Libertarian politics
purepedantry | January 29, 2009Radley Balko over at Reason summarizes the collateral damage that has been incurred in our nation's drug war. These casualties include police militarization, repeated foreign policy travesties (read: the entirety of Latin America has good reasons to hate us), the incarceration of hundred of thousands for nonviolent offences, and impediments to the use of to adequate pain control in medicine. Oh, and the cherry of top of this horrid sundae is the abdication of the rule of law.
It is a pretty sad read.
But here is the kicker:
Even if the drug war were working -- even if all the horrible…
purepedantry | May 14, 2008Two good articles on libertarian politics this week.
First, the Economist covers Freedom House's "How Free?" report on the US:
But the verdict on the Bush years is nevertheless sharp. "How Free?" not only details and condemns the administration's familiar sins, from Guantanamo to extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretapping. It reminds readers of its aversion to open government. The number of documents classified as secret has jumped from 8.7m in 2001 to 14.2m in 2005 -- a 60% increase over three years. Decade-old information has been reclassified. Researchers report that it is much…
purepedantry | March 12, 2008Things I did not visualize reading this morning. 1) David Mamet wrote a piece in the Village Voice -- of all places -- disavowing his faith in government.
Money quote:
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years…
purepedantry | January 10, 2008Boo Universe! Boo American politics and your absence of choices!
You can try this electoral quiz that tells you who you should vote for here. The Universe has apparently determined that I should vote for Ron Paul -- which is really unfortunate for the Universe because I ain't doin' it.
Try for yourself. Or you can feel free to speculate in the comments while all libertarian candidates (big L or little l) are such nutcases.
UPDATE: Daniel Drezner is having a similar issue.
purepedantry | December 19, 2007Ron Paul just lost my vote (not that he really had it before). See the video below the fold (the question is at about 2:40):
So here's my deal. I'm a libertarian, and Paul does advocate some policies that I agree with. For example, he advocates returning the gold standard. In light of the Fed fiddling with the markets and creating a moral hazard after the sub-prime meltdown, I am beginning to think this is a wise policy. Furthermore, he is the biggest deficit hawk of the candidates at the moment. Therefore, it would make sense for me to support him.
However, I have two objections to…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007I am clearing out links, so here are two quotes on a libertarian persuasion.
From Jane Galt (about media coverage of the Hillary/Obama foreign policy debate:
It's not really my business, since I don't think anyone will ever describe me as progressive or (outside of Britain), liberal, but I don't find this surprising, or even necessarily bad. Progressives/Liberals are possibly on the cusp of a political resurgence. It seems perfectly natural that they should spend more time worrying about how to cement their political coalition, then what to do when they have power. This has massive drawbacks…
purepedantry | July 2, 2007Brian Doherty from Reason has an interesting article on NY's place as a libertarian mecca:
New York City is the celebrated center for many vital aspects of American culture: publishing, finance, and the arts. It rarely has been credited, however, as a cutting-edge leader in political ideologies.
But New York also is the breeding ground for a unique and growing American political tendency -- the modern American libertarian movement. It might seem ironic that a city that has been, at various times, one of the most overly governed and poorly governed of American cities should be a launching…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007I wrote about my skepticism about libertarian paternalism before.
Here is some more skepticism. Glen Whitman writes about one type of policy advocated by libertarian paternalists -- the opt-out program. In opt-out programs, you are enrolled in what the government says you should do -- such as a savings account -- unless you specifically say that you don't want to do it. The problem as Whitman points out is in how difficult it is to get out. If you make it a bureaucratic maze to extricate yourself from a program, you have essentially made that program mandatory. (He discusses the slippery…
purepedantry | May 29, 2007Ilya Somin from the Volokh Conspiracy has this post on a resurgent paternalism -- using as its justification new findings from behavioral economics:
"Libertarian Paternalism" is all the rage in law and economics circles these days. To slightly oversimplify, libertarian paternalists claim that people systematically make mistakes as a result of cognitive errors and biases. Afterwards, they end up with outcomes that they themselves consider inferior to at least some of the alternatives they could have gotten by making a different decision in the first place. As a result, third party intervention…
purepedantry | February 14, 2007Cathy Young has an interesting column on the tension among libertarians between the desire to be tolerant about other people's lifestyles and personal convictions about those issues:
Within the libertarian milieu, there is a tension between political libertarians, whose chief concern is limiting and reversing the expansion of the state and its powers, and social or cultural libertarians, whose central interest is maximizing individual opportunities and freedom of choice.
For some political libertarians, the centralized government is so unquestionably the greatest enemy that they not only…
purepedantry | December 11, 2006Everyone always emphasizes the evangelical Right as running the Republican Party, but David Kirby and David Boaz -- writing in TCS -- argue that Republicans ignore the libertarian vote at their peril:
In the past, our research shows, most libertarians voted Republican -- 72 percent for George W. Bush in 2000, for instance, with only 20 percent for Al Gore, and 70 percent for Republican congressional candidates in 2002. But in 2004, presumably turned off by war, wiretapping, and welfare-state spending sprees, they shifted sharply toward the Democrats. John F. Kerry got 38 percent of the…