Fear the Cartoon Libertarian

Responding to this post and recalling an earlier comment of mine from a thread at TAS, Freddie writes:

… 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.

Filed under: economics, libertarianism, politics

“It’s only logical that if we can prevent advertisements from being run, we can prevent all kinds of speech.”

I’d really love to see what defenders of campaign finance reform can find to say in their defense after watching this:

Filed under: civil liberties, media/culture, politics

On Preschooling, Universal and Otherwise: No Hope?

Seeing as it appears to be Say Controversial Things About Public Education Week, I want to make a couple of remarks about state-sponsored preschool programs, by way of a column I wrote for Culture11 late last year.

That column grew out of what was, and still remains, a deep frustration with the ways that advocates for “universal” preschool have drawn on the work of Chicago economist James Heckman, whose research on the social and economic benefits of preschool programs is frequently put forward in support of the claim that federal and state governments need to make publicly-funded preschooling available to all. That Heckman’s work would be used to this end isn’t initially very surprising: he’s a Nobel laureate, after all, and his research into the economic benefits of preschool has turned up some tremendously encouraging results. But as I wrote in my column, Heckman’s case for preschool simply isn’t a case for universal preschool, and using his work to such an end requires ignoring a number of his own convictions:

[Heckman] is much more careful than many of those who appeal to his work to distinguish between the sorts of targeted preschool programs that have actually been found to work and huge, multibillion-dollar boondoggles like the Obama-Biden “Zero to Five” plan. While Heckman does speak and write passionately about the value of intensive early intervention in the lives of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, enlisting him as an advocate for a federally-sponsored universal preschool program requires severe distortions of his actual views: for example, a 2006 essay that Heckman wrote for the Wall Street Journal closes with the observation that there is “little basis for providing universal programs at zero cost,” and “no reason for [early childhood] interventions to be conducted in public centers.”

“Vouchers,” Heckman continues, “that can be used in privately run programs would promote competition and efficiency in the provision of early enrichment programs. They would allow parents to choose the venues and values offered in the programs that enrich their child’s earliest years.” Appropriately targeted, means-tested, and choice-driven ventures are one thing; but to spend public dollars in such a way as to “try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing,” as he put it in a 2005 interview, is “foolish.”

So what gives? What I wrote at the time, and still think is basically right, was that Heckman has been able to be enlisted on the side of universal preschool largely because opponents of such policies have failed to claim the moral high ground in anything like the way that they’ve – arguably, anyway – claimed it so successfully in the “school choice” approach to primary and secondary education. And again, there’s a reason for this: the kind of programs that Heckman’s research has found to work haven’t been ones like Head Start; they’re far more expensive than a universal program ever could be, and involve quite a lot more time and effort than preschool usually does. When Heckman cautions against universality as in the quotes above, or concludes a paper (gated, I guess) that discusses the famed Perry Preschool Program by saying that “[i]nvesting in disadvantaged (my emphasis – JS) young children is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large”, he means exactly what he says: every dollar spent on taxpayer-funded daycare for rich and middle-class kids is a dollar not spent on having teachers come, as they did in the Perry Program, to visit the homes of kids who are worse off. But as it is, there’s no real constituency for spending tens of thousands of dollars a head only on the lower-class kids who’d really stand – and need – to benefit.

All of which is just to say that politics is a drag, isn’t it? On one team you’ve got a group that supports the educational lobby and so favors universality; on the other you’ve got the group that screams “Socialism!” and “Statism!” at the faintest whiffs of redistribution or government intervention; and over on the sidelines you’ve got a rag-tag group, clinging tightly to the data showing that they’ve got an idea that just might work, watching the ongoing battle with horror and occasionally spitting into the wind. I think I need a beer.

(Cross-posted.)

Filed under: education, politics

Christians, Conservatives, and Torture

Rod pronounces the Pew Forum’s finding that Christians – and Catholic, Evangelical, and frequently churchgoing ones in particular – are more supportive of torture than non-Christians to be “shocking”, but of course it’s not that at all. There are plenty of data showing that Christians’ attitudes toward abortion, contraception, and the rest don’t differ very significantly from those of the rest of society; the real factor, of course, lies in political affiliations, and I have little doubt that most of the relevant findings can be explained in terms of the fact that frequently churchgoing Catholics and Evangelicals are especially likely to identify as Republicans.

“What on earth are these Christians hearing at church?!” asks Rod. Perhaps it’s had something to do with there being a moral obligation to support the GOP in the face of the Democratic menace.

Update: Razib’s got the data. He concludes:

Politics & religion matter [in] shaping opinions. But to me it looks like religion has a much stronger independent effect on abortion than the death penalty. If I had to bet, I think torture would be more like death penalty.

Filed under: morality, politics, religion, torture

Who’s a Republican?

Arlen Specter isn’t. Nor am I. And nor, it seems, is much of anyone else:

… when you are looking for clues as to where the two parties stand politically there is only one number to remember: 21.

That’s the percent of people in the Post/ABC survey who identified themselves as Republicans, down from 25 percent in a late March poll and at the lowest ebb in this poll since the fall of 1983(!).

In that same poll, 35 percent self-identified as Democrats and 38 percent called them Independents.

Glad as I am to see the War Party get its comeuppance, there’s little question in my mind that in the short term at least this is a very bad thing. These are trying times that call for serious dialogue and a responsible opposition, and a rigidly doctrinaire* party that hemorrhages independents and screams treason at the slightest sign of intra-party criticism is not going to be able to provide any of that.

* Though N.B.: When Ta-Nehisi Coates adds opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage to Ross’s list of the issues that define the predominant understanding of “real conservatism”, I can’t but feel that he’s missing something. There are plenty of people whom movement groupies will gladly identify as among their own despite diverging positions on “social issues”, while the You’re a closet liberal! treatment is usually reserved solely for anti-interventionists, opponents of torture, and others whose jingoism “patriotism” can conveniently be impugned. Oh, and people will also get that treatment if they support trillion-dollar deficits and massive interventions in the domestic economy … so long as their names aren’t Cheney or Bush.

Filed under: conservatism, patriotism, politics

“Straight Shooting”

I have many dear friends, colleagues, and acquaintances closely associated with First Things and am generally inclined against public spats with magazines that were highly influential in my intellectual development, but come now: the staff blog finally gets around to breaking the silence on the torture interrogation memos, and what we get is the EPPC’s Keith Pavlischek, first with an approving link to an astoundingly-titled Marty Peretz post and a subsequent attempt to use talk of war crimes as a reductio of … well, of talk of war crimes; followed up by another post that leads with a request to “[l]eave aside … the moral and legal debate”, then uncritically parrots David Ignatius on how the fear of being prosecuted for beating the shit out of detainees might lead CIA agents to be careful before they, you know, beat the shit out of detainees.

To be clear: so far at least, at the main blog of religious conservatives’ intellectual journal of record, torture is “torture”, the Reagan-signed UN Declaration thereon is an annoyance at worst, Dennis Blair’s remark that America’s actions have “hurt our image around the world” in ways that have “outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security” counts as a case of you-know-what, and the description of this from Porter Goss:

The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate.

… is what gives my post its title. As I put it in the comments, I am SO glad that these people are the ones serving as the face of the religious right. First things first, indeed.

(H/T: Reader Boz.)

Filed under: morality, politics, religion, torture

Decentralisms of Convenience

Noting the various left-liberal criticisms of the recent push for states’ rights and even utterances of the s-word from the likes of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Radley Balko recalls the days when the tables were turned:

For all the heat he’s taking, Texas Gov. Rick Perry might want to consult with MSNBC analyst and former West Wing writer and producer Lawrence O’Donnell, for example, who favorably used the word secede on the McLaughlin Group back in November of ‘04. O’Donnell helpfully pointed out that secession needn’t necessarily be violent, explaining that, “You can secede without firing a shot.”

Lefty pubs like Salon, the Nation, and the Stranger ran think pieces that called for (sometimes begrudgingly) a new debate over the benefits of more parochial control. A couple of lefty-penned op-eds in the New York Times also argued for decentralized control and weakening the federal government’s ability to influence local policy.

Alas, it was all rather short-lived. Nothing invigorates interest in federalism like losing a national election. And nothing smothers that interest like winning one.

Indeed, and it’s precisely for this reason that I haven’t had much to say about the various federalist, separatist, and generally Tenth Amendment-related stuff that readers have brought to my attention over the past few months. As Thomas Naylor put it when I interviewed him for my piece on separatist movements, the biggest threat to the push for secession in Vermont was the presidential campaign of Barack Obama: and on this point he was clearly right. By the same token, to the extent that much of this right-wing chatter about federalism and secession is ultimately in the service of electing the likes of Sarah Palin, it’s not at all clear to me why I should find it especially interesting or worthy of my support. A Great Untying sounds terrific to me; just give me a call when there’s someone who, you know, actually wants to do it.

Earlier: Secession linkage; Bill Kauffman secession linkage; Norman Mailer on federal authority.

Filed under: government/law, politics

Radio Silence

When it comes to Contentions or The Corner, one learns quickly not to bother looking for much at all by way of acknowledgment of crimes of war committed at the behest of Republican politicians. But the staff blog at First Things? Surely there must be somewhere in the religious/Republican-leaning blogosphere where the release of 80 pages of memos detailing tissue-thin legal rationalizations for inflicting severe mental and physical harm on human beings will make for the occasional expression of moral discomfort. But …

Not. A. Thing.

If this is bearing witness, then it’s no small wonder that so few are bothering to listen.

Addendum: It’s not on the staff blog, but Samuel Goldman of the revived-and-now-at-FT Postmodern Conservative – you’ve heard, right about the revival of Postmodern Conservative? – has a nice post up:

These documents contained few revelations. For my part, I have nothing substantive to add to what I wrote a few months ago. And I have no expectation of changing anyone’s mind. But intellectual probity demands that both opponents and defenders of torture be willing to name and be named, unlike the “former top official in the administration of George W. Bush” quoted in this piece. Stand up and be counted.

Filed under: politics, religion, torture

Classical Athenian Wisdom of the Day

“Who in the world will you serve justice to, if it is actually permitted for The Thirty to say [in their defense] that they were merely doing those things which had been ordered by The Thirty?”

-Lysias (XII, Against Erastosthenes, c. 403 BC), prosecuting the sole member of that tyranny to stand trial.

(JL Wall)

Filed under: politics, torture

The Truth Is a Terrible Thing to Reveal

At the Corner, NRO’s Andy McCarthy calls the release of the CIA torture interrogation memos “a terrible decision”. At the risk of having my head explode, might I ask what the frack makes it so terrible? Does it have to do with state secrets, and the uncomfortable concern that some of the baddies might be able to draw on our experience for tips on the niceties of waterboarding, or perhaps super-secret insights on how to cook up bogus legal cover re: same? Does it have to do with the discomfort of having the harsh truth of daylight go streaming into McCarthy’s blackened pupils, dilated as they must have been by the hours spent scribbling in his shadowy, ethics-free lair? Or is it maybe just that torture porn doesn’t do it for him in the way that the Starr Report almost surely did?

Maybe McCarthy can read the memos, take some notes, and then get back to us on what they say. Yeah, I’m not holding my breath, either.

P.S. Let the record show that I was secretly rooting, at least some of the time, that Obama would keep the memos secret or at least heavily redact them, so that then I’d be able to call him a bastard. And let it also show that I’m really much happier to have the truth out there than to be able to score some cheap points, and that on the whole I’m pretty damn impressed. This I can believe in, Mr. President.

Update: Everyone really ought to read Joseph’s comment.

Filed under: politics, torture