Practical Libertarianism

And all I want is for you to read the news. You want me to acknowledge the nuance of libertarianism, first you have to pay attention. You're better than this selective memory nonsense.

 

Re: Unintended consequences - not just for breakfast anymore

Agreed.

Our problem us that the private power has almost completely consumed and digested the state apparatus. Just take my previous post about Chicago and you can apply that to the Federal government as well. The corporate media system is only part of the problem.

To offer an imperfect analogy, the state apparatus is a tool, like a hammer. Concentrated private power has basically stolen the hammer, redesigned it so that it only works for those who control the private power and now keeps it under lock and key (or should I say "under Super PAC").

The dilemma for practical libertarians is that we need to simultaneously steal the hammer back from them and re-redesign it so that it can serve us again. This also means reforming the laws that encouraged the concentration of private power in the first place (things like corporate charter laws, "free trade" agreements, etc.). It's an overwhelming project but history shows us that trying to tackle the various subprojects piecemeal is a recipe for failure. We can't even begin the project, though, as long as most of our society is hostile to the idea that there is any other problem besides "the government" and -unwittingly or not- supports the battle cry of "All Power to the CEOs!".

As long as people obsess about creating "small government" rather than creating good government (including getting a proper balance between public and private power), the CEOs will wield "the government" against us and even reducing the size of "government" will not get rid of the intrusion or coercion or corruption or any of the things that real libertarians are against.

 

Richie Daley screwed the pooch with this deal. Richie was a horseshit mayor his last few years, kicking the can down the road by postponing capital expenditures and raising revenue via short-term maneuvers, this being the worst.

 

I like the EPA and FDA (when they're actually enforcing regs). What does that make me?

 

Perhaps you should saunter over to reason.com's Hit & Run blog.

 

Re: Unintended consequences - not just for breakfast anymore

This.

Rent-seekers have to have some source of rents that they are seeking. Guess where that source lies?

 

Glenn Greenwald gets a ton of credit for actually deigning to pointedly criticize this administration. The Times managed to get something right for once - blind squirrel and all.

The ACLU is hardly the sole province of the doctrinaire left and Team Blue. Their job is to raise issues like that regardless of who is doing it, and they actually manage to do a decent job of it in most cases (except their 2nd Amendment blind spot).

And by saying "the left went completely silent", I meant more than a progressive Congressional caucus harumphing disapprovingly. The marches, the rank-and-file anti-war masses stayed indoors for the past three and a half years. Some pundits have finally begun to say mean things about Hopey. Good ********ing going. Where's the rest of the left?

 

Way, way out in the political hinterlands because the Right has moved to the right of Hitler and dragged the Center with them...

 

So I spent thirty seconds and show off half the left's media pieces and you dismiss them all out of hand because you don't see giant marches. The reason why you don't see giant marches is because those marches were against the wars, both of which we are leaving. Why would liberals protest something we want done? Nobody on the left thought we would leave Iraq or Afghanistan in six days, but the timetables are certain and the administration has followed them pretty religiously. You want a grassroots opposition to something that the grassroots doesn't oppose.

And then I show you where the left has been very critical and you dismiss it. You read into whatever you want to get out of the conversation. Selective memory. Congrats.

 

Half!

You're just as dismissive. I explained each in turn. That's not dismissive.

As for the left not marching, well, they didn't even though we "pulled out" (hahaha! 50,000 "advisors" and embassy staff) of Iraq pretty much exactly on Bush's timetable. Yet there were still marches and papier mache heads during Bush's years (as well there should have been, though the impact of papier mache is mostly nil) when the timetable was negotiated.

Meanwhile, other than an anti-war caucus in Congress, hardly anyone on the mainstream left seemed to give a flying ******** that Obama had taken Bush's Iraq surge tactic and applied it to Afghanistan. Obama got us involved in several other elective conflicts, some by remote-control. No marches.

So, if you and superdave are going to hold libertarians individually and collectively to a nearly impossible-to-verify standard regarding local intrusions by government (again, reason.com [all sorts of national and local issues], Balko's Agitator blog [cops, justice system] and his Huffpo column, Baylen Linnekin's Keep Food Legal blog to name three off the top of my head), why can't anti-war libertarians do the same to the allegedly anti-war left?

 

It would appear we are both hypocrites. You reject my standards for liberal criticism, and I demand libertarian purity.

 

I think it's cute how Uber folks are acting as if yellow cabs are the only way to get point-to-point rides in New York.

 

Anyone else think the title of this thread is an oxymoron?

 

I see what you did there.

 

I don't know much about the situation but is it working for cab companies and politicians?

 

This is not to reduce the relative importance of this problem to New Yorkers, but you go to 95% of the municipalities in the country and ask for competing cab companies' phone numbers and you get this look: