The Ultimate Putdown for Libertarian Ideologues

This is the relevant quote that you need to hit libertarians with:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

John Rogers is the author of the above devastating putdown. And here's his own carefully crafted profile of himself from his blog:

John Rogers started doing stand-up in 1988, got his Physics degree in 1990, began writing television in 1995, writing movies in 1999, writing comics in 2005 and writing for RPG's in 2007. He plainly needs to focus.

Sounds like a truly interesting character. Oh... and I bet he sleeps with a copy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings under his pillow every night!

My problem with libertarians is that they live in fantasy world.

• Ayn Rand argued for self sufficiency and spewed poisonous verbiage about social programs, but when she became sick with cancer, she maximized her use of every social program available to her to cover her costs. But she carefully kept this "character flaw" hidden from her followers.


• Friedrich von Hayek was induced to come back to the US and join a right wing think tank where his job would be to rant about FDR's entitlement progams and to do everything possible to destroy that "socialist" program. But before he would agree to come back he had to make sure that he would qualify for Medicare. Of course he never advertised this inconsistency between the social philsophy he espoused and his own personal standards of looking after No. 1 at the expense of those he could fleece.

These "individualists" are only too eager to convince you to take on the heroic pose and rage against the world, but they were cowards who took advantage of every penny of entitlement money they could get. They were utter hypocrites.

What really, really drives me crazy is that they espouse a "social philosophy" which is a pure fantasy. They deny any social relationships and declare that the only "glue" holding a society together are freely entered "contracts". But how many families negotiate a contract with their newborn? Nobody lives in the fantasy world of absolute independent self-made "individualist" that these crazies espouse.

Political Myth-Making

Humans are funny creatures. We are driven by basic needs, urges, and instincts like any animal, but we strangely are driven by symbols and ideas. Propaganda is a set of ideas shaped to control people's thinking and actions. The US in the last 40 years has fallen sway to right wing fanatics with a poisonous brew of propaganda that has won the hearts and minds of roughly a third of the population. The price for this debasement of political ideas, dialog, and debate can be seen in the broken politics of Washington.

Here is a bit from an article by William K. Black about the poison of selling the simplistic idea that America is divided between "makers and takers". (For details on Black, refer to his Wikipedia entry.)

Moore’s column deplores the debasement of the American economy by government employees.

“More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers.”

The claim that employees involved in making physical things that are purchased in the markets are uniquely valorous is an odd argument for someone with his professional career (Moore ran the ultra conservative, “supply side” anti-tax group, the Club for Growth). The trade and tax policies he embraces encouraged U.S. businesses to export their manufacturing plants (and their jobs) to low-wage/low-tax nations and to import food produced in those low-wage/low-tax nations. Moore has praised both states and nations that serve as tax havens. He has singled out the Texas model – low wage, low tax, low government services, and hostile to safety rules. Moore has worked for years to punish the “makers” and produce the condition he deplores in which the number of U.S. “makers” has fallen sharply. His column decries the budgetary crises in states and localities, but it was the Great Recession driven by the criminogenic environment his anti-regulatory policies created together with the anti-tax hysteria generated by his repeatedly falsified fantasy that slashing taxes for the rich increases tax revenues that drove that budgetary crisis. Architects of the crisis like Moore who write primarily to excuse their consistent failures should stop. They have done enough damage to the world for a dozen lifetimes.

Consider the implications of Moore’s assertion that people who do not work in manufacturing and farming are “takers.” Under this dichotomy the world is divided between “makers” and “takers,” the biggest “takers” in the world work on Wall Street, the City of London, and the worst kleptocracies – the Wall Street Journal’s core readership. If “makers” of manufactured goods and crops are uniquely valorous, then Moore’s logic requires that it is the workers in these sectors – not the managers, professionals, and clerical workers – who are the actual “makers” who embody that unique valor. (Again, it is passing strange that Moore has dedicated his life to rewarding these uniquely valorous Americans by exporting their jobs and leaving them unemployed or employed at lower wages.) If one can claim to be a “maker” by performing functions that merely assist the actual “makers” make things, then we are all “makers.”

Moore, however, implicitly makes two assertions about government employees – all government employees are “takers” and only government employees are “takers.” Moore doesn’t attempt to support any of his assertions, and they are logically inconsistent. These truths are apparently self-evident to Mr. Moore – people are not created equal. Americans who choose to be government employees are inferior because they are not endowed by their creator with an adequate taste for risk.

“Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

In Moore’s world, an American who wishes to work as a “maker” and develops the skills to be a “maker” has no inalienable right to a job as a “maker” at a living wage. Why? If (1) there really is something particularly virtuous about working in manufacturing or farming, (2) there are too few Americans working in those industries, and (3) the Americans who wish to work in those industries embrace “tak[ing] career risks” and have prepared themselves by education to be able to be productive “makers” why not commit the U.S. to ensure that these virtuous, risk-loving young people can find jobs in manufacturing and farming in the U.S.

Moore is not strong on nuance. All government employees are “bureaucrats” in his parable of “makers” and “takers.” No corporations are bureaucratic. Moore’s fable is crude propaganda. Let us add some reality. Our largest group of federal employees provides national security (DoD, CIA, NSA, DHS, DOJ/FBI, VA, etc.). Many of these “bureaucrats” are living their parasitical life of ease as “takers” in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The virtuous Taliban are busy being “makers” – cultivating poppies.) I do not recommend telling our troops that they are risk-averse “takers” and bureaucrats. The exact number of federal employees engaged in national security is unknown because many employees in other agencies, e.g., NASA, actually work on national security under various degrees of deliberately misleading information. There are over a million federal military personnel. DoD, Homeland Security (DHS), and the VA have nearly a million civilian employees.

As Black walks you through the "argument" of takers vs. makers, it is quickly obvious that this is not a serious analysis and can't support any real understanding of the economic reality in the US and the value of various jobs in that economy. But this kind of short-circuit to thinking, this propaganda, is the kind of stuff that right wing radio show hosts spew and it gets picked up by those who are uncritical and unwilling to think for themselves. It poisons politics in America until you get the kind of collapse you are seeing as the Republicans play "the card of debt ceiling" in their grand strategy to destroy Obama.

The Sad State of Integrity and the Law in the US

James Fallows' blog has posted many times over the outrageous behaviour of Senator James Inhofe landing a plane at a closed airport endangering work crews on the runway and then browbeating the FAA into "forgiving" him his transgressions.

Fallows has raised a comment up to the level of a post because it identifies a very important point:

I'm surprised by how deeply saddened I am by this. On reflection I think I'm responding to the decreasing degree that we are a nation of laws, and the premise that no one is above the law. Nixon was pardoned to save the country the anguish of prosecuting him. And yet, look at what we've lost as a result: Had Nixon been prosecuted, would Bush/Cheney have been so cavalier? (And they, too, are being given a pass.) The CIA brazenly destroyed evidence they were under judicial instruction to preserve. (They are being given a pass.) CIA members have been given a pass because John Yoo told them they could perform acts that we prosecuted as war crimes 60 years ago. Remember when the "following orders" defense was not recognized at Nuremburg? Will anyone in power ever again feel the deterrent effect of the Law?

That a sitting senator would have the hubris to say that he did nothing wrong in a situation that no pilot could condone, speaks volumes. That he was given a pass speaks to a serious erosion in the integrity of the fabric on which our nation rests. The Law? That's just for the grunts at Abu Ghraib, not the superiors who set them up. Redress of grievances? Not if some politician merely utters the phrase "national security." Justice and Law in this country are becoming source of cynicism.

The Law is not real. It's an idea; it exists only in the human mind. It's nothing but ink squiggles on a piece of paper. It is only as honorable as the honor given to it by those in authority; it only deserves respect if it is applied with equity. And, like the creditability of the US dollar, the minute that we cease to respect and to protect it, it will be gone.

As far as I can tell "justice" in the US was never as respected and obeyed as it has been idolized. Any country that could proudly proclaim:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

But then write a constitution that ignored slavery except for some hard fought clauses over "importation" of slaves and "counting" of slaves:

Section 2 of Article I defined other persons as "three-fifths" of a person for calculations of each state's official population for representation and federal taxation

What an odd document. Slaves are legally not "persons" but "property" but for perposes of sharing in political power and enjoying pork barrel politics when that "property" became 3/5 of a person.

No, the US has never been really strong on integrity and lawfulness. But I fully agree with the commenter on Fallows' blog about the sad state of the law and government over the last 40 years.

How to Make a Miniature World

According to Charlie Stross, the science fiction writer, you really can't do it. It is a wild-eyed dream of fanatics who want to crawl back into a "simpler" past, especially one where they would be the overlords. Here's the starting bit of a fascinating post on Charlie Stross's blog Charlie's Diary:

There's a deceptively simple question that's been bugging me this week, and it is this:

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

There are huge political ramifications hiding behind this question. Let me unpack them for you.

Conservative politicians in the US — and elsewhere — get a lot of mileage from appeals to false nostalgia, to a yearning for a time when things were simpler, everyone was sturdily self-sufficient or knew their place (or both), and government was small (sometimes small enough to drown in a bathtub). Nostalgia trips manifest themselves in all sorts of curious places. In SF (the literary field I know most about) we have the perennial libertarian/space colonization nexus.We have Ayn Rand, and her wish-fulfilment nerd fantasy of a world sustained by a tiny, overworked minority of geniuses who, if only they could demand a level of rewards corresponding to their work, would be rich beyond dreams of avarice (and able to make the trains run on time). Outside it, we have the peculiarly rustic aspirations of the green fringe, who'd like to see a world of five million or so pre-industrial humans living in harmony with nature. In the Republican party of the United States we see rhetoric couched in hatred for "big government", and among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending framed with calls for a big society in which many current government services will be delivered by voluntary citizens groups instead.

I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.

Urban Myths have us by the Throat!

Here's a post by Roy W. Spencer that was put on Anthony Watt's What's Up With That blog. Spencer raises the key point:

I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.

But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical one to one of near-certainty. The actual scientific basis for the plausible hypothesis that humans could be responsible for most recent warming is contained in the cautious scientific language of many scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of the uncertainties and caveats are then minimized with artfully designed prose contained in the Summary for Policymakers (SP) portion of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Summary was clearly meant to instill maximum alarm from a minimum amount of direct evidence.

Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.

Just as the tales of marauding colonies of alligators living in New York City sewers are based upon some kernel of truth, so too is the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But there is a big difference between reports of people finding pet alligators that have escaped their owners, versus city workers having their limbs torn off by roving colonies of subterranean monsters.

...

In December, hundreds of bureaucrats from around the world will once again assemble, this time in Copenhagen, in their attempts to forge a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. And as has been the case with every other UN meeting of its type, the participants simply assume that the urban legend is true. Indeed, these politicians and governmental representatives need it to be true. Their careers and political power now depend upon it.

And the fact that they hold their meetings in all of the best tourist destinations in the world, enjoying the finest exotic foods, suggests that they do not expect to ever have to be personally inconvenienced by whatever restrictions they try to impose on the rest of humanity.

If you present these people with evidence that the global warming crisis might well be a false alarm, you are rewarded with hostility and insults, rather than expressions of relief. The same can be said for most lay believers of the urban legend. I say “most” because I once encountered a true believer who said he hoped my research into the possibility that climate change is mostly natural will eventually be proved correct.

Unfortunately, just as we are irresistibly drawn to disasters – either real ones on the evening news, or ones we pay to watch in movie theaters – the urban legend of a climate crisis will persist, being believed by those whose politics and worldviews depend upon it. Only when they finally realize what a new treaty will cost them in loss of freedoms and standard of living will those who oppose our continuing use of carbon-based energy begin to lose their religion.

Go read the whole post, it is well worth your time.

Canadian Health Care Myths

Paul Krugman pointed to this article by Rhonda Hackett in the Denver Post that debunks myths about "socialized" medicine, long lines, and oppressed doctors under the Canadian health care system:

As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one.

Often I'll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner's nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one's merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems.

Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.

Yet, the debate rages on. Indeed, it has reached a fever pitch since President Barack Obama took office, with Americans either dreading or hoping for the dawn of a single-payer health care system. Opponents of such a system cite Canada as the best example of what not to do, while proponents laud that very same Canadian system as the answer to all of America's health care problems. Frankly, both sides often get things wrong when trotting out Canada to further their respective arguments.

As America comes to grips with the reality that changes are desperately needed within its health care infrastructure, it might prove useful to first debunk some myths about the Canadian system.

Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.

Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.

Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.

Myth: Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.

Myth: There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.

Myth: Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.

Myth: Canada is a socialized health care system in which the government runs hospitals and where doctors work for the government.

Myth: There aren't enough doctors in Canada.

Go read the article to get the specifics of the various myths.

Self Image?

Here's a posting by Paul Krugman in his NY Times blog that points out that Americans have yet another error in their self image. I've bolded the key part:

Interesting paper from CEPR:

Despite our national self-image as a nation of small businesses and entrepreneurs, the United States small-business sector is proportionately not as large an employer as the small-business sectors in the rest of the world’s rich economies.

A couple of possible explanations. One is our lack of national health insurance; I personally know a number of people who gave up jobs at small firms in order to get health coverage. Another possibility, more favorable to the United States, is that in some European countries (Italy comes to mind) firms stay small to escape onerous regulations.

Either way, though, one more American myth bites the dust. We’re not independent free spirits; on the contrary, we’re more likely than Europeans to be cubicle rats working for big employers.

Another myth that Americans like to believe about themselves is that "America is the land of opportunity" meaning "you can rise from the humblest background to the very top". That isn't true. What is true is that it is a land of opportunity for the very, very rich. American has a gini coefficient closer to the third world than to the developed world (i.e. rich who tower above their "fellow" citizens in wealth). From the Wikipedia page, here are the gini coefficient numbers for the US as calculated by the Census Bureau:

1929: 45.0 (estimated)
1947: 37.6 (estimated)
1967: 39.7 (first year reported)
1968: 38.6 (lowest index reported)
1970: 39.4
1980: 40.3
1990: 42.8
2000: 46.2
2005: 46.9
2006: 47.0 (highest index reported)
2007: 46.3

Think about what the above numbers for the US means. You know that the rich were ascendant in the 1920s, you know that in the 1950s and 60s the "middle class" blossomed in the US. And you know that from Reagan on the right wing's philosophy of "trickle down" has meant that the poor huddle around the tap waiting for the odd drop to trickle out of the faucet.

From here you can see that the UN calculates the gini coefficient for the US at 40.8 but Japan is at 24.9, Sweden, 25, Canada 32.6, and the UK 36. On the other hand, China is 46.9 and Mexico is 46.1. Think about this. (Note: The US number differs between the Census Bureau and the UN's Human Development Index, but the basic pattern and interpretation remain the same.)

So much for self image.