CapitalistImperialistPig

Who is not a Slave? Cicero declared that any man who works for wages makes himself a slave. Certainly Walmart thinks so. By a slight extension, those who sell the product of their work are equally enslaved. A couple of thousand years later, libertarians discovered that anyone who paid taxes was a slave. Whom is left? Only rentiers - those who live solely by the labor of others - who don't pay taxes. Mitt Romney, for example. Given the above its not surprising that many of the rentier class worship at the libertarian altar. It's less clear why others do. Humans, as I keep saying, are social animals, and as such we live in a network of mutual obligations and duties. The tension between community and liberty is a dominant theme in human morality and all our moral dilemmas. Libertarians resolve that tension by rejecting community and making liberty the be all and end all. In doing so, I argue, they reject a fundamental component of human nature and expose themselves ...

Tyler Cowen has an annoying post entitled Who is Against Individual Responsibility ? I find the post and it's title annoying because it's laden with so much political and ideological bullshit. Nearly everybody approves of people taking responsibility where they can and exercising initiative to solve their own problems. What the people who trumpet "individual responsibility" really seem to want, though, is avoiding any personal responsibility beyond their own narrowest interests. The Koch brothers and their ilk may blather about getting the government off their backs, but what they really want is the government on their side - fighting wars to preserve "their" oil interests, acting as enforcers and collectors for the fees they extract from the economy, guaranteeing their investments in shaky economies, and so on.

Kevin Drum reads James Q. Wilson on the decline of violent crime in the last couple of decades. Crime guru James Q. Wilson surveys the evidence for why violent crime rates have dropped so dramatically over the past two decades. The state of the economy, he says, seems to have little to do with it: The biggest effect seems to be due to getting rid of lead based paints, so that kids have less lead in their developing brains.  Bottom line: So if I can put words into Wilson's mouth, the decline in crime is perhaps one-quarter due to increased incarceration, one-quarter due to reduced cocaine use, and one half due to reductions in blood lead levels in children. Note that getting rid of lead based paints and reducing cocaine use are both the kinds of actions libertarians abhor.

It's been my experience that when something intellectual really irritates me, there is a significant chance that my brain is telling me that I'm missing something. So it has been with Libertarianism. It has always been repellent to my deepest instincts, but I keep coming back to see if I really might be missing something important. I would like to thank Tyler Cowen and (especially) Steve Landsburg for relieving me of that worry. Not that I'm implying that Tyler Cowen isn't worthwhile - just the opposite - but he gets wack too when he gets libertarian.

Yes, Libertarians are as wack as we suspected . Via Arun Even genius has its limitations. Stupidity is not thus constrained. By way of response, let me just note that the value of the reductio ad absurdum is that it reveals who and what is absurd.

The election of Obama has made secession a once again popular topic among the fruitcake right. Here is Alex Tabarrok talking it up: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/06/secession.html After a long quote from Patri Friedman, Alex throws in his own suggestion: “Finally, don't forget: If at first you don't secede, try, try again.” May I suggest a historically more plausible slogan? “If at first you don’t secede, enjoy your dance on the hanging tree!” No doubt libertarians would find this punishment a bit harsh, but I don’t really agree. Jefferson, the rebel and revolutionary (or secessionist, if you prefer), was wise and honest enough to note that governments should not be dissolved for “light or transient causes.” Given his position, it’s quite natural that he didn’t want to go into detail, but the reasons are hardly obscure. A nation is an organic whole, and tearing it apart is a traumatic event – frequently as traumatic as ripping off an arm or a leg. ...

Via Marginal Revolution Charles Murray, ostensibly reviewing two new biographies of Ayn Rand: In 1991, the book-of-the-month club conducted a survey asking people what book had most influenced their lives. The Bible ranked number one and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was number two. In 1998, the Modern Library released two lists of the top 100 books of the 20th century. One was compiled from the votes of the Modern Library's Board, consisting of luminaries such as Joyce Carol Oates, Maya Angelou, Edmund Morris, and Salman Rushdie. The two top-ranked books on the Board's list were Ulysses and The Great Gatsby. The other list was based on more than 200,000 votes cast online by anyone who wanted to vote. The top two on that list were Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943). The two novels have had six-figure annual sales for decades, running at a combined 300,000 copies annually during the past ten years. In 2009, Atlas Shrugged alone sold a record 500,000 copies and Ran...

One of the interesting points of the previous topic is the question of what exactly is "socially useful." The answer depends on what you mean by "socially" and "useful." China reputedly spent tens of billions on the Beijing Olympics. Why? It spent all that because it wanted to signal to it's own people and the world that it had become a great power. Most major nations now invest quite a lot in their Olympic programs with the objective of increasing their prestige. They do this because they realize that they are in competition with each other and that prestige matters in that competition. Do a few olympic medals make it more likely that other nations will buy your products or decide not to try a miltary adventure against you? Probably so, and even if they don't, they appeal to our primitive instincts that equate prestigious with "dangerous." Humans tend tend to organize themselves into a heterarchy of social units, which both compe...

Is Steve Landsburg a closeted social democrat? I would never have guessed, but how about this statement? ...No, you’ve missed the main point, which is that markets work well when the reward to a supplier is commensurate with the social value of what he produces, and that tournaments (such as Olympic events) are classic examples of markets where that condition is not met. Now this sounds to me like something Paul Krugman might have said, but Prof Landsburg said it right here . What, you might say? You're quoting Landsburg again! What is your problem? I not a big fan of Landsburg's opinions, and he can't stand me, but he does turn out to have a lot of the ideas that are just annoying enough to get my attention. Ideas can be annoying because they are wrong, trite, insulting, or just boring. Such are the mosquitoes of the idea world. There is a more interesting type of annoying idea though, and that’s the one that undermines some tenet (or even tenant!) of one’s world view...

Peter Thiel made a billion or so bucks on Pay Pal and Facebook . This essay suggests to me that the pain of having to pay taxes may have driven him over the brink - though he claims he always was. A few of the other things that really piss him off: democracy, women getting the vote and the suggestion that he won't live forever.

I thought of a few alternative titles for this post, like, for example: How Alan Greenspan, George Bush, and the Right-Wing Kleptocracy Conspired to Bring About the Sub-prime Crisis. Or how about: How the Invisible Hand got its Fingers Stuck in the Cookie Jar. Or we might have just gone with the headline of Paul Krugman's NYT column: Blindly Into the Bubble. It's a now familiar tale: ideology and greed combine to produce stupid policies. A few get very rich, less than honestly, and many get a good deal poorer. Krugman lays out how Alan Greenspan, Ayn Randian zealot of unfettered capitalism, ignored clear and persistent warnings to enable a vast swindle. Naturally, George Bush and his appointees played key supporting roles. When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” There was a definite Hirohito feel to the explanation Ben Bernanke, the Federal R...

I haven't whacked away at libertarians for a bit, but JT has just today commented on an ancient post of mine - a couple of blog years or so ago, so this gives me an excuse to repeat myself. First - my post : Anti-Libertarian: re-post The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I b...