Libertarians for Obama

There was a moment during the 2008 campaign when there was this giant push that libertarians should seriously look at supporting Obama.

At the end of 2006, in the middle of what was that nearly three-year-long primary contest, Cato published Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas's "The Case for the Libertarian Democrat" and accompanying Cato Daily podcasts.

In early 2008, Cato drew attention to the comments of Scott Flanders, CEO of libertarian publisher R. C. Hoiles, who "reasoned that Obama is the best candidate to work on four top libertarian reforms: 1) Iraq withdrawal, 2) restoring the separation of church and state; 3) easing off victimless crimes such as drug use; 4) curtailing the Patriot Act."

And not longer after you had stuff happening like the launch of the Libertarians for Obama blog (tagline: Put aside your skepticism and read on.)

By September, you had people like Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution - a blog which I hold in high regard - making the case for Obama and having their case highlighted by The New York Times.


Fast forward to today.

I'm posting this blog post as a reminder for the next time libertarians start thinking "you know, voting for the most liberal member of the Senate is starting to make a lot of sense!"

Here we are, just shy of 8 months into his Presidency. We've seen the largest growth in government in 50-some years - and that's excluding whatever lurch awaits in his attempt to revamp healthcare via yet-more-government.

And, returning to Scott Flanders' laundry list:

1) We are still in Iraq
2) As the Washington Post reports today, Faith-based initiatives: still goin' strong. (And perhaps even stronger.)
3) And, did you really delude yourself that Obama would change drug policy? Puhleeze. Although, there is that whole Andrew Sullivan fiasco.
4) Which brings us to "Curtailing the Patriot Act." Um, not so much. I'll just quote today's AP headline: "Obama Supports Extending Patriot Act Provisions."

Mr. Flanders: You're oh-for-four. Zero. Out. Of. Four.

As Jon Henke rightly put it in July, here's the Obama response to libertarians: Thanks for the votes, now get lost.


Now, I'm something of a hybrid between a conventional conservative and a libertarian. I can appreciate the libertarian case for John McCain was pretty much nilch, and the case against McCain was tremendously strong. I, too, hate McCain-Feingold, and anyone willing to regulate our Free Speech Rights is no friend of our liberty.

However, please learn this lesson: A liberal is a liberal is a liberal as long as the day is long.

No matter how bad the conservative nominee, it can not justify voting - on a libertarian basis - for the liberal one.

And a second lesson: If you elect a liberal president, who has a liberal super-majority in the Congress, the policy they pass will not resemble what you want. Period.

Something for Sullivan to think about during his Mental Health Break

Andrew Sullivan (political commentator/blogger for The Atlantic magazine), April 17th, 2009:

My view is that no one is above the law, and that when a society based on law prosecutes the powerless and excuses the powerful, it is corroding its own soul.

Fast forward a few months. As reported by The Docket, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s news blog:

Political commentator, author and writer for The Atlantic magazine Andrew M. Sullivan won’t have to face charges stemming from a recent pot bust at the Cape Cod National Seashore — but a federal judge isn’t happy about it.

U. S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings says in his decision that the case is an example of how sometimes “small cases raise issues of fundamental importance in our system of justice.”

While marijuana possession may have been decriminalized, Sullivan, who owns a home in Provincetown, made the mistake of being caught by a park ranger with a controlled substance on National Park Service lands, a federal misdemeanor.

The ranger issued Sullivan a citation, which required him either to appear in U.S. District Court or, in essence, pay a $125 fine.

But the U.S. Attorney’s Office sought to dismiss the case. Both the federal prosecutor and Sullivan’s attorney said it would have resulted in an “adverse effect” on an unspecified “immigration status” that Sullivan, a British citizen, is applying for.

Read the judge's full opinion here. It's very much worth a read, particularly in noting that U.S. Attorney’s Office had other pot-bust cases they were going to prosecute before the same judge on the same day.

Sullivan's latest blog post says he's taking a "Mental Health Break." Here's hoping he'll spend some time during said break thinking about the repugnant hypocrisy of this.

(H/T Internet Scofflaw)

A rant: Buy.com won't let me ... buy

So, I'm trying to buy some CyberPower UPSs for my work. I price out various online vendors, and Buy.com happens to have the best pricing when including shipping. So, I try to purchase the UPSs from Buy.com.

Problem: I'm using a personal Discover card which has my home address as a billing address, but I don't want these shipped to my home - I want them shipped to my employer's office.

Now I make similar purchases. All. The. Time. Places like Dell and Amazon and NewEgg let me purchase things with my personal Discover card and ship them to my office just fine, thankyouverymuch. But, when I try to check out, Buy.com refuses to let me do so because my shipping address doesn't match my billing address. I remember back like 9 years ago when a lot of vendors forced you to ship to your billing address, but then they started just asking for that three digit code on the back of your card and the world returned to normal.

So, what to do?

Well, I call up Discover. They let me register my office address with them and say that vendors shouldn't have a problem, so I should talk to Buy.com again.

Well, instead of calling Buy.com since their website flat out won't let me continue (and they don't actually list a phone number on their website, although it's 1-800-800-0800, fyi), I I notice Buy.com does offer to let you use PayPal. So - plan B. I check out with PayPal, which is set up to use my Discover card, and in PayPal I tell them to ship to my office address. Order accepted. Yay.



But - not so fast. I then get an e-mail stating that my order has been rejected, because the shipping address isn't a confirmed address with PayPal. Super.



So, now, although for a little while I thought I was sailing smoothly, I'm now actually back to square one. I want to buy these, with my personal Discover card, and ship to my office address.

So I call up Buy.com. I'm on hold about 15 minutes wondering again again why I'm putting myself through this for give them my money and being told over and over that I'm a "valued customer" - which isn't even true on two accounts. They won't let me be a customer (they won't take my money!), and a 15 minute wait means I'm really not valued.

I finally get to talk to someone. Or "talk" to them, because the woman's grasp on English... "naght szo grud." After a first failed attempt she pulls up my (now rejected) order. Then I explain what I'm trying to do.

She basically says their system is utterly unable to accept an order where the billing address is different from the shipping address if you're using Discover. It's ambiguous if I could use a different credit card brand and get better results, but she does try to steer me to some Buy.com "no payments for X days" plan. No, sorry, not interested. I tell her if they're unwilling to make this easy for me, I'm going to their competitors. I try to be semi-polite, but I basically hang up on her.

Now I'm in the process of ordering from Amazon. It's going to cost a little more, but I like Amazon - they let me ship things I'm buying for my company ... to my company. Scratch that - they let me buy things. Unlike Buy.com, which should seriously consider a name change.

Broken. Promises.

While I detest the fact all sides seem to playing to the populist AIG outrage, the point remains - President Obama has avoided carrying through with anything he promised but would be difficult to accomplish. No leadership for change on earmarks. Keeping exactly the worst parts of the Bush Stimulus Agenda.

At least some people seem to be waking up to the fact that this guy promised the world, but if miserably failing to deliver.

Daily Beast's Big Fat Story: The Enablers

To believe the Federal Government in general, and Democratic party politicians in particular, are not a major source of our current economic turmoil is to be woefully ignorant.

Nice round up by the Daily Beast today on "The Enablers":



Thanks: Rahm, Barney, Chris, and Chuck!

Quote of the Day

From The Economist's "Fireside chat" podcast for March 13:

But Obama has a long history of saying the right things and not necessarily delivering on them.

It's at about the 4:50 mark:

They were talking specifically about Obama's education speech and his remarks in favor of merit pay and getting rid of bad teachers - concepts I strongly favor, but doubt Obama will actually come through on.

This discrepancy between Obama's rhetoric and action is rapidly becoming one of my top annoyances with him. Pass a nearly trillion dollar stimulus package that won't work, then hold a "fiscal discipline" summit. Talk on the campaign trail about cutting wasteful spending in Washington, then stand behind a budget with 9,000 earmarks. Talk about removing "ideology" from science in an embryonic stem cell move that was clearly all about ideology, not science.

I'm glad Obama favors merit pay, the ability for bad teachers to be fired, etc. And I really do hope he'll stand up the NEA teachers union to get these things implemented. (Unlikely, but even better, would be to move education back down to individual states and let states take care of this, but I digress.) But, I have absolutely no confidence he'll do so.

Three American Values, and David Brooks

Some time ago (quite possibly two or three years ago) on an episode of the Observations Podcast, the Q and O guys pontificated about what they considered to be the three American values: Justice, Liberty, and Equality. Their discussion has stuck with me.



These three values are are displayed with prominence in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ...

In fact, beyond simply showing up as words, the values resonate through out that paragraph (and the rest of the Declaration for that matter). The securing of rights deals further with Justice, their unalienable status with Liberty, our right to life with Equality.

The values of Liberty and Justice also appear in the Pledge of Allegiance ("with liberty and justice for all"), and Equality was considered as being added to these before the pledge was finalized.

Each of these three values resonates through the American ethic today and has since our country's founding. But the three necessarily interfere with one another.

Before I get too far discussing the tensions between the three I should define what I happen to mean by each, because each is fairly nebulous with many options for interpretation.

Justice

By Justice, I mean "maintenance or administration ... by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments" if I can borrow part of a Merriam-Webster definition.

An instance I would consider to be within the realm of Justice would include if you are promised some amount of compensation for some amount of work, and you complete the work, that you are properly compensated, and that others then can't also lay claim to your compensation. Or, in another instance, that others are prohibited from causing you physical harm, and if do so, receive a suitable punishment.

I should mention that as a socially concerned Evangelical, I often hear the term "social justice" bandied about. "Social justice" has nothing to do with the Justice I am talking about here (and, I think, little to do with what our Founding Fathers were talking about in the Declaration.) That's to not say that "social justice" proponents have goals I disagree with - but I do dislike their terminology (and often I also dislike the means they propose to achieved their desired ends). So called "social justice" deals with what the Catholic Encyclopedia terms a "claim in charity" as opposed to a "claim in justice" (or likewise, "charity leads us to help our neighbour in his need out of our own stores, while justice teaches us to give to another what belongs to him.")

Again, charity is important, but it is not Justice as I'm defining it for the purpose of this post.

Liberty

To explain what I mean by liberty, I'll again cherry pick from M-W: "the quality or state of being free", "the power to do as one pleases", "the positive enjoyment of various ... rights and privileges".

This is all about being able do that which you desire without impediment by others, to "be free". If you want to paint your house red, and you have the means to do so, you can paint your house red. If you want to engage in an open market exchange, you are able to do so. If you want to share your wealth out of charity, you can do so. Etc, etc, etc.

Equality

I mean two related but perhaps slightly different concepts by Equality.

The first deals with impartiality. We should be impartial about things beyond someone's control and which aren't relevant when making decisions. So, one should not be able to able to discriminate based on race or ethnicity or creed because that violates equality in terms of impartiality. In this sense we are all "equal" in that we all, by virtue of being human, have access to the same set of unalienable rights.

The second deals with egalitarianism. This incorporates both the desire to provide equal privileges to all and to address the "gap" of "inequality" between individuals. We educate all children in this country out of this egalitarianism, so all persons have some degree of "equality of opportunity." Our progressive tax code is also based on this egalitarianism such that those with much are taxed more to give aid to those without (this is an attempt to achieve "equality of results/ends").


Now that you hopefully have some sense of what I mean by these concepts, I can get into how they conflict. Justice necessarily requires the State (or whomever is administering Justice) to be able to violate one's Liberty. Locking someone in jail clearly violates their Liberty, but punishing those who commit crimes is Just. Equality also conflicts with Liberty. Anti-discrimination laws violate a person's Liberty to discriminate on various criteria to achieve the goal of Equality in terms of impartiality.

Equality and Justice can also conflict. Progressive taxation, for example (and - to come back to my previous point on "social justice," which often involves calls for progressive taxation), takes away the merited rewards that should be protected by Justice for the sake of achieving the egalitarian ends of Equality.



Within the conflicting tensions between these values is where different political philosophies pop up. Referencing back to the Q and O podcast, the participants discussed how (typically) Liberals emphasize Equality above the other two, whereas Conservatives broadly champion Justice, and conservatives who would identify as Libertarians primarily care about Liberty.


Hopefully by this point you've come away from this post with something to think about, but I'm really just setting up the framework of these values for the purpose of evaluating a recent New York Times article by David Brooks - his Feb. 19 piece, "Money for Idiots". Keeping in mind that Brooks described himself as a "conservative moderate" on March 3 in his later article "A Moderate Manifesto", and he's the token conservative on PBS's NewsHour, let's consider exactly how "moderate" and exactly how "conservative" Brooks is.

"Money for Idiots" starts:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It's based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.

So far so good. That's conservative red meat. It's Liberty (make your own decisions) and Justice (live with your decisions) all over the place.

Then:

Over the last few months, we've made a hash of all that. The Bush and Obama administrations have compensated foolishness and irresponsibility. The financial bailouts reward bankers who took insane risks. The auto bailouts subsidize companies and unions that made self-indulgent decisions a few decades ago that drove their industry into the ground.

The stimulus package handed tens of billions of dollars to states that spent profligately during the prosperity years. The Obama housing plan will force people who bought sensible homes to subsidize the mortgages of people who bought houses they could not afford. It will almost certainly force people who were honest on their loan forms to subsidize people who were dishonest on theirs.

These injustices are stoking anger across the country, lustily expressed by Rick Santelli on CNBC Thursday morning. "The government is promoting bad behavior!" Santelli cried as Chicago traders cheered him on. "The president ... should put up a Web site ... to have people vote ... to see if they want to subsidize losers' mortgages!"

After reading just the intro, I started thinking "Hey - Brooks is back!" After all his Palin bashing and what seemed to be his secret glee over the Obama win, I was hoping to be breathing a fresh breath of Brooks by the time I made it that far through the article — individual responsibility, apparent sneers at bailouts and the stimulus, Liberty. Justice. And, low on egalitarian Equality. He's a conservative again!

But, wait! Unfortunately, there's more:

Well, in some cases we probably do [have to subsidize irresponsible people's mortgages]. That's because government isn't fundamentally in the Last Judgment business, making sure everybody serves penance for their sins. In times like these, government is fundamentally in the business of stabilizing the economic system as a whole.

Sigh. He's back to his liberalism. He just chucked Liberty and Justice out the window to welcome in egalitarian Equality.

It's more anti-Justice, anti-Liberty through the rest of the article and Brooks concludes:

The nation's economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we're all in this together. If their lives don't stabilize, then our lives don't stabilize.

Which, is basically a more elaborate way for Brooks to make a bad parody out of Patrick Henry's famous quote ... changing it to: "The government needs to give egalitarian Equality to the entire economy, or you get death."

David Brooks doesn't share a common outlook on these three American values with conservatives. He's willing to do away with the conservative push for Justice and Liberty for a little Equality. That's not the balance of a conservative, it's the balance of a liberal. Now if only the mainstream media would bring Brooks on their programs under the right label.

Related:
1. Bruce McQuain makes similar points to the above over at Q and O.
2. Brooks wins the "2009 Beclownment in Journalism Award". (H/T The Other McCain).
3. David Brooks: insane. Count me stuck on Reagan. (Also, H/T The Other McCain).

Update, 3/11: Michael Wade over at Q and O critiques the latest nonsense to come out of David Brooks which is continued criticism of faux capitalism from a faux conservative.