Remember all libertarians are crazy

And thus hold the crazy positions
These are the supposedly evil and vile and stupid ideas of Ron Paul (and by extension, his libertarian, quasi-libertarian, constitutionalist fans)
1) Eviscerate Entitlements: Believes that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are unconstitutional, and has compared the failure of federal courts to strike them down to the courts' failure to abolish slavery in the 19th century.

I'd say comparing taxation to slavery is a little extreme, and there are utilitarian grounds on which public health and retirement do have externality costs and especially free rider problems that need to be attended to. But the systems that we have are not especially good at doing so and replacing them with something like mandatory allocations would probably be more efficient. In particular with retirement. Given consumer transparency problems in the health care market at present and that health care benefits are owned by employers rather than individuals, health care is trickier. Basically it's a market failure caused by government and replacing government interventions with some simple regulatory structures would work a lot more smoothly. The main reason to oppose these however is the public cost rather than the rights conversations. If governments wish to offer some sort of public provisions in competition with private market solutions or to subsidize the additional costs to provide rights for the poor, I'm not obstinately and philosophically opposed, but right now medicare and social security operate largely as middle class entitlements rather than as social insurance. This is therefore a dumb idea, and clearly its a tremendously popular one. As with many of these ideas, the problem is that the status quo position is popular, entrenched, and does not work, certainly not for the cost that we must pay for it.

2) Lay Off Half His Cabinet: Wants to abolish half of all federal agencies, including the departments of Energy, Education, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Labor.

I don't see a problem with this. HSA, USDA seem especially useless. Commerce does generate useful economic data and the census, but it does a lot of useless subsidizing. Same with Labor. I'm a little more skeptical about completely abolishing Education, Energy and HHS, but I don't think they're substantially useful either. Energy is mostly a DoD budget hiding spot, and then a lot of economically distorting and environmentally damaging subsidizing for coal and oil and eventually natural gas (along with ethanol), so gutting it is fine. EPA regulations come under other auspices I think, so perhaps it can go all together. Education should probably exist in some form (I'd say nominally to oversee individual tax credit transfers for school funding), but not the form it has taken.

3) Enable State Extremism: Would let states set their own policies on abortion, gay marriage, prayer in school, and most other issues.

- States are already doing most of this anyway. Gay marriage for instance is mostly illegal. Abortions are strictly regulated and restricted in some states, particularly in the South and Midwest. I'm not sure how this is a different and extreme position as a result. Prayer in school does strike me as a serious federal amendment problem, but I get around it by just allowing people to fund schools that they want to fund. If those schools include prayer, then only those parents who want their children to pray in school will go there (or those that don't care). There are schools that already do this (private parochial schools, as well as many home schooled children), so this is hardly a radical shift. The principle problem with prayer in school as an issue is that the people who push for it are less interested in having their own children pray, but rather having other children do so. If the schools are free to set their own policies and appeal on those grounds to the consuming public of parents and students, I see no problem. However I also don't think it should be set by state law that schools or even teachers (much less the students) should be required to do it. That would strike me as an extreme position. I don't think that's the Paul position, but I'm unclear on his education funding ideas. He's been a little busy on other matters of government abuse (and some imaginary ones)

4) Protect Sexual Predators' Privacy: Voted against requiring operators of wi-fi networks who discover the transmission of child porn and other forms online sex predation to report it to the government.

Two points here. One, the crucial element for child porn ought to be the generation of it (where it involves actual harm to an actual child), so the consumption of it should not require invasive government monitoring services (with the one exception I can think of off hand that paedophiles should, on some condition of prison release, be required to turn over IP information to probationary officers or therapists for monitoring). In general, I'd probably take a much stronger stance on how we incarcerate actual sexual predators than we do at present. And two.. large numbers of our sexual offences that we do punish already seem to be counterproductive, and one such element is the transmission of things like sexting or nude photos distributed among teens. We haven't decided as a society how to approach these, but there are jurisdictions that have decided to crack down and treat this as the same as paedophilia. That does not seem to make sense. Teenagers exploring their sexuality is not the same as adults abusing young children and should not be treated the same in a criminal sense. Harms exist but they can be better dealt with by having more open sexual dialogues between parents and children. If we are dealing with mere IP information and ISP disclosure, I'm sure that information should be requested by police where they suspect criminal behavior and harm. It should not be required to be turned over. One behavior that does exist and would seem like a reasonable compromise is for police to set up their own websites, collect data on who goes there, and then request the identities of IP addresses for later criminal processing. But police already do this. A third ameliorating factor is that the actual child predator population is decisively smaller than is commonly believed, and where it does exist, it exists in actual harm forms, and more closely associated with the children involved, rather than as strangers and consumers of online child pornography. Such as teachers, priests, and adult family members having sex with children. It is largely a mythological population of random child predators and creating invasive systems of surveillance to capture them strikes me as overselling the issue.

5) Rescind the Bin Laden Raid: Instead of authorizing the Navy Seals to take him out, President Paul would have sought Pakistan's cooperation to arrest him.

How awful. A President who would be bound by international laws to extradite an accused criminal and hold him accountable in a court of law instead of assassination? As much as I'm not terribly concerned that we as the US follow our interests in order to kill enemies of our vital strategic interests, I don't think it would have killed us to put the guy on trial if we could have. This one doesn't strike me as batshit crazy either, but it does strike me as a little naive and possibly neglecting some facts on the ground from the operation itself that we are not privy to because the government has decided we don't need to be. To me that's a larger problem than that we killed the guy instead of arresting him. That the raid lacks proper documentation (video seems to be have been explicitly turned off) for instance introduces doubt to the official story that his death was a necessary outcome to protect the safety of the SEAL team. Of course, I am already rather skeptical of official stories where terrorism is concerned (given that very large numbers of accused terrorists have turned out to be nothing of the kind).

6) Simplify the Census: The questions posed by the Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey, which collects demographics data such as age, race, and income, are "both ludicrous and insulting," Paul says.

- This is considered an extreme position? It should not be terribly difficult for the Census to cross reference with the IRS to gather income information. Age might be something worth gathering, but this is mostly because we have middle class entitlements for old people and is otherwise a statistically interesting fact about the country (for measuring life expectancy) but has little actual utility. On the face of it though, none of this information is necessarily important private information to the point that it should be considered "insulting" for the government to gather it for statistical purposes. It's just not very useful either to the government.

7) Let the Oldest Profession Be: Paul wants to legalize prostitution at the federal level.

This one and the next fall under "status quo is insane, reformers labeled as crazy". Most of the societal harms posed by prostitution come from either other public health problems (condom use, STD transmission) that can be better resolved with cultural shifts rather than vice squads or from its prohibition, illegality and prosecution by authorities. Its black market status makes practitioners more prone to sexual abuse, physical abuse, death, arrest, etc, as well as making it easier for teens to be entered illegally into it or women/children to be sold into sex slavery. These are problems that can be more openly dealt with in an open legal market than in a hidden black market one. Additionally, cracking down on things like Craigslist sex advertisements doesn't help anyone. The Internet's primary utility for sex workers has been its ability to render them more independent of pimps while still generating the additional income that might come from having a middleman to arrange for business. So to speak. All pushing women back to pimps accomplishes is that someone else gets a cut of illegal activity (ie, money), has incentives to do things like force teens into their ring, and potentially increases violence or risk of arrest toward the sex workers themselves. Woot says I. What a wonderfully effective policy... Speaking of which..

8) Legalize All Drugs: Including cocaine and heroin.

This one is a tough one to swallow for people. There's a slight distortion on both of these in that Paul's actual position is to allow states to decide for themselves if things like prostitution, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, et al should be legal. But leaving that aside, as with prostitution, large amounts of harm are effected by the prohibition and prosecution itself of drugs and drug trafficking. While there are societal harms effected by drug use and especially abuse, these are much smaller than the violence (both by traffickers and police) of a black market and the disruption of communities caused by both open air drug markets (ie, the violence again feeding into the movement of business away from criminal actors and the lack of jobs feeding back into the movement of young people in the drug trade) and the arrest and incarceration of large percentages of young (mostly black) men, which also feeds back by putting criminal records on people and stifling their job options further as well as breaking apart families. Where social conservatives claim to be greatly concerned with the nuclear family, they are quick to turn a blind eye to it once that family is a poor inner city (ie, black) one. See the disparities with crack and cocaine distribution sentences.

9) Keep Monopolies Intact: Opposes federal antitrust legislation, calling it "much more harmful than helpful." Thinks that monopolies can be controlled by protecting "the concept of the voluntary contract."

- This is a terrible distortion of the position. Opposing antitrust regulation by calling it "much more harmful than helpful" is not the same as saying "keep monopolies intact". Most current monopolies exist because of government sponsorship and less because of market domination and market failures. Examples of where government regulations protected monopolies are, for example, airlines and automobiles. Utility companies and especially cable and phone companies as well. Antitrust regulation at its face has other strategic interests to prevent the disruption of public supplies of necessary goods and services that might come from market contracts with large vertical monopolies in an industry, say oil or steel. But much government regulation, aside from antitrust, fosters and protects the existence of these very trusts rather than hindering them.

10) Lay Off Ben Bernanke: Would abolish the Federal Reserve and revert to use of currencies that are backed by hard assets such as gold.

- Paul's goldbug fascination does strike me as a little insane (not as crazy as Angle's chicken bartering scheme, but still). They got maybe 1 1/2 of the 10 so far and a couple where the norm is crazier than the proposal being offered.

11) Stop Policing the Environment: Believes that climate change is no big deal and the Environmental Protection Agency is unnecessary. Most environmental problems can be addressed by enforcing private-property rights. Paul also thinks that interstate issues such as air pollution are best dealt with through compacts between states.

- The first two parts do seem a little odd. I do however think that stronger private property protections relating to environmental damage would work pretty well. I'm not sure about the air pollution compact solution. Cap and trade worked pretty well for non-carbon pollutants as a minimal governmental solution in the free market (essentially all the government did was establish a market that did not previously exist). I don't think it would as well for carbon emissions, but I do think that private property protections do speak to a need for a basic carbon tax (and a hike in the gasoline tax) because there are significant externalities (public health for instance) even before one approaches the politically toxic climate change issue.

12) Not Do Anything, but Still...: Would not have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it was a "massive violation of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of a free society."

- I've been over this one. I think the CRA was necessary to correct for a government caused disaster of civil rights violations. But the key word there is "government". The southern states in particular imposed regimes of oppression upon all citizens and compelled them to prejudice their private relationships (anti-miscegenation laws), private contracts (laws restricting where blacks could live and work), and private associations (and where they could sit, eat, play, drink, go to the bathroom, etc). That's not to say that there was not public support among whites for this compelled bigotry. But whether or not it would have withstood opposition from more open-minded market participants who could exploit their bigotry for personal (and mutual) gain is an untested hypothesis. We must also have an understanding that these legal regimes could be imposed largely because the oppressed populations were also prevented, often harshly, from participating in construction of the legal environments under which they could live. It is mostly THIS gross violation of civil rights that had to be corrected through the CRA. The deconstruction of other civil restrictions requiring prejudice and bigotry was a natural consequence of destroying the architecture which allowed it to come into being in the first place.

13) Let Markets Care for the Disabled: "The ADA should have never been passed," Paul says. The treatment of the handicapped should be determined by the free market.

- I'm ambivalent on this one. I would think a more logical solution from the top-down perspective is to simply subsidize disabled people (as we do with school vouchers and SSI for instance). Or just go with a negative income tax, where someone who is disabled would have at least a guaranteed income level plus access to charity, family, etc. A downside risk of having governments involved in providing benefits to disabled people is the difficulty of attaining those benefits by having to jump through bureaucratic hoops. It also reduces potential market participation (ie, getting a job as a disabled person) by imposing new costs on employers. That is to say, the ADA is not without potential costs even for the disabled. It's possible that these are balanced with gains in rights and public standing, but we should not be quick to assume that legal structures and regulations are costless effects when assessing their utility.

14) Wants to end birthright citizenship. Believes that emergency rooms should have the right to turn away illegal immigrants.

- Both of these I don't agree with. Medical ethics violates the second one. A simpler solution is to allow immigrants (legal or not) to purchase health insurance. Illegals would simply not be able to do so with government subsidies. I don't think this actually drives up our costs as much as is believed. Terminal costs and care for the aged is far more expensive than the trumped up cost of a visit to the ER by someone with a cold. A better market solution still is to allow for less medical licensing and to put up more clinics or doc-in-the-box stations where medically trained people could issue a sort of triage and treat common ailments and injuries for the poor and thus reserving space in the ER for emergency cases. As far as birthright citizenship, I don't see how this proposal resolves any real problems. The supposed problem is that there are people dropping babies across our borders. The real world situation is that most immigrants (of the illegal variety) have lived here a while and start families while they are already here. The real world solution is to examine the possibility that our immigration laws are already too ridiculously overdone with bureaucracy, red tape, and impose considerable costs on potential immigrants, especially of the variety of trained and educated potential workers, who often end up in Canada or Europe or Australia instead where immigration can be easier. Possible compromises between the open-borders position (the most economically sensible one) and the xenophobic silliness of walls and changes to the 14th amendment include things like auctioning off immigration visas and removing the government's current legal intrusion into why anyone would wish to buy one (ie justifying that a skilled worker should be hired by a business, regardless of their country of origin).

15) Diss Mother Teresa: Voted against giving her the Congressional Gold Medal. Has argued that the medal, which costs $30,000, is too expensive.

Congress does a lot of idiotic and harmful things for symbolic reasons (drug laws for instance). This is at least not odious and obviously harmful, but it's still a waste of money designed to get a couple of Congressmen on TV. It's politically symbolic as opposed to societally so.

Basically I see 2.5 to 3 batshit crazy points versus about half a dozen where the status quo, populist position is the truly crazy one that makes no economic or social sense. I have my own misgivings about Ron (and Rand) Paul as opposed to Gary Johnson, and I understand that neither is likely to garner any reasonable press attention because their positions often require explanations rather than soundbytes. But really, would we prefer that say, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich as examples are the GOP nominee? What do they really offer? How are their positions more reasonable and sane?

Aftermath

In the wake of all this Osama killing business I'm hearing a fair amount of commentary relating to the old torture debate. Supposedly, we are told by pro-torture advocates like John Yoo or Rumsfeld, information relating to the courier was obtained in this way and thus that the eventual death of Osama itself is accountable to these methods of interrogation and information gathering making such choices worthwhile.

This has rather serious problems with it as a set of assumptions and conclusions.

1) We are told, but it is not demonstrated, that the information relating to the courier (as well as other Osama-related data) was obtained through waterboarding or other "harsh" measures.

2) We must assume that this information could not be obtained using normal interrogation procedures and that only torture was useful in obtaining it (a very dubious assumption based on the accumulated wisdom of interrogation specialists, including some who work for the US government in the FBI or armed services).

3) We must assume that these methods as employed did not also generate false or misleading information as well which, had it been ignored, might have hastened the capture or death of bin Laden or his associates. (based on the faulty intelligence relating to the Iraq War, this is a very dubious assumption).

4) It is assumed that people objecting to torture are objecting firstly and mostly on some notion that it doesn't or cannot work to generate useful intelligence information. I'm not aware that there are many people claiming that it is completely ineffective at obtaining intelligence outcomes. The usual complaints instead are that it is ineffective relative to less invasive and damaging alternatives and that it has strategic and moral downsides which would have outweighed any potential utility as an interrogation tactic and particularly as an interrogation strategy licensed and encouraged by government officials (that is, that if some agent in a hostile country tortures a captured prisoner for information in a raw action we might understand this action if it led to useful intelligence which saved lives, but not if we order that agent to conduct his interrogations using these methods).

5) I suppose a lesser conclusion being made is that having access to these prisoners through a system of unlawful detention allows us to generate ongoing intelligence and that this related to the operations which allowed us to kill bin Laden. I would argue that it is fully possible to contain these prisoners through convicting them of heinous crimes for which they are likely guilty and to then have access to them for on-going intelligence purposes. The status of detention as either the permanent stripping of legal rights or the incarceration of convicted human rights violators (ie, terrorists) doesn't seem to matter to the question of having access for intelligence developments.

6) Update. Most disturbing of all: We're running polls on "news networks" asking who we should torture, I mean conduct an "enhanced interrogation" on, next. To my mind this demonstrates that we, the public, do not have much of a clue why we would torture someone at all. Or, more likely, that we do, but we are not publicly acknowledging that its purpose isn't information gathering. It is the inflicting of pain or torment upon an avowed enemy for revenge or retribution.

Some more final thoughts

- I'm not concerned or happy that Osama is dead. What concerns me is the cost that a society bears in order to work lethal justice upon a chosen few, regardless of how self-evidentially they appear to deserve death. It seems a whole lot cheaper to go after a lot more who would work often considerable damage themselves, and devise strategies in foreign policy to do so (along with our criminal justice policies more generally where the death penalty costs us far more than life without parole AND leaves us with less messy moral complications of errors in our judgments)
- Osama bin Laden, or even Islamic radicalism more broadly, never was an existential threat. We reacted as though he was. For my part, it would be nice if we reacted to his death as though the existential threat is gone then, gave medals to the soldiers involved and declared victory, and just collectively pretended the war was over. The actual physical risks to terrorist acts most of us would suffer from doing so would be vanishingly small and not worth worrying about. The actual physical risk increase of terrorist acts in the fallout of this event itself is vanishingly small and should be ignored. Yet the overwhelming majority of people seem to think we need to ratchet up the security level in the wake, not decrease it or even keep it where it absurdly was and call it even. Maybe there's some psychological benefit to pretending that we have more levels of security to deploy than we are currently employing. But we don't (all we have is more levels of citizen harassment and debasement).
- My own memories of 9-11 are somewhat distinct from most, and I don't recall sensations of rage and a desire for revenge. I recall instead the sense of unity and brotherhood that the damage to our collective psyche had the unfortunate ability to call out from us, somewhat temporarily. Then we went back to "fuck you!" to the guy who cut us off in traffic when we were the one running a stop sign, after a couple minutes of humanity and basic decency. I'm somehow not surprised to see that this sense of ... oneness?, was not restored by killing someone associated with the initial tragedy.
- As a result, it sort of surprised me to see so many of my social media companions expressing concerns that the public face of our reactions seemed to be celebratory and to see calls for an abiding sense of humanity and mutual respect, even love. Our hatreds must have grown powerful, but I am somewhat heartened from my usually persistent cynical mood to see a few friendly faces in the crowd of bile.
- I was also not surprised to see people busy trying to play politics. To those who hadn't been paying attention, there is and wasn't a GOP candidate who had a chance in hell of winning BOTH the GOP primary AND the 2012 election (at least who was running, Mitch Daniels doesn't appear to be running, Romney wasn't winning the primary and nobody else yet in the field has a chance in hell of beating Obama in a national election where Democrats and moderates have votes). This probably clinched that barring some veeeeeerrrrry sluggish economic performances over the next year or so, and/or any large scale terrorist incidents. So it doesn't surprise me to see a lot of people who didn't like Obama, mostly conservatives, busy trying to exercise a lot of mental contortions to get out of having to assign him any credit to this event whatsoever so they can pretend to have a need to vote against him as some sort of "weakling" (nevermind his actual record for efficiently killing Muslim terrorists or deporting immigrants or whatever your conservative credential bugaboos are). Look, I don't like the guy either. If I have the option, I'll actually vote for Gary Johnson in a second over Obama. This whole Libya mess combined with a terrible civil liberties record (other than maybe on gay rights issues, it is at least as bad as Bush other than the torture, and I'd hold Bush down somewhere with Nixon and Wilson as one of our worst civil liberties upholding Presidents since Buchanan or Pierce, and Obama so far isn't doing very well either), pretty mediocre economic policy viewpoint (predictable for any national candidate from either party, more so for one tied in with both Unions and Wall St), and a very mixed record on other core issues like education policy doesn't impress me. So if it comes up that he doesn't deserve credit for something (the way we've somehow collectively decided that FDR and the New Deal got us out of the Depression, when in fact he bungled us into a second one), I'll be happy to let you know. This one, seems like it is fine so far.

Save the screaming and talking points for something that actually matters.

A list of thoughts

- Apologies for the delay, I'm fighting a cold and just got in from out of town.

- Does this mean we can keep our shoes on and take toothpaste on the plane again?
- Where's the long form death certificate? I'd expect there are plenty of morons waiting on that one now to give them proof he was really killed....
- I suppose in one sense, this was the objective, originally. I had no real beef with going into Afghanistan to clear out some bad guys who attacked us. I had a huge beef with occupying the country under the illusive (perhaps impossible) pretense of liberating it with a democracy. You don't just give people voting rights and call it a democratic state. Sorry. That's not how that works.
- So if it was the objective, does that mean the war is over?
- If not, then clearly we have a problem with how we conducted this war and its overarching strategies. I mean, almost 10 years to kill one guy? The Russians got Hitler in under 4 and he had the full power of a nation-state with imperial designs at his defence. I suppose he was a little easier to find (and killed himself), but still.
- I submit that our problem was that never in our strategy was it defined "what causes terrorism". We failed to understand the course that the war was taking. In so doing, large numbers of people who were doing little more than defending their homes and way of life were deemed to be terrorist threats to America and a (much) smaller number of people took it upon themselves to wage an active campaign on their behalf to attack Americans.
- A couple hundred thousand people are dead here. I'm not sure "rejoice!" or "dancing in the night" was the appropriate response. Even if the overwhelming majority of them are not Americans, the overwhelming majority of them were innocent people. Unless you're one of those "kill all ragheads!, they're ALL terrorists!" Islamophobic morons (and there are plenty of them out there in the country), this statement is true and should be sobering.

- So in summary: If it is somehow necessary to kill many, many thousands of (mostly innocent) people, many of them in a completely different country/region, in order to kill one guy, then Yay us. USA! USA! and all that. I'm pretty confident in saying that we failed this equation. So the correct answer is not to celebrate but to ask when we can stop doing what we're doing. It has way too high a cost and probably does nothing to keep us safe and now with this guy dead, doesn't have a clear end point.

- Addendum. I suppose it goes without saying that there was also these
- Gitmo
- Torture
- Civil liberties abuses involving rendition and wrongful detention, or even guest appearances on the no-fly list and our inability to get these overturned or penalized as inappropriate policy choices. To say nothing of now being able to claim someone is a terrorist and summarily kill them anywhere in the world without having to adjudicate the claims and without them being actively involved in combat or a terror plot.

But if I had to look back on this whole episode, this would be one way to look at it. We should not come away holding our heads high. We should be ashamed that in our collective rage we descended to levels well beneath the means available, and useful, to a powerful liberal democratic state.

But in the spirit of commemoration

- whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday....

Having long since seen little point in attending to religious ceremony, or really ceremony generally speaking, I see no reason to commemorate such useless things. So instead I will demonstrate my annoyance with some particular commemorations.

Twisting Fawkes attempt to impose Catholicism into a struggle for freedom is a little off-putting, but otherwise, it is not all that distant the operations of most modern religious institutions and their promises of order, of freedom from thought (rather than of thought), and so on from V's speech.

I suppose if your desire is to depose of your reason and your faculty for tolerance of viewpoints distinct from your own in exchange for an illusory sense of balance and appoint to yourself a label of holy moral judge of the character and habits of others, if your desire is to absolve yourself the responsibility to live in exchange for the presumption of an afterlife, and that always full of reward. If it is to demand of others the conformity to your comfortable assumptions and claims of common sense rather than investigation of wisdom and a discomforting presumption that you might be wrong, then religion is the perfect world for you.

But I'd have to ask how far it has fallen since Aquinas and Augustine and others to make a challenge of free will and the responsibility of engaging and wrestling with one's moral ethical standards over a lifetime somehow a mortal danger worth casting aside in favor of being told what to do and how to live by others.

In which religious fundamentalism is revealed

Seems like a plausible thesis: That religious identity and the fervor which it has undertaken in parts of the world is a reaction to a perceived threat to identity and individual meaning. It is a lot more comfortable to "find" meaning by having someone else tell you what it is I suppose, and much easier to make sense of the behavior of "others" when you belong to a firmly set group holding strict ideas. I think this method is lazier and often leads to a lot of sloppy thinking (plus inherently leads to tribalism), but then again, most people do not do a whole lot of existential questioning of their lives and societies either.

The biggest element to all of this is the resilience, of a sort, of universalist set of values against this allergic reaction to cultural shifts that some have adopted. I'm not totally sure I buy his thesis that it's an effective response. I'd have to probably see how he lays out the case for that. But it is essentially what non-religious fundamentalist people often do, adopt an overarching view of say "tolerance" or a respect for free people's choices within some reasonable constraints and move on rather than busy themselves worrying about what everyone else is doing. The crucial part is that such a set of ideals worries less about what others are doing, but it still has to grapple with the individual's demands for status games somewhere in there. I'm not sure that his explanation is satisfactory for how to thread that needle. Nor does it seem to me that if this is already a commonly held liberal worldview, so to speak, that it would have any sensible impact upon the traditionalist worldviews that are attempting to insulate themselves against this modern global environment. I don't see a whole lot of crossover happening here already.

I'm also not convinced that the problem is worse or amplified in a social media standpoint. I think the problem always existed in humanity and that there are just more people in the ballgame than ever before competing for those same social accolades of status. The ballgame is different than just "valedictorian at your high school" or something like that from the previous generations, sure. I don't see how that intensifies the problem. It would seem like that means there are more winners (and more losers), but that there are more opportunities as well to get back into the "game".

The most convincing thread of his thought is the explanation for things like suicide bombing (along with other acts of isolationist violence engaged in by fundamentalists, like murdering doctors for example). A desire for immortality that is so powerful it leads us to completely devalue life itself? ....And to wonder that I called that whole afterlife concept the most pernicious aspect of religious dogma and theology.

As if I needed another reason

to be pissed with this guy

Another difference

There seems to be a distinction between most libertarians and progressives over economics, and commonly we are lumped together with right-wing conservatives for this distinction. While it is broadly speaking true that libertarians and conservatives share some economic views, this appears to summarize what we lack in common on economics.

"Libertarians generally have two broad types of reasons for favoring a free-market system, which countenances potentially quite large inequalities, without a great deal of redistribution: First, they think the incentives and decentralized coordination this system produces generate much more wealth for the society as a whole over the long run. Second, they think it’s an important way of respecting people’s free choices and agreements (given, of course, a bunch of controversial assumptions about the conditions under which a choice counts as “free” and the scope of our rights over physical stuff, as opposed to the added value human effort imbues that stuff with).

Conservatives will say those things too, but it seems to me they’re far more likely to rely heavily (primarily?) on the idea that wealth is a deserved reward for hard work, ingenuity, prudence, and whatever other virtues they ascribe to the rich—while the poor must similarly deserve their lot by dint of being lazy, dissolute, and so on."

This is why, when discussions about drug-testing welfare recipients comes up, I'm having to fend off these absolutist perspectives that all poor people are inherently vile creatures who don't "deserve" the money that we give to them and thus that somehow instituting a vast draconian system of testing at our expense would, presumably, give us the decreased liability of taking care of the poor and downtrodden. When in fact, most people are poor for structural reasons, and many of those are poor for temporary reasons (job loss in a downsizing field, divorce, newly minted graduate, etc). Drug testing these people serves no purpose and we are now talking about a set of people who are chronically poor for other reasons. Most of those are not Calvinistic predestination any more than people are born with an inherent quality that provides them with wealth and prosperity. Things like poor education systems, broken homes, lack of societal role models, generally poor incentives, lack of job opportunities in poor neighbourhoods growing up, etc. Much of this is beyond individual control and somehow it becomes thus that we are bound to punish people for it by presuming that they are guilty of being poor for other reasons (never mind that people can be quite wealthy or successful and use drugs, alcohol, etc, but that they also acquire and use drugs or alcohol in "approved manners").

And there are a whole wealth of preference sets that conservatives internalise and do not wish to see the public choose, and seek to restrict these while posing as the agency who opposes bigger governments (as a system requiring drug tests of welfare recipients would be, or going back further, as a system requiring state authorities to help seek out escaped slaves or to engage in conquest for an empire of slavery would be, from those former "state's rights" folks). Drug wars, abortion/birth control, religions other than Christianity (or whatever the predominant religious agency is in a conservative's realm of existence), education, use of language, cultural tastes in art or music, expressions of sexuality, forms of sexuality, etc. All attempts to restrict as though such restrictions are best used through governments and would somehow be modest or small intrusions into private preferences of a broad subset of people who are not conservatives and do not share these preferences.

But of course at the same time, I have to beat back the prospect that all wealthy people are inherently scummy people that should have their wealth and prosperity confiscated and provided to the poor. I'm reasonably comfortable with a set of liberaltarian values which might include a welfare state which must be funded, in part, by redistributive or progressive taxation. But the sort of political optics that have to be engaged in do little to encourage people to adopt what appear to be successful models for a prosperous life. And of course neither do our actual policies favor such things where they create barriers to entry for no apparent reason other than to protect or at least insulate market participants from the vagaries of the market system itself. One reason libertarians are fond of freer markets is that wealth can be overcome by new players in the field, new technologies, and so on, rather than it to be used to rig the market against both. Conservatives are often as uncomfortable by the prospect that a market system changes societies very rapidly and somewhat unpredictably just as progressives are. And this leads to half-adoption of things like a market for education or health care, mostly just to subsidize their own choices at preference to those of others however, and not to actually create open markets where their preferences would have to compete. Progressives are fond of somehow concluding that given a choice between the broken systems we have now and more socialized ones, the public will generally choose the more socialized one. And this is correct. But it is not the choice that a libertarian, free market endorser proposes having in play either.

The game is rigged. And it's rigged by both the players toward having their own slightly different flavor of tea. Since I hate tea anyway, I'm not fond of playing by those rules.

A list of biases and preferences

1) Pro-civil liberties/anti-security theater
1a) Pro-free speech especially.
2) Pro-sex ed/anti-anti-science (ie, abstinence only sex ed)
2b) Pro-vaccines too for that one
3) Anti-dumb regulation. I see these all the time in the form of licensing laws, sign restrictions, most traffic laws, etc. A better way to put this is that I am anti-symbolic laws. Laws should actually function to do things against that which they purport to oppose when they are constructed. They should not simply be a pass-forget system in which we feel better for having done something (or opposed something) and we all move on without having evaluated whether the law actually benefits the people it is publicly intended to. Most laws will have beneficiaries, but they are often authorities, or rent seeking industries, and not say, poor people, or minorities. Many laws use the fallacy of a corner solution also and ignore their significant costs and effects in their haste to attend to a single issue (and often enough, badly at that too, as in the case of anti-drug laws).
4) By contrast, pro-externality prices. So by my reckoning, gasoline, most forms of energy, water, meat, corn, or milk probably would either cost more if left to their own devices in the market or would use more efficient methods to gather them (as would most narcotics cost more in my idealized state, as they would be largely legal and taxed). Sugar would probably cost less. Corn and milk probably would too. As would labour
5) Pro-immigration/anti-xenophobia. I think there are some smart arguments against mass immigrations of people across borders, but most of them are coached in the same tired "logic" of the Know Nothings in the 1840s and 50s. That these are a noisy, dirty lout of criminals and degenerates streaming across the border. Send them back from whence they came! And so on.
6) Pro-Utilitarianism and empiricism. Anti-received "wisdom". Lots of arguments are just utterly wrong when they come this way because people don't fully understand where they are coming from themselves, having not had to think through their beliefs. If you have very few critical first principles, and arrive at them basically as "free people will tend to do better than otherwise", because that seems to be the historical trend, then it's a stronger case to be made than "america is teh awesome" or some such.
7) Anti-emotional appeal. I see people doing this frequently. The plural of your anecdote is not data.
8) Pro-market. I'm not definitely anti-union, but I'm not all that fond of them at this point either. They have not done much of benefit for the public since we enacted a series of labour laws and they mostly operate as another source of rent-seeking for an industry lobby.

Planned parenthood and other bits and pieces

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I remember being stopped in the street in Philadelphia by an activist wanting funding for activism (and not for the actual day-to-day operations for Planned Parenthood), and my response to this...was that they didn't need to worry about it. I'd be okay giving money to the actual organisation. Not for lobbying that wasn't necessary because I was certain that it a) wouldn't pass and b) wouldn't get through the Senate or the President. And c) wasn't necessary to cut in the first place. It mostly saves us money to give poor people access to cheap preventive health care for one and it's not nearly a huge chunk of the funding (neither was NPR, though I'm certainly more comfortable saying we don't really need social funding for public broadcasting companies). Symbolic politics being what they are, I guess it was important to go to war over a few pennies on the floor when there are dollars to be had that are flying out of the building. Remind me again why I'm supposed to take these Tea Partiers seriously?

(Wake me when more Republicans take Paul Ryan seriously. Much less when any Democrats do and propose something of their own which deals with entitlements. Or when Paul Ryan takes himself seriously and proposes things dealing with tax reform more specifically than "we need to do it" and with defence and "security" cuts to boot. He didn't cut nearly enough in my view, still I'm glad someone took using block grants for medicaid seriously at least).

But in any case, the "not intended to be a factual statement" meme, that's glorious.