognizing this:
What does Cato say that no other think tank says? Militarism is… the worst foreign policy for a free market. The War on Drugs is not only unnecessary in a free market, but ending it would be a straightforward implementation of free market principles. And the freedom to buy and sell is a sick joke without robust civil liberties for all. Conversely, most people want their civil liberties partly so that they can earn a living and enjoy economic opportunities. That is what Cato is about. That is also apparently why the Kochs are trying to destroy it.
If I were a meaner-spirited type of person, I would say that this realization is too little, too late - that libertarians spent decades being apologists, water-carriers, and useful idiots for authoritarians, and only now that their masters are reeling in the leash do they suddenly want out. But instead I say: Better late than never. You guys made mistakes before, but now you see the truth. First, realize that the conservative puppeteering of the libertarian movement is not an extremely recent phenomenon, but was always present at some level. And then start thinking about what kind of political agenda and rhetorical emphasis will actually promote liberty in America.
Freed from the conservative yoke, libertarians will have huge potential to do a lot of real good for this fundamentally libertarian country.
Update: Wil Wilkinson, libertarian writer and former Cato employee, confirms that Cato has been a proxy army for the right, and has many other insightful things to say.
Update: Wil Wilkinson, libertarian writer and former Cato employee, confirms that Cato has been a proxy army for the right, and has many other insightful things to say.
What's your evidence to support this view?
ReplyDeleteIf you're familiar with the politics of the libertarian movement you'll know there are two camps: the political pragmatists and the philosophers. The Cato folk consider themselves to be philosophers. The Kochs consider themselves political agents. Both claim to be doing the right thing for libertarianism on fairly reasonable grounds.
To cite this Koch-Cato fight as evidence that libertarians are controlled by the right shows a poor grasp of the situation.
Um, I think the evidence was as follows:
ReplyDelete"The key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize. Most Americans share the idea that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, and high taxes are bad. But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place."
That paragraph was too anecdotal to count as evidence. Which libertarians? What emphasis? What people and publications are you referring to. He was obviously just listening to the wrong people.
DeleteI'd say another rock solid giveaway was Libertarian climate skepticism. Love of liberty should not imply a firm belief about the spectrum of C02. It is hard to believe that funding from a fossile energy centered conglomerate was coincidental.
ReplyDeleteI think you are a bit hard on Nozick who wasn't von Hayek. He thought about many things and the libertarianism was only part of it. Sure doesn't explain why he was a vegetarian.
I personally don't share your hopes for liberated libertarians. And ohhh the shadenfreude is fun (I guess I am not as nice a guy as you are -- in fact I'm sure).
Finally, the USA isn't a fundamentally libertarian country. For one thing due process rights of defendants are unpopular. Hell opinion on torture is divided. Look at polls on "morally acceptable" vs "morally wrong" a significant majority thinks that premarital sex is morally wrong -- much larger than the minority which thinks the death penalty is morally wrong. But also, a solid majority wants higher taxes on rich people and a huge majority loves Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
I'd say the libertarian pattern of beliefs is quite rare. The huge group not represented by a party consists of those who disagree with libertarians about everything -- egalitarian social conservatives.
Robert,
ReplyDelete"I'd say another rock solid giveaway was Libertarian climate skepticism. Love of liberty should not imply a firm belief about the spectrum of C02. "
I don't want to get in an argument here, but please let me offer for your consideration that might not be fully understanding the libertarian mindset here. It was never about CO2 levels, it was about
1) a too authoritarian approach to science, arguments to authority ("99% of scientists agree") instead of evidence. AGW was always presented in a "too religious" way.
2) left-liberals like Al Gore threw their weight in fairly early. An Inconvenient Truth etc. Thus it was even 10 years not purely a scientific thing but also very political, politicized. If you are libertarian and you see Al Gore is vociferously supporting something, you get suspicious. Just like liberals get suspicious when tobacco companies fund research. Same thing, right?
Economics is the study of scarcity. Therefore, it would be really awesome if you could write at least one post that explained how scarce resources are efficiently allocated.
ReplyDeleteThat would really go a long way to help me understand your optimism regarding the ability of 538 congresspeople to efficiently allocate millions and millions of people's taxes (aka limited resources).
"Here are a bunch of smart people who truly, honestly believe in their worldview [...] discovering for the first time that they are in fact merely a proxy army for people who don't take them or their worldview seriously at all."
ReplyDeleteYes, a lot of libertarians are smart and honestly believe in their worldview. But the only way they can be "discovering for the first time" is if they have been denying the evidence all along, the same exact way they have maintained their beliefs. There is a systematic denialism of contradictory evidence and acceptance of grotesquely wishful thinking that is characteristic in the many strands of the movement.
Few people understand libertarianism beyond a handful of throwaway slogans. I've written What Is Libertarianism?, which shows 21 different aspects of libertarianism that include at least three relevant to this discussion. Folks who have spent any time discussing libertarianism will recognize most of these.
As somebody who has opposed libertarianism since I met my first libertarian friend 40 years ago, schadenfreude is definitely the right word. Many people who have smugly and vehemently denied this are now having their noses rubbed in it. Including many who were employed to do so.
It will be interesting to see which ones have the entrepreneurial spirit strongly enough to abandon Cato en masse and found a Cato II, leaving a husk for the Kochs. And which ones will keep sucking on the Koch tits when there is a bigger payoff for loyalty and face-saving. Much as happened in the earlier schism when Rothbard left and the Mises group formed.
Shenpen,
ReplyDeleteIf you wanted to know something about global climate change beyond its politics, why were you listening to Al Gore in the first place? There were plenty of academic studies that began showing trendlines all the way back in the late 1980s. By the late 1990s, the evidence by professional climatologists published in their peer reviewed literature was slam dunk. Yet one person from another political spectrum swayed your thinking?
And Libertarians call themselves intellectual.
"Because the superpower bankrolling America's libertarian movement is simply our version of the right-wing oligarch-and-racist coalition that crops up in every nation from time to time." Noah the truth-revealer is painting with a brush that's just a wee bit too broad. Writers of such callowness should use issue charges of "useful idiot" with care.
ReplyDeleteNoah, the term you are looking for is "useful idiot", not proxy army.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
A libertarian is an anarchist is a communist. The word you are looking for is "propertarian".
ReplyDeleteAnd my experience is that most propertarians, like many economists, have no interest in knowing what they are talking about.
Shenpen:
ReplyDelete"left-liberals like Al Gore threw their weight in fairly early. An Inconvenient Truth etc. Thus it was even 10 years not purely a scientific thing but also very political, politicized. If you are libertarian and you see Al Gore is vociferously supporting something, you get suspicious. Just like liberals get suspicious when tobacco companies fund research. Same thing, right? "
No.
A politician choosing to get involved in a cause doesn't make the cause political. You look at the cause, the science behind it and judge for yourself. If Libertarianism claims to be all about informed choice, then they should look at the information, not the speaker.
They can debate about the solutions and how much proposed solutions (taxes, penalties, cap-and-trade) infringe on liberties, that would be a worthwhile argument with socialists, environmentalists and whoever has an idea. But by dragging Gore's political credentials into it, the Libertarians politicised it.
My analogy would be that no liberals opposed Bush's efforts to stop AIDS in Africa. The objection was to do it using charities that promoted abstinence as a solution.
Let me get this straight: Noah Smith, a liberal, is accusing libertarians of failing to prioritize issues such as civil liberties?
ReplyDeleteAt a time when most liberals have essentially either turned a blind eye to issues of indefinite detention ever since Obama adopted the Bush line and has been the worst presidential administration on FOIA?
And when Ron Paul has practically been screeching at the debates about War with Iran and the War on Drugs?
That's a bit rich.
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ReplyDeleteApparently you have a point. Only yesterday I (as a libertarian) was accused of having a mind no higher than an animal by another libertarian, because I called him out on his apparent desire to get rid of the lower classes.
ReplyDelete"Freed from the conservative yoke"...
ReplyDeleteLOL! Libertarians have only had a voice because they've been given a bullhorn by their conservative backers. If they really abandon Cato they'll wind up like the Western European communist parties after they lost their Soviet bankroll, irrelevant.
"start thinking about what kind of political agenda [...] will actually promote liberty in America."
LOL^2! Just like the commies they have an extremist agenda that would never make it in a democracy without riding on a money train. Their agenda is the equivalent of taking down all the traffic signals and firing all the police. Yeah, we'd all muddle through but life would considerably more of a pain in the a$$.
The contrast between libertarians' continual jeremiads against taxes and their muted, intermittent criticism of things like warrantless wiretaps, executive detention, and torture was a huge tip-off that the movement was really just some kind of intellectual front for America's right wing.
ReplyDeleteYou're arguing with a straw man. The last time a conservative administration was in power, the major libertarian institutions -- Cato, Reason, the Mises crowd -- devoted a good deal of resources to criticizing warrantless wiretaps, executive detention, and torture. Far more than they did to taxes, if only because tax hikes weren't a serious possibility while Bush was in office. Lowering some taxes was, from a libertarian point of view, pretty much the only thing Bush did right.
Also: Doesn't this whole fight suggest that Cato hasn't been a tool of the Kochs all that time?
"But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place."
ReplyDeleteYou obviously do not spend much time at the Cato website.
Like I said on DeLong's blog:
ReplyDeleteWhy is everyone bemoaning the demise of Cato as an "independent, libertarian think tank"?
It was never any of these things.
By virtue of its position in society, Cato was always politically motivated. I find not a trace of unbiased, impartial libertarian analysis in any of its publications (okay, maybe some but not much).
They deliberately exclude data that clashes with their political agenda (witness the paper comparing the Nordic model with the USA, where tons of relevant data is tragically ignored because it would drown out the clear purpose of the message). Many of their papers somehow end up in support of policies advanced by specific GOP leaders. Maybe it's mere correlation, but I highly doubt it.
There is nothing to bemoan here.
The Koch takeover is merely a formality. Cato has always been what we know it is.
"..libertarians will have huge potential to do a lot of real good for this fundamentally libertarian country."
ReplyDeleteAnd exactly what historical evidence do you have that leads you to believe that this supposed potential will actually be used to get to any objectively "good" result? Blind optimism can be a charming trait, but it's not a terribly good basis for policy decisions. I'll assume that the self-named "libertarians" will continue on their merry way as self-blinded authoritarian supporters. Just like the mass of the modern Republican supporters, they have convinced themselves that "liberals" are Trotskyites or worse who want to bulldoze America to create a Socialist Utopia. That road doesn't lead to anywhere terribly good for the country.
Libertarianism suffers from the same problem that the State's Rights movement fell into back in the 1960's.
ReplyDeleteIt is an ideal principle that becomes badly used for specific and unworthy ends, namely, the continuation of racial discrimination.
That is the problem that is faced by many ideal ideologies which are essentially amoral, and prone to obsessiveness.
And it is too bad. Because the libertarian strain of thought has many worthwhile contributions to make, and forefathers like Jefferson among them.
If you are libertarian and you see Al Gore is vociferously supporting something, you get suspicious. Just like liberals get suspicious when tobacco companies fund research. Same thing, right?
ReplyDeleteNot even a little. Do you think Gore is motivated to speak up on climate change by personal profit?
A more interesting question is what it is about Gore that makes you suspicious?
Let me get this straight: Noah Smith, a liberal, is accusing libertarians of failing to prioritize issues such as civil liberties?
ReplyDeleteAt a time when most liberals have essentially either turned a blind eye to issues of indefinite detention ever since Obama adopted the Bush line and has been the worst presidential administration on FOIA?
This is a very good point.
As much as I deplore name calling , would be too wrong to refer to the duped libertarians as Koch suckers?
ReplyDelete@Mark - the question isn't whether it's wrong, but whether it's hilarious. Which it clearly is.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize... a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place. Should we really be more afraid of turning into Sweden than turning into Singapore? The contrast between libertarians' continual jeremiads against taxes and their muted, intermittent criticism of things like warrantless wiretaps, executive detention, and torture was a huge tip-off that the movement was really just some kind of intellectual front...
ReplyDeleteI’ve thought this same thought eighteen hundred times, but I’ve never been able to articulate it as well as you do here. Thank you.
Nice post to comeback after that last debacle.
ReplyDeleteDeep thought of liberty would include going back to the Constitution's founding thoughts:
Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness.
Now, defining happiness in terms of "He who dies with the most wins!" is a rather callow and shallow viewpoint.
As for Life, one could easily make the argument that if a truly effective medical establishment had existed, the founders would have backed socialized medicine.
The real tragedy of the Cato brand is the driving results to absurdity we now have, including insufficient taxes during normal economic condtitions leaving gaping deficits in times of economic turmoil.
They are part and parcel of the cynical "Starve the Beast" outlook that has done immense damage to our country. Starving the Beast implies destroying the foundations of our country, and to destroy our society through conflict between rich and poor.
Now, with the poor beginning to suffer more, and worthy fools like Murray and Ferguson finally noting that society is fragmenting what are the proposed solutions? They advocate more suffering for the poor, because it will improve them through adopting middle class values that don't immediately confer anything the poor want beyond more suffering. College educated lefties used to breezily state "Come the Revolution..."
I would posit those on top espousing such crap should really worry about the bottom, after all, those on top did so well with their crony capitalism when the French Revolution came through.
Until Libertarianism begins to contemplate the responsibility of a society to all of it's members beyond the Galtian productive classes, it is a nearly useless exercise of selfish people using logic to justify abuse of the lower classes, because they can.
The really ridiculous stuff that lies in Ron Paul's background supplies more than enough of these arguments.
>But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place
ReplyDeleteThis is your opinion
As much as I deplore name calling , would be too wrong to refer to the duped libertarians as Koch suckers?
ReplyDeleteEPIC WIN
It'd take less than couple minutes to look up Koch brothers position on patriot act, military spending, gay marriage and war on drugs. Did you actually do a simple google search?
ReplyDeleteIt'd take less than couple minutes to look up Koch brothers position on patriot act, military spending, gay marriage and war on drugs.
ReplyDeleteIt would take even less time to look up the positions of the Republican Party and its main presidential candidates on these issues.
The Kochs are trying to incorporate Cato into the Republican electoral machine.
I rest my case.
If you supported the expensive waste of blood and treasure that was the second invasion of Iraq, you have no claim to being called a small government Libertarian.
ReplyDeleteThis is why us adults don't take you seriously, and never will.
Forget about trying to enlist allies from the libertarians. Waste of energy.
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. is an informal aristocracy. (Informal in the sense that we haven't gotten around to re instituting hereditary titles of nobility.) The only avenue to increase political leverage for the policy positions you favor is to persuade uber-wealthy liberals to invest more in political lobbying. Naturally, you'll have trouble persuading them to argue vigorously for higher taxes on themselves. But gay rights, or 'out of iran' type stuff, sure. Dicey on bank regulation of course, since high finance is how people get to be uber-wealthy in the first place.
In other words: you can only fight (money) fire with (money) fire.
Wait, doesn't this analysis contain a *basic* logical error?
ReplyDeleteThese Cato guys are complaining *now* that the Kochs are trying to turn them into Republican shills.
So surely something must have happened *now* that makes them especially uncomfortable, right? [the takeover attempt or whatever]
Why should any Cato supporter not be proud of such resistence? Further, why is this suggestive that Cato *has been* a room of Republican shills? Apprently, these complaining guys felt that they had the freedom to do real scholarship before, right?
Here's a liberal who's president promised during the '08 campaign to restore habeas corpus and has since codified a law to make it possible to haul an American citizen to a foreign prison for torture and death without a phone call home picking a nit on the blanket of libertarianism. Scoff, scoff.
ReplyDeleteThe real problem with libertarians isn't whichever of their tenets they chose to promote more or less, but the huge pink elephant in the room: that leaving the markets to themselves guarantees monopoly. And once monopolies exist, the free market goes out the window and you wind up with goliaths like the Koch brothers who can swallow you up whole. They completely ignore the history of unfettered capitalism and its inevitable, yes inevitable, result in both vertical and horizontal monopolies, that are also of course political oligarchies. These will take away whatever "freedoms" the libertarians pretended to have up to that point. I'm sure the libtards have "answers" to this, but any answer that doesn't involve a large and powerful regulatory state mostly controllable by a democratic system with strong enforcement of antitrust laws is a non-answer. A strong regulatory antitrust state is the only counterweight history has seen that can reign in the power of monopolists. The fact that libtards ignore these inconvenient truths is testimony to their blindness and the ease with which they are used by those same monopolists to further the goals of plutocracy. This Cato incident is merely reality bursting their bubble... but don't expect them to take away the correct lessons - their arrogance and misplaced self-confidence will win out, and they will come up with some foolish "exception" that allows them to continue on their merry journey.
ReplyDeleteHere's a liberal who's president promised during the '08 campaign to restore habeas corpus and has since codified a law to make it possible to haul an American citizen to a foreign prison for torture and death without a phone call home
ReplyDeleteThis is true, but who wrote and pushed that fascist bill?
> any answer that doesn't involve a large and powerful regulatory state mostly controllable by a democratic system with strong enforcement of antitrust laws is a non-answer. A strong regulatory antitrust state is the only counterweight history has seen that can reign in the power of monopolists.
ReplyDeleteI recommend you look at the work of the (certainly not libertarian) Gabriel Kolko. He makes a strong case the regulatory capture has been very common, from the Roosevelts to today.
Hope that qualifies as a brilliant "answer."
Shenpen and Robert,
ReplyDeleteIt was never about CO2 levels, it was about
1) a too authoritarian approach to science, arguments to authority ("99% of scientists agree") instead of evidence. AGW was always presented in a "too religious" way.
But you are holding the public debate over AGW to the standard you expect of scientific debates on matters that are not matters of much public debate. It's not like the scientific literature ever cites a consensus as the reason for believing any result, but the general public should know where the experts stand because most people don't have the time to develop the expertise that would be required to make an informed judgement on where the evidence stands.
2) left-liberals like Al Gore threw their weight in fairly early.
No kidding. Tribalism, deciding who you're with and who we're against before deciding what, explains many dumb things about politics. When Penn and Teller retracted their Bullsh!t episode on climate change, they mentioned that their feelings toward Al Gore were a major motivating factor. But there's a reason why it was Al Gore and not George W. Bush who took up this cause.
I'd say another rock solid giveaway was Libertarian climate skepticism. Love of liberty should not imply a firm belief about the spectrum of C02. It is hard to believe that funding from a fossile energy centered conglomerate was coincidental.
It shouldn't imply a belief about CO2, but it does affect beliefs about any number of problems. The problem is that Libertarianism just doesn't have good tools for dealing with large collective action problems, so Libertarians tend to doubt their seriousness. Pretty much every environmental problem was at some point believed by Libertarians to be overblown. What is a Libertarian to do if they do believe it? Suggest that, while it's bad, it surely can't be as bad as the cost of preventing it? But there's no law of physics or politics or economics that should cause one to expect that to be the case. Where some end up is "we're not going to be able to fix this anyway." And that is a much less inspiring movement to be part of than one that believes it is fighting a conspiracy to create a fake science to justify expansion of government.
I seriously think that if there were a convincing Libertarian solution to climate change, there would be much less denial of the issue. If Naomi Oreskes is to be believed, even for those paid to not believe in global warming, Libertarianism is the main factor, not money. See this paper, starting around page 33.
I do wonder if there are equivalent liberal blind spots -- any large classes of problems liberals can't see because they couldn't offer a good solution if they did.
"I do wonder if there are equivalent liberal blind spots -- any large classes of problems liberals can't see because they couldn't offer a good solution if they did."
DeleteGenetic factors in intelligence or criminality?
P.S. Before someone yells at me, those genetic factors might be sex linked.
DeleteBefore someone yells at me, those genetic factors might be sex linked.
DeleteKid, you done made me laugh.
Best line ever on the Libertarians:
ReplyDelete"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
So are you saying that the Kochs are Palpatine and the libertarians are... the Trade Federation, maybe? To me that seems like the best analogy from Star Wars...
ReplyDeleteThere is a richly ironic struggle going on at Cato right now; having for years taken money from the Koch brothers, the Koch brothers are now taking over the Board. The old-school members of the board are naturally up in arms that this will dilute and defame the purpose of the institute. But of course, what they are experiencing is the genius of capitalism at work - a hostile takeover very much akin to a private equity corporate raid - and predictably the new owners fully intend to sell off the prime assets, jettison dead weight and underperforming operations, and monetize the brand into simulacra. Duh.
ReplyDeleteApparently, creative destruction is not so pleasant when you are on the receiving end….!
"If you are libertarian and you see Al Gore is vociferously supporting something, you get suspicious. Just like liberals get suspicious when tobacco companies fund research. Same thing, right?" (Shenpen)
ReplyDeleteThis is wonderful. Member of the Democrats on one side, and tobacco companies on the other. Who will win the next presidential elections?
Shenpen: "1) a too authoritarian approach to science, arguments to authority ("99% of scientists agree") instead of evidence. AGW was always presented in a "too religious" way."
ReplyDeleteUh, excuse me? Authoritarian? Bullshit. The problem is that the glibertarians are trying to overturn century-old physics in the name of ideology. Would you similarly have us take up the putative existence of a luminiferous aether, or the existence of atoms (which we can now "see" with an atomic force microscope)?
When scientific ignoramuses start
1)bringing utterly irrelevant crap into a scientific debate,
2)accusing scientists of malfeasance,
3)passing out death threats
4)abusing state and national offices to persecute climate scientists for doing their job,
pray, how should scientists respond?
When your philosophy demands that you reject physical reality, that's a pretty good indication your philosophy is wrong.
Most Americans share the belief that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, and high taxes are bad.
ReplyDeleteMost Americans share the belief that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, high taxes are bad, and free markets work so that government regulation should be kept to the minimum effective dose.
center America is socially liberal (stay out of my bedroom and bloodstream) and economically conservative (stay out of my wallet).
The republican party is struggling with the fact that social and economic conservatism are ill bedfellows (so, Darwin is fine for the economy but he was totally wrong about biology...)
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ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
ReplyDeleteAssuming you are a member of a political party, you are even more of a useful idiot/stooge yourself.
ReplyDeleteWho funds parties? Who do parties listen to? Lobbyists, or voters?
Something about motes and beams springs to mind.
Libertarian has always been a misnomer. Propertarian is a much better description, since the philosophy is not, at it's core about liberty, but rather about protecting private property everything else be damned.
ReplyDelete@Mike Huben...his guide to Libertarism.
ReplyDelete"No one libertarian exemplifies all of these viewpoints, nor do any of these viewpoints match all libertarians. There might be a libertarian who doesn't match any of these viewpoints. But it is easy to find libertarians who are well-described by any of these characterizations."
Reminds me of cold reading.
@Absalon,
ReplyDeleteI always liked that quote.
A potpourri of bigots ducking under the cover provided by a convenient sophist.
ReplyDeletePathetic.
"Let me get this straight: Noah Smith, a liberal, is accusing libertarians of failing to prioritize issues such as civil liberties?
ReplyDeleteAt a time when most liberals have essentially either turned a blind eye to issues of indefinite detention ever since Obama adopted the Bush line and has been the worst presidential administration on FOIA?
This is a very good point. "
Noah you shouldn't have conceded - it is not true. Go to genuinely liberal blogs (digby for instance). They are NOT the least happy about this - but they realise the ONLY alternative government is even worse.
@Antoine Doinel
ReplyDeleteA potpourri of bigots ducking under the cover provided by a convenient sophist.
Pathetic.
An interesting comment. Too bad there is no way to know which side you are targeting.
Plus, as Reason said, if you think liberals are not livid over B. Hoover Obama's continuation of Bush policies, then you haven't spoken with many of us.
I know quite a few who are sitting out this year's presidential election for that very reason.
My own frequently expressed view is that the ONLY thing Dems have going for them is that they are not Rethugs.
But that is a very large thing.
As to what should and should not be criticized - if both parties are similar on certain issues, the political debate is naturally going to focus on the differences.
That's just the way the world works. Presten mui really doesn't have a point. And Ron Paul may be right about certain things, but if so, it is for the wrong reasons. He just doesn't want to spend the money.
Further, with Dems there is at least small chance these horrible program will end. Under Rethugs, they will only get worse.
Cheers!
JzB
Libertarian suspicion of the climate debate comes from the fact that it's being used as a springboard to argue for authoritarian government control over minute details of human life.
ReplyDeleteBy the standards of public debate, that's pretty suspicious. I cannot think of many instance where when someone said "X is true, therefore I need total power and all your money," X turned out to be quite as true as claimed. At the least, it has always turned out to be exaggerated.
Noah you shouldn't have conceded - it is not true. Go to genuinely liberal blogs (digby for instance). They are NOT the least happy about this - but they realise the ONLY alternative government is even worse.
ReplyDeleteAlso true.
But IMHO everyone should be talking more about civil liberties.
Chris:
ReplyDeleteNot cold reading: think of it as being like a nerd code where you state how many matching characteristics you have. I am describing many potential characteristics, because libertarians are varied over several dimensions.
Cold reading involves fooling people by pretending to knowledge when they actually are unintentionally presenting it to you as you fish around.
" The key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize. Most Americans share the belief that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, and high taxes are bad. But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place."
ReplyDeleteThe day I knew just how naive libertarians are was the day I was talking with a libertarian coworker and I addressed the fact that libertarians routinely support the GOP despite the GOP's opposition to many civil liberties. The response I received was that it's more important to secure financial liberties because without them civil liberties are useless, and you can always use financial liberties to gain civil liberties, but not the other way around.
Mike Huben - you have to change your refutation of Objectivism on the wiki. Protons do not, as far as we know, decay. That was the basis of SU(8), the most promising system moving towards a GUT after the Standard Model. It collapsed precisely because protons don't decay. It collapsed like Libertarianism :) Also, Objectivism, especially taking Ayn Rand at face value with her Aristotelian A is A being really central to it (it's not at all, she was just too stupid to see her system's optimal consistency the way trained people could), is not at the same level of importance as your other 2 pillars. it's not a philosophical pillar it's a complex emotional and cultural pillar. But that's a value call: the stuff about protons you should 86 ASAP because it's really outdated and hence becomes more ignorant every year. Experiments have pushed the upper boundary on (almost certainly nonexistent) proton half-life to 10^33 years, and still rising.
ReplyDeleteAll the Singaporeans I've talked to believe their country is a far superior place to live than the United States.
ReplyDeleteThat would be because all those who don't have left. I suspect if you look up emigration from us and Singapore the latter would be a higher percentage
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that this whole thing indicates that libertarianism is not a synthetic ideology used only as a proxy army for oligarchs. Most of the Cato Institute and the movement in general is publicly rebuking the Kochs for trying to exert more influence on them in a direction they feel is contrary to their beliefs.
ReplyDeleteAs far as civil liberties focus goes, antiwar.com is backed by libertarians and you won't find many defenders of civil liberty in the Executive Branch right now. Conservatives show obvious disdain for civil liberties, but liberals pander to them to get elected only to then trample on them once in office. Libertarians have never held any significant political offices, but they do seem to be more hardcore in their support of civil liberties than liberals when you take each group as a whole.
Plenty of liberals are very unhappy with Obama regarding the civil liberties. Trust me, many would prefer to abandon Obama and vote Green, but they are afraid that GOP will win then do to split votes.
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