… of course libertarian orthodoxy really does render most libertarians unwitting shills for corporate interests. Although also unintentionally so, the mainstream libertarian agenda is in effect largely a sop to corporate interests. If you could wave a magic wand and enact your average libertarian’s economic agenda, our corporate leaders would fall into a joy-induced stupor. The libertarian economic agenda, to a great degree, just is the corporate economic agenda.
There are times when Freddie can be a quite incisive observer, but this is decidedly not one of those. Indeed, as my friend Tim Carney has recently observed, the most libertarian members of Congress are actually among its least “business-friendly”, for the simple reason that they’re staunchly opposed to the kinds of taxpayer-sponsored corporate giveaways that make up approximately 95% of the daily business of Washington. The libertarian economic agenda includes neither bailouts nor handouts nor bizarro tax loopholes nor unnecessary wars and the associated channeling of billions of dollars and loads of influence into the hands of defense contractors. In a perfectly libertarian world there would be no regulatory creep for the simple reason that there would be very little regulation to speak of; no influence-peddling due to the government’s lack of, well, influence; no such thing as being too big to fail or too small to cut through the red tape; no more billions channeled to Midwestern farmers to produce wasteful and unnecessary corn ethanol; and so on. To me at least, this sounds very little like the sort of thing that sends corporatists into joy-induced stupors.
Now we can, of course, read Freddie’s words with an emphasis on “unwitting” and “unintentional”; he’s not really saying that libertarians are evil, but only that they’re a bit daft. And in fact I think there’s quite a lot to the observation that on the ground, the aspects of the libertarian political agenda that have the greatest political traction are the ones that are likely to get big-time corporate funding. But the problem with this criticism is that the same is true of everyone in politics; if libertarians are accidental shills for corporate elites, then by the same token liberals like Freddie are just a bunch of unknowing tools in the hands of unions, trial lawyers, energy interests salivating over the prospect of cap-and-trade, and dozens of other powerful lobbies besides. And many of those lobbies are – get this! – representatives of those dread “corporate interests”, aiming to use the liberal agenda as a means to tilt the economic playing field by regulating their competitors into oblivion, protect their backsides when things go wrong, siphon billions away from the government in the alleged service of “green” ends, and so on. Everyone gets played in this game, and so telling a realistic story about the politics of libertarians or conservatives means telling the same sort of story about those of standard-issue liberals. The idea that it’s the libertarians, of all people, who are insufficiently sensitive to “the banal truth of the everyday corruption of human power politics” is silly beyond belief.
Greg Mankiw, who knows more about math than I do, comments:
Stock prices are approximately brownian motion, which means they are everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable. In plainer English, “continuous” means that stock prices an instant from now, or an instant ago, are close to where they are now. But “not differentiable” means that the direction they move over the next instant is not necessarily close to the the direction they were heading over the last instant. A roller coaster with that property would be quite a ride.
But that should call in to question why we are so dependent on oil to begin with, and beyond that, why we as a culture have shifted so many of our priorities to a belief in unending growth that can and should be enforced by an omnipotent military.
The problem with “the American Way Of Life is not on the table” “is not up for compromise” or some other such better phrasing that’s escaping me this morning doesn’t lie in a devotion to liberty. But we haven’t defined The American Way Of Life as involving, to a primary degree, devotion to liberty, but to growth, the clearing of the economic elbow room in which we will then practice our liberty. But when “growth” and “expansion” are viewed as at least as essential as liberty, when reconsidering “unending growth” is a reconsideration of The American Way Of Life even if such growth is not sustainable (except, perhaps, by force — eh, what I mean is anangkê, not bîos or hybris), then we ourselves are compelled to do the compelling.
Which is to say: anangkê esmen — we are compelled — we are required — we are constrained to this course by our choice of this course. We clear space, ostensibly in which to grow and expand a liberty, but in reality because the past and present benefits have grown comfortable: we haven’t seen the cost, the underside; or if we have, we are less terrified by them than the the unknown nature of a different life.
And we see liberties more essential to liberty constrained, restricted, deemed inessential because they interfere with the growth which is supposed to to allow them to flourish. Though meant as a force to expand liberty, unrestrained and unending growth (or at least the philosophy thereof) are forces of constraint on our ability to live in liberty. Yesterday there was a girl on campus shouting very loudly that she had free copies of the Constitution for anyone who wanted them — presumably (I could be wrong) as part of those tea-party-things I’ve heard about. I was tempted to tell her it was better late than never she’d discovered the document.
We will never get the money out of politics until we get the politics out of money.
That is from Alex Tabarrok, commenting on a study that found a 22,000 percent rate of return on money spent lobbying for tax breaks; the $3-billion-a-year lobbying industry is, of course, likely only to get larger as the avalanche of money makes its way down Capitol Hill in the coming months and years. Busiment!
… if you are in the restructuring business, you can’t let these stray thoughts get in the way of your restructuring. After all, restructuring is your life. Restructuring is forever. Restructuring is like what dieting is for many of us: You think about it every day. You believe it’s about to work. Nothing really changes.
When the economy cratered last fall, the professionals at G.M. went into Super-Duper Restructuring Overdrive. In October, they warned the Bush administration of a possible bankruptcy filing and started restructuring. In December, they came back asking for a loan while they … (wait for it) … restructured.
The Bush advisers decided in December that bankruptcy without preparation would be a disaster. They decided what all administrations decide — that the best time for a bankruptcy filing is a few months from now, and it always will be. In the meantime, restructuring would continue, federally subsidized.
Today, G.M. and Chrysler have once again come up with restructuring plans. By an amazing coincidence, the plans are again insufficient. In an extremely precedented move, the Obama administration has decided that the best time for possible bankruptcy is — a few months from now. The restructuring will continue.
P.S. Given last night’s post, this bit of Brooks’s column is also relevant:
… by enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the Democratic Party are now completely implicated in the coming G.M. wreck. Over the next few months, the White House will be subject to a gigantic lobbying barrage. The Midwestern delegations, swing states all, will pull out all the stops to prevent plant foreclosures. Unions will be furious if the Obama-run company rips up the union contract. Is the White House ready for the headline “Obama to Middle America: Drop Dead”? It would take a party with a political death wish to see this through.
Glenn Greenwald’s widely-cited post from over the weekend on Jim Webb’s courageous push for prison reform is a must-read. I especially liked this bit:
Webb’s commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making [that says that taking bad but popular positions is necessary if one is to avoid political risk] is – just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold’s singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold’s subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush’s assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin. Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy. Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian [sic] consensus. Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.
In this context, the unpopular stances Greenwald has in mind concern the drug war, sentencing guidelines, prison conditions, and the horrid condition of a country where blacks are sentenced to prison on drug charges at over five times the rate of whites despite not using drugs any more frequently, but it’s not hard to think of others that fit the bill:
The specific question of whether a country with a criminal justice system in the state of ours can really be trusted to administer the death penalty responsibly.
The dangers inherent in the legislative branch’s unconstitutional, near-complete abdication of its roles in declaring war, making and passing laws, and so forth.
The questions of why, since college is demonstrably not for everyone, we insist on making it a precondition for a productive adulthood, and of how we can extend higher educational opportunities to those with the capacity really to benefit from them while helping others transition into family life and the workplace.
The need to rethink our open-ended and essentially conditionless support of the Israeli government, with all its aims and policies, no matter the damage this does to our image in the Middle East and the rest of the world.
The importance of a serious national dialogue about overconsumption, excessive indebtedness, and the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility – at home, in business, and in government alike.
The need for serious, far-sighted, and no doubt inconvenient (for many) entitlement reform, and the corresponding task of paying down our national debt.
The tremendous dangers, both foreign and domestic, inherent in our commitment to maintaining a massive national security apparatus with a near-trillion dollar budget the shrinking of which is a political impossibility.
The questions of whether international terrorism might be better opposed by abandoning or at least severely altering the present rubric of the Global War on Terror, and more generally whether the recent history of U.S. military engagement might suggest the need for a serious retrenchment of our far-overstretched armed forces and a recommitment to using American power to serve the national interest first and foremost.
That’s just off the top of my head – what have I missed, and where do you put the odds of finding “actual leaders” who are willing to take these and similar issues up?
Alex Massie has a splendid post on how American liberals, lately of the “Stop trying to force the Europeans to obey America’s orders” school of thought (and thank goodness for that!) when it came to foreign policy, are … well … less enthused about other countries’ free-mindedness when it comes to the financial crisis:
The President has told everyone what to do, so why won’t our friends do as they’re told? Once upon a time – and not so long ago neither – Democrats thought it was important fro friends to speak candidly to friends and stand up for what they thought was right. Now? Not so much. Now friends must remember that their independent analysis of the economic troubles afflicting the globe counts for nothing and they should fall quietly into line and accept their marching orders from Washington.
As I say, how times change. We’ve swapped a military and foreign policy sense of imperial entitlement for an economic one. How refreshing!
What if the Americans are right, however? Well, maybe they are. But what if they’re wrong? Is it really necessary for every country to adopt identical responses to the current difficulties? How likely is it that there can be a global one-size-fits-all answer? Might there not be some sense in sharing eggs between different baskets? That is, different approaches and regional variation might work better than ex cathedra pronouncements from some of the very people who helped get us all into this mess in the first place. Perhaps not, but the costs of the Americans bullying everyone into following a policy that they themselves admit they have no idea of knowing will work seem, potentially, anyway, to be quite high if they are wrong. And, at least putatively, possibly higher than the benefits that might accrue if the Americans (and Gordon Brown) are right.
This post, from several days ago but which I’ve only just now gotten around to reading, is a perfect example of why Rick Saenz – formerly a dotcommer and now a Kentucky homesteader, homeschooling dad, online bookseller, and old-timey musician – is such an important blogger to be reading in these crazy times. Money quote:
… perhaps people are beginning to ask themselves a question that would naturally occur to a staunch agrarian: what made us think it was a good idea to hand so much power and authority over to fallible, ordinary men? Unfortunately, part of the answer is: there is no way to create a centralized, globalized, complex, thoroughly modern society without handing someone the power.
I’m way behind on my reading, and so only this afternoon did I finally get around to reading the excerpt (subscription required, but why not remedy that?) from Adam Fergusson’s When Money Dies, on the history of hyperinflation in Weimar Germany, from the February 9 issue of TAC. Here’s what may be my favorite from among a great many memorable passages:
“The delirium of milliards [i.e., billions]” was a phrase of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau’s coining. “The majority of statesmen and financiers think in terms of paper,” he wrote. “They sit in their offices and look at papers .. and on those papers are written figures which again represent papers. … A milliard comes easily and trippingly to the tongue, but no one can imagine a milliard. … Does a wood contain a milliard leaves? Are there milliard blades of grass in a meadow?”
I seem to recall this book having been quite helpful when I was a kid, though talk of millions just seems so trifling now, doesn’t it? As an empirical hypothesis based on a fair amount of introspective evidence, I’d submit that the incomprehensibility of certain numbers has got at least something to do with the impossibility of taking in at a glance the sheer number of digits they involve. I should make it clear that this is, more than anything else, an argument for keeping nation-states small enough that their budgets feel no pressure whatsoever to exceed the thresholds set by the limits of human psychology itself.
"... if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration -I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind." - G.E.M. Anscombe, via Joe
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