Understanding your local europhile.

The local Europhiles--you know the sort: affluent social-democrats, the sort who advocate big-government while being educated enough to know it doesn't work--may be easier to understand due to Stuff White People Like.

Some of the information may also deepen your appreciation of overeducated snobs like me. Caveat lector!

The Poll: Libertarian presidential hopefuls

At this point, were I someone who participated in prediction markets, I wouldn't put my money on the LP's presidential candidate getting more than 5% in the November general election. Yet, for reasons I can't understand, there are between eight and fifteen people seeking the Party's nomination.

Stephen Gordon of Third Party Watch is conducting a poll on the matter, including a rank-ordering of the candidates. My response is as follows:

1. Bob Barr. Bob Barr isn't actually in the running, but if he were, he'd be the most qualified candidate. An eminently decent ex-Congressman and collaborator with the ACLU, Barr has drifted toward a (pragmatic) libertarian position since the LP targeted him, then a notorious drug warrior, as a demonstration of the spoiler effect.
   
   That isn't to say that his record in Congress wasn't, from a libertarian's perspective, respectable. While not as purely liberal as Ron Paul, Barr, who understands the meaning of compromise, accomplished a great deal more.
   
   
2. George Phillies. George is un-charismatic, even for a physicist, and he and I disagree on several policy questions, most notably immigration, but I recognize and appreciate his thoughtful, cautious approach to most issues. Moreover, alone among the candidates, he seems to understand what it takes to conduct a campaign. Whether or not he wins the nomination, his privately-conducted polls will do the party good.
   
   
3. Steve Kubby. Steve Kubby has a solid record as an activist and mounted respectable third-party candidacies in California. His ability to raise funds--like every candidate lower on the list--should be cause for embarassment. He's made up for it by calling in his connections in the libertarian movement and putting together a bit of a brain trust, including maverick Chicago School economist Joe Cobb.
   
   Kubby's endorsement of Ron Paul was a statement that, as the LP's candidate, he'd under certain circumstances commit a gross impropriety. Likewise, rolling around in the mud with born-again purist Christine Smith is not to his credit. With Paul out of the running, his respectability has been restored by events out of his control. I suspect that, on the issues, I am more in agreement with him than with Phillies, but Phillies so far has run a more solid campaign.
   
   
4. Mary Ruwart. Ruwart is not actually seeking the nomination, although there are rumors that she will jump in, Jacob Hornberger-style, at the last minute. That's tawdry, but I'll forgive it, as, unlike Hornberger, and despite her role in driving my sort of libertarian out of the Party in the '80s (read up on the history of the Bergland nomination!) she is not a willful idiot worried about the effects of "compromise and concealment"--Hornberger's term for taking thoughtful positions on policy matters rather than always talking about the Best of All Possible Worlds--on her immortal soul.
   
   Ruwart has somewhat of a broad appeal in the libertarian movement, although in my 12 years as spectator and minor participant I can't say I've ever been a "fan". Said appeal stems largely from style, and it isn't the "macho flash" style which usually wins a libertarian street-cred. Her training as a biophysicist, even though most of her publications are about rat guts, wins additional points with this 'blogger.
   
   Like Phillies and Kubby, Ruwart would, despite her lack of political experience, be a respectable candidate and an asset to the Party. Too bad she's not running!
   
   
5. Bob Jackson. Jackson's approach to the issues is solidly libertarian and solidly sane. His campaign, however, has not gotten off the ground and it's not clear that he even remotely understands what it takes to win the nomination, let alone be a player in the general election. Nobody without any experience in government really belongs in the race (sorry George, Steve, and Mary!), but Jackson is the only one of the three people listed so far actually seeking the nomination who seems to be running for dog-catcher.
   
   
6. Wayne Allyn Root. Talk about opportunity lost! Root is a zillionaire and a minor celebrity. His libertarian credentials are a bit lacking--he emphasizes being an ex-Republican and a "conservative" more than anything else--but his policy views are broadly libertarian. However, his campaign has been about as serious as Bob Jackson's.
   
   
7. Robert Milnes. Milnes is among the nobodys, or at least the "people nonexistent in the movement until they decided they could run for President. He proposes a Libertarian-Green alliance. Given the ideological climate of both groups, with Libertarians largely hostile to both environmentalism and soft-communitarianism and Greens having tolerance or even affection for market abolitionism, Parecon, and other totalitarian schemes, that'll happen soon after pigs learn to Use the Force. Not a bad idea, however, for reasons I may discuss some other time.
   
   
8. Michael Jingozian. Is Jingozian a Milnes clone, or vice-versa. From my perspective, the answer is "yes." Ranking these two was a toss-up, and done randomly.
   
   
9. Daniel Williams. Demerits go to Williams for basing his whole website around video. If I wanted TV, I'd buy a TV. Video works at its own pace; creating a video means you expect the audience to sit and take as much time as you would have them take. Especially when you're a "nobody", that's unacceptable. Williams is ostensibly the author of The Naked Truth About Drugs and, like your humble narrator, a low-level LP activist. He's done very little to even let the community know where he stands on the issues, and hasn't been campaigning.
   
   Note that this implies that I'd take a libertarian who I don't know much about over the rest of the candidates!
   
   
10. Jim Libertarian Burns. That's his real name, by the way; Burns's record of party activity goes back to the '70s. Of late--you can call it his retirement--he's taken to running for the Presidential nomination every four years, to tell us all that the LP candidate won't win so policy questions are irrelevant.
    
    
11. Alden Link. Link is the inventor of the wheatgrass juicer, and one of the first candidates to declare. His campaign never picked up much steam, despite his having been taken under the wing of prominent New York-area activist Tom Stevens. Perhaps it has something to do with his cluelessness about the libertarian approach to the issues.
    
    Worth noting, however, is that Link stands as evidence that the rhetoric of liberty and prosperity can attract people to the movement who don't care the slightest about ideas.
    
    
12. Mike Gravel. Gravel is in Gordon's poll due to a statement made during a campaign stop in Alaska about running on the Libertarian ticket, which came to nothing. He shows up at this point in my list as my way of saying, "I'd rather have Mike Gravel than any of the candidates ranked lower."
    
    Insert "Hillary Clinton"--who I'd rather have than Mike Gravel--and my point becomes more clear.
    
    
13. Christine Smith. Smith was yet another newcomer to the movement who decided she could run for President. Unlike most in that mold, she brought a background as an organizer and raiser-of-money for humanitarian causes. Like Alden Link, she was a bit soft on Libertarian ideas, but seemed promising for quite a while.
    
    In the past few months, she's taken to opposing much-needed reform of the LP and has joined--with some wild, off-the-deep-end, Hornberger-esque releases--the "purist" camp. For those unfamiliar with the internal culture of the libertarian movement, a "purist" is not someone who believes the same thing the rest of us do but is just more honest about it. Rather, a "purist" is someone who believes in many ridiculous things, has trouble with prioritization and shades-of-gray, and insists that if others agree, they must be evil. The libertarian calling you a "socialist", a "central planner", or a "fascist" because you believe in cap-and-trade or school vouchers is a purist.
    
    Such a person clearly has no business running for President. If we needed any further confirmation of Smith's lack of suitability, her recent temper-tantrum shows her true colors. The Libertarian Leadership Forum, held in Las Vegas, charged candidates for the Presidential nomination $500 to participate in the debate. The debate cost money to put on (more on this later), moreover, with anywhere between eight and a dozen candidates in the running, there needed to be some way of filtering. To a respectable campaign, $500 is a peppercorn fee. To the bozos, it's steep. Smith refused to pay, then sent messages to every contact list she could find condemning the practice and confirming her place among the bozos.
    
    Even Jim L Burns paid the fee. Smith would rather have been a free-rider. She's new to the libertarian movement and her positions have been evolving. I wonder if she's heard or read the term "free rider" before. Most don't get that far.
    
    
14. Barry Hess. Outwardly a perfectly respectable Hadacol salesman turned Jesus Junk salesman turned currency speculator, Hess is a profoundly vain man. As such, he has more in common with most Presidents than the other Libertarian contenders do--see what Greenspan had to say!--but I nonetheless maintain that he is of insufficiently sound moral character to carry the Party's standard.
    
    In Arizona, Hess is the man who Runs For Things. Not local offices, mind you, but the top. Always the top. He ran for Senate in 2000, coming in last behind an independent and a Green, and for Governor twice, receiving about 2% of the vote and coming in last each time. Reasons why are manifold. Hess has no background in government, nor in public policy. His credentials as a man-of-the-community are limited to his church. He comes off as not understanding the issues.
    
    Worse still, he's unmanageable, and doesn't know how to take advice or criticism in stride. He's told me, repeatedly, to "watch and learn"--insisting that the things winners do to win are all wrong--and and even had the gall to tell me I should admire him. Why should I learn about success from a repeat failure who's been an embarrassment to his Party and refuses to learn from his mistakes?
    
    
15. Ron Paul. I don't care what his ideological roots are, and I don't care what sort of mold his followers would like to fit him in. Ron Paul, of the candidates in Gordon's list, is the only one who would be antagonistic to liberty, were he elected, with his veto pen, with court nominations, and with administration-authored legislation.
    
    Paul talks a lot about the Constitution, but isn't properly a Constitutionalist. He believes strange things about said document, not supported by legal scholarship, and has introduced several bills--google the "We The People Act"--threatening to de-fund the courts if they deviate from his creative re-interpretation. The most insidiously Christian Dominionist and anti-gay member of Congress, Paul wouldn't actively oppress, rather, he'd remove Federal protections and nominate judges who would remove Federal protections, knowing that localities would establish religion or move to punish gays for being who they are.
    
    Paul's record in Congress is unimpressive. Being "Doctor No" has meant that the Doctor has not advanced his agenda, whatever it may be. I cannot think of another Congressman of Paul's seniority who has accomplished so little. Jeff Flake and Tom Coburn, only one of whom is libertarian, provide useful comparisons. Aside from Barr, Paul, who is not seeking the LP's nomination, is the most likely on Gordon's list to actually win the Presidency were he nominated. A man who does not understand how to compromise and prioritize cannot serve as President, and a man with Paul's absolutism may very well wreck the country to show us.
    
    No matter: George Phillies got this one right. Paul may be a small government man, but he's a homophobic bigot. He thus would not deserve the nomination of a party that represents a movement in which gays have played a role akin to that Jews played for socialism.
    
    
16. Dave Hollist. There may be something profoundly wrong with Barry Hess, but the real nutcases begin here. Hollist doesn't want to be President, he wants to sell us "contract insurance". An interesting idea, straight out of Rothbard's book, but not the role of a President as defined in the Constitution. Hollist doesn't seem to understand why he runs for the nomination, every four years, since (at least) 1996, and I don't, either. If he wants to bring about the anarchists' Age of Aquarius, surely there's a way that at least begins to make sense. This is not it.
    
    
17. Daniel Imperato. Imperato is certainly an interesting character, but the issues he cares about don't make it clear, any more than Hollist's, that he understands what the President does, why he is running, what the concerns of the day even are, or what the Libertarian Party is all about. Combine the information in the Wikipedia article with some of the emotional, nonsequitur-filled communications he's sent around, and you get the impression that Imperato is a certifiable nut, albeit a high-functioning one.
    
    
18. John Finan. Speaking of nonsequiturs, have a look at Finan's website. Someone is off his meds.
    
    

Don't get the impression that I like to pick on the mentally ill. I have a couple of sad cases in the family, and I don't take the topic lightly. However, what is one to say when nutcases run for the US's highest office? Sometimes you have to call them as you see them.

Buckley on Rothbard.

I'm too young for Bill Buckley to have been an acquaintance. The best I can say is that he was a friend of a friend of a friend. Such distance does not preclude admiration, at least not of a man's clear strengths.

Buckley, or at least the public Buckley, was at his best when looking for the faults of others. Consider his 1995 National Review obituary of Murray Rothbard, a balanced piece with two real zingers:

Murray couldn't handle moral priorities.

It was a great pity, but his problem ought not to be thought of as tracing to the seamless integrity of libertarian principles. In Murray's case, much of what drove him was a contrarian spirit, the deranging scrupulosity that caused him to disdain such as Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and--yes--Newt Gingrich, while huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement that "rous[ed] the masses from their slumber," as he once stated his ambition, but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco. Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.

One has trouble finding a more astute criticism of Rothbard-style libertarianism (not to be confused with Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism), this "purism" which consists of inventing bumper-sticker scruples, then throwing a fit when reality, sense, or ethics causes one to deviate from the last moment's invention by some tiny epsilon, or worse still, to reject the scruple but not the underlying values. Believe that pressing the "button" to get rid of all government overnight would be disastrous and even morally wrong? You're a socialist, no better than Hitler or Stalin: out you go! Believe that "self-ownership" is sophist's hooey? You're even worse. The guru's own weirdness, of course, gets a free pass.

This is the "libertarianism" of LP chair candidate Ernest Hancock, of presidential candidates Christine Smith and Barry Hess, and of numerous lumpen activists in the movement and the Party, including quite a few involved in the center of downmarket libertarianism down at Auburn. (Lincoln apologist? Must be a socialist!) To Hancock and the rest, Buckley's words still apply today.

A new solution to the Cuba Question?

The USA embargoes Cuba ostensibly for three reasons:

1. To prevent the fencing of American property stolen in post-revolutionary expropriations and give Cuba an incentive to give full compensation.
   
2. To punish Cuba for the attack on unarmed airplanes in international airspace.
   
3. To induce the Cuban people to overthrow the socialist regime.
   

Perhaps 2 and 3 are the same. Regardless, the embargo has been ineffective on all counts. It has not induced Cuba to compensate victims of the expropriation, nor has it induced regime change. One may argue that it has strengthened the socialist state, by giving it an alibi for its own failings. Consider the Castroist line the newest version of "Socialism is great in theory, it just hasn't been properly done yet.": "It isn't socialism that is causing mass deprivations, but rather the Yanqui bloqueado". Stupid, yes, but even a US Congressman, Jose Serrano from the Bronx, NY, has bought it. (Any Congressman mistaking the embargo for a blockade is not thinking critically and possibly taking his talking points from the Cuban socialists, leaving him unfit for office either way.)

Reasons for failure are complex; Europe's lack of solidarity, Cuban authoritarianism, and simple poverty are all possibilities.

The US has since learned that trade can subvert authoritarianism and socialism itself, as has been done in China, Vietnam, and (arguably) the social-democracies of Europe. Reform, be it democratizing or merely liberalising, does not change the fact that the Cuban government stole something, or rather billions of dollars worth of somethings.

Everyone in the world would be owed compensation by everyone else were all historic wrongs to be righted by transfer from one group of descendants to another. It would be ridiculous to require Mongolia to pay reparations to anyone who had ancestors in Poland, Hungary, or Damascus in the 1200s, or even for the USA to pay the descendants of United Empire Loyalists or descendants of slaveholders to pay descendants of slaves. Such claims are anhistorical inventions, in the case of slavery reparations, rediscovered generations later by those with a victim complex, and in the case of the Godfrey-Milliken Bill, childish jokes.

Claims that have been consistently pursued through the decades, with the struggle carried on--not invented--by heirs are a different matter, as are claims made by living victims. The call for a right of return and compensation for property expropriated under the Absentee Property Law from Arabs who fled fearing atrocities at the hands of militant Jewish nationalists is essentially legitimate and cannot be made otherwise by stalling tactics.

Inconsistency concerning Israel aside, this is the position of the United States, even toward Native American bands, like the Sioux, who have kept up the legal fight continuously. It is an extension of the common law rights of heirs to continue to pursue the civil claims of the decedent, and it is the policy of peace. Just as thieves must never be allowed to keep their gains, so too must conquest, by outside aggressors or socialist guerillas, never be allowed to yield permanent material gain.

Compensation to victims of expropriation is not currently being collected. Cuba refuses to even discuss the matter. Trade provides a means to collect: a surcharge of 20% on purchases of American goods or services made by the Cuban government (or its straw buyers) and 5% on purchases by Cuban private enterprise could be levied until victims are compensated with interest. The rate disparity is to shift the burden to the real perpetrators and to incentivize development of capitalism. Surely, Cuba can also trade with Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and others not imposing such a surcharge--as is already possible--but given its objection to the embargo, and that the USA is currently its primary food source, it's unlikely that it will completely forgo trade with the US. Note that any trade at all is an improvement from the status quo.

There's one catch: Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution prohibits export duties. Could a useful fiction (a la "socialism with Chinese characteristics" or the penumbra of an inkling of a whiff of a Constitutional right to privacy) be created to circumvent this? "This isn't an export duty, it's collection of restitution from Cuba."

Thinking of those pesky Europeans, lifting the embargo might just shut them up twice over. They could no longer blame the US for the misery of the Cuban, and might even become shamed by the truth; unlike the European's, the American's prejudices (Michael Moore excepted) will not lead him to be duped by Potemkin hospitals and hotels and silly UN metrics designed to reward countries with socialized healthcare. Strange as it seems, what would at first appear to be a softening might lead to long overdue international pressure on the socialists to liberalize, or at least to allow elections. Even if mere democratization is the result, Cuba is so socialist that votes can only take it in one direction.

Text-bite: George Phillies on anti-environmentalists

From his campaign's statement on energy and the environment:

Attacks on scientific global warming observations have substantially passed their time. Many attacks are a political waste product, resulting from 1970s feuds between Republicans and environmentalists over air and water pollution. The feuds are so ingrained that they are being recycled.

I've felt for several years like a lone-gunman in the libertarian movement. Many old libertarians have had Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer whispering in their ears for so long that they come from a different planet, where climatologists are so incompetent as to neglect solar effects, concern for the environment is a socialist ploy, and the anthropogenic global warming thesis simply Must Be Wrong: liberty depends on it. One, of late, said that talk of biodiversity loss was "eco-theology".

How can I even have an intelligent discussion with someone so ignorant, who has had at least eighteen years to learn why scientists and the educated public find such things of concern, but simply hasn't bothered? Worse still, the man's a PhD economist!

Thanks to one of the frontrunners in the LP race, or at least a well-informed campaign staffer, for easing my burnout, if only momentarily.

Have you heard the one about Big Government and the Gold Standard?

(Proof that even dull 'blogs can inspire interesting questions:)

Ron Paul has popularized it of late, but it is an opinion long current among downmarket libertarians, that going off the gold standard enabled the Federal government to grow to its current size and that going back on the gold standard is a sensible route to decreasing the size and scope of government.

There may even be a kernel of truth to it: going off the gold standard meant that the US as a nation could run up a current account defecit without provoking an attack on the dollar, doing away with Triffin's Dilemma, carrying with it two side effects, the first being that private business was free to import according to market prices, without a need for quotas in order to prevent a major depression, and that the government, too, was free to spend more on foreign aid and defense. The balance of payments was no longer a make-or-break issue; the dollar's peg to gold, which to a modern eye looks artificial and superstitious, no longer unnecessarily complicated everyday economic activity.

That isn't what vulgar libertarians have in mind, though, when they denounce the Federal Reserve and call for a return to a gold standard. Triffin's Dilemma is also resolved when the US Dollar is no longer the base currency for the rest of the world, but massive government interference in the marketplace, in the form of export subsidies, high tariffs, and import quotas, would nonetheless be necessary to prevent an attack on the dollar, deflationary spiral, and depression. I doubt that even Ron Paul would give up free trade to get gold.

The argument instead is that the "government can and does Just Print Money to finance Wars, Welfare, and All That." Translating crass ignorance of the money creation process out of that statement, the libertarian gold bugs' allegation is that the Federal Reserve is a major enabler of defecit spending.

Is that so? The numbers don't bear the story out. As of the seventh of January, 2008, according to the Treasury Dept's Bureau of Public Debt, the total US public debt was $9,199,557,987,743.58, of which $4,083,366,539,555.28 is intragovernmental (owed by the government to itself: think "Social Security Trust Fund") and $5,116,191,448,188.30 is held by the public, including by the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve, as of October 2007 held $775,000,000,000 of the public debt. That amounts to roughly 8% of the total, or 15% of the portion held by the public.

The Federal Reserve thus enables about eight percent of Federal defecit spending. Is taking a purchaser of eight percent of the debt out of the picture really worth going back to the days when imports and exports were a political issue, or worse still, to the era of Great Depressions and even greater Panics of 1873, of cyclical depressions and deflationary spirals?

My America, Yours, and John Edwards's

John Edwards, the far-left candidate for the Democrats' presidential nomination, once said there are "Two Americas", one for the powerful and the other for everyone else. Tonight, in his speech delivered after Obama won the Iowa caucus, it became clear that there are two: one in his head and the other in which the rest of us live.

In Edwards' America, the 47 million people without health insurance "beg" for treatment at the emergency room. The emergency room in Edwards' America is also apparently where people go to get anti-cancer chemotherapy, which sounds like much speedier treatment than we must deal with in real life. Apparently there's something called "health care coverage" one must buy to get such a speedy course of treatment. I don't have it, thus if I was diagnosed with cancer tomorrow I'd have to see a few specialists, including an oncologist, and suffer through several weeks of chemotherapy, none in the emergency room.

And in Edwards' America, wealthy personal injury lawyers with twenty-six million dollar homes can't open their wallets to pay for cleft palate surgery for downtrodden coal miners. The rest of us must be soaked.


Edwards has taken to being the sob-sister and poverty prostitute of the '08 campaign. (He's also possibly the cocktail-party socialist Lew Rockwell is looking for...) The matters he brings up: poverty, the flawed health-care system, relocation of manufacturers, could all be helped by careful examination of extant public policy. Health care, especially, has been broken by a flawed tax code coupled with government mandates that constitute for many people an effective ban on cheap insurance. Otherwise they're social issues, suited more for the church pulpit or the civic fraternity fundraiser than the campaign stump. That such matters get brought up in the context of a political campaign should have us afraid, and Edwards's manner of doing so should have us shaking in our boots. Edwards is such a simpleton he makes Tom Tancredo look nuanced and such a formulaic ideologue that Ron Paul is a casuist by comparison. He seems to believe that real life is described by same sort of victim/villain narratives he told in the courtroom. Who's a villain? Anyone who's not a victim. Work, save, be entrepreneurial, be responsible, take care of yourself and your own, and you become the target of Edwards's class warfare.

Under an Edwards presidency, if he had his way--and the bad ones always do, separation of powers be damned!--we can look forward to any of the following three scenaria:

1. Companies like Maytag are forced to keep US plants open until bankruptcy, so as not to "send jobs overseas",
   
2. A privileged class is created, of Maytag shareholders, who are paid a subsidy by the rest of us so as not to go bankrupt when forced to keep US plants open by the Federal government,
   
3. A tariff, or even an embargo on imported washing machines, is put into place to wipe out other countries' comparative advantage, driving up the price and making something our grandmothers considered a luxury once again less affordable at the margin.
   

It's not just washing machines that are at stake. Automobiles, microwaves, food, clothing, and health care will all become luxury goods that many of us wouldn't be able to afford without government transfer payments were Edwards to become president. The pool of successful people to be shook-down, soaked, mugged, or otherwise robbed, will also diminish. Fighting poverty the Edwards way will only make us poor and increasingly dependent on men like himself for our basic necessities. Iowans ought be ashamed such a man even received thirty percent in their caucuses!