“Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don’t act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment and the American dream slipping further and further out of reach,” Mr Obama said.
Across the political spectrum eh? And which spectrum would that be? Let me guess… the spectrum that runs from Democrat regulatory statist to Republican regulatory statist? There is no ‘spectrum‘ in front bench congressional politics in the USA (or the UK), just a groups of people who are arguing over how much deeper the same hole they are standing in should be dug in order to get out of said hole.
That is why the USA needs vastly less bipartisanship and a whole lot more disunity. The truth is that NOTHING the US government will do is going to prevent double digit unemployment and economic depression. Both parties were the authors of this situation and every time some jackanapes in Washington DC uses the term ‘bipartisanship’, it is worth pointing out the discreditable Republican role creating a vast edifice of state controls that prevent markets from actually working.
Outside the USA, explicit attacks on capitalism are perfectly acceptable by leading politicos, so it is unsurprising to see Britain’s dismal prime minister Gordon Brown petulantly blaming ‘unbridled capitalism’ when Britain’s regulation smothered and very much ‘bridled’ economy refuses to respond to his ever more pointless orders. But in truth politicians in the USA, the ones in both parties who have done equally absurd things to bury the US economy, in practice share much the same views about ‘capitalism’ as Gordon Brown does. The reasons for that are not hard to figure out.
They are trying to blame everyone other than the predatory political class and its army of tax funded clients and instead point at those pesky people who actually create wealth rather than destroy it as the problem. It is not so much that they are consciously lying about the nature of reality but rather their underpinning axioms within which they see everything simply cannot cope with a world view that does not place politics and regulation at the heart of absolutely everything and as the solution to everything. And if vast reams of regulations are a given then problems cannot be regulation per se but rather that the wrong regulation was tried this time and so ‘we’ need to try different ones. The notion that there is something systemically wrong with creating a massive impenetrably complex tower of (often contradictory) laws simply does not compute. Most politicians, and indeed most people generally, do not even see the teetering structure in totality, just the changes compared to the last time they looked. The tower of regulations simply is… the only ‘sensible’ discussion they will even entertain is how much more should ‘we’ pile on this year.
But then that is one of the major upsides of the massive global crash that is coming down upon us all… the tower that has been created has been struck by lightning and yet they want to save it by piling the structure higher even as it is tipping over… whereas the correct course of action is to get out from underneath it.
Now let us make sure that the people responsible from the largely interchangeable statist ‘right’ and ‘left’ are the ones who get the blame because the smarter ones are already trying to shift it to anyone else but themselves. Our job in the non-mainstream media is to make sure the political life gets crushed out of them as they so richly deserve.
The ‘Crisis of Regulatory Statism’ meme needs to spread.
So, is it a tower or a hole?
We know where the Bipartisan ‘holes are. Most of them shovel prodigally, but few of them tower.
Don’t worry. The AmeriCorps volunteers will have pretty uniforms, just like the cartoon ads on TV, and with their vast experience you can be sure they will be part of the necessary change the ads predict, and will have perhaps as much wise concern for healing Americans’ souls as did the Inquisitors those under their care. Yankee Doodle is floating around in the ether nearby.
If the explicit part of the federal bailout, about $1 trillion so far, is opposed by the overwhelming majority of American voters, I wonder how many would oppose the total of explicit and implicit ($3 trillion?? Zero??) parts.
Sounds great! How do we do this bit, exactly?
By endlessly repeating the ‘inconvenient truth’. How the hell do you think?
A tower falling into a hole.
Well, libertarians have been doing that for the past century. What’s different this time?
Non-violent non-compliance is the only avenue left to us before we have to start getting nasty.
The fact ‘pamphleteering’ is both more effective and easier now, and the timing of this crash could hardly be better politically speaking. Plus we have also have a great many spectacular successes over the last century.
If you have any useful suggestions how else to shine the light where it needs to go, feel free to add them.
The ongoing crisis is a political collapse whose major symptom is economic trauma.
Predictably, the very pols and groups whose philosophy of endless state intervention brought us to this crumbling ledge of sandstone over the Grand Canyon are desperately pointing fingers in every direction away from themselves to assign blame.
In these days of illiteracy and ignorance at so many levels of society, the bewildered products of our fragmented, PC/multi-culti, race/sex/gender educational system sit in stunned fear in front of the TV news shows blaring one sensationalist story after another about “corporate greed” and “financial fraud”.
It is not surprising that so many are therefore susceptible to the allure of the strong leader who will save them from the crooked, greedy capitalists just like another mythic figure did the last time this happened.
When a populace has little knowledge of history, economics, or even logical thought processes, myth, cliche’, and emotionally reassuring nonsense are powerful weapons.
So, what shall we do? As state minimalists, as devotees of individual rights and liberties, how can we compete against the century-long momentum of the “progressive” story line?
First, get over the idea that there is some magical formula, some incantation that will suddenly turn every thing around, and cause the citizenry to abandon the reassuring fairy tale of the wise and powerful leader who will direct the state to make everything all right again.
The world has become a reality show. The above plotline is the accepted conventional wisdom of a people who have been taught for generations that the state is the guardian and protector of everything. We have become the “tube obsessed and tube led” drones that the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves warned us about so many years ago in “Network”.
But there are strategies and tools at our disposal. You are sitting in front of one of the most powerful as you read this.
Find the documentation, the speeches, the legislation, the broken pledges, the dubious campaign contributions, in short, all the evidence that used to be out of reach, but is now available to those skilled and diligent enough to find it and publish it for all to see.
Speak up. In every possible forum, from the workplace to the school board meeting, from the church group to the crowd at the local bar, challenge the drivel and present an alternative.
You have a great advantage—statism’s record is clear and well documented as it has lurched from one disaster to the next. Talk about it, write about it, and have the courage to defend your positions when the statists get hysterical and abusive, as they certainly will when their deeply held tenets of faith are challenged.
Finally, gird yourself for the long haul. Understand that it will take as long to dismantle the edifice of the modern state as it took to construct it. What is required is not giddy enthusiasm, but the grim, dedicated perserverence that continues no matter how dark the night, in the hope of the eventual dawn.
When the rights of man and the concept of limited government were put forward, only a few hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a nation of, by, and for the people. Now there are several, in spite of their many flaws and errors.
We must accept the struggle to regain and protect the freedoms and liberties so many thousands have bled to secure. What better use of our time and energies are there?
My children and their children will walk among the stars as free men and women. Only our devoted effort can make this happen.
Start now, and don’t ever stop. The reward is to live as a truly human being, independent in mind and soul.
We, and our children, may possess the pearl of great price. Make it so.
These would presumably be the same economists from “across the political spectrum” a mahority of whom think that the New Deal prolonged and deepened the Great Depression;
sorry Obama, I very much doubt that they agree with you that we need a New New Deal.
There needs to be a campaign to drive lawyers out of politics. They all, at heart seem to believe that if they impose just enough of the right laws/regulations they can make society better.
Thats a load of steaming horseshit.
I needs to be pointed out in nearly every modern democratic society the judicary is supposed to be seperate from the politicans. Take that one step futher, if you are involved in the administration of law you cant make them.
That should be a campaign easy enough to run, lawyers are despised, and a lot of the regulations passed appear to provide more work for lawyers rather than a better society.
Less laws more Justice would be a simple catchphrase.
I heard something that might relate- an item of news. Is it true that Britain is going to cut down on the number of traffic signs?
If it is, then this can be proclaimed as an example of liberty in action. A small step on the road back to self-responsibility, but still a step back!
mandrill: “Non-violent non-compliance is the only avenue left to us before we have to start getting nasty.”
I’ve been saying it all my adult life. They will keep stealing our very lives from us as long as we let them.
Perry: “Our job in the non-mainstream media is to make sure the political life gets crushed out of them as they so richly deserve.”
You are not going to do that with writing about them. If you cannot resign yourself that you are now writing for history, then you’re in the wrong game and you need to find another way to deal with it.
You cannot do that just by writing about them but this *is* part of the essential culture war.
I say that the culture war is essentially lost now, Perry.
What’s left is annotation.
Perry, one element you have left out is the fact that politicians both in North America and Europe as well as the vast majority of media opinion mongers seem basically clueless about simple math and every type of pure and applied science.
I cite as an example media and political hyperventilating about energy supplies. Virtually no-one in the US knows that the largest quantities of im,ported energy there come from Canada.
My father a geologist told me when I was seven years old that the world was full of oil but the seven sisters oil companies were spreading the tale that there was only so much, etc. etc. doom and gloom forever when it ran out.
Apart from the question of why he was telling a little snippet like me that and that obviously it stuck with me all these years my father was right. Under the oceans, under the prairies, under the least great of Lakes, Erie, probably under the Gobi desert. You name it.
Since the politicians are by and large non-achievers in the pure and applied realm don’t expect them to know that or much else of useful knowledge if push comes to shove.
Millie, the battle we need to win is not the ‘Battle of Facts’, it is largely the ‘Battle of Packaging and Promoting’. Sophisticated arguments may create more activists but then the activists need to popularise and promote the message on the basis of perceived self interest and ‘gut feeling’.
There was no lightning, the tower simply collapsed under its own weight.
You sure don’t understand the reference, do you!
You got me there:-) What is it?
Well, I found the reference, and I am sorry to say the lightning part still doesn’t apply, at least when used by an atheist such as Perry. But whatever:-)
Applying contrarian thinking, the tower could be a place that generates lightning, and the shocked people are early versions of Benjamin Franklin!
Still, the best way to spread liberty is to set an example. We need a worldwide syndicate that grows and sells marijuana, and invests the profits into armed forces, and takes over a deserted place, like the Kimberleys in northern Western Australia. Then this outpost can establish a viable libertarian economy and society. This is why I think we should have local democracies- with all citizens being given arms and arm training, and learning how to defend their locality. No standing army, detached from the citizens, and able to be used against them. No central government to rule over them, and become too powerful. No taxes or confiscation or conscription (if you choose to not be a citizen, you get no training in weapons, and no vote on laws over public lands,etc.)
Then win it back, or do you think that the other side is forever? I assure you they are not. I find such a lack of fight surprising.
In truth there are many many things in our favour that can, and will, undermine state power. Technology itself is working in our favour even though the statists too see its uses. However the shift of power that information technology brings helps us hugely more than it helps them.
Then let me explain. True, I am not a ‘believer’ but that does not mean I do not like to use loaded symbolism from a variety of places (our logo for example). The ‘tower struck by lightning’ tarot card represents both calamity (as is obvious from the imagery) but also the sudden collapse of belief… paradigm shift if you like. That is what the lightning means.
Before I wrote this I had just finished reading an economic paper describing the point of no return in recessions happening rather like a abrupt change in quantum state rather than a continuous progression, and I was reminded of this tarot card by the way the author had phrased his remarks.
Perry: my last comment was not an attempt to take a shot at you or your views on religion, but to point out that my original comment was not inconsistent with the understanding of the explicit reference of the imagery. I understood everything you just said intuitively before I understood that reference. Problem is that most people would interpret the lightning to signify a great external power, over which humans have no control, i.e. god. (The immediate reference I thought of was Babel, and sure enough, it is mentioned here as well.) In fact, there are very many people out there who have no idea how the world economy came to be where it is now (or was 70 years ago), and are beginning to think of it all as some kind of natural phenomenon, like earthquakes. Of course there is this other, rather large group, who thinks that all of it (including earthquakes) is the fault of humans in general, and evil capitalists in particular, but that is a different kind of problem.
Perry, is there a link available to the paper you were reading? It sounds very interesting.
Alisa writes:
What’s all this ‘god need’? How about these external powers:
(i) The laws of the physical universe.
The concept that humankind can control its environment is vastly overstated (though not totally absent). Have we quashed any good earthquakes or volcanic eruptions recently, quelled a hurricane or two, or even stopped the River Severn from flooding? Though we think we are so wonderful, the mediocre best we can do with more than the most minor and regular of natural events is to predict, run and hide: and even getting that right is often beyond us.
(ii) The absence of human agreement, which easily confounds whatever small chance there might be in the effectiveness of any grand plan for world society and the world economy.
Any two-bit nation, or the odd tribe or sectarian grouping can screw things up pretty well; try Palestine, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Congo – especially with continuing sincere help from the UN and the rest of the world. Even without natural catastrophe, pumping gas and paying for it is currently beyond the combined wit of Russia, Ukraine and the EU. And first world nations do a really good line in not sorting out the world’s problems, big (well biggish) and small, existent and non-existent, by ending up waging, half-heartedly, long-term wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(iii) Economic laws, which are rather soft and floppy (compared to physical laws), but still uncontrollably powerful (and less predictable than those physical ones). And some modestly simple accounting arithmetic does not hurt either.
Perry’s choice of The Tower is highly relevant: the lightning being best interpreted as the (sudden) revelation of unseen truth. With today’s truth being that severe economic downturn is unavoidable (not least due to past actions). So trying to retain political credibility and avoid the blame by repeating these past actions on an even wider scale really is a tower in need of a big lightning strike.
So the solution to our economic woes is for everyone to ‘believe’ and spend like there is no tomorrow. Which group of morons is it that really thinks the people with any spare money are going to do that? [The plus side of absence of agreement.]
Tomorrow will come, no doubt; we will need our money then, to spend wisely during the recovery, and we need those who brought us here not to remain in control.
Best regards
Sure. But how many people do you actually know (outside the internet) that actually interpret it this way?
I hope everyone on this site opposed the bailout, otherwise you are hypocrites.
I see alot of bashing of Obama, while corrupt fascists like Bernanke and Paulson get off lightly.
Hank Paulson is one of the most evil shits ever to hold office in the US, he has presided over the biggest theft of tax payers money in US history, and given welfare handouts to the stinking rich.
Goldman Sachs is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda or Islamic terrorism.
“Then win it back, or do you think that the other side is forever?
{cold stare} It’s close enough, mate, for the purposes of my life, which is all that I’ve ever been interested in.
“I find such a lack of fight surprising.”
Perry… if there was a “fight”, I would be ass-deep in it and right shoulder-to-shoulder with you. What we’re doing is not a fight. Not any more. Matters are already past anything we can do in blogs, now, and they will be for a long time to come. You can doubt me if you want, but you’ll see.
We’re going to go all the way through this — the whole bloody lesson-plan that should have been the overweening moral of the twentieth century — again. Don’t you see it? The biggest and last domino is falling right now in front of your eyes. This is going to be an example to the whole world, but here’s the thing: “the whole world” is a lot to teach by example. The destruction of America might live up to it, but it’s going to take a while.
And after that, there is no telling how long people will have to live in the greyed shadows of what used to be, before they remember what that was, if they ever do.
We were really lucky in some ways, Perry, although cursed in others: as a long-range matter of history and the serendipitous time of our being, we saw what was possible.
That’s really all there was to it, and I am beginning to find the resolve of facing facts strangely calming.
Only you AC guys could take the inevitable ending of the credit cycle and blowout of our financial system by the ultimate capitalists, Wall Street, and turn it into the Second Coming of Ayn Rand.
Amusing, though.
Carry on!
Perhaps, Billy, that’s because you don’t have kids.
Sorry Billy but just because you cannot see it does not means it ain’t happening. With all due respect I have little time for anyone who has given up and is unwilling to fight on. You greatly over estimate the other side.
The one question I ask those of you who believe that the answer is “true capitalism,” is how you think that would function in the real world, and what evidence do you have to prove it.
That said, I agree with much of the analysis. This is an economic collapse, and Obama’s stimulus plan is likely to fail(Link). And the problem is indeed that we’ve had a culture trying to get something for nothing(Link).
But like the Marxists, hard core free market capitalists seem to posit the free market as a kind of perfect moral system that one would embrace if only one could properly use reason, and then things would work well. The fact is that the economic system reflects the society and culture. If you got rid of government tomorrow, or tried to have a minimalist government and libertarian laws, the people would soon rise up and change everything. Culture comes first, the economic system reflects it. Moreover, theories like laissez faire capitailsm or Marxism are vastly simplified interpretations of reality, based on assumptions and often unprovable beliefs about the nature of freedom, morality, etc.
Now, talking with yourselves about these things creates a kind of re-enforcement of those beliefs, but to those of us who don’t share those views it honestly comes off sounding more like faith. I honestly find myself lumping hard core libertarians with Marxists as believers in some kind of “proper” economic system that if only it were correctly embraced, would be the best of all possible worlds, regardless of the culture of a society.
Is this a “crisis of capitalism?” A “crisis of regulated statism?” I could say yes to both of those. But at base it’s a cultural crisis that isn’t just about economics, but about consumerism, materialism, ignorance about how society functions, and a desire to simply retreat into a material delusion (games, entertainment, drugs, consumption) rather than to take control of ones’ life, take responsibility for ones’ choices, and work with others to compromise and solve problems.
Solve the cultural and even psychological crisis, and the economy would start working better. How it would function, I’m not sure. I doubt the simplified theories of the “right” economy are accurate. Different cultures and different eras will have different economic systems. Freedom will be understood different ways and in different places. If you want to change how a country or economy operates, you either have to change the culture (which is a generational process and requires engagement) or grab power and force changes (and we’ve seen how that works from Russia to Cambodia).
“Perhaps, Billy, that’s because you don’t have kids.”
Keep working the premise in that direction, Eric: I did that on purpose, and everyone should be goddamned glad I did. Otherwise, I would have been driven to something quite spectacular.
Get it through your head, Eric: I have always been right about this stuff. All of it. For decades before you ever knew me, I saw all of this coming and I was always right. And there was never one chance in hell that I would have children in this culture. Never.
I made the right move a long time ago and I know why. I don’t need the observation you made, mate. I’ve been ahead of you every single step of the way.
“Sorry Billy but just because you cannot see it does not means it ain’t happening.”
Excuse me, but what the hell are you talking about, Perry?
“With all due respect I have little time for anyone who has given up and is unwilling to fight on.”
Look: with all due respect — and I mean that — I am not about to take lectures on giving up from people who haven’t even started yet. I repeat: what we do in blogs is inconsequential, and if you don’t think so, then I give you this coming January 20 as evidence.
When you hear of a “fight”, do let me know and I’ll be there.
Deleted
Really? Not what I think at all. I see markets as the best way of dealing with the crises that reality inevitably throws our way, not a way of avoiding crises. Things will not be ‘ok’, they will just be better and in the real world that is the best you can ever hope for.
Which is why I constantly talk about fighting the culture war. It is also why I am not a pacifist as political chance sometimes needs force as well, which means different things depending on the context.
Billy Beck: you have your own blog and you make the rules there, mate. Make your remarks there as you are wearing out your welcome here.
‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’
I have never disputed your rule, Perry, and you bloody know it.
You work your end, and I’ll work mine and take my own chances. I know what I’m doing.
I guess you do not read us much, eh?
I am not convinced you read my article at all. Try this one.
Remind me again when the Rapture of the Nerds will arrive and make all this moot?
At least Billy can be relied upon to be both entertaining and to remember that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.
If it happens it must true. The Commies have won and we’ll live as serfs and supplicants begging for scraps from the politician’s table. That’s pretty much how civilization has always been organized, the current economic shifts are simply human society adjusting to the expansion of global communications and trade whilst retaining the pre-existing power structures transformed to function on a larger scale. (By larger I mean both in geographical scope and raw numbers of people, though in terms of proportion of the global population then power and wealth will clearly become more lop-sidedly concentrated at the top.)
Relax. Nobody lives forever (unless that pesky Rapture of the Nerds surprises me) and your children will choose to fight their own battles in their own way for their own purposes, as they must – and should.
True, but you have to realise that the global Establishment forces for which Obama, Blair, Bush, Brown et al turn out are playing an incredibly long game; you only have to look at the decades-long-and-counting incubation of the European Coal & Steel Community into the post-Lisbon proto-goverment European Union of today (if they bully the Irish into submission) to realise this.
And now the Americas seem set to get their own version as these same people look likely to use the current beneficial crisis to evolve NAFTA into a new American Union with its own shiny new currency. I am waiting with interest to see whether the fallout from the credit crunch might be used to bounce the UK into the Euro.
The ultimate goal is, apparently, a global currency. Don’t believe me? Here is the economics director of the Council for Foreign Relations stating as much in plain english: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj27n2/cj27n2-10.pdf
And as we all are endlessly told regarding the Euro, you can’t have a successful single currency without a single political authority, which would therefore eventually entail some form of unified world government.
When Galileo was persecuted by the Roman Catholic church for his heretical helio-centric views some centuries ago, he was able to take refuge in liberal Holland and continue his groundbreaking work. Under a single global authority, where would opponents of the orthodoxy have left to flee?
But then that is the point.
“Under a single global authority, where would opponents of the orthodoxy have left to flee?
But then that is the point.”
{nod} “The last domino…”
By “the spectrum” – is meant from Keynesian to Chicago School.
It seems the Austrian School stand alone.
Fair enough.
As has been stated to you for *decades*, Erb, free market anarchism is not a quasi-Marxian “belief” in some arcane, ivory tower economic system; it is an acknowledgment of a moral truth, namely that voluntary, mutually consensual relations are defensible whereas statist theft is not.
No one is suggesting Utopia will suddenly spring up, Scott. All the same players will always be here; the hard working and the lazy, the selfless hero and the greedy opportunist, the honest, moral individualist as well as the disingenuous fraud. The question is how all of these individuals are allowed to express themselves, and the “culture” is the backdrop against which their various ethical views get played out.
What we’re witnessing now is the dropping of the facade, Scotti. The excuses are threadbare, the lies more blatant, the rationale weak and tattered. It IS happening whether any of us like it or not, and the statist theft advanced by Old Guard like you and Obama is being shown to be anti-human and, frankly, uncivilized and regressive.
Learn a useful trade, Scott. Surely there’s a market for skate sharpening in central Maine.
The Anarcho-capitalists are the only group I know that engage in excruciating rational deduction and end up with impractical results that never worked anywhere for anybody.
The problem is that A/C assumes there’s no marginal utility to freedom. It is the foundation & currency for all things.
In the real world, however, most people prize stability and comfort over the ability to eat polar bear meat or tote a marijuana-powered minigun in a backpack.
Ah yes, the ‘real world’…and in this ‘real world’ stability and comfort come from state spending and regulation, right?
That explains why, here in the real world, with regulatory statists in power more or less everywhere, we are all in such splendid economic shape at the moment.
No?
Broward Horne writes:
Indeed they do, and it is no bad thing.
However, the stability and comfort has just ended. This has happened because of spendthrift ways. It is highly unlikely that anything can be done to continue an adequacy of stability and comfort.
IMHO, the problem has been one of short-term bribing of the electorate to excessive happiness (and so continued support of the party in power), while leaving them up shit creek in the longer term.
And Broward Horne writes:
It is all very well to quote such minority freedoms. However, majority freedoms also go out the window as statist policy becomes ever weaker through its failures (and also ever more zealous in its aims) and the state props up its support (though only seemingly) by forceful quashing of modest democratic dissent.
Best regards
Interesting comments. I would say the current system is more like fascism (Link)than socialism since fascism is defined by: a) a business-government partnership rather than government economic planning; and b) emotional appeals in general, seen in patriotism, consumerism, and emotion-driven politics.
The reason I bring up culture, and the need to define what is meant how “free markets” would work is that without cultural support “free markets” quickly devolve either into mafias and organized crime on the one hand, or governments on the other hand. That’s why no functioning “anarchy” or even minimalist libertarian system exists — people don’t want it, they make choices that make it impossible. On the left Antonio Gramsci recognized this when he realized Marx had been wrong in underplaying culture and that the fascists had won by creating a cultural hegemony. That’s what exists now: A cultural hegemony based on consumerism, patriotism, and materialism. It also leads people who think they are for small government and free markets to support a massive military empire, including attempted social engineering through force in Iraq. How can one be more ‘big government’ than American foreign policy? Our “soft fascism” is more efficient and productive than bureaucratic socialism, but as the current crisis shows, it was built on unsustainable practices (namely living beyond our means for thirty years through wildly growing budget and current account deficits).
So as I look at arguments made by libertarians, I find a strong emotional appeal concerning a belief in freedom, and Hayek’s arguments about markets being far better in responding to diffuse information. As a political scientist I see no way for libertarian ideas to win because there is a distance between the statement of ideals, and an understanding of what it would take to make those ideals real. I hear a lot of very provocative talk, I get people angry at me when I don’t simply accept the rhetoric, but I don’t get a sense of what it takes to bring a change that could work.
Now, there is a once in a century chance for cultural transformation. To do that requires to go beyond the ideology and claims about morality and freedom, but to think about the cultural attributes that would lead people to do things that would support those ends. That’s what I see missing in the libertarian argument. The best I could imagine is the old “small is beautiful” argument — if most politics were local or regional, it would be easier to limit power and build the strong sense of voluntary community which I think needs to be present if libertarian ideas of some form are to have a chance. There also has to be some understanding of diverse perspectives. I have sympathy towards libertarian ideals at a basic moral level, even as I dislike ideology and efforts to argue that there is one ‘right’ human style of organization. Often I get the impression that not adhering to the ideology means getting insulted or dismissed (not on this site, but in other discussions). That’s not a way to persuade people, and could risk marginalization. Cultural change is gradual, after all.
I am not an anarchist but examples of minimal states by modern standards are legion. Just compare both column inches of regulations and state share of the economy in, say, Britain, between, say 1850 and 1900, and say 1960 and now. States were vastly smaller and worked just fine.
The reason I have little time for either ‘defeatist’ libertarians (and frankly I am not really all that interested in much of the self described libertarian ‘movement’) or people who see Big Government as inevitable is that the small state/pro-liberty side are winning the culture war… but only at the base of the pyramid (few can be bothered to vote, which is a very good sign, and deference to authority have probably never been more brittle).
Where they are losing the culture war (and indeed have not really started to fight it yet, which is appalling) is at the top of the pyramid amongst the vile towers of the political class. Thus paradoxically we see states becoming more regulatory and repressive at the same time the bulk of the population are becoming ever less in tune with the political systems they are subject to. Yet First World economies have been steadily de-massified and continue to become ever more distributed at the same time states come more centralised.
Asymmetries of information between state and individual have never been smaller and in many ways have actually inverted, which I think in the long run will prove revolutionary in every sense of the word. My guess is the last people who will see the paradigm shift coming will be politicians… or political scientists 🙂 Will it be the Rapture of The Nerds that finally does it? Opinions vary but that is indeed my suspicion.
Understanding is fine but successful culture wars are not about ‘understanding’ but rather about assimilating people into the meta-contextual framework that makes the appropriate political shifts even possible. That is also why Cameron’s Tories are worthless at the moment: they argue within the meta-context of the other side and thus greet arguments in favour of smaller state with blank stares. It literally does not compute.
The reason why it is worth attacking the statist enemy on many economic issues and, above all, liberty, is the frames of reference to do so are widespread and deep. However other fights are pointless like, say, the National Health Service in Britain: the common meta-context does not yet even entertain the vocabulary to attack, let alone, dismantle, the NHS… hence it is a worthless fight at this point in time. One day that too will change.
We will eventually win some battles and lose others, but the big advantage we have in that with our non-Ponzi based economics, we actually have reality on our side. That counts for little in the short run and only a bit in the medium run but in the long run it means everything.
Leaving aside debates about anarchcapitalism and so on, government is vast today.
Government spending could be greatly reduced – and government would still be vast. Far greater in size (whether in money terms, real terms or as percentage of the economy) than it was as recently as the 1950s – especially if one is just dealing with the Welfare State.
If economic life is to be restored government spending must be reduced. People who support a reduction in government spending are of use in restoring prosperity – people who support even more government spending snuff out hope of an economic recovery.
It really is that simple.
“I would say the current system is more like fascism than socialism since fascism is defined by: a) a business-government partnership rather than government economic planning; and b) emotional appeals in general, seen in patriotism, consumerism, and emotion-driven politics.” – Scott Erb
That’s rather an odd definition of “fascism.” I realize that it’s a bit of a slippery concept, but as far as I can tell most definitions are more like the following:
Or this from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
I just don’t see how that is very similar to what we’re seeing today in the West. And in any event, your argument seems more properly directed against Anarcho-Capitalism (a small subset of the libertarian universe) than more “mainstream” (if I may use that term) libertarianism. Most of us aren’t “no-government” types; we’re “limited government” (tending toward “minimalist government”) types. You’re fighting a straw man.
One of the problems in the so-called culture war is the role of intellectuals and ideology(Link).