“From a libertarian perspective, the best course of action is not to elevate Trump to Satan or to Saturn, but to acknowledge that he is a mixed bag. In this, he’s perhaps more like Bill Clinton than anyone wants to admit. The major successes of the Clinton years—welfare reform, balanced budgets, capital-gains tax cuts, acknowledgment that the “era of Big Government was over”—came not out of one faction winning but the tension among various factions. If there is a problem to be solved, it’s not a president who, like his predecessors, refuses to cut the size, scope, and spending of government. It’s Congress, which has abdicated its constitutional role of actually writing legislation. And it’s government at all levels, which seeks to control and regulate the hell out of social and economic innovation in the name of some imaginary greater good. There are midterms afoot, so it’s easy to understand why people in the dying Republican and Democratic parties are desperate to view everything through partisan lenses. But the rest of us, especially libertarians, are free of such blinders and do well to remember that independence means first and foremost not making everything about politics.”
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Samizdata quote of the daySeptember 6th, 2018 |
 8 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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There is a lot of truth in the quotation – no President since Calvin Coolidge has really cut government spending, and both Congress and recent Presidents (and Presidents do have a veto power that can only be overturned by two thirds of both House and Senate) have allowed government spending to explode.
For example the supposedly conservative President George Walker Bush spent his few months as President pushing yet more expansions of government – “Medicare Part D” and the “No Child Left Behind” Federal government intervention into education.
Could a President (say a President Ted Cruz) really reverse the growth of the Welfare State (libertarians who talk about the “warfare” state really have not paid attention as the United States armed forces have DECLINED over many decades) and restore something closer to a limited government? Or is civilisation doomed to collapse?
I do not know – but President Trump is not even going to try to reverse the growth of government, so we are not going to find out. At least, unlike the Democrats, President Trump does not spend his time thinking up new Welfare State schemes and regulations to make the collapse of society (of civilisation) occur more quickly.
However, where the quotation goes off the rails is in its talk of the Republicans and Democrats as “dying” and its treatment of libertarians as a viable third party.
Sorry but this effort has been going since 1971 and it has got NO WHERE – a third party approach is not going to work. Not in a “First Past the Post” election system.
Libertarians really have to choose which of the two big parties they wish to influence (they can NOT influence both parties – libertarians just do not have the numbers to do that) and get really involved. Remember American political parties can not keep people out – not in most States. If a libertarian wins the nomination in a Primary vote – then they are the candidate of that party (all they have to do is “register as” a supporter of that party – and then WIN THE PRIMARY VOTE).
“We can not do that – it is too difficult”.
Well just shut up and go home then – for if you can not even win a Primary there is no way you are going to win a general election.
As for the general mode of the public – the are still saturated with propaganda that the government must provide them with everything. The education system is a collectivist brainwashing machine.
The Democrats benefit from that – after all the teachers and university professors are pushing the young to vote Democrat. And the Republicans (being mostly pragmatic business people without a deep understanding of ideological conflict) do not really understand what is going on or how to deal with it.
The opening for libertarians is plain – convince that Republicans that the education system is STRUCTUALLY rigged to favour their rivals the Democrats, and explain to Republicans that it is in their SELF INTEREST to reform (really reform) education – by taking power away from government and professional structures, and putting it back in the hands of parents and children.
The same is true of such things as Social Media.
Basically one can only “sell” a policy to people likely to benefit from it. Democrats are not going to support a roll back of the ever growing American Welfare State because the people on benefits (and the people who ADMINISTER the system – the local, State and Federal bureaucracy) vote for them. So who the “market” for anti statist policies is (has to be) is obvious. Presently the Republicans are often in ignorant default mode – for example spending more money on government schools because to do anything else is to be “anti education”, and nodding through increases in XYZ “entitlements” because to do otherwise is seen as “anti poor people” – alternative policies that would IMPROVE education and actually REDUCE poverty (not make it worse) are not really understood by most of them.
But the Republicans are “the market” (the potential market) – as they are the people who would benefit at election time from there being fewer people on government benefits (and dependent on “public services”) and there being fewer government administrators. It is a matter of explaining to them how policies to achieve these things would work, and how it would be in their own interests to follow such policies.
As for the “Woke” Big Business executives for whom even the Democrats are too moderate and who insist on MARXISM NOW! (for example Nike and its Fidel Castro loving new “face”) I really do not know what to say about them. They seem to be utterly determined to destroy civilisation – even though the destruction of “capitalist society” will mean not only losing their own private wealth, but also the deaths of their own families.
Nothing seems to “reach” the Big Business executives – for example “Starbucks” funds the left (as do so many Big Business organisations) yet when the left riots the first place they smash up is the local “Starbucks” (and the executives still do not get the hint – and just carry on giving support to the left).
Famously – much of the American media is privately owned (“capitalist”) and yet supports Marxist individuals and movements – the New York Times (which the rest of the media tend to follow like sheep) has been doing that since the 1930s.
The intense “Progressive” brainwashing by the education system is the only explanation I come up with for this. But that includes many private schools – the most expensive often being the most collectivist (and obsessed with getting their students into “good colleges”, i.e. Yale and other collectivist brainwashing centres).
‘In this, he’s perhaps more like Bill Clinton than anyone wants to admit.’
I’ve never seen them together. Is it possible they are the same person?
1. The left argue emotionally. They do this because most people respond to emotion first and reason second.
2. The right is rubbish at this. Every time. Trump won and is hated because he made emotive appeals all over the place. Every policy was sold emotively.
3. The right need to attack guilt. Guilt and repentance is how the left sell most of their nonsense. Like a church.
4. If nobody feels guilty about what they have, how they got it and how others have less, they won’t vote for policies that appeal to those. I am not advocating against civil society helping out society’s worst off. Just that no one should accept having their stuff taken involuntarily.
I think Paul’s comments are interesting. Especially the analysis of the Libertarian party’s strategy. I think of the electoral system more like the NFL. There are two conferences, the AFC and the NFC, they compete together to win the conference and then the final election is between the conference winners. (You Brits can think of it similar to a football tournament like the World Cup.) Anyone can get in at the bottom but they need to actually win through to get to the election. So the LP is, I think, mostly a waste of time from an electoral point of view (though it does a decent job promoting libertarian ideas.)
Basically you have to chose your conference (which for libertarians is largely going to be the Republicans, since most of the social issue wars have been won). Then you have to, god forbid, convince people who are somewhat sympathetic to your ideas, that you can be trusted with power.
However, this latter thing is the problem. People, for the most part, don’t want libertarianism, except in small doses. They want to cancel the government programs that they don’t like, but keep the ones they do. This is captured best with the best LP campaign in its history, that of Harry Browne’s with his “Would you give up your favorite government program if it meant you never had to pay tax again.” Great question. The answer from the large majority of Americans was NO. Certainly not things like Social Security, Welfare, public schools and so forth.
And so fundamentally, as Paul point out, the battle for libertarianism is not at the ballot box. It is in the school yard. It is the changing of minds before they are ossified into statist atrophy.
That is hard, but not as hard as we might imagine. It is in schools that the poor, so wedded to the democrats, feel the pain of government incompetence, fecklessness and mendacity the most. Where I live, near Chicago, there are many schools that I would consider it nothing short of child abuse to send your kid there. We see the lottery for magnet schools where desperate parents weep tears of despair when their kid doesn’t get in, and instead is tossed back into the trash pile of the war zone of PSxxx, to get a solid education in drug dealing, bullying and criminality.
To me, for libertarians, that is the starting point. Liberating the schools. And it is much more doable because it can be done progressively, at the state and local level. It has a brutal opponent in the teachers’ unions as we found out recently in Wisconsin. But the people are surely behind the idea of giving parents more choice for their kids. A simple thing like a big tax credit for education expenses might well generate a massive market in private schools, and something like that would be truly transformative. I have in my mind an interview with some lady in Chicago who was waffling on about how the rich have to pay their way, and how she is entitled to this and to that. But turn the conversation to her kid, and hear her fear and helplessness as to the education her child is getting. It is a point on which the democrat base is extremely vulnerable for the hearts and minds of their core constituency.
To me, although far from an easy course, that is the ONLY practical course to change the direction of liberty in America. The Internet has been extremely helpful in that regards, but I think it has reached its limits now, and there are powerful government forces arrayed against it.
It is why I think Betsy DeVos was one of the most important appointments Trump made to his cabinet. Unfortunately, she hasn’t managed to achieve much against the powerful forces arrayed against her. Even something as simple as demanding reasonable due process in campus Kangaroo courts has left her open to the accusation that it will unleash “free reign on girls on college campuses.”
@Paul Marks: President Trump has not yet reduced the budget (in real terms), but he’s done an awful lot to get that to be a possibility. I’ll list the specific things that he has done below, but the most important one is not done yet: reducing the trade deficit.
The trade and federal budget deficits are mutually self-causing. Foreign central banks have to buy U.S. dollar denominated assets in order to maintain a trade surplus with the U.S., and the easiest asset to acquire (no constraints at all) is U.S. treasuries. If the federal budget deficit goes down, then either the trade deficit must go down, or foreigners (exporters or their countries central banks) will have to find other dollar-denominated assets to buy instead of treasuries (and quickly too). If the trade deficit goes down first, then that will put upward pressure on interest rates in the U.S. and eventually the government will face a crisis. Either way, the two deficits go hand-in-hand, but it is the federal deficit that makes our mercantilist world possible at all.
If Trump fails at rebalancing trade, then the federal budget deficit will NOT go down. If he succeeds then the federal budget will have to get much closer to balanced, as any deficit would have to be financed -on net- by Americans.
Clearly, Trump intends -at least outwardly- to succeed at rebalancing trade. Whether he will or won’t, I can’t say as I don’t know, nor will I make predictions about that.
Now, as to the things he has done to reduce the size of government (or start to anyways), he has: reduced the staffing at various agencies (e.g., EPA) by attrition, he has frozen the pay of federal workers (which, in a growing economy, should tend to cause many of those workers to look for employment in the private sector, thus reducing the federal payroll), he has reduced the regulatory burden (thus reducing the amount of staff needed at corresponding regulatory agencies, which in the long term should result in staffing reductions, probably by attrition), he has increased employment and decrease demand for welfare (which will tend to reduce the cost of the welfare state), he has grown the economy and the tax base (which will tend to increase tax revenues, thus reducing the budget deficit, and so the trade deficit). I’m probably leaving something out.
Also, DJT has not proposed any new entitlements, unlike Bush 43 (who very much did). By the Democrats’ worldview, where a cut in the expected growth rate of entitlements is a catastrophic cut, this alone is a cut, though, of course, I realize present company is smart enough not to see it that way 🙂
I won’t hold my breath as to actually reducing the size of the U.S. federal government, but besides DJT, the only President since the inception of our current mercantilist world order who has done much of these things was Reagan, and Reagan gave up early on undoing the mercantilist order — he had bigger fish to fry (the soviets, naturally). Really, the above list is unprecedented in the U.S. since Hoover — ~90 years!
Incidentally, you pinpointed the start of our mercantilist era correctly: 1971.
The best thing about Republican presidents is the zeal with which any alleged misdeed will be pursued by the press. With Dems, they conceal all crimes, but they will brave hell with a glass of ice water to shit on a Republican. One can rest easy with a Republican in the white house, they won’t be getting away with a damned thing.
Nico – I am not sure I totally follow your argument, but that does not mean you are mistaken (I may just be being dim). I am an old man and have been hit over the head a lot of times – so I may need to read what you have said when I am less tried. I would like to go the other way – cut government spending and see if that (by the mechanism you describe) cuts the trade deficit as well.
As for the Credit Bubble monetary and financial system – I would go “Cold Turkey” (in the full knowledge of the short term horror that would unleash), I suppose I am just not a very nice person – and I just do not believe that gradual change in the monetary and financial system will be stuck to (something like that has to be done FAST – much like an old fashioned surgeon in the days before pain treatments, a good surgeon could cut off a limb and tie up the arteries in a couple of minutes, they HAD TO be fast).
Fraser Orr – a lot to think about there.
I think a lot of people still have the folk memory of when the “Public Schools” were centres of learning where useful skills were taught- and that may actually have been true as recently as the 1950s. But, as you say, it certainly is NOT true now – today the Big City schools (on which a fortune is spent) are indeed Hell Holes.
Radical change must happen – millions of children can not just continue to be written off, left to be play-things for the left.
I am just filled with foreboding that we have LEFT IT TOO LATE.
@Paul Marks: Sure, I would prefer to cut spending first too, but politics is in part the art of finding what is possible and making the impossible possible at some point. Right now, in the U.S., and for the past half century, cutting spending is not and has not been something a majority is strongly keen on.
I too would go for shock therapy in the event of economic crisis. I think what would be nice is if next time we could go with Andrew Mellon’s (Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury) advice immediately after the crash of 1929: liquidate, liquidate, liquidate. In today’s world that would require an automatic claim resolution mechanism, as we know from 2008 that liquidation can take far too long.