Quote of the Day
Nothing in life is to be feared.It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie
Unusual Response To Yesterday's Post
I've had occasional posts that for some reason seemed to be the recipient of spam attacks distorting statistics; I've developed some tactics to deal with that. There was unusually heavy activity, including European eyeballs, all day long, which, if legitimate, would make for my single day record for a post. I never know how readers will react to a post; I've written what I consider some of my best work, which gets nominal readership, and then there are those which go beyond expectation. Yesterday's post was unusual in the sense I went into battle on immigration in the aftermath of the Cantor primary defeat on a forum (plus I do not like the fact Eric Cantor is being scapegoated for everything wrong in DC). Don't get me wrong; I take a dim view of politicians in general (I've often used a pejorative term 'political whores'), and I know that DC will move on without Cantor as Majority Leader. But I really, really, really loathe anti-immigrant media conservatives, and the fact that Brat, Cantor's opponent, is an economist whom gratefully accepted the endorsement of Laura Ingraham, whose voice reminds me of a teacher's fingernails scraping over a chalkboard, really set me off.
I usually have a tolerance for opposing points of view, provided the tone is respectful. But I've found myself annoyed enough to snap back at trolls. Today is a classic point. The Libertarian Republic had posted the Ron Paul image below. What I didn't realize was there was a lurking neocon troll. I posted a classic Bastiat quote (perhaps falsely attributed, although consistent with Bastiat's perspective) about if goods don't cross borders, armies will. A troll posted a disrespectful image of Bastiat, the artist mocking libertarians. I responded, "Look how well that American embargo on oil to Japan worked out..." The troll snapped back with a contemptuous response ending "Of course the Japanese could have purchased oil from other sources, or US oil through third parties, but that doesn't follow nutty isolationist logic." To which I responded with a documented quote: "The American oil embargo caused a crisis in Japan. Reliant on the US for 80% of its oil, the Japanese were forced to decide between withdrawaling from China, negotiating an end to the conflict, or going to war to obtain the needed resources elsewhere." Don't forget at the time of Pearl Harbor the US military served as a check on Japanese expansion in the Pacific. I've been increasingly calling myself a libertarian, but I think this is the first time I've been directly attacked for being a libertarian.
Yesterday I found myself called a "liberal". In fact, I refer to myself as a classical liberal. Let me quote from an excellent Don Boudreaux (Cafe Hayek) rant on the topic:
Regular Cafe patrons will not be surprised to read me describe myself as a liberal. Of course, not ”liberal” as that term is popularly understood now in the United States. Today’s mis-named “liberals” are not liberal... I refuse to call the likes of, say, Paul Krugman or E.J. Dionne or Rachel Maddow or Alec Baldwin or Nancy Pelosi or Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama or Francois Hollande or Thomas Piketty or Pope Francis “liberal.” They are not liberal. They are authoritarian. They believe that social order – or, at least, the most useful social orders – must be designed and imposed by a political authority, by centralized force. They have, unlike the original, wise liberals, little or no understanding of (and, hence, no appreciation for) spontaneous order. They are social creationists of the most naive sort. And they blend their ignorance of spontaneous-ordering forces with an arrogant confidence in their own superiority over ordinary men and women at the task of deciding many of the details by which ordinary men, women, and children will be forced to live.Ippon!
Friday the 13th
Dads Are:
Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day
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| Via Libertarian Republic |
Image of the Day: Chicago Public Schools in a Snapshot: "Our Story"
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| Via Huffpo |
- Four out of 10 CPS freshmen don't graduate.
- 91 percent of CPS graduates must take remedial courses in college because they do not know how to do basic math and other schoolwork.
- Only 26 percent of CPS high school students are college-ready, according to results from ACT subject-matter tests.
- Before the 2012 strike, the average salary for a Chicago teacher already was $76,000 annually; CTU representatives held out their strike until they could snag 17 percent raises over four years for some teachers
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| Via Drudge Report |
Eileen Dinino, a 55-year-old mother of seven, died Saturday at the Berks County Jail in Bern Township, about halfway through the 48-hour sentence she was ordered to serve after her children racked up multiple truancy violations.
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| Via Bastiat Institute on FB |
Barry and Iraq: Relax, Don't Do It
An official told CNN today that the United States plans to move the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush into the Persian Gulf in coming hours to provide President Barack Obama with options for possible airstrikes against militants in Iraq, CNN's Barbara Starr reports.Obama was later quoted giving assurances that this didn't mean American boots on the ground. Both Clinton and Obama seem to have a fixation on missiles and the Air Force like bombing countries is like a no-cost video game: it's not the real world. It's not like explosives hit at the wrong time and place, forever destroying innocent civilian lives and property.... The US did a remarkable job leaving a reasonably unified, governable country. Too much lives and treasure spent in Iraq. We cannot serve as the country's surrogate air force; it would be morally hazardous. It's time for Iraqis to take charge of their own destiny and make peace among the three main groups (Sunni,Shiite, and Kurd).
The Benefits of Immigration
I'm still stewing over "free-marketer" Brat (likely Cantor successor) embracing anti-immigrant logic. Don Boudreaux (again) gives the late Milton Friedman a well-deserved asskicking for stipulating immigration reform AFTER we've ended the social welfare net, providing political cover for anti-immigrants:
I have never grasped the logic that leads to the conclusion that the illegitimate welfare state turns the otherwise illegitimate power exercised by government to interfere with freedom of movement and association (that is, open immigration) into a legitimate power...The fact that Friedman (again, as far as I know) never qualified his case for drug legalization with the condition that the welfare state first be rolled back suggests to me that Friedman’s case for restricting immigration (at least as that case has now come down to us in lore) is at odds with his case for drug legalization. At the least, this difference between Friedman-the-’realist’ on immigration and Friedman-the-principled-proponent-of-freedom on drugs exposes an inconsistency in his policy assessments. And so why not resolve the inconsistency in favor of more freedom rather than in favor of more government-imposed restraint?The excellent Martin Mazorra has assembled some excellent excerpts/statistics, which I list as follows:
- In 2011 Michael Clemens looked at the economic estimates of the global GDP growth that would come if every country in the world abolished restrictions on the movement of goods, capital and labour across national borders. According to the papers Clemens looked at, removing all barriers to trade would increase global GDP by between 0.3% and 4.1%; removing all barriers to capital flows by between 0.1% and 1.7%. Those are big gains that would make the world a substantially richer place. Completely removing barriers to migration, though, could increase global GDP by between 67% and 147.3%. Think about that: simply letting anyone work anywhere could more than double global GDP. And that would be a long-term boost to economic growth, not a one-off. Even the bottom end of that, 67%, is an astonishingly huge figure.
- Historical experience certainly suggests it would do a lot of good: the United States’ stunning economic growth between 1870 and 1920 coincided with the migration of tens of millions of Europeans to America. A study of fifteen European countries finds that a 1 percent increase in the population through migration is associated with a boost to the economy of between 1.25 percent and 1.5 percent. The World Bank reckons that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere 3 percent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $356 billion a year better off, with the new immigrants themselves gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries $143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion.
Now I’m not sure in which sense our congressional candidate considers himself a free marketeer, but surely if you’re a free marketeer in either sense, you’ll tend to endorse statements like these:Ippon!
I, and not the government, should get to decide who will be a guest in my home.
I, and not the government, should get to decide who I’ll hire to mow my lawn.
I, and not the government, should get to decide who I’ll go running with this evening.
I, and not the government, should get to decide whose businesses I’ll patronize, who I’ll serve as customers in my own business, and who I can sell my house to.
Guest Post Comment: Class Acts/Libertarian Republican
As I've mentioned in the past, the Libertarian Republican blog is an odd mix which includes a very hawkish (at least with respect to the alleged War on Terror), anti-immigrant perspective; the blog's editors seem to regard those of us with a less activist foreign policy perspective as "left-libertarian" and despises think tanks I love to cite like Cato Institute and Reason. (I don't want to get in the weeds here, but, at the risk of oversimplification, left-libertarians are more like social liberals whom distrust anything big, including government, and don't have as high regard for the right to property.) Still, they extensively cover politics, including international stories; around the time I started this blog I was probably checking RCP daily, but I've gotten so disillusioned with politics and politicians it might be once every other week.
In any event, Brat's quirky mix of free market and anti-immigrant policies fits right into that blog's sweetspot; there was rather some obnoxious in-his-face gloating, trying to argue that Cantor, up to then the odds-on favorite to succeed Boehner as Speaker, lacked class in not immediately endorsing Brat to succeed him. (This is a heavily GOP district, and endorsements are overrated, anyway.) Actually, Cantor has not made excuses for his loss and has pledged to continue his work getting Republicans elected this fall, which I regard as the ultimate form of sportsmanship. I took exception to the tone of the commentary and wrote this response:
David Brat is an unprincipled political whore whom claims to be free market, when in fact immigration is a free market construct; worse yet, as an economics department chair, he had to know the overwhelming win/win economic evidence in support of liberalized immigration, but sold his integrity and soul for the petty endorsement of a shrill, intellectually vacuous, anti-immigrant populist like Laura Ingraham. Ingraham and other media conservative hacks are largely responsible for turning California into a People's Democratic Republic and a big reason why Romney lost ethnic immigrant votes across the board (including Asian) in the 2012 election. Cantor was no RINO--he has a lifetime ACU rating of 95. A lot of legitimate free market economists, like Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux, are not happy with Brat's political opportunism. Will I as a libertarian conservative support Brat's election this fall? Probably. Even Ron and Rand Paul have had to engage in political posturing on immigration to deal with despicable anti-immigrant populists. But I loathe your contemptible commentary; it's like 2010 when Castle was expected to pick up Biden's old seat, and O'Donnell upset the former governor and long-time popular Congressman. The end result: we ended up with another "progressive" hack in the Senate.
Facebook Corner
This is sheer hubris and not respectable analysis. First, it is true that Eric Cantor, as part of leadership, had to cast some sacrificial votes that he didn't want to cast. He had to protect the President; it would have been a political death wish to do otherwise; Cantor is not responsible for Bush's policy mistakes. What Gillespie doesn't do is point out is the federal budget is up over $1T/year since the 2006 election--and little of that had to do with Bush or Cantor. In fact, the GOP has held the spendaholic President and Senate in check since 2010, to such an extent that one progressive blog has called the $7 Trillion Dollar Man the most frugal President since the 1950's. Really, what do you expect, Gillespie? Cantor got his share of adverse attention for allegedly shutting down the government over the budget--which was politically radioacive. When you have POTUS pitching a Chicken Little temper tantrum over sequester, how can you blame Cantor? Obama holds a veto power with more than enough Democrats in either chamber to sustain it.
Second, why is it true that these factors did in Cantor, but didn't do in Boehner or Graham?
Third, why is anyone concerned about the 4% of gay people do and why they feel a need to impose on traditional social institutions and norms using the power of government? Keep in mind over 30 states have publicly reaffirmed the traditional definition of marriage, most recently in a landslide in purple North Carolina. And marijuana has been banned for decades and even Obama hasn't pushed for decriminalization: how is this a GOP issue?
As for the status quo, Gillespie fails to point out the Democrats want to spend vastly more. When Bush raised education by 70% or so, Ted Kennedy thundered it wasn't nearly enough. When Bush pushed an unpaid for Medicare drug benefit, Pelosi bitched about the doughnut hole. The problem is that the spending is booby-trapped; you can't cut almost anything, because the special interests will come out of the woodwork and throw money at Democrats; Democrats will inevitably say that the GOP will have Grandma eating catfood. The GOP has taken exception to ObamaCare and look how far that's gotten.
Now personally I support almost everything Gillespie speaks of, but there are only a handful of legislators whom do--and they, like Justin Amash, have a bullseye on their backs.
(Reason). He lost because he personified all that is bad and hypocritical about the Republican Party. And until the GOP demonstrates it is serious about limiting the size, scope, and spending of government, it will keep losing elections.
The left and right each have their fair share of progressives. The "isms" of the left are old and tired. The social control that the right wants to impose is also unacceptable. The extremists in both parties need to understand that there are all sorts of views to be represented. The more I read reason articles, the more convinced I am that libertarians are losing their way as well.
There are so many trite nonsensical talking points in this thread here that it's hard to know where to start, but let me pick out "the social control that the right wants to impose is also unacceptable." A number of fusion libertarian-conservatives like myself support traditional institutions (marriage and family), societal norms in the prevailing community and oppose a licentious culture. But we also have more of a live-and-let-live tolerance for alternative lifestyle choices, like plural households, and we think that the State is no more competent intervening in the community (short of protecting unalienable rights) than in economic matters (i.e., not at all). If I join a community that promotes traditional values, I don't want the State intervening on behalf of a special interest group to redefine the definition of marriage, for instance--I don't have any issue with a gay community with their own social constructs, so long as they don't impose on the greater community. If you look at DOMA, for instance, it was not a prohibition on states choosing to recognize alternative constructs but it served to protect traditional state regulation of the same, vs. decisions by other states and judicial interventionism.
Have states or communities tried to micromanage personal decisions, particularly in the past--e.g., the use of contraceptives, sodomy laws, prohibition of alcohol and drugs? Yes. That's where the libertarian side of my views comes into play; even though I may morally disapprove of promiscuity, recreational drugs, etc., I recognize that people have free will, and some regulations are just not feasible to enforce.
These are not new concepts; for example, in the early 90's, Rockwell and Rothbard floated a similar concept they called paleolibertarianism. Another way to think of it is in the context of negative vs. positive liberty/rights; there's a difference between tolerance (our traditional Constitutional rights--say, banning people from baking a cake for a "gay wedding") vs. imposition on others (you must bake a cake for a "gay wedding")
(Tom Woods). George W. Bush is actually being described as a prophet by the neocons, who cite his 2007 statement that premature withdrawal from Iraq would hand the country over to al Qaeda.
I guess they think we really are stupid enough not to know that there was zero al Qaeda presence in Iraq before the messianic we-can-change-the-world, "small-government" neocons intervened in the first place.
Tom, you're overstating the case. "The report also stated that "captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda." In July 2001, the Director for International Intelligence in the IIS had ordered an investigation into a terrorist group called The Army of Muhammad. The investigation revealed the group "threatened Kuwaiti authorities and plans to attack American and Western interests" and was working with Osama bin Laden. According to the report, "A later memorandum from the same collection to the Director of the IIS reports that the Army of Muhammad is endeavoring to receive assistance [from Iraq] to implement its objectives, and that the local IIS station has been told to deal with them in accordance with priorities previously established. The IIS agent goes on to inform the Director that 'this organization is an offshoot of bin Laden, but that their objectives are similar but with different names that can be a way of camouflaging the organization.'"
Keep in mind that the US had been enforcing a no-fly zone; Saddam Hussein had attempted to assassinate GHW Bush. No one seriously believes that Al Qaeda and Hussein collaborated on 9/11 (bin Laden and Hussein had competing visions for region domination--the idea that Hussein would let Al Qaeda mount a serious challenge to his own authority in Iraq is absurd), and the evidence on any collaboration was sketchy at best. But don't forget that al Qaeda and Hussein had a common enemy--al Qaeda had declared war on the US earlier.
I think we can all agree that Western intelligence on Iraq was deeply flawed, and the Bush Administration hyped the intelligence it had. I agree to intervene was tragic and questionable given the fact he had criticized Clinton for nation building. But I feel you're overstating the case.
(Drudge Report). W STAYS SILENT
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had all the judgment to once give a speech against intervening in Iraq, laid claim for getting us out of Iraq (on GWB's timetable), unsuccessfully negotiated for us to extend our stay there, and had Al Qaeda on the run now is back and willing to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iraq, a nation with which we are not at war...
(Bastiat Institute). You want evidence that the old-world system of top-down command and control is breaking down? Look no further than Elon Musk’s statement on behalf of the revolutionary company Tesla Motors. http://ow.ly/xYCHB
Not so dumb move. Consider a mistake Apple made in the 1980's; by not focusing on building the platform, say, through licensing, in order to protect high-margin sales of proprietary technology, Microsoft and IBM and other vendors countered with a more open standard, providing IT managers with preferred multiple suppliers. Economies of scale and lower prices drove customers to buy, developers were attracted to design and sell software to a growing consumer base, and the rest is history. Apple became and remains a niche market of admittedly very fanatical users, with a much more limited developer base.
Tesla probably figures by growing the market, it'll get its fair share of growth as the market segment leader of electric cars without taking on full market segment risk and relevant costs.
I have a different opinion on patents and other intellectual property than Tucker. however I do think there are pro-competitive reforms to the system that should be made.
Political Humor
I'm not sure where the Fallon dancing gimmick came from--is he mocking Ellen DeGeneris? I was amused when the inevitable bridge theme came up...
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Jerry Holbert via Townhall |
Journey, "Separate Ways".
