Meanwhile, over at the global superpower, the public is slowly waking up to the fact that this government, too, is going bust, thanks to out-of-control entitlement programs, expensive bailouts, and the suicidal policy of everlasting peace through everlasting war. For the past six months, all of the United States government’s issuance of new debt has been bought by its compliant central bank and paid for by the printing press. As the politicians of this empire in decline are fiddling on the aptly named Capitol about a few billion in savings here and a few billion there, trillions are getting burned by the unstoppable state machinery. And over in Albion, the hotly debated “savage” cuts in public spending still seem the figment of tabloid imagination as they have so far not prevented the country from accumulating another £145 billion in debt over the past 12 months.
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Samizdata quote of the dayJune 2nd, 2011 |
 14 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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If motor firms are too big to fail, I’m sure they’ll think of something to get by! They can take out a loan from that World Bank, right? Or that IMF? The Americans do control one of those, so that’s alright!
Anyone who thinks for a second that some kind of libertarian thought-revolution is coming down the pike is out of his or her gourd. What is coming, and is too late to stop, is a kinder, gentler Soviet Union. It isn’t just the politicians (and those who have bought them) that’s the problem.
1) Everyone knows the budget needs cut…but that doesn’t apply to that sacred cow. Leftists want the military gutted, conservatives want social services eliminated, bluehairs don’t care so long as Social Security is left alone, the poor will vote to whomever continues to send them their danegeld, farmers demand that agricultural subsidy, teacher that teaching money, this group, that group, the other group all want their special project saved from the chopping block. The result is nobody is able (or willing) to stand up in Congress and say “this needs to go” and mean it, in large part because they all want reelection.
2) In America politics is a team sport. People identify with a party like they back a football team. In some cases it goes back generations. “I’m a Democrat because my daddy was a Democrat because his daddy was a Democrat because…” Can’t name the planks in the party platform? No biggie, just pull the lever. Don’t know what the incumbant actually voted for? It’s cool, you just know he’s been there forever and brings home the pork. Never heard of what the other guy stands for? It doesn’t matter because he has the wrong letter after his name. It is nigh on impossible to get die-hard partisans to even acknowledge the good the other guys occassionally do, much less vote for the guy.
3) Everyone gets a vote. You read, you study the issues, you make an informed decision, and you cast your vote. The idiot who only knows that guy looks better than your guy gets a vote too. So does the leech that is just looking for a pandering payout. So long as human nature is to try to get something for nothing and so long as politicians say “vote for me and I’ll get you free shit”, your vote will remain overridden, especially when you consider half the population now gets some form of cashy money from The Man. I don’t care how much you try to inform and enlighten a baby factory about the merits of libertarianism, she will never vote against the paycheck her crotch fruit brings her. Neither will the fatty with bad knees waiting for the first of the month. Nor the farmer who gets his fat subsidy check.
4) Too much money and power at stake. The War on Drugs is a financial boon to local communities. Between grants and forfitures and property auctions, too much cash is on the table for the locals to just vote away. All those rules and regulations give the paperpushers a tremendous amount of power. No EPA beauracrat is going to vote himself out of a job and all that authority. The state loves that the 4th Amendment has been gutted. It openes up all kinds of avenues of approach for them when dealing with criminal cases. No government is going to just let that power slip from its fingers.
5) Libertarians are unelectable at the local level. Talk all about balanced budgets and government responsibilies all you want, but local libertarians running for office only talk about repealing drug laws and eliminating city services. Bluehairs get freaked out when they start thinking potheads will roam the streets freely and John Q. Citizen doesn’t like hearing that the police, fire, parks, and libraries will be eliminated. No local libertarians means none in the state house means non on Capitol Hill. None on Capitol Hill means no party worried about losing voters so no need to change their platforms. RINOs keep getting elected because there is nothing for them to run against. And when they do run their message isn’t wanted. The average American doesn’t want to hear about open borders and competative trade and NAFTA. They want the borders secured, drug violence in the border states stopped, illegal immigrants out, and jobs for Americans. They don’t want to hear about no drug laws and personal responsibility because they have a cousine who is a junkie. They don’t want to hear about legitimate responsibiltieis of the state and why privitzation of the roads is the best approach, they want the potholes on 5th Street fixed like they’ve been promised.
Libertarianism has a great message, but no way to get the word out in any real way. Libertarians don’t control the mass media, they aren’t in classrooms, and aren’t in the statehouses. I don’t see how that can be changed any time in the near future, even if a few thinkers say “how about we just skip the next G8 conference”.
I don’t disagree with anything Steven Rockwell said, but that’s all short term. What happens when the economy collapses? Because that’s the road we’re on. When hyperinflation hits (that’s coming, folks; the sages in Washington and on Wall Street are already talking about Quantitative Easing #3), and the dollar loses all its value, and the credit markets seize up, and suddenly we’re thrust into a barter economy, what then?
In the immediate aftermath there could be a lot of politicians hanging from lampposts, but then we’re going to be forced into a fundamental re-examination of what we need from government. And that’s when we hit the decision node: one possibility is radically reduced government and a return to substantially more old-fashioned self-reliance; the other is devolution into complete dictatorship. All in all, I suspect that the latter is the more likely result, but maybe, just maybe, here in the US there will be enough residual pioneer grit to pull us in the libertarian direction. (I wouldn’t care to be in Europe, though. France could see a return to 1789. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort!)
I share neither Schlichter’s optimism nor Rockwell’s unalloyed pessimism. I simply remain cautiously hopeful.
The political process – in particular modern mass democracy in which every vote counts the same whether from a taxpayer or tax-consumer – is designed to increase state power, not to limit it.
I want to have Detlev’s babies. Maybe in Western Civilisation II we’ll figure out it’s a really, really bad idea to give the vote to people with no skin in the game.
The state will never be bankrupt as long as it retains the ability to confiscate everything you own.
I’m not optimistic at all. In Europe the picture is even worse than the one Steven Rockwell paints of the US. The enemies of liberty are circling the corpse of their own monster. Look at the “anarchists” of Greece, Spain, and – most depressingly – Britain. I’ve seen the SWP posters round my way. These people think it’s capitalism that’s failing. During this failure of central planning, it’s somehow the supporters of free markets who’ve been put on the back foot.
When the regulatory welfare states finally collapse under their own weight, there will be very strong pressure to put something even worse in their place. Can we prevent it? Perhaps. With people like Schlichter around, there’s a chance. But it won’t simply follow as day does night. I’m not even sure it’s very likely.
The various governments around the world say, “see, we told you Capitalism doesn’t work. We need to reign it in some more,” and the candidate that runs on a platform of sticking it to the rich gets elected. This morning I read a Gallap poll found 48% of americans want wealth redistributed via taxes. Perhaps coincidentally, that is the same percentage of Amercians that pay nothing into the upkeep of the country, yet still collect some form of money from said government. So the suits in DC grab more and more and more to pander to those folks.
In the long term we end up with a kinder, gentler Soviet Union. Sure, we’ll still have rights (that continue to be chipped away by the courts), but we’ll also end up with a command based economy, rules and regulations for every concievable activity, and a beaurucrat over every shoulder with fines, taxes, and prison terms for everyone somewhere in the 10.5 million+ laws on US books, a number that will only continue to grow.
The bottom line is my countrymen had an opportunity to choose between “land of the free and home of the brave” or “take care of you cradle to grave” and chose cradle to grave. Short of an armed revolution, it is too late to fix the United States and let’s be brutally honest, there isn’t going to be some libertarian led uprising or a secession movement based on getting rid of welfare anytime in the future.
We’re going on two centuries of Marx and Engels. Their disciples have total control of education, both at the university and public levels. They have trained countless lawyers, judges, economists, professors, philosophers, and all the other movers and shakers in Western society. They totally control the mass media. They control labor. They control government; maybe not the politicians (yeah, right) but all those offices and beauracrats. How do we defeat all those people and all the minds they have trained when we can’t make any inroads into academia? We’re facing almost two centuries of leftists being in charge.
Look at the United States. We have a century of progressive government, going back to Teddy Rooseevelt. We have Social Security going back to 1935. An entire generation of Americans were bron, grew up, had children, and died without knowing the concept of no government involvement in their lives. How do we get around that? Especially when they were told that they were “paying in” to their retirement (nevermind that the money was already spent in this Ponzi scheme ages ago).
The ugly truth is liberty and freedom are scary propositions. We don’t have pithy sayings to counter the accusations that libery means people will fail and some will die in the streets because government safety nets are a moral worng. We don’t have a bumper sticker that will offset the TV pictures of starving children in the ghettos or the trailer parks or the reservations or the hollers if we had the power to say “it’s not a legitimate role for government”.
We don’t have the means to education the masses or the media to spread the message. Reaching out to one or two people online is great, but it’s countered by dozens of tv shows reminding the masses that rich people suck and you should have their stuff and you can vote to take it from them.
I have yet to see any libertarian think tank or blogger come up with a realistic way to convince the 48% of Americans that are voting themselves a free ride to vote that free ride away. Or a way to take back academia or the press or the labor movement because the only way I can see is to start killing folk and I’d really like to avoid doing that.
Steven Rockwell is depressingly convincing.
Yes, he is depressingly convincing. But I still don’t buy his “In the long term we end up with a kinder, gentler Soviet Union” statement. That’s simply not a sustainable economic system, as the experience of the Soviet Union demonstrates. All the bureaucratic and regulatory machinery will eventually collapse under its own weight, at which point I return to my original question: what then?
My suspicion is that the US will degenerate into a large number of semi-autonomous fiefdoms. A figurehead government in Washington (and in the state capitals) may remain, but it will be largely impotent; the local strong man will be all that matters to most people. And unless there is a substantial amount of what we term “freedom” there will be a lot of starvation and the survivors will be at a subsistance level. The only hope is that some of these enclaves will develop something approaching a libertarian approach to government.
On a somewhat related side note (since I was talking about currency collapse), does anyone here know anything about the bitcoin virtual currency? Does it have any merit?
Of course it isn’t economically sustainable. Government doesn’t work if there’s no crisis. If everything is right on the knife’s edge of failure, that just means the government is able to say “if we don’t step in, we’re screwed” and when the system does fail they can say “see? We told you so. We need this power now or it’ll just get worse”. It’s self=perpetuating. A failure due to government policy and intervention just means we need more government policy and intervention. If I were a conspiracy theory kind of a guy, I’d say this is by design. Invent an economic crisis or have some Emmanuel Goldstein to require govenment action (and more government power). Repeat as necessary.
As it stands now, we’ve got a system were every four years we meet the new boss, same as the old boss. DC and the state legislatures already are the figureheads. The power is the special interests that have them bought and paid for.
As far as the local strangman, I doubt that will ever happen. We already have millions of strongmen in suits and ties in every Federal building, every state building, and every county courthouse. They are armed with countless rules and regulations and ordnances and laws and have the best law enforcement available to enforce their beaurucratic will. Big Jim and his gangs of armed thugs got nothing on your county tax assessor’s office and the sheriff’s department.
Think about your property rights for a second. What can some local strongman do to you really? Kill you, burn your house down? Eventually someone gets tired of his crap and puts him down. Now think about the power of your state (and I’m not even thinking about the feds). You buy your chunk of land and if you don’t pay your property taxes every year, it’s taken from you. Or if then need it for some public works project, they take it from you. You want to build a house, you have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop to get planning commission okays, and building inspectors and zoning approvals and environmental impact studies and any number of other office workers who can say “NO” at any time. And even if you do manage to get okays for all of that, and build your house, you can still be told you can’t develop your property because of conservation or historical considerations. Oh, you still have to pay your taxes, you just can’t do anything with it. And all those offices and departments and divisions and beauraus are going to fight tooth and nail to keep that power. That’s what I mean by a kinder, gentler Soviet Union. You ran afoul of the commissar and you went to Siberia. You run afoul of the country clerk’s office and you get fined, and feed, and taxed to death and maybe they “misplace” your paperwork so you have to start the process all over to boot.
You bring up an intersting point about starvation though. I doubt very much that the US will ever not have enough food for everyone. Say what you will about the evils of Monsanto and ConAgra and Smithfield Farms, but they have industiralized food production to the point that short of a nuclear war, Yellowstone blowing it’s top, or the sun dropping out of the sky, we will never not have enough food. That said, I can easily see food, shelter, and other necessities of life being used as a means of control. Get enough people on the government teat and then use that teat as a means of control. If you are required to use government electronic food stamps for food and end up on a “no-buy” list, you’re pretty much screwed. So you behave. Or you are poor, get your government housing voucher, and that gets cut off. Or your children are no longer allowed to go to school. And thanks to the ever restrictive laws about non-inspected food (maybe someday including the garden you grow in your backyard) that ConAgra writes and their bought politicians pass, they’ll never go out of business.
At the end of the day, it is all about power. Big business buys their government to pass whatever regulations they need, the true believers teach their followers in academia and in the courts, and the beauracrats have their cubicle feifdoms. They will never let those go without a fight. Thow in the brainwashed population that thinks they need the government and we’re screwed now, tomorrow, and for the forseeable future.
Even if, by some miracle, in the long run libertarian thought does win out, what is to stop it from eventually going back to the same soft tyranny we hve now? Remember the end of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress?
Whoo, Steven, you are a depressing fellow, aren’t you? (And yes, I do remember the end of Moon.) Well said, though.
I don’t think we’re that far apart, and your point about local sheriffs is a good one. They already have the armed goons (and probably control over the local judges, too). They might very well develop into the “local strongmen” I was talking about. My only point of difference is I don’t think Washington (or the state capitals) will matter much at that point, so Big Business can buy all the Congressmen it likes but they’ll be largely irrelevant; it will have to buy a few thousand local sheriffs as well, a much more difficult proposition (logistically). The modern counterparts of Wyatt Earp and Judge Roy Bean aren’t going to pay too much attention to the dictates of the telephone sanitizers on the Potomac.
And I’m not as sanguine as you about food supplies, not because ConAgra and Smithfield aren’t competent to produce it, but if the currency collapses how will they manage to deliver it? I think food will be abundant in some areas and in very short supply in others. I just hope that Washington quickly falls into that latter category!
I try not to be too depressing or pessimistic in my outlook. I just don’t think it’s going to be as easy to convert the masses to the church of libertarianism or become professed Randian Objectivists as many of our blogging brethern do. I’d love to be wrong.
As far as DC and the bottomfeeders on Capitol Hill goes, it’s like like Lisa Simpson said in Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington
But I’m not bitter. 🙂
Steven and Laird,
Victor Davis Hanson (Pajamas Media) is through many of his posts describing a situation in California where the law is only enforced on the ‘soft targets’ (my term) and there is a whole separate culture that is completely extralegal. He describes it specifically here and more generally here.
I think California’s failure is a very likely prototypical to the larger economy. When the police are paid in funny money and chaos runs the streets, I expect that the officers will choose to protect and serve their family’s well being, not make futile last stands on behalf of a redistributionist class that has nothing left to redistribute. The breakdown of currency will destroy the spoils system along with everything else.
I am cautiously hopeful that at least some of the state governments will ignore the unfunded demands and mandates of the National government and may revert to something much closer to the pre-National days of federalism.
Chaos is not a good thing – it is NOT liberty.
And it is to chaos that we (Britain and America and …..) hare heading.
“But Paul – the people will….”
John Stossel went out a few days ago and asked people basic questions – not higher end libertarian doctrine stuff, just questions that even most establishment economists would get right.
“Do you think that the minimum wage laws are a good thing – or do they cause unemployment?”
“Is occupational licenseing a good thing – or is it a means of ripping of customers for the benefit of the professions that a licenced” (by the way – within living memory only a few American occupations were a matter of having a license – now most skilled jobs need a license).
And, of course, “do you think that a basic safety net of government welfare is needed – or do you think it produces a dependent people?”
You do not want to know most of the replies John Stossel got.
And, it is not just that he talked to the wrong people – the opinion polls support the (terrible conclusions).
The left, via their control of education and the media (including the entertainment media) have not produced a population of Marxists – that is true (America is not Peru – they are not knowingly going to elect a Marxist murderer as President).
But most people out there (in Britain and America) are not libertarians.
In a time of crises (the collapse of the present order) they will scream for a new government to save them – to “do something”.
And there are many evil people planning out exactly what they will do when this call comes.
Rememer Barack Obama is not some freak evil – he is the face of the academic and other elite mainstream. Just one of a large movement of powerful (and well prepared) people. They love the idea of the collapse of this system – as they have a new system already worked out in their minds.
We do not look very impressive in comparison.
Of course the total tyranny the elite are planning will not work in the long run – but that will not stop them trying to impose it (perhaps on a WILLING population – desperate for order “just make the chaos stop”).
And taking us all into a new Dark Age.