Libertarianism, Proper Politics and "Property" Proper

The Lesson of Rod Blagojevich: We Need Better Government!

But if government just doesn’t work, limited government just doesn’t work either. So either go ahead and come out as an anarchist or swallow your iconoclastic loathing of “good government” pap and admit that you want better government. I want better government!

Generally, we’re more likely to get relatively good government in a cultural climate that encourages good government. Ridiculing as naive norms of anti-corruption and civic responsibility doesn’t undermine belief in the efficacy of government so much as expose the one who ridicules as a defector in a crucial cooperative game, undermining his reputation as a sincere advocate of the public interest. It is valuable and necessary to point out that certain institutional arrangements are unstable and invite corruption, and should therefore be reformed. But people are more likely to listen to you if they believe you believe reform is possible.

this might be satire... (on both our parts?)

comment from a fellow leftist that I highly disagree with:

FDR's and LBJ's fascist tendencies are the reason we have entitlements, and the United Auto Workers' fascist tendencies are the main reason the auto companies are failing. We blame CEOs, and exonerate unionized workers, because CEOs make "excessive" amounts of money, while workers are, well, working. But we never stop to think that CEOs have a lot of talent, education, and jobs that require hard work and much more stress than working on an assembly line. The advantage of being on the left is that you don't have to think or put forth any effort to be considered compassionate.

From this quote Robbie obviously took the side of Marx in his spat with Bakunin. I took the other side and I think history has exposed Marx as having been wrong about decreasing liberty via authoritarianism as an end to be sought.

Entitlements via subconscious pathologies? Robbie you are mixing micro with macro... even more you are taking quick steps from conscious to subconscious. Tough to do which is why I might be misinterpreting some of your positions.

But moving on... how do personal pathologies of elected officials equal out to social policies that are popular? Directly mind you not indirectly... because then everything gets thrown into the interpretation

So did the fascist tendencies of FDR beat the fascist society of Germany? If so then good. Ditto for passing popular legislation.

UAW? If you are opposed to the purchasing power of walmart and want to attack their ceo's then i'd be happy to get into a discussion of the collective bargaining pro's and con's of the UAW. I hold human beings to be more important than excessive shareholder value thats an ideological position on my part. The idea that unions are the reasons for their troubles shows a very shallow grasp of the issue, unions didn't stop the foreign makers from making popular high quality cars. If the American Auto Manufactures management aren't as good as the competitors with managing their unions,well that's a problem but not the unions or the other compainies.

CEO's have talent...well, some do some don't.

Ineptitude and pay rate are not necessarily corollaries.

Larry Summers is getting a promotion to a job in the Obama administration for missing and helping perpetuate the housing bubble!?!?!?

What percentage of economist missed the housing bubble as a major crisis... and/or stayed silent on it 75,85,95%????

How many of them got fired for it?

I am a lowly wage slave mind you so i'm oft to be disingenuous and ignorant of so many things.

As to Robbie's experience from being on the left, that "you don't have to think or put forth any effort to be considered compassionate" I can't speak to it because I have never worked with people and talked about compassion at all. I've always worked with people on the left talking about improving the quality of life for people through policies and organizing. At least in my experience compassion ain't a topic of discussion much.

Mind you compassion (ethics more broadly) often is a topic in my political philosophy classes... and I must confess I do enjoy a good philosophical debate. But when it comes to actual politics and organizing, dealing with very real problems and how to solve them--what I would define as "politics"--there isn't much use for such ivory tower intellectualism. To someone in politics words have meaning... but human consequences are the important issue at hand.

That does drum up some debates within social science has to how and what we are measuring with our analysis. But i'll leave that for anohter day.

Lets put away 102 Trillion dollars this week...

I should be studying for my theories of democracy final but this is too much fun...

Jason responds again:

How can you say that it's not true with any certainty? These programs will be consuming almost 20% of GDP in 30 years. The current budget, not including bailouts, is around 21% of GDP. You're talking about adding another entitlement to these boondoogles programs.

It doesn't make any sense.

I believe markets work.

And I'm assuming we're speaking to the medicare issue and the market competition that the government can bring via a plan you can buy into as the entitlement you are speaking of?

Does anyone really believe cutting into profit margins of other firms doesn't lower costs and makes markets more efficient?

Does anyone believe that government purchasing power won't lower costs of medicare by providing cheaper drugs? We're not currently allowed to negotiate prices by purchasing in bulk thanks to Republicans.

We have to waste revenue subsidizing private companies who already get protectionism from patents. I'm on board with getting rid of wasteful spending--who isn't by the by?

If one doesn't think purchasing power would push down costs why is the purchasing power of walmart so effective for lowering costs?

Also note a clever chess move in the NCPA study Jason cites...

"Looking indefinitely into the future, anticipated benefits, over and above expected premiums and dedicated tax revenues, amount to $102 trillion. This is about 7 times the size of the U.S. economy. It is the amount the government needs to have set aside today, invested and earning interest, to fund these programs indefinitely"

Look at social security... its set up so the workforce today is paying for the current benefits going out. So its a straw man to say anyone is arguing we put all that money away today.

And once again... are there any other government programs we project 70 years into the future? Why not project the military expenditures for the next 1000 years? Might as well throw up the white flag, cut and run so to speak... we can't afford it.

I don't know of anyone saying we save all of it up today? Err... aside from ncpa. No wonder they are worried about it... (on second reading my hyperbole doesn't work... of coarse they don't.)

update: also check this... they state:

Congress often passes legislation that benefits current generations by imposing costs on future ones — Social
Security and Medicare are prominent examples.

Question... are there any government programs whose sole goal is to benifit future generations?

In what democracy could a politician possibly get elected by saying: "We need to spend x amount of dollars so that every child in 2085 has a robot of their own--I don't care about helping citizens today... we need to think about our future first." Whose gonna vote for that? People are greedy and selfish (i.e. people work on incentives--the reason markets work so effectively).

Obviously the social security surplus was about thinking about the future... but it was for the future in the sense that its our economic sustainability that is important--and people do have incentives to give a decent quality of life to their kids...

critique of enlightenment thinking

The Limits of Individual Knowledge

As Barack Obama is putting together his team that will help "fix the economy", we need to keep in mind that in a world with nearly 7 billion people all acting in their own self-interest, no one person or one group of people can ever have the knowledge to successfully tinker with the economic system.

Case in point: Less than three months ago, Hurricane Ike hike the Gulf Coast and already sky-high gas prices shot even higher. After more than than seven years of increasing gas prices because of terrorism and two Middle Eastern wars, everyone just knew that the old ways of American life were over. From business to politics to media to the arts, everyone in the American elite called for a "rationalization" of American energy policy.

I commented:

I think the Kennedy administration proved that the technical class isn't all knowing.

Well, in reality... look at any elite group since the beginning of time. There will always be those who promise salvation or claim some group will bring it to us.

That's not how salvation works, and that's not how human knowledge works. Another failure of enlightenment thinking really...

Also moving from theory to real world. I don't think terrorism, and two middle eastern wars, were the only contributors to our transportation crisis. Bad Transportation policy and bad governance doesn't help... as Doug noted:

there is no way any group of people - no matter how smart - can have enough knowledge to successfully plan the economy. The world is just too complicated, and the only way to efficiently allocate resources is through the market economy.

Throwing up our hands and saying here is the only solution, be it certain market approaches or the hands off "the private sector is the best way to address these issues"--the way people too often do. Has reaped the mess we are in (mind you bad transportation policies are supported by Dem's too!). This situation and many we fcae right now are of the "hands off" descent. This fact would fall within the logic of the post as well.

Thinking we can determine the most successful plan without using our best understanding of markets and the tried and true test-- what happens and is happening in the real world when we implement it--would be a stunning failure of human thinking.

Not that such is anything outside of the norm (myself included).

Policy is not pretty, representative government and the compromises and deal making it entails is most definitely not pretty. Life isn't fair... we just roll up our sleeves and try to find policies that work.

Good point by David Brooks...

Today's op-ed column "The Insider's Crusade"

Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced "fresh faces" to change things. After all, it was L.B.J. who passed the Civil Rights Act. Moreover, because he is so young, Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.

I hate the "reformers" who want to "change Washington." I'm systemic by nature. I see dead people as that kid in the sixth sense said.

You want the smartest in the class, you want the most vetted politico in the legislature to deal with parliamentary maneuvers that might stymie your agenda. To bring "change" is actually counter intuitive. The smart competent people aren't the ones who have gotten us into this mess to begin with.

The populist screed of ending the corruption 9 times out of 10 tends to be just that... a screed.

Even though we may disagree...

Somewhere in my heart of hearts I have a deep respect for classical liberals: "Buckley first, then Martin."

I want to read... but need to sleep... so I'll keep it for tomorrow with just a link...

How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Charles S. Peirce
Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302.