Warning, the images in this video are not suitable for children or the faint of heart. Real images of stoning, genital mutilation and honor killings are shown so be prepared. While I’m actually opposed to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I also think that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about what the Islamic faith is about. The treatment of women depicted in this video is supported by mainstream Islamic doctrine – these are not “radicals” – these are mainstream  Imams in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere upholding these practices. Why should we be tolerant of this? I’m not tolerant of a religion that oppresses women so horribly, are you? Shar’ia is not just religious – it is also a governing structure for society, hence it is not comparable to other religions we “tolerate” in the U.S. Political Islam is a movement that seeks to expand the Muslim world and Shar’ia along with it. Are you actually prepared to say that this belief system is an alternate way of life that we should accept? I’m not, it’s pre-modern and horrific in its very nature – no thanks. No tolerance here for this repressive, violent, authoritarian and totalitarian belief system – how about you?  If you are “tolerant” of it, well perhaps you should watch this video again…

For those of you who don’t know, Libertarians are in principled alignment with the so called ‘Austrian School of Economics’ and F. A. Hayek was an Austrian School Economist who made major contributions to our understanding of free enterprise. Okay, bye for now – I hope you all like this.

Technorati Tags: Hayek, Keynes

I spend an inordinate amount of time online, perusing content and sites, gathering resources and continuously informing myself. I have definite preferences for certain types of content, but it’s surprisingly hard to find on the web – you know, straight reporting or real analysis? So much of what is presented today as ‘journalism’ is polemic, and is also very weak analytically and in substance. I do not want to be one of those folks. Polemic is fantastic – but it has great limits as well. I am not interested in becoming a ‘pol’ or ‘wonk’ or even an activist. so what is the purpose of my writing? Before my hiatus I was giving you a smattering of other content in my “Pickings” section but focusing on my own original content in my “Musings” section. This will change going forward.

I realized that most of what I was doing was polemic and while I enjoy it, it’s not what I want to contribute to the world. Instead, I think I can do a much better job by finding content that is good, commenting on it and sharing it with you. Think of me as a principled, libertarian clipping and comment service. I will write original articles from time to time, but with much less frequency and much greater analytical/investigative content – as those are the kind of pieces I enjoy. They can take months to develop, but I’d much rather write a couple of great (if I can) pieces a year than just being another blathering, talking head.

That is enough from me. Thanks to all who read my content, I greatly appreciate it.  Also, don’t hesitate to contact me if you see interesting content that you think might be of interest to me. My email is glenn@libertariancomment.com .

A bit more on the Progressive movement is probably in order. The fact is that Progressives have gone to great lengths to build up a philosophical foundation for their beliefs and policies. Their moral justification is exquisite in fact, and is probably most rationally justified by John Rawls’  Theory of Social Justice. As well, many of their criticisms of capitalism and U.S. society are based on Critical Theory, which attempts to unify sociological and philosophical threads of theoretical work, and is an entire discipline of thought. Critical Theory has a strong, well defined epistemology all of its own, and many Progressive ideas lean on it heavily. Progressivism, in fact, is the very foundation of modern sociology and a belief in it is considered axiomatic in those circles as the only viable way to improve a capitalist, free society. Their policy recommendations flow from these well formed intellectual foundations. So, when I see proposals to ‘reform health care’ with a strong hand from the federal government, I’m not surprised and I don’t see it as part of some Trotskyite revanchist movement. Quite to the contrary, in fact, I expect it, as they have talked about this policy for decades, they run on this platform plank and the current slate of candidates in the Congress – and Obama himself – were very up front about their desire to reform health care in the way that they have proposed. I don’t agree with them, but I also can’t claim surprise, or that this is some rash, crazy move on their part. They won the right to do so, and if they succeed, it can rightfully be seen as a consequence of democracy in action, despite what the opinion polls of the moment say.

So pardon me if I’m not freaking out. My anger is actually focused on the Republicans, who for years have promised smaller government, a reliance on free markets and fiscal responsibility but have failed to lead the country in that direction. With respect to our health care system, which currently isn’t really any kind of unified system at all, and in its current state is a rather chaotic mish-mash of public-private entities that is certainly not sustainable based solely on it’s spiraling costs, the Republicans have offered little of substance to counter the very real problems we all face. They occasionally mumble about privatization of some entitlement programs, but their actual policy initiatives have been half-hearted at best, and looked at dispassionately, don’t add up to much. Worse yet, the Republicans have held power in significant ways in the past 30 years but have failed miserably to build a competing theoretical worldview to what is on offer from Progressives. Instead, they rely on a melange of patriotism, feigned fiscal responsibility, the illusion of small government and fierce opposition to the march of Progressivism; a battle they’ve fought poorly and have almost continuously lost ground in. Make no mistake, the cause of individual liberty, as it is constructed by classical liberalism, is losing ground in our country, and in Western democracies in general (Rawls’ theory is in many ways a rejection of it). I love when I hear Progressives complain about the sway of conservatives over society, as though I’m not going to notice that government in all of it’s forms now takes 46% of our GDP, compared to 6.8% one hundred years ago. The Progressive impulse has taken root in every level of government and one can daily see its relentless march – and its dire consequences in cities like Cleveland and Detroit, for example. They are winning and are continuing to win. The Republicans are left to negotiate the terms of the reduction of our liberties and nowhere are they succeeding in turning back the tide. Under Gingrich, there was a bit of an anomaly with welfare reform, but even now, despite the wild success of that initiative, welfare reform is being rolled back by Progressives.

The root cause of my anger is at the timidity of the Republican’s defense of liberty and free markets. There is a reason for this. It’s because they’ve sold their souls to crony capitalists, religious fundamentalists and other bigots, and if they were to actually stand up for liberty and free markets, they would need to turn their backs on the agendas of these special interests.

Let’s take the corporate interests first. If they really thought long and hard about our current corporate society, with the protections corporations have, they would have to question the very existence of them. If you’ve never thought about it, here’s a quick primer. The corporation, as an entity, enjoys limited liability for its actions, in the sense that shareholders cannot be held liable for the actions of corporations in any way, other than losing the value of their holdings. Compare this to say a sole proprietorship or partnership in which the owners are legally and financially liable for the actions of corporations. Consider, for example, how the shareholders of AIG would have reacted if they were held accountable for AIG’s losses. Imagine their own net worth was at risk – they would certainly not have been nearly as blind to AIG’s activities. In political philosophy terms, it’s called the agent-principal problem. Management and boards are supposed to act as agents of the shareholders, but in fact quickly develop interests of their own that subjugate the actual interests of shareholders. The shareholders are protected from this insanity because owning shares in a corporation is a kind of option in that downside is only limited to the capital one invests but the upside is unlimited. To take this a step further, our protected and highly regulated banking and securities industries hold monopoly power over the credit and equity markets, so they manipulate them to keep shareholders at bay while creating wealth for themselves and corporate managers (who are board members of other corporations). Politicians of all stripes are bought off along the way – and the truth is that most Republicans or Democrats don’t even understand this problem well, but it’s just as true that Republicans are their willing apologists. I don’t blame the Democrats – they don’t claim to believe in free markets as a core value. But the Republicans do, and either through stupidity  and/or venality, they choose to turn a blind eye towards the insanity of modern corporate America and its enablers in the legally corrupt financial services sector. If they were really proponents of free markets they would address these problems straight on, promoting free banking, eliminating the Federal Reserve, change corporate structures to reintroduce accountability to owners and a host of other policies. Ask any Republican about these and other like-minded ideas and he will just kind of dimly smile, barely able to understand what is being discussed. Again – the Democrats don’t either – but they don’t claim to be the protectors of capitalism, do they?

Okay, so what about their defense of individual liberty? Well, it’s clear that the Republicans made some of deals with the devil along that road. By making common cause with conservatives who are anti-drugs, anti-gambling, anti-gay, anti-porn, pro-religion – you get the point, yes? – they support government intervention into the private lives of humans in many ways that violate one’s natural rights. So, when they try to argue with the Progressives about individual rights, well they often get hung by their own hypocrisy. As well, they don’t understand that Progressivism has already accounted for and resolved these conflicts in theory.  On another front, and worse yet, Republicans have also bought into a bigotry that moral majority types accept as revealed truth – that faith in a Christian god is at the core of what makes our country great, in order to mollify and activate their most enervated supporters. And why not? The sanctimony and self-righteousness of a Neo-Con-Gelical, who believes that he is doing God’s work is a powerful political force. It’s a big part of the Tea Party movement, and they are the Republican’s answer to ACORN and union activists. I get it, it’s the crass politics of power – but when they do this, they quite clearly lose any legitimacy to their pretense of support for individual liberty. Also, perhaps by default, and some would say by design, they’ve become the comfortable home for the racists in our society. The “Southern Strategy” of the post civil-rights era has made folks who are “good Americans”, you know, white, very comfortable in their assumption of moral superiority. This isn’t overt, but it’s very real – and I was a life long Republican until about 2003, I have seen this firsthand. Let me put it another way. The average white racist (who is in the minority in the party) is much more comfortable with the Republican party than the Democratic party. You can call this an accident, but without Republican resurgence in the south, it would not be competitive nationally. The party doesn’t speak loudly about equality and doesn’t intentionally make those who aren’t really for liberty for all Americans uncomfortable. I’ve only really come to terms with this as a libertarian, which, as “The Party of Principle” makes one really look head on at liberty, making any tolerance of racial or ethnic hatred impossible. This is why the Republicans are so suspect when they talk about immigration or affirmative action – they don’t get the benefit of the doubt, fairly or unfairly – but regardless, they haven’t earned the public mantle of standing for equality the way the Democrats have.  All of this and more make their bleating about individual liberty fall on deaf ears to anyone outside of their most rabid base – and the funny part is they don’t even know it how silly they look to anyone outside of their echo chamber.

So now we come to health care and suddenly the American public, who was just subjected to 8 years of George Bush and Tom Delay, are supposed to believe that suddenly the Republicans actually have workable policy solutions to the problems in our health care sector? After ceding any legitimate moral high ground  in terms of really supporting individual liberty or free markets, they don’t even realize how ridiculous they sound by railing for these ideas. It’s made even worse now by the likes of Beck or Palin – who personify the self-styled political activists in the Tea Party movement. After never bothering to even study history or political philosophy in any formal way, and while completely ignoring the need to build a foundation of a counter-political philosophy to Progressivism, they suddenly just pour out into the streets and the halls of our nations capitol – or onto our TVs, crying foul. If you listen to their complaints, they are barely rational. I heard a caller to Rush Limbaugh the other day complain because when she called into the congressional switchboard and asked the operator if she should complain to him/her only, she was told a bit snottily that she needed to give him the name of her representative so she could put her through. She didn’t even know that she had to talk to her specific representative to lodge a complaint. I’ve seen countless scenes like this while traipsing around on the blogosphere. David Frum had one of his reporters do an informal survey of Tea Party protesters in DC  on tax issues, asking simple questions about whether Obama has actually raised taxes (no – he cut them) or what percentage of GDP the Federal Govt takes (most said for 40% or greater – answer: 20% and that’s not a record either). I’m not taking cheap shots at these folks for the sake of belittling them, btw, I’m trying to point out that the unintellectual posture, or perhaps better said, the intellectual laziness of the Republicans is biting them in their own posteriors. They have not done the hard work of building a real movement that relies on a strong, well defined philosophy that they actually have supported with real policies. No, they just cherry pick the aspects of classical liberalism and free market economics which suit their current issue, rally the troops into a frenzy with half truths and then wonder why the rest of us don’t take them seriously. At all – really, if you’re a Republican and you’ve actually read this far, know that virtually nobody outside of the Neo-Con-Gelicals – about 20%  – of the population can listen to your hysteria without laughing or getting angry. You are winning nobody new to the cause. The only reason that there is hope for the Republicans in the next election cycle is because the Democrats are ridiculous in their own ways. The truth of our current political reality is that when either one of the parties gets power, the citizenry immediately turns on them out of just plain old common sense. There is no swing to conservatism now and there was no swing to Progressivism in the last election cycle. Both parties are incredibly screwed up in their own ways, and the American public quickly gets sickened by either of them as soon as it assumes power.

Libertarians actually stand for such things as free markets and individual liberty, and brook no quarter from those who don’t adhere to these ideals. We are working very diligently at building up real intellectual support for our philosophy, and libertarian academics are spreading out through the intellectual world elucidating it in growing numbers. In twenty years, when we have a solid base of support and are winning elections, the Republicans won’t understand why. They really need to stop being such whiners, and instead build a coherent movement that can attract principled people who insist on policies and strategies that make sense, instead of vague, unbelievable tropes and populist rhetoric with no basis in principles or philosophy. But see, they can’t because they’d have to shake off most of their base, and they would never risk power to stand on principle. But in the meantime, the Republicans should stop whining about the Democrats  – it’s really quite pathetic.

Technorati Tags: health care reform, libertarian, libertarian thought, libertarianism

Libertarian philosophy at its core can be described as a radical view of the property rights of human beings. Essentially, we state that one owns oneself and accordingly, there is no justification for an external authority to breach your full ownership of yourself. We make an exception in that the use of force is justified to protect your natural rights when they are breached by another. Owning oneself includes the freedom to do as one pleases with the property one owns. Since human beings create things and labor to do so, the  product of those efforts or what is gained through free exchanges of the effort or property with others is yours to keep and no external authority has any right to either. I like to think of it as individual sovereignty, which means that essentially that there is no higher authority than me in society, except in those areas in which I agree to cede that authority for our mutual benefit. Btw, hard core libertarians would argue with that approach and that is why they recommend anarchy. I’m not willing to go that far as I believe we need a state to protect everyone’s natural rights, to defend our nation and that we can agree to act together in other ways collectively to improve all of our lives. For example, I differ from many libertarians in that I think we should have public support for education to guarantee every citizen the ability to understand their natural rights and the world around them before they are actually cast out into the great game of fending for oneself that we heartily believe in. I think, as Thomas Jefferson did, that “information is the currency of democracy”, that freedom stems from reason, and that a person must be trained to reason before he/she can adequately appreciate what being free necessitates.  But, in the main, I and most libertarians agree that government interventions into the free market are unnecessary encroachments on our natural rights and, accordingly seek to reorder society into a much freer place with far less government.

This is why many libertarians push back at government regulation of environmental issues. However, there are aspects of our principles that actually would support government intervention and I think the environment is an area where government intervention is not only desirable but in fact implied by our principles. The simplest way to describe it is via ‘The tragedy of the commons’, a theory that lays out how property which is not owned will not be cared for. Essentially, since current depletion affects later users, current depletion of a resource is encouraged because there is no penalty for the immediate user. If the ‘commons’ were privately owned, the owner would ensure that the ‘commons’ were used in sustainable ways so current and future consumers could be satisfied. An example of this is how farmers rotate crops to ensure the long term health of their land versus just depleting it’s capacity as quickly as possible.  Many libertarian theorists claim that this argues for the privatization of everything, but I can’t see how that could be applied to the air, water or the effects that the polluting of either have on property that is privately owned. The Libertarian Party mumbles some vagueness about this in its platform and it’s clear to me that this view is insufficient theoretically to deal with the fact that these ‘commons’ of air/water aren’t owned by anyone currently.

Given this analysis, it seems that libertarians should support government intervention to protect the environment, or better said, to manage it. In terms of what policies we should support, clearly policies that rely on the free market to develop effective solutions is what we should be supporting. Certainly, policies that pick the winners and losers by selecting one technology or another should be strongly objected to. For example, the rubric of ‘Green Jobs’ has to be fought tooth and nail, as it simply is a cover for subsidies to favored groups. In fact, these approaches are economically costly and will distract us from creating real solutions. I recently  wrote a post about great work being done by Craig Ventner at Synthetic Genomics which may solve the entire problem for us – and it is doing so with no government funding. The free market will drive all the innovation required if there is a need to be met – there is no need for some bureaucrat, or even worse, a sanctimonious do-gooder, to figure it all out for us. As far as actual regulations, it seems the best approach is to regulate emissions as we have with say CFCs (with great success – that’s  why you don’t hear much about the ozone layer anymore) or other pollutants. Both a carbon tax or cap and trade schemes seem to have merit and I’m fine with either as long as they impose as little friction as possible on the economy which can be done by making them revenue neutral. This means that any revenue the government receives from these regulatory activities must be offset by givebacks in income taxes for tax payers. Expanding government’s GDP footprint is unnecessary to accomplish our environmental goals, and I think we can do so in a way that is both effective and consistent with libertarian principles.

In closing, I must mention that the support in some libertarian circles for AGW skepticism is very wrongheaded. Any serious inquiry about the science shows that C02 drives warming and that we are producing more C02 which will lead to warming. There is no debate about this from any climate scientist (Lindzen, Michaels or Spencer, for example). There are legitimate questions about the extent and rate of the warming and the likely impacts, which we should try to understand and advocate for a non-politicized evaluation of the correct policies to address the challenge. The AGW fetishists should know that when they gave Hugo Chavez a standing ovation in Copenhagen, they reveal an ugly thing about the politics of the Green movement that does them no favors. Libertarians should avoid being drawn into the highly politicized food fight that AGW deniers and hysterics are having at this time. We should also be sure that we aren’t distracted from other important environmental concerns that all the talk of AGW squeezes out of view. Clean water should be high on our list to, for starters.

The bottom line is that libertarians should hold themselves to a standard of reason and science, as liberty is a gift that arose from both, and not descend into polemical fist fights for their own sake. Leave that to the neo-con-gelicals and the lib-gressives. It doesn’t seem to be working out too well for them,  and we should not allow ourselves to be drawn to the side of anti-intellectualism because of our reflexive dislike of government.

Technorati Tags: climate change, libertarian principles, libertarianism

Okay, so I went to the movies, undecided as to whether I was going to see Crazy Heart or Green Zone. Truthfully, I was in a pretty grumpy mood having been cooped up for too many days in a row in my southern headquarters, so I made a last minute decision to go for some blood pumping action. I knew it was going to be an anti-Bush administration movie, which isn’t a big problem for me. I knew it was going to be dealing with WMD and figured Hollywood would sensationalize it a bit. I can quite enjoy a thoughtful send-up of our country and government, as long as it’s done well, and, like I said, I was kind of in the mood for a ‘shoot ‘em up’. In the back of my mind I guess I was ready for something along the lines of War Inc, which in hindsight made no sense because War Inc. set out to be a satire, and was a brilliant one. I don’t know what critics have said about it, but my advice is that you’d be far more entertained and thoughtfully engaged by renting War Inc rather than the hackneyed and ham-handed Green Zone.

Bottom line, it has no regard for the facts as it meanders through the ridiculous fantasy adventures of a rogue Army Chief Warrant Officer, played by Damon,  who is tasked with finding WMD in Iraq after the invasion based on intelligence supplied to the military. First,  the action isn’t remotely believable. Damon just barrels around, going off mission and putting his men in way too much danger on a regular basis in ways that even I can see are ridiculous. Even less believable, Damon, operating apparently free of any operational command, develops his own intelligence source, is seconded to the CIA and then hunted down by our own special forces. Right, that’s exactly how things go down in the real world of military operations. He ultimately single-handedly discovers that the intelligence is entirely fabricated and then apprehends a senior Iraqi general, the commander of the Iraqi army, who subsequently tells him that he provided intelligence weeks before the war to the U.S. that there was no WMD in Iraq. This general is then shot by special operations forces under the command of the administration’s minion in Iraq. Right, yeah, that’s how it was under Bush.

Okay, what’s going on here? First, the feel of it reminded me a bit of the Generation Kill mini-series,  so, okay, and in recreating the feel of Baghdad, it seemed to work well – but that’s it. I think the director/writer stopped trying to engage in reality right then and there. One of the most ridiculous elements of the plot is that the CIA was actually trying to stop the administration’s puppet from behaving so badly, that somehow the CIA doubted the intelligence in the run-up to the war. I mean there is no mention of a CIA director telling  the President that it’s a “slam dunk. The entire story comes off like something a superficial, liberal wing-nut would scribble out in a single evening after smoking some fine weed.  It wasn’t even a thoughtful satire or a critique of the real situation, nope, it just made a story up with stick figure caricatures of characters. These characters lack depth, believability and aren’t even likable. It also makes overuse of the shaky camera, fast frame changing action effect of the Bourne movies which makes the action completely unintelligible. So, all in all, it simply doesn’t work on any level.

So, okay you say, another bad hollywood movie, big deal, why are you so ticked off, Glenn? Well, it’s because when treating a subject like this, so recent in history, with an authentic feel, I think the authors have a responsibility to have a basis in fact for their storyline. It’s not like Avatar, in which – as science fiction – I’m perfectly happy to ignore the corporate use of military forces to extinguish indigenous species because the story, characters and special effects are so captivating that I just don’t care about the politics. Green Zone seems earnest to be taken seriously and Damon is certainly trying hard to be taken seriously with his sternness and military rigor. But it just fails miserably to deal with any of the complexities of this issue.

You see, I’m a troublemaker. I actually read stuff like source documents, when I can. And guess what, there is a great document on WMD in Iraq and there have been several studies of the intelligence failures on Iraq. The Iraqi Survey Group, headed by David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector and no Bush administration lackey, did an in depth report of what we actually found and didn’t find in Iraq. First, WMD capability is about much more than just stockpiles of munitions. It also requires significant infrastructure of men and equipment to manufacture. In the concluding remarks by David Kay in his report, he claims that in significant ways Saddam was more dangerous than we thought and that he had substantial WMD operations in place. While there were no stockpiles of weapons found, when analyzed in it’s totality, there is no doubt that Saddam was a danger with respect to WMD. Second, after three separate investigations of the intelligence leading to our invasion of Iraq, not a single ‘smoking gun’ of politicization was found. Instead, the thoughtful critics have concluded that this was an epic intelligence failure. Also,  the entire scenario also reflects the grave difficulty of gaining intelligence in totalitarian, despotic regimes. It also should makes us all think about the very difficult nature of making decisions about what  acceptable levels of risk of this sort are. But these more nuanced and complex ideas, only arrived at after analyzing the facts involved, don’t even try to peek out from anywhere in this movie. Instead, we are treated to a Manichean story line in which the dumb, ambitious administration lackey, played by Greg Kinnear,  ignores or kills everything in the way of his agenda – an agenda which is never explored, btw.

I think that one of the biggest risks we face as a society is the pre-eminence of politics in our public discourse. Our entire public debate is politicized now – from global warming to health care reform, it’s all polemic and bashing the other, and the actual issues and facts aren’t even discussed that much in our media anymore. We are in real danger as a society if we all don’t try and catch ourselves more. Ask yourself, am I just railing for my side or am I adhering to a set of principles and looking at the facts to make my decisions? What are your principles? I think this is the core problem – neither the Republicans or Democrats have a fixed set of principles that I can discern. This is why I love the Libertarian Party – “The Party of Principle”. We work from clearly elucidated first principles that we’ve carefully examined and developed, and then make our minds up on issues based on those principles.  The lure of the outrageous polemic has less effect because we start from a different place. You should check it out at :  www.lp.org/platform . Most people will find themselves agreeing with our principles, but then start to have trouble with some of the positions/policies that flow from them. If that’s the case, you should ask yourself, am I willing to govern my views by principle or not? If the answer is yes – we are the party for you. If not, well, good riddance – you are the problem in our society.

Technorati Tags: green zone, libertarianism, libertian principles

I just saw an interview with J. Craig Venter, famous for his participation in the human genome project and now CEO of Synthetic Genomics, in which he stated that he is creating a microbe which eats C02 and creates hydrocarbon fuel. That’s right, you heard me correctly. Using genetic engineering, they essentially assemble this little bug and it does this biologically. HOLY *^&%!

The interview is incredibly telling. Venter describes how this work is feasible and scalable, and how energy companies are investing to develop it as commercially viable. He describes how the resultant fuel would be usable in current combustion engines with no modifications. As I listened, I began to get angry though. First, you’ll note the questioner’s insistent tone when asking has about whether the current inaction in Washington, DC is hurting him and his obvious disappointment at Venter’s answer, which is essentially that he doesn’t need any help from the government. I can almost hear the gasps from AGW fetishists who believe the AGW is more evidence of the flawed nature of capitalism.

I then went to the web to research this topic and found myself a bit stymied. The green type of sites reporting on this interview focused on one comment, taken utterly out of context, in which Venter says that without scale, the companies working on this are ‘just playing’. They completely downplay the fact that he claims he has the funding to move ahead already from private industry, including 600 million usd from Exxon Mobil. There was very little other reporting on this topic. Can you believe that? I think that this is due to the fact that Venter isn’t singing from the AGW hymn book about needing to completely change our societies, economies and lives in order to survive. Rather, he proposes a solution that negates fossil fuel dependency and consumes vast quantities of C02 in one fell swoop, a solution that is at once breathtakingly elegant and simple, and that works with our existing industrial infrastructure.

Wow. Okay, I don’t want to get too excited because obviously this has a ways to go. But if he’s right, and look for yourself, he’s not claiming this is some whacked out idea, no, he has the science down pat and he’s a legitimate, credible serious person. He’s already rolling out a significant pilot program. So this isn’t just some hope – it’s real and viable. Do you realize what this means? First, all govt spending on ‘Green Everything’ is unnecessary. Worst case, from a public policy standpoint, we might want to put a carbon tax in place (I love the revenue neutral idea being proposed, btw, if we have to have one at all) to create stronger incentives to adopt it, although I don’t think it’s needed. But that’s it. We are done. No more IPCC, no more green proselytizing from every progressive political hack – no more teaching our children that doomsday is coming! We can stop giving vast sums of money to oil producing countries that prop up their evil regimes with petro-dollars. Okay, you get the picture.

My biggest question is why this isn’t leading every newscast in the world? Answer: Because the AGW issue is so politicized that it’s no longer about the environment. They simply couldn’t take it if their crisis was actually solved by the free market, not government, and all of their rent-seeking, anti-capitalist garbage was invalidated. Check it out – tell your friends, this could be the ‘game changer’ we’ve all been hoping for.

Technorati Tags: capitalism, global warming

So what is this twist? In a nutshell, it’s that Beck is actually intellectually curious about the world and this is very engaging to a group of people who are sick of being treated to very simplistic polemic every day. Beck’s popularity is a rejection of the ‘talking points’ hectoring of major conservative talkers – folks on the left just don’t get this, btw. He tells his own story enough, so I won’t repeat it all here but essentially he claims that he woke up after 9/11 and really began trying to inform himself about the world. He’s an everyman that regular middle class Americans can relate to, and he’s taken his viewers on an intellectual journey through history, philosophy, economics and political thought in a way that no college professor or pointy-headed intellectual could ever do. He brings along with this a set of traditional values which can loosely be described as ‘faith and family’, that give great comfort to his audience. His self-styled political philosophy mirrors that of the Tea Party in that it is hard to articulate the actual differences between him and traditional Conservatives or Republicans in both rhetoric and substance. He often makes reference to libertarianism and at one point actually claimed that he should have voted for Ron Paul, although this admission was primarily based on Ron Paul’s critical view of our rigged economy, not the rest of his philosophy.

So, what’s wrong with that? Well, first, it’s painful to watch if you actually know something about the subjects he’s exploring. Let’s take one recent example of how he gets it so wrong. He’s been trying to understand the epistemology of left and right, communism, fascism and progressivism – but notably not conservatism. He’s put together a spectrum of political belief with anarchy at one end and totalitarian government at the other, rightly concluding that Fascism is totalitarian, as well as Socialism. However, he completely neglects the fact that Socialist theory (admittedly, not most of the practice of it) is democratically based, and in fact calls for all industry/business to be run by democratic cooperatives and have elected leadership. This is the problem with a one dimensional analysis. He gets totalitarianism correct but completely neglects the idea of authoritarianism. He then throws them in the same bucket, and at this point loses all serious students of the topic. Fascists and Communists were arch enemies in Nazi Germany, and the communists saw themselves as the proponents of freedom, which the Fascists had no interest in.  I will stop detailing a critique of his specific thinking at this point because I don’t listen to most of what he says. But, from a broad standpoint, I think it’s fair and accurate to say that he really misses the intellectual underpinnings of the enlightenment and how classical liberalism has driven political philosophy forward. More directly, I think that if he’s going to posit himself as trying to understand and explain political thought and the history of it to us, he needs to do a much better job. Fyi, if you are tempted to think I’m sympathetic to communism due to the previous statements, you couldn’t be farther from the truth and in fact you are falling into the same pseudo-intellectual trap as Beck. Check your facts, Marx and his ilk based their entire theory on advancing their version real freedom for people – however wrong they were. It is utterly different from Fascism. You should also know that socialists play the same trick on capitalists, identifying fascism as a form of capitalism. Essentially, Beck is engaging in a combination of Red-Baiting and Nazi-Baiting – it’s intellectually invalid and not even new. Any undergraduate student of the topics he’s discussing would be able to easily identify the flaws in his thinking.

It must be said that much of what he’s wrestling with is understanding the canon of what used to be referred to as a ‘classical education’. Four years in an undergraduate history program that focuses on western civilization (unperverted by Critical Theory, admittedly hard to find) would do him wonders. It’s painful to watch him try to sort this out on his own, and between his radio and TV show, he does this for four hours a day. It requires a certain arrogance to put yourself forward as an authority while one is so self-admittedly ignorant, and also begs the question of why wouldn’t he spend his time putting people forward who know the subject far better than him. Yes, he does have many thoughtful guests, but really, if he wants to educate people in the way he claims he wants to, he would put them front and center to actually teach instead of using them as props. What Beck does instead is continuously move back and forth between polemic and inquiry in a chaotic way, with the ultimate aim of aggrandizing the world view he holds a priori.

Special criticism is deserved for his treatment of religion. Having had the hackneyed ‘spiritual awakening’ that only the ‘recovering alcoholic’ can have, he fervently promotes a brand of ill defined spirituality that he has absolute faith in. I stopped drinking with the help of AA 15 yrs ago, successfully, and adopted it’s spirituality for a few years, so I can speak of this authoritatively.  Apparently this week he’s going to discuss the role of ‘faith’ in our nation’s history. He teased it on his radio show today as showing how our countries values and, by implication, its radical adoption of individual liberty arise from the teachings of Moses, as embodied in the Ten Commandments. This just isn’t so, and in serious intellectual circles, again,  it can’t even be taken seriously. Here are a few reasons why, for those of you under his sway. First, The Enlightenment and the concept of individual liberty – better described as individual sovereignty, meaning that one owns oneself – arose in direct opposition to man’s previous state in society which was being the subject of God and King – and the King’s authority derived from God in the first place. Clerics of various religions were very powerful and the state used this power to visit and justify merciless depredations on its subjects. The idea that you were born into something other than this condition was a radical departure from the ‘faith based’ world of pre-enlightenment history. This is not debatable – it is an accepted fact. Go study this and you will find I’m correct. Second, the many of the founders of our country weren’t religious people. Key ones, including Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and others rejected Christianity and all religion, thinking of themselves as deists, at most. While it is without a doubt true that there were many Christians involved too, they all agreed to put in writing a prohibition of the state establishment of religion in attempt to stop the imposition of religion on man. It needs to be pointed out that while the Declaration of Independence has liberal mention of a God/Creator,  it is not the founding document of our country or government – it’s the document that separated the colonies from England’s despotism. The U.S. Constitution, which formed our nation, makes no mention of God and requires no such belief to adhere to its principles. I could go on – many have – but Beck, and many other Conservatives are so wrong in this assertion that it’s breathtaking.

Last, but not the  least of his failings, is Beck’s co-opting of the libertarian mantle in some people’s eyes. Yes, he sees the corruption of our monetary system by the Fed, yes he sees the abrogation of freedom that flows from the Progressive movement and yes he understands the importance of the rule of law but that does not add up to being a libertarian. Libertarians are for a radically different relationship between the state and individuals, one in which our current militarism is unthinkable and where your gay next door neighbors might sit on their front lawn doing bong hits with no fear of intervention by force.  The Libertarian Party is “The Party of Principle” and we are unafraid to go to the places that these principles will take us. I’m not saying he has to agree, but the phenomena of Conservative Christians adopting the rhetoric of liberty is not new and when you really boil down Beck – and the Tea Party for that matter – both are very hard to distinguish from the the Neo-Con, Christian Republicans.

I do think that there is hope for him and his followers. My general sense of them from their calls to his radio show and my encounters with them in the blogosphere is that most  have never really studied political philosophy before encountering Beck, and as such,  make some simplistic assumptions about the world that undermines their reasoning. Unlike snarky elitists on the left and right, I’m okay with that. Most of these people have been busy building good lives for themselves and their families, and in many ways are the backbone of American society. Not everyone can spend years reading Locke and Friedman, Mao and Rawls and reflect on them thoughtfully. As well, many self-styled liberal/progressives don’t understand the foundations of their philosophy either. That said, this does not let Beck fans off the hook – if you want to argue political philosophy, you need to actually study the topic, otherwise you will end up sounding like an ass. So, be true to Beck’s call, educate yourself, hold yourself to the principles you espouse and learn for yourself. Encourage your children to be educated in the classic canon and push your educational institutions to do so.

As for Beck himself, he should engage more true intellectuals on his show. I’d love for him to have say Christopher Hitchens on for an entire hour or even a week to discuss the epistemology of classical liberalism. He should sponsor more debate on his show between intellectuals, say a Tom Palmer from CATO versus the current head of the Socialist party. He should spend more time on ideas like ‘Social Justice Theory’ by John Rawls, and give air time to criticism of it. Progressives think they are serving a higher purpose, justified by these lines of thinking and Beck could do real intellectual damage to their cause if he stopped the Red-Baiting. Sadly, mostly what he’s doing now is talking to the same folks the conservatives have always spoken to, and with only a slightly better message. In fact, it may be worse, because many people think they are being educated by Beck, when,  they’re just mostly being subjected to agitprop. It’s sad because Beck comes close to doing something much more profound, and as such, it’s a real missed opportunity.

Technorati Tags: agitprop, classical liberalism, glenn beck, libertarianism

Obama and his hackneyed ilk like to prattle on about how Gitmo or our harsh interrogation tactics are actually causing Al Qaeda to grow by providing PR fodder for their recruiting drives. It is true that the U.S. is continuously villified in Arab/Muslim media for many things, including these issues, but if you spend some time on Al Jazeera (easy to do, they publish on YouTube) or other sources, you’ll quickly realize that U.S. caused civilian casualties is the biggest issue they scream about. Today’s report of 27 civilian deaths caused by NATO air strikes in Afghanistan is business as usual for us (despite our apologies) and you can guarantee that this will be huge on Islamic media.

Rightly so. U.S. and coalition forces have killed thousands – maybe tens of thousands of civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also true that many more civilian deaths have been caused by ‘insurgents’ of various stripes. It seems clear at this point that in the Muslim world an individual’s life is not worth that much when taken by a fellow Muslim in the name of Allah (pause, throw up, continue). However, that doesn’t matter when measuring our own actions against our own morality, and in fact, it’s clear that some of these deaths are the foreseeable consequences of our actions so we do bear some moral responsibility for even these deaths. It’s this dissonance that is used against us and what makes our claim of serving the higher purpose of freedom ring hollow in the Muslim world.

The facts are hard to find, as the reporting is always sketchy and politicized, and our own defense dept isn’t very forthcoming about this issue (understandably). Fighting an insurgency is, defacto, something that occurs in the midst of civilian populations and will result in civilian deaths as collateral damage (what a euphemism that is, ehh?). After all, the insurgents don’t wear uniforms (not unlike many militia-men in our own revolutionary war, btw) and many civilians support the insurgents openly or covertly, so they may even be legitimate targets in some sense. Even taking all of this into account, the bottoms line is that we are killing innocent people every day.

Just look at our drone attacks in Pakistan on Al Qaeda and other targets. Obama has launched 57+ such attacks since taking office – more than Bush did in his entire administration. Since the inception of this tactic, we have killed about 900 civilians in drone attacks. Just stop and think about that for a moment. From remote control in Nevada, the USAF is launching and controlling these unmanned drones, not unlike a video game, in your name. What do you think that is like for some poor peasant living in Waziristan? They see robots in the sky tracking them down, blowing them, their friends and family members up. If you lived there, what would you think? Do you think you might want to join up with the only folks brave enough to fight back?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not supporting these Islamic maniacs. The Jihadi movement is repugnant to me in so many ways.  However, I cannot stomach these civilian deaths. There are many reasons to oppose our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere, be on the lookout for what we are doing in Yemen), but this is something that breaks my heart, and I think that it creates a future generation of Jihadis to fight us. Hmm, why doesn’t Obama talk about this as a recruiting tool? Answer: He’s just another political hack without any real vision. Some of us saw this ahead of time, but hey, it’s not like McCain was any better.

Libertarians believe that we should only initiate force in defense of our rights, and country (although some libertarians would debate the latter). Our policy of non-intervention in foreign affairs is based on the beliefs which many of our founding fathers held dearly, and a belief that the unintended consequences of our actions ultimately make the world less safe for Americans. We also believe that we cannot afford our military adventurism – with a price tag of over 700 billion slated for 2010. Can you imagine? That is more than the GDP of 170+ countries. It is wrong, scary and very far from what I want America to be. How about you?

Technorati Tags: afghanistan, civilian casualties, iraq, libertarian politics, libertarianism

I think that one of the problems which pervades the social sciences is the lack of valid testbeds for their theories, and the fact that they don’t often like to digest negative results. Take Marx, who is held as one of the three fathers of the field of sociology; despite the observable fact that dialectical materialism doesn’t predict outcomes in the real world or that the “Proletariat” hasn’t risen up in revolution, Marxism still holds great sway in leftists political circles. These are two central tenets of Marxism that most honest adherents of Marxism has admitted are not valid. It’s like believing the world is flat after it’s been proved otherwise, but that doesn’t stop them.

The internet is uniquely able to connect us, both individually and collectively.  I think it provides great insights about our nature which do real damage to the assumption that people aren’t well equipped to run their own affairs much more readily than the average leftist would have you believe. Lets take two examples that just scream out for notice. eBay and Craigslist. eBay is an absurd business, if you just stop to think about it. You bid on stuff that you can’t physically see and send the person money, hoping they send the stuff you bought, and that the stuff actually works. When eBay was going public, it had real difficulty convincing investors that the business model could scale because many investors reacted with real doubt that people would trade with each other fairly. Yet look at the reality, eBay is a multi-billion dollar business in which millions of buyers and sellers continuously do just that, with very low levels of fraud. eBay does some policing of the site, but in fact has a predisposition against overly regulating buyer and sellers, leaving it to the community to police itself in many regards. I have to note that there is bad behavior, but as both buyers and sellers adapt to this new model of transacting with each other, they have developed habits to protect themselves.

Craigslist is an even more extreme example. My first real experiences buying and selling over Craigslist were tentative, but I quickly became a fan. The first thing you notice is that it’s so simple to buy and sell. Either browse for what you want without any registration, or simply write your ad, upload your photograph and you’re off. You choose how you want to be contacted, there are no bidding rules and nothing is binding. Typically you meet the buyer after having negotiated over the phone or on email, in many cases they come to your home to pick up the goods. My experience was nothing more than shocking. Having sold  and bought motorcycles, guitars, electronics, furniture and household goods on CL, I have yet to have a single bad experience. I’ve never been ripped off or been misrepresented to. Never, and this experience is common (at least to the people I’ve asked about it). eBay itself records ridiculously low levels of fraud, one tenth of one percent, while other studies put it higher with broader definitions of fraud, but still they are low enough where users make wide use of these exchanges, indicating that the risk reward is favorable.

This is shocking to those who make their living based on telling us we can’t look after ourselves. But they control most of the media and virtually all of educational apparatus, so is it any surprise that after, say, a government caused financial meltdown (predicted by Austrian economics) people would look to the government for solutions? In the case of the economy, it’s even more bizarre because Keynesian economics was disproven in the late ’70s, but many still cling to it. For those of you who don’t know much about economics, the stagflation of the late ’70s isn’t a condition that the Keynesian model would allow to exist. This hasn’t dampened the current crowd’s enthusiasm in claiming its authority, howeve. Btw, a better explanation for their failure to adapt to the facts on the ground is that all they really seek is to be seen ‘doing something’ about our problems and unfortunately, the politicians don’t know enough about economics to understand how bankrupt their theories are. But I digress…

What conclusions can be drawn from these experiences and phenomena?

1. Trustworthiness is common  – People are much more trustworthy than we think, at least in our society. Even more to the point, individuals and private institutions are quite capable of optimizing all of the trade-offs involved to maximize security and trust, with no governmental involvement other than the normal enforcement of laws that preserve our security and property.

2. Cooperation is innate in us – The emails that go back and forth between buyers in these systems are instructive. Both parties inform themselves directly and indirectly about each other via overt communications and signals drawn from the interaction by the participants. The quality of the ad language, the pictures and one’s responsiveness to an email question all say something about the sellers and buyers, and new participants quickly pick up on it. How many pictures are optimal? What kind of language is attractive? All of the behaviors and communication evolve to help buyers and sellers manage their interests quite effectively, with various levels of oversight. eBay has much more structure, whereas CL is a free for all. Amazon is a third model which is really oriented as a web based storefront versus a pure auction site, and represents yet another private take on the approach. All of this evolves without any coercion from the state, and works very well. This is a key point: it doesn’t just work, it works incredibly well. If you use one of these sites, I’m sure you can attest to it. People are generally very accommodating and a pleasure to deal with.

3. Bottom up innovation works best – Both CL and eBay let their community drive how it evolves. They are fanatical about understanding what their customers want and when they develop a new feature or policy, often it is an option, not something that is uniformly imposed. Customers are free to use them if they want to. When they don’t want to, if those policies don’t work well for them, customers can go elsewhere. My experience, for example, using eBay’s auction structure is not particularly attractive for me. I also think they charge too much. Taking into consideration that I negotiate for a living, I’m much more likely to sell or buy a product on CL than eBay. But that doesn’t mean its right for everyone. The person who doesn’t trust their negotiating skills or doesn’t ever want to meet the person they’re buying from may like what eBay does (and apparently do). This is the exact opposite of how the federal government attacks problems. It coerces participation, and its instruments are rules and bureaucracies which have no chance of matching the efficiency of free exchanges, open communication, trust, price signaling and provider competition – all of which run without any supervision from government.

What is most amazing about all this is how many people go around believing that the first place we should go for solving societal problems is the government. In fact, if you look at the biggest problem areas in society, for example, education and health care, you see that these areas are flooded with governmental regulation, institutions and money. But if you look at the areas where government isn’t that active – say food distribution or personal computers, those marketplaces of individuals acting freely without coercion are working so much better. Put plainly, I can get thirty different brands of toothpaste twenty four hours a day within a fifteen minute drive from my house, and can get a laptop that has the power of a twenty year old multi-million dollar supercomputer for six hundred dollars, but still, I’m continuously met with the a priori assumption that government is the answer to our disastrous health care system.

This view simply doesn’t comport with the observable facts and it needs to be treated with incredulity by those of us who believe in free markets and free people. One of the most endearing and frustrating aspects of being human is our ability to confuse ourselves, but knowing this only places a greater burden upon us to examine our beliefs and compare them with the available facts. Sadly, I’m not at all sure most people actually want to figure things out as much as they just want their side to win.

Technorati Tags: free markets, individaul freedom, libertarian econo, libertarianisms