Platform: n. A list of what politicians are supposed to be trying to do.
I’ve been telling my friends that I’ve tuned out of politics during the 2016 primary season, mainly because there have been too many candidates to keep track of, and because it has been mostly a circus sideshow beneath my dignity. I told several of my politically interested friends that I’ll get more into following the race after the conventions, after the teams have picked their players. Today is the first day of August, 2016, and that time has come.
The plan I’ve hatched to become politically informed for the remainder of the election season is to read and comment upon the four major party platforms. Libertarian, Green, Republican, and Democratic.
I’ve been working two jobs this summer, and I’ve got a family history project that I’d rather do. Time to read through these platforms is scarce, but I’ll see how far I can get. I’ll go section by section, make my comments as terse as possible, and see if I can give each section a general thumbs up or down.
I haven’t decided the order in which I’ll do them. I’ll probably bounce around, to be fair, but perhaps favor the Libertarians and Greens. Since the Republicans and Democrats seem to be dwindling into irrelevancy, I don’t know if I ought to waste so much scarce time on them.
I think Dena Takruri would make a good libertarian.
AJ+ and Now This are the new producers of hip, left-wing minute-news designed for the facebook attention span. It’s a brilliant format from which propagandists of all political stripes could benefit. I don’t really see a whole lot of short, flashy, hip-looking conservative videos ‘splaining the whole one-man, one-woman thing, or how to beat the terrorists with more military boondoggles.
Libertarians have Learn Liberty from the Institute for Humane Studies, but I don’t know if it has quite the same allure. The focus is more on economic theory than current events. Reason.tv produces short videos, but they are often kind of jokey. It’s not quite the same as a sweet, punchy AJ+ video, like the one I saw this morning about our rigged economy. Please watch this video now, and read my libertarian reaction below. Read the rest of this entry »
In case you missed my warning about Salon.com and Alternet articles with the word libertarian in their headlines, the gist of it was: Don’t waste your time. These articles are junk garbage noise written by people who don’t know what they’re criticizing. Add to that heap the musings of Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum.
A bachelor’s degree, similar to Kevin Drum’s bachelor’s degree in journalism.
When I used to live with roommates, one of them had a subscription to the print edition of Mother Jones. I regarded each issue very highly as an inspirational journalistic masterpiece. Then someone invented Twitter, so I subscribed to Mother Jones’s Twitter feed. Annoyingly, I found that feed to be a stream of petty buncombe. “The magazine is so good”, I thought. “I guess they flush their doo doo down their twitter feed.”
Half of the stuff from the feed was written by this guy Kevin Drum. According to his Wikipedia page, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from California State University in 1981, so I guess that qualifies him to pound on a keyboard. He also “invented Friday catblogging”, according to his MoJo bio. Maybe I should genuflect to that, or something. I don’t know.
His stuff isn’t all terrible, but whenever he sticks his neck out to criticize the libertarianish, pro-market crowd, I’ve found him to be transparently ignorant. I’ve therefore come to recognize his name: Kevin Drum. If you see it on Mother Jones’s Twitter feed or Facebook feed and he’s burping up hot air about libertarians, ignore it. It isn’t worth your time.
So I’m scrolling down my Facebook feed and I see this:
Before we even click on this article, which promises to be a turd, let’s clear up a couple things. Well … maybe that’s asking too much. It will never be clear to those who have chosen not to understand. I could explain what’s wrong with this idiocy a dozen more times and never see its end. I’ll never clear it up, so let me just type for a while to hear myself type. Allow me indulge in the mental masturbation of online discourse.
Being offended by willful ignorance is the province of crybaby liberals. I don’t get offended when know-nothings demonstrate their cluelessness about libertarianism. Kevin Drum didn’t hurt my feelings, or anything. He’s just wrong. He shouldn’t be sorry. He should be diligent. He should be curious. He should take some time off to learn what libertarianism is, then he should return to write about what he has learned. I don’t want an apology. I want him to get his shit straight. No hard feelings, just stop being a dunce. Be smart, then write like a smart person. Got it? He should improve his journalism for his own good and quit worrying about my feelings. My feelings are just fine.
Don’t be sorry! Be diligent!
Everyone who repeats this “libertarians are convinced of their own independence” horseshit should stop doing that. If I have to post this “I, Pencil” story one more time, I might throw up in my mouth a little. But here it is again: “I, Pencil,” by Leonard Read. It’s all about how no one person alone has the wherewithal to make a useful item as simple as a pencil, let alone any of life’s more modern conveniences. Libertarians love this story because libertarians understand how we each depend on one another for building even the simplest of tools:
Great. Now can I please never see this cartoonish twaddle again, about how libertarians are all these wannabe Grizzly Adams characters who are “convinced of their own independence”? Shit’s gettin’ tired.
Let’s proceed to article now and marvel what’s inside: Kevin Drum’s grand unified theory on why libertarians are mostly male:
[H]ere’s the quick answer: Hardcore libertarianism is a fantasy. It’s a fantasy where the strongest and most self-reliant folks end up at the top of the heap, and a fair number of men share the fantasy that they are these folks. They believe they’ve been held back by rules and regulations designed to help the weak, and in a libertarian culture their talents would be obvious and they’d naturally rise to positions of power and influence.
This is incorrect. This Kevin Drum’s fantasy about what libertarianism is, and it’s kind of dumb.
The last thing I care about is some stupid heap. I don’t walk around daydreaming, “Man, I want to be Gordon Gecko and talk to my big brick cell phone on the beach! Man, I want to be like Donald Trump! He’s cool! I want to be on top of the heap! Yeah!!” No. That’s dumb. That’s Kevin Drum’s dumb caricature of libertarians.
No, the heap is not the animus. That’s not it. Basically I just want to live my life, and I want others to live theirs. That’s it. I want to enjoy the fruits of my efforts, and I want others to enjoy the fruits of theirs, and if some government busybodies want to boss people around with rules, then those rules should not be preposterous. That’s all. It’s really kind of simple, and I’m routinely amazed at how so many people who write for such large audiences revel in their decision to misunderstand this.
Kevin Drum should get with the program. Rules and regulations are not designed to help the weak. They are designed to help those in power stay in power. They are designed to crush competition. Those who don’t understand how this works should resist regaling us with their naïve fantasies about libertarians’ alleged desire to scale heaps.
When the government burdens street vendors with reams of idiotic regulations and prohibitions, does that help the weak?
When the government requires that 1 in 3 American workers obtain an occupational license at great personal expense before legally working, does that help the weak?
When the government confiscates regular people’s homes and hands them over to business developers, does that help the weak?
When government kidnaps 800,000+ regular Americans every year because they puff on the wacky weed—and destroys everyone else’s Fourth Amendment protections in the process—does that help the weak?
In general, burdening the creation of new businesses with rules and regulations so expensive that only the rich can afford to comply does not help the weak, and neither does kidnapping them. Libertarians oppose rules and regulations designed to help the rich and punish the weak.
That having been written (but unlikely to have been understood by those who have chosen not to understand), why is it that libertarians are mostly men? Let’s hail Kevin Drum’s singular insight into this perennial conundrum:
Few women share this fantasy [of climbing heaps]. I don’t know why, and I don’t really want to play amateur sociologist and guess. Perhaps it’s something as simple as the plain observation that in the more libertarian past, women were subjugated to men almost completely. Why would that seem like an appealing fantasy?
I see. Kevin Drum hates libertarianism, so he wants to take a shit on libertarians. What shall be his raison du jour for shitting on libertarians? Well, they’re most men, right? That’s no good, so his raison du jour for shitting on libertarians shall be that they are mostly men. Oh, but he doesn’t really want play amateur sociologist and actually figure out why libertarians are mostly men. All he really want to do is shit on libertarians. So he typed out this shitpile, titled it Here’s Why Libertarians are Mostly Men, and submitted it for public consumption at MotherJones.com.
If you ask me, it seems like Kevin Drum doesn’t really want to play journalist, either, despite his glorious bachelor’s degree.
On the matter of this “more libertarian past” in which Kevin Drum’s heroes in government refused to acknowledge the rights of women: Moving from a more selective regimen of rights enforcement to a more general regimen of rights enforcement is a step in toward libertarianism, not away from it. If that’s what holds women back from libertarianism, it shouldn’t. In a more libertarian future, everyone would be treated equally under the law as individuals, and not differently based on gender.
So why is it that more women don’t join libertarians in their opposition to rules and regulations designed to help the rich and punish the weak? Why is it that more women don’t join libertarians in support of equal treatment for each individual under the law? That’s a really good question, and I’d be most interested to hear any woman’s opinion on that.
[F]eel free to take some guesses in comments about why women don’t take to libertarianism as strongly as men.
Goodbye, and I’m not sorry for anything I just wrote.
UPDATE, 10/25/2015: Kevin Drum has issued a follow-up to his post, Here’s Why Libertarians are Mostly Men. It’s called, There’s a Big Untapped Market Out There for Insulting Libertarians. It’s pretty short and it’s pretty great. At the risk of violating copyright, here it is in full. Note that by “over on the right,” Kevin is referring to the Mother Jones website’s right sidebar, which highlights the sites currently trending articles:
Ah, the mysteries of blogging. Over on the right, you’ll notice that a post of mine has been highlighted: “Here’s Why Libertarians Are Mostly Men.” But why? It’s four months old. It’s 200 words long. It probably took about 20 minutes to write. It offers up a theory that I pulled out of my ass.
And it has 161,000 Facebook likes. By contrast, my piece on lead and crime—by far the most important and most popular piece I’ve ever written for the magazine—has 87,000 likes after three years online. This quick post about libertarians is probably the most widely read prose I’ve ever written in my life.
Fine. My public has spoken. Less research, more Trumpesque insults aimed at libertarians. I’ll see what I can do.
First, that’s Mother Jones’s online readership in a nutshell. Second, Kevin candidly admitted the origin of his theory on libertarians and gender. I’m satisfied with his admission, so we’re good. Third, that was a very thought provoking article on lead and crime. It kind of confirms my own ass-sourced theory about Mother Jones: The quality stuff gets published in the print edition, and the farts end up on Facebook and Twitter.
I read a post by one R. J. Eskow, when AlterNet and Salon.com first published it two years ago: 11 questions to see if libertarians are hypocrites. At the time, I thought about recording a YouTube selfie diatribe answering these questions, but I ended up not bothering after libertarian historian Tom Woods issued his podcast rebuttal. I declined to duplicate Tom’s fine work, and went on with the other things I had planned for that day. It was raining, so I tested my new tent for waterproofness. I actually got in there in the rain and hemmed up a couple pairs of pants, one of which I’m actually wearing right now. That’s called “multi-tasking”.
Here we are, two years on, and I’ve just received a request from a facebook friend to answer these questions. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise, but anything for a friend, right? Before I answer the questions, let’s get a few things straightened out:
Preface 1:Libertarians have more productive things to do than respond to inane Salon.comarticles. Salon has thi … [Intermission. I’m going to mow my lawn right now, since there is a break in the rain. … Start time: 9:23. Stop time 9:52] … s stalkerish, obsessive compulsion to bash libertarians. Radley Balko profiled it in his piece entitled: Portrait of an obsession: Every Alternet and/or Salon headline about libertarians from the last three years. I’ve read many of the articles mentioned in that maniacal list, and I’ve found them bereft of useful insight and understanding of the subjects they were written to criticize—childishly so, not in the higher-level details. Trust me: If you find a Salon.com article with the word Libertarian in headline, or crowned with a photograph of Rand Paul, just skip it. Move on. Don’t read it, and—by God—don’t respond to it. Use your scarce time more productively. If I had responded to this article two years ago, I would not now be enjoying these righteously hemmed up pants. What will I wish I had in two years that I won’t have because I’m now wasting time responding to this? I’ll never know.
Preface 2:Asking a bunch of questions doesn’t necessarily make one insightful. It might just make one ignorant. R. J. Eskow doesn’t understand what libertarians believe? Join the club. A lot of people don’t get it. Fair enough. That’s what questions are for, and I’m happy to answer them for people who are interested in learning. I understand that R. J. Eskow is ignorant, but he doesn’t have to be a douche about it. A better title for this article would have been: I’m ignorant, so I’m asking libertarians these 11 questions because I want to learn something. Of course, that was neither the title nor the tone of the article. For me, a person who is becoming more conscious of how I spend my scarce time, I have to wonder: Will someone like R. J. Eskow exhibit genuine curiosity, and actually exert effort toward understanding what I have to say? If I don’t receive any indication that the answer will be yes, then I don’t see why I should have to bother—and if you’re reading this because you think R. J. Eskow is, like, “Wow, totally spot on, man!” because he phrases his ignorance in question form, then do yourself a favor and stop reading this right now. Go do something productive. Go bake a cake, or something. Make something. Do something that actually manifests in a product to show for your efforts. Increase your wealth. Stop wasting time on mental masturbation. If, on the other hand, you are genuinely curious about what libertarians think, and you’ll find that useful information to apply in your daily life, then read on.
Preface 3:Hypocrisy is a trumped-up charge, in my opinion. So what if R. J. Eskow proves that I’m a hypocrite with his little questions? That doesn’t that make the things I say about libertarianism incorrect. All he’s proven is that I’ve failed to attain my higher standards. This is in contrast to the norm of American political life, which is to set low standards and rarely fail. Think about it: If I go to the store, steal a candy bar, and speak nothing of it, that makes me a thief. If I go to the store, steal a candy bar, and then counsel all of my facebook friends about the social harm of stealing, that makes me a thief and a hypocrite. Fair enough, but I stand by what I say, even when I fail to live up to it. Contrast that with a typical lefty non-libertarian who counsels that stealing is wrong, unless voted into rightness by a critical mass of theives, who then steal a million candy bars en masse, and then congratulate themselves for not being hypocrites. Give me a libertarian hypocrite any day, who rightly counsels those around him to improve their world while personally failing, over any progressive popinjay, who, in ignorance, counsels those around him to injure their world, and they publicly succeed. Am I a hypocrite? Let us remove the issue the table, and stipulate for the purpose of this post that I am. Don’t we all fall short of perfection? Let us then take what I say on it’s merits, and stop pursuing meritless excuses for rejecting good advice.
Those issues hopefully having been clarified, let’s proceed with these 11 questions. When the author writes in his article, “a libertarian”, or “our libertarian”, I’ll assume he’s referring to me, personally, so I’ll substitute words to that effect in my responses.
#1) Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of “spontaneous order”—and if not, why not?
Spontaneous human combustion: Almost as bad as politicians.
Sure they are, but bear in mind that libertarians don’t necessarily like everything that’s spontaneous. For example: Spontaneous human combustion is spontaneous. Libertarian don’t like spontaneously bursting into flames. We’d rather not do that. No, libertarians don’t love spontaneity. Libertarians mention spontaneous order to reassure critics that people will get along well enough on this Earth without central planners micromanaging everyone’s lives—not because we have any particular love of spontaneity. Congratulations to unions and political parties on being spontaneous. If they could ever make themselves more useful than spontaneous human combustion, I would welcome them.
#2) Am I willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?
Yes on part one. Production is the result of many forces. Consider the story I, Pencil, by Leonard Read, to learn how libertarians acknowledge and appreciate this fact.
Part two is a passively-voiced half-thought. It’s missing an agent. Who, exactly, should do the rewarding? Only those who value the product should reward the many varied producers, and the reward should accord with the terms to which the producers agreed.
#3) Am I willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?
Yes, sure. But (a) so are employers who fire workers for unionizing, so be careful with that one, and (b) let’s not kid ourselves. We all know that unions don’t limit their activities to benign bargaining. Answering, ‘Yes,’ to #3 is by no means an endorsement of all union activity.
#4) Am I willing to admit that a “free market” needs regulation?
Another passively-voiced half-thought. Does it matter whom I call upon to implement this regulation? The question doesn’t specify so I assume I’m free to choose anyone. So confident R. J. Eskow is to brand libertarians as hypocrites, at some point in his life must have heard one assert that markets self-regulate. I reckon the author doesn’t believe that markets self-regulate, but rather than offer insight, he substitutes a banal question.
Yes, markets need regulation, and hear this explanation: Regulation is a market function. It’s a service. If customers demand that service, suppliers will provide it. A more interesting question than whether a market needs regulation is how a market could possibly exist without regulation. They can’t. Markets self-regulate.
I reckon this explanation won’t satisfy R. J. Eskow, who attempted in his article to use the mortgage crisis to demonstrate that markets need regulation via threat of government force. He asserts that the mortgage problems occurred after the market was “deregulated”. Well, may I remind him that, in spite of any recent “deregulation”, that the whole of the banking and monetary systems are still centrally planned by a government institution? I think that detail is significant. The most R. J. Eskow can draw from his case study is that whereas the regulatory leviathan controlling the banking system a few decades ago was bad, the regulatory leviathan controlling the banking system in the years leading up to the mortgage crisis was horrendous. R. J. Eskow’s example offers no insight into the effects of actual deregulation. So it doesn’t really bear on his question—his real question, not his passively voiced half-thought:
Do people in their private dealings need for armed agents of the government to interfere, forcing them a threat to do some things, and prohibiting them at threat to do others? No. I don’t believe that that’s necessary, and I don’t believe R. J. Eskow’s chosen example demonstrates any such necessity.
#5) Do I believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with governments that regulate.
“Believe in” isn’t very clear. Do I believe it exists? Do I believe it exists in America? Do I believe it works? Do I believe it is an appropriate method to settle all questions? Let me rephrase this question to get at what I think the author is getting at: Does an aggressive act that’s harmful when committed by an individual become beneficial when voted upon by a group? If so, at what number of voters does the harmful act become beneficial? I don’t think there is such a number. I think the act remains harmful, no matter how many people vote for it. So I don’t think I quite “believe in” democracy. I think it’s fine for voluntary associations, and not really so fine for wishing something harmful into something beneficial.
Elections are great. Just keep them to yourselves.
If I join the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo, Lodge No. 26., tomorrow then yes. As a member of that organization, I’d be interested to participate in their internal democracy, provided I’m free to leave the organization peacefully if I find that it no longer serves my interest. Believing in that, however, does not imply that I want the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo, Lodge No. 26., to show up on my doorstep uninvited to impose upon me the will of its uninformed membership.
My short answer is that democracy is adequate for resolving some issues, but not all issues. What’s wrong with governments that regulate? I don’t think the public, or the governments purporting to represent them, ought to be weighing in on or forcefully interfering with the private transactions of consenting parties. I do not believe that is an appropriate exercise of democracy, and I’ll leave Milton Friedman to finish the point:
#6) Do I use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?
Yes, and here is my justification for doing so:
I don’t believe I could answer this question fairly without some accounting of the things I use that would not exist without government. R. J. Eskow prattles off several items in which the government has stuck its fingers: schools, intellectual property, computer technology, Internet, a communications web. His litany is insufficient for its purpose. Just because the government sticks its fingers in things, that doesn’t establish that these things couldn’t have existed, possibly in better form, but for government. I assert in my defense that a great many of the things I use would not only have come into being without the government’s meddling, but might actually have turned out better for it.
Secondly, the ways in which government routinely impoverishes its people are myriad. When I’m trying to run a business and the government taxes and regulates it into bankruptcy, I’m poorer for that. When I have to pay more for medicine because the government has blockaded off imports, I’m poorer for that. When the government criminalizes opportunity by interfering in my private affairs, I’m poorer for that. When the government destroys communities with its senseless prohibitions, I’m poorer for that. After all this, so what if the government leaves me a functional communications web that may well have come about in its absence anyway? Am I supposed to kiss its feet? I assert in my defense that to the extent I utilize wealth in which the government has stuck its fingers, the government has also made me at least that much poorer with its myriad interventions and prohibitions. So long as the government has left me a functional communications web, I’ll use it to preach against the government’s costly interventions. If that makes me a hypocrite, then so be it.
#7) Do I reject any and all government protection for my intellectual property?
Here’s a gotcha. R. J. Eskow can gloat over this on all the way home. He’s got me. I’m a hypocrite! Get this: I’m trying to run a genealogy services business, and part of what I do is take photos for people, some of which end up on online, often on the Find-A-Grave web site. The Find-A-Grave site says that I retain the intellectual property rights, so what I say to users of that site is that I release the photos under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, meaning that people are free to use the photos any way they want so long as the reasonably credit me for taking the photo. If they don’t credit me, then that’s technically a violation of the license that I can run to papa government to have enforced. Will I ever do that? Will I ever run to the government and say “Hey, please enforce this licence for me?” No, I’ll never bother. I leave the threat to loom. I’d like for my name to go with my images when people share them, but the threat is idle and toothless. Maybe I shouldn’t say that stuff about Creative Commons and I should say instead that I release all my works into the public domain. So yeah. He’s got me! I’ve been a hypocrite!
R. J. Eskow should know, anyhow, that there is a growing movement among libertarians to reject intellectual property, so he may not net as many hypocrites with this question as he thought he would. A lot of libertarians fully reject intellectual property.
#8) Why isn’t a democratically elected government the ultimate demonstration of “spontaneous order”? Do I recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?
Let me remind those readers who have followed me this far: Libertarians aren’t infatuated with spontaneity. Spontaneous human combustion is also spontaneous, and I, as a libertarian, am not interested in spontaneously combusting. So yes, the democratically elected government is a demonstration of spontaneous order, and if democratically elected governments could ever make themselves more useful than spontaneous human combustion, then I might then appreciate them.
Is democracy a form of marketplace? The voluntary organization kind of democracy is. Again, if I join the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo, Lodge No. 26., participate in their internal democracy, and if I turn out not to like the result, then I can always easily leave for some competitor that offers a better product.
What about the involuntary kind that I believe the author is referring to, when people show up to your door uninvited and impose all manner of ill-considered public policies on you? Is that a marketplace? One must strain the imagination to make the comparison, but I believe it’s possible. I’ll say, “Yes, but gimme a break.”
I know you’ll enjoy eating pepperoni pizza for the next four years. It was the result of a free and fair election!
Imagine a “marketplace” in which every four years the public votes on what our collective pizza topping will be, for example. Suppose pepperoni wins the election this year—but suppose you don’t like pepperoni. Too bad. It’s pepperoni for you, for the next four years. If you really don’t like pepperoni, then the competition is that you have to pick up stakes at great personal expense and move to some other country, where maybe the collective pizza topping in power is less to your disliking. Repeat this process for everything you consume, in attempt to maximize the elections you win and minimize the elections you lose. Come on. Is this a marketplace? There are elements of competition, so I suppose it could possibly meet the bare minimum criteria for what could constitute a marketplace, but let’s get real. When democracy is imposed on everyone in a large geographical region, I’m pretty sure it’s the shittiest marketplace the imagination could possibly conjure.
#9) If big governments are bad, why are big corporations so acceptable? Do I recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?
When many corporations compete in a marketplace, no individual is under compulsion to deal with any particular corporation. The customers choose whom they deal with. Governments, by contrast, compel “customers” at threat of force to either deal with them or leave the country. Corporations have an incentive to behave well because they need to attract your business away from competitors. Governments have less incentive to behave well because utilizing the services of a competitor government is too expensive for most of the government’s “customers”.
Do I recognize that large corporations are a threat to our either our freedoms or to our general prosperity, or whatever? Sure. Yes I do, but relatively speaking corporations are less menacing to me because they have a stronger incentive than governments have to respond well to customer demands. Of course, corporations can go rogue. When they do, usually it is because governments have enabled them by either providing material support or undermining competitors who would do better work.
Maybe I can summarize: If the government is The Grinch, then Big Corporations are a seasick crocodile. Between the two of them, I’d choose the seasick crocodile. And it’s not even like that because I’m pretty sure that, over the course of my lifetime, big corporations have offered me a net benefit, whereas the government’s track record of generating benefits is a little less clear.
#10: Ayn Rand was an adamant opponent of good works, writing that “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.” That raises another test: Do I think that Rand was off the mark on this one, or do I agree that historical figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?
I’ve never read any Ayn Rand. I saw portions of her interview with Phil Donahue in which she criticized charity and altruism. I thought her comments were a little over-the-top. Here are her comments on that show. By the end of the clip even she admits that she is using harsh language for rhetorical purposes. So yes, I thought that comment was a bit off. As a libertarian, I don’t feel like I need to adopt everything she says and take it all literally, least of all this point about altruism.
#11) Libertarianism would have died out as a philosophy if it weren’t for the funding that’s been lavished on the movement by billionaires like Thiel and the Kochs and corporations like ExxonMobil. So our final question is: If you believe in the free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?
I’ve found the ideas of libertarianism to stand on their merits, irrespective of who funds them, and who else buys them in the marketplace of ideas. “Believing in” the free market, to me, means that I buy what I want, and everyone else buys what they want. It does not mean, to me, that I should want to buy what other people are buying. So too in the marketplace of ideas. If R. J. Eskow looks for other people to tell him what to think, that’s his business, and I’d thank him to leave me out of it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I had other things I wanted to do today. If I’ve made any typos, screw ’em.Okay, I broke down and made some minor revisions for clarity.
I’ve lately frequented the facebook page called Still Laughing at ‘Anarcho’-capitalism (SLANCAP), which is maintained by self-described anti-capitalist anarchists. They believe the that phrase Anarcho-capitalist is an oxymoron, and, as far as I can tell, they believe the that the phrase anti-capitalist Anarchist is redundant. Hence, they feel no need to specify the flavor of Anarchy to which they subscribe. I’ll call them anti-capitalist Anarchists, redundant as that may be.
Maybe I’ll get into the merits of these labeling choices another time. Suffice to say here that I have learned a great deal about anti-capitalist Anarchist objections to capitalism by following the SLANCAP facebook page. The authors of the page have yet to change my mind about how I think the world ought to work, but they have convinced me to pay more attention to the self-congratulatory rhetoric the libertarians and anarcho-capitalists often employ without realizing they’re doing it.
The page admins have launched a traditional website at slancap.com for anyone interested. I think I’m good for trolling only the facebook page for now, whereupon I recently spotted the following video about scarcity. Capitalists and anti-capitalist Anarchists will never come to an understanding about scarcity until they each learn to understand how the other uses the term. This is yet another a definition problem, at the core. Here is the post:
I appreciate this anti-capitalist gentleman’s polite, constructive criticism. Here are a capitalist’s, rebuttals, responses, and apologies. This is going to be a long response, so I’ll sum up the main rebuttals first, and then I’ll launch into details afterwards. The rebuttals are:
Anti-capitalist Anarchists use the word scarcity differently than capitalists do.
Private property and markets create the illusion of abundance where, in reality, there is not enough of each commodity to satisfy all demand.
Describing private property as “an unlimited amount of property that [the owners] never personally interact with” does injustice to those who interacted with the property in the first place to increase its utility.
Where dwellings go unsold, unused, and vacant, owners have a capitalist financial incentive to let others use the dwellings in exchange for maintenance services, and many property owners have begun to do just that.
Government manipulation of incentives away from those of the capitalist price system, often at the behest of an economically naive populace, is why so many people built so many houses so uneconomically in the first place.
Robert Reich’s arguments are curiously poor for a former cabinet member.
Okay, so we’re comparing who to what, now?
Robert Reich is the former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton who has made waves on the internet with provocative YouTube videos assailing income inequality and other apparent economic problems in America. His arguments generally have ready responses among libertarians that, unsurprisingly, I find convincing. Reich’s latest exposé is against the economic theory that workers are generally “paid what their worth”. Libertarians use this argument to oppose to minimum wage laws. Because Robert Reich favors an increase in the legal minimum wage, he argues that the “paid-what-you’re-worth” theory of wages as a myth. Salon.com thought Reich’s exposé merited republication, but I was not so impressed. Entitling it, The “Paid-What-You’re-Worth” Myth, Robert Reich begins his exposé by stating the economic theory this way:
It’s often assumed that people are paid what they’re worth. According to this logic, minimum wage workers aren’t worth more than the $7.25 an hour they now receive. If they were worth more, they’d earn more. Any attempt to force employers to pay them more will only kill jobs.
According to this same logic, CEOs of big companies are worth their giant compensation packages, now averaging 300 times pay of the typical American worker. They must be worth it or they wouldn’t be paid this much. Any attempt to limit their pay is fruitless because their pay will only take some other form.
To libertarians, this is not a bare assumption. To libertarians, this is the expected result of a market process. Ph.D. economist Matt Zwolinski explains the process, also known as the Marginal Revenue Productivity Theory of Wages:
Well, first, it’s absolutely correct that capitalists want to exploit workers. they want to pay as low a wage as possible, and get as much work out of workers as possible, in order to maximize profit. but the fact that other capitalists also want to exploit workers in this way makes it difficult for any of them to do so. This is because competitive pressures force capitalist to pay workers close to the value of what those workers produce, whether they want to or not. If you tried to pay someone less than they’re worth, someone else will offer them more, because they can profit by doing so. Imagine you’re in an auction bidding against others for a dollar [symbolic of the value a worker might produce in some short amount of time ~eds]. Of course, you’d like to pay as little as possible for that dollar. But if someone else was bidding 60¢ for it, wouldn’t it be worth your while to bid 62¢? And wouldn’t someone else then bid 64¢, and so on? In a competitive market, that same process leads capitalists to pay workers close to the value of what they produce, not because they want to, but because they have to.
Sounds convincing to me. At least I can’t refute it on the spot. Let’s consider Robert Reich’s rebuttal. Ladies and gentlemen, Robert Reich:
Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today’s dollars. Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical Walmart workers earns $8.80 an hour.
Does this mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was worth four times what today’s typical Walmart employee is worth? Not at all. Yes, that GM worker helped produce cars rather than retail sales. But he wasn’t much better educated or even that much more productive. He often hadn’t graduated from high school. And he worked on a slow-moving assembly line. Today’s Walmart worker is surrounded by digital gadgets — mobile inventory controls, instant checkout devices, retail search engines — making him or her quite productive.
I see. So, rather than expose the flaws in a libertarian’s actual economic argument, our former Secretary of Labor instead tosses us a pure apples-to-oranges comparison. He wants us to compare the productivity and earnings of 1964’s auto workers to those of today’s retail workers. Well, I’m sorry, but in my tiny little libertarian brain, this comparison is completely opaque. Yes, I see that today’s Walmart workers are surrounded by digital gadgets that make them “quite” productive. Could Mr. Reich show us, perhaps a little more quantitatively, just how quitely the productivity of Walmart workers now approaches that of 1964’s auto workers? Maybe I’m dumb, but “quite” doesn’t quite draw a clear enough picture. Why not at least compare 1964’s apples to today’s apples by sticking with either auto workers or retail workers?
Well, let’s let Reich continue:
The real difference is the GM worker a half-century ago had a strong union behind him that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they’d be unionized if they didn’t come close to matching the union contracts.
Today’s Walmart workers don’t have a union to negotiate a better deal. They’re on their own. And because fewer than 7 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, non-union employers across America don’t have to match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. The result has been a race to the bottom.
Guess which company’s business model the former secretary of labor prefers.
Hmm. So, aside from being in a completely different industry, with a completely different demand curve, and living in a completely different era, the real difference between the two is that, whereas GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union behind them, today’s Walmart workers do not. I see. Well, another difference that I think should not pass without mention is that, whereas GM is a complete failure of a company that would have gone under but for a massive government bailout, Walmart thrives as one of America’s most successful businesses. Of course governments throw favors at Walmart cronies in a variety of ways, so I’m not holding Walmart up as a paragon of free-market excellence, but let’s try to acknowledge some the recent failures of GM’s business model before lionizing unions for negotiating extravagant wage and benefits packages. A business that is not profitable can not employ people, and not all industries can always rely on governments to bail them out, nor should they.
I know Mr. Reich feels that he put together a decent case here, but just in case you found his anachronisms to be unconvincing, he continues:
If you still believe people are paid what they’re worth, take a look at Wall Street bonuses. Last year’s average bonus was up 15 percent over the year before, to more than $164,000. It was the largest average Wall Street bonus since the 2008 financial crisis and the third highest on record, according to New York’s state comptroller. Remember, we’re talking bonuses, above and beyond salaries.
All told, the Street paid out a whopping $26.7 billion in bonuses last year.
Are Wall Street bankers really worth it? Not if you figure in the hidden subsidy flowing to the big Wall Street banks that ever since the bailout of 2008 have been considered too big to fail.
Well, yes. Fair enough. Like GM’s auto workers, Wall Street’s bankers are also unworthy of a government bailout. The solution to the problem, of course, is for the government to stop making it rain on Wall Street with bailout money that it either borrowed or forcibly confiscated from taxpayers. Understand, though, that this has absolutely nothing to do with the minimum wage debate, where the pay-what-you’re-worth theory tends to surface.
As for the run-of-the-mill CEO who makes 300 times that of an average worker, Mr. Reich observes:
By the same token, today’s CEOs don’t rake in 300 times the pay of average workers because they’re “worth” it. They get these humongous pay packages because they appoint the compensation committees on their boards that decide executive pay. Or their boards don’t want to be seen by investors as having hired a “second-string” CEO who’s paid less than the CEOs of their major competitors. Either way, the result has been a race to the top.
The operators of facebook’s Being Classically Liberal page have rebutted this repeatedly and convincingly, in my opinion. Running a multi-billion dollar corporation is not as easy as these CEOs make it look. Balancing all of the factors takes a great skill that not many people have. CEOs’ decisions can generate either billions of dollars in wealth for consumers and shareholders alike, or billions of dollars in losses for the latter. Does the CEO who generates billions of dollars in wealth for others by soundly making difficult decisions not earn a multi-million-dollar paycheck? I think so. I do not find convincing Mr. Reich’s explanation that a CEO is little more than a multi-million-dollar figurehead—a veneer of machismo to parade before gullible investors. I think CEOs do more than that.
In conclusion, Mr. Reich offers a great case study in why I am still a libertarian after all these years. As a former Secretary of Labor, Mr. Reich is supposed to offer the best of the best arguments in favor of his preferred economic policy of higher minimum wages. In this case, as is typical, the best of the best arguments against a good libertarian idea consists of complete unresponsiveness, anachronistic apples-to-oranges comparisons, unhelpful caricatures, and the unrelated failures of other government interventions. Isn’t it about time for voters to listen more carefully to what libertarians are saying?
Anyone can read the news to you; The Daily Show promises to feel the news at you.
I thought Jon Stewart was heroic when he took on Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, exposing media theater and the uncomfortable truth that news organizations essentially take cues on integrity from Comedy Central. I bought it for a long time that Stewart’s The Daily Show was almost an acceptable substitute for cable news. Well, we all got a cold splash of reality last week, when Jon proved to us that his show is really is only comedy, and properly scheduled after puppets making crank phone calls.
Last week, the producers of The Daily Show defamed one of my intellectual heroes, Peter Schiff. Many libertarians criticized Schiff for walking into an obvious trap, but I can understand why Schiff took the bait. He personally appeared on the show in 2009 to speak with host Jon Stewart after having correctly predicted the 2007 financial meltdown. Stewart treated Schiff respectfully, and Schiff won the audience’s approval:
I imagine Schiff was expecting similar respect and thoughtfulness this time around. What he received instead was the following hatchet job, led by comedian Samantha Bee:
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