Penn Jillette on what distinguishes a Libertarian from a Liberal

Pemn Jillette:

"I think the biggest misconception that I find about libertarians is that there's a lack of compassion and I think that there is as much compassion on libertarians as there is among liberals. It's not what the problems are, it's how to solve them."

Amen, brother. When I first read Milton Friedman's 'Free to Choose' I realized that here was a guy who, like me (a Democrat liberal at the time) cared about the same things: the poor, the unfortunate, the unfairly treated -- but who had fresh new ideas for how to organize a society that made solving these problems more likely -- or possible at all, frankly. I was a burnt-out liberal, tired of the same old 'solutions' that never solved anything but just argued in circles.

Barack, the Demo-Publican President, and Welcome To Him

Well, I voted Libertarian, as always. The rest of you thought you were voting for Republicans and Democrats and, turns out, you were all voting for Politicians  - or as we Libertarians say, the Politician's Party, or the Government Party.

I knew Barack would push for things like health-care 'reform,' and the irony is, the way things have been going the past two decades, if he had been a Republican he would have passed it. Now we might get lucky and have the evil thing die unborn.

But I at least hoped we'd get some good anti-Republican things from a liberal Democrats, like a reduction in our military presence overseas and our overreaching foreign policy that just has to involve itself in absolutely every single thing in every other country (when we can't do things right in our own). But no: We're still as involved as we were under the hated Republicans. So we've been getting the worst of the Democrats and the worst of the Republicans, just as we have been for years. Lots of government programs at great cost and little benefit, and lots of foreign policy at great cost and no great benefit. 

Terrific. 

Barack needs to take a leaf from Clinton's book and try to become the best Republicans president the Democratics ever had. 

Believe It or Not, Here are 4 Presidents Who Were Even Worse Than Bush!

According to recent public opinion polls, only one third or fewer of those surveyed approve of President Bush's overall job performance. More startlingly, about one quarter consider George W. Bush to be the worst president in U.S. history. If these respondents took the time to look closer at other U.S. presidents, however, they might well rank them even lower than they rank Bush, as Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland suggests in his latest op-ed.

Eland offers a litany of costly mistakes, bad precedents, and unconstitutional abuses by previous U.S. presidents. James Polk, for example, lied to get Congress to declare a war to grab land from Mexico. William McKinley permanently expanded the president's power at the expense of Founder's vision of the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government, and he also turned the anti-colonial United States into a colonizer in the Philippines and in other lands formerly occupied by Spain. Woodrow Wilson plunged the country into World War I and helped set in motion a chain of causation that would lead to World War II. In addition, writes Eland, "Wilson's violations of civil liberties during World War I were the worst in U.S. history and make Bush's look fairly mild." Harry Truman enshrined Wilsonian interventionism, permanently burying the traditional U.S. foreign policy of military restraint. Eland also takes Truman to task for intentionally bombing civilians in World War II and the Korean war, unconstitutionally fighting the Korean War without a formal declaration, laying the groundwork for the first large permanent peacetime army in U.S. history, and more.

"Make no mistake," Eland concludes. "George W. Bush has been a horrible president and is one of the worst in U.S. history. But of the 42 men who have served as president, these four men--Polk, McKinley, Wilson, and Truman--were probably worse."

"Is George W. Bush the Worst President in U.S. History?" by Ivan Eland (9/13/08)

Also see, "To Make War, Presidents Lie," by Robert Higgs (10/1/2002)

"No More 'Great Presidents,'" by Robert Higgs (The Free Market, 5/1/97)

The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition), by Ivan Eland

Center on Peace & Liberty (Ivan Eland, Director)

"A Conservative for Obama" editorial: Don't hate tax cuts, hate spending increases!

Someone sent me a copy of an essay published in September in the Dallas city magazine, Big D, in which the former publisher of the conservative National Review says he's going to vote for Obama because he's less likely to get us into a war than McCain, and Obama also shows glimmers of useful pragmatism.

Good essay. He's right about the Republicans not being conservatives in any helpful sense any more - or for a long time. I am not confident that the Democrats are a whit better, but still... He's not promoting the Demos, he's promoting Obama, and he makes a good case.

However, I hate the misreading of the value and meaning of tax cuts -- first, we are not in debt because of the tax cuts -- the improvement in the economy since then generated more money for the government than projections had it earning before the cuts. Second, we are in debt because we are spending even more, if that is possible, than ever before - much, much more. Much of that on the war, but equally profligate in every other area Washington touches. There is simply no amount of tax money that will pay the bill when the politicians hold the credit cards. Just try asking a politician or a tax-eating special interest how much is enough? You'll never get a useful answer--because enough is all of it. There will never be enough money to satisfy them. Every increase in revenues is overmastered by a bigger increase in spending - whether in war or peace, in crisis or in flush times.

Third, if the economy is indeed staggering at this time, the worst thing on earth is to increase taxes -- not even on those awful, awful people, the "rich." JFK made this exact same argument while President, and then signed the largest tax cut since WWII - which was followed by the boom that helped define the economics of the 60s. The right thing to do, in reality, would be to cut marginal tax rates, especially where they will boost the economy most -- on the rich, on investment, on capital gains, on corporations. Yeah, I know -- all the devils of the modern world, what could I be thinking?

And then, of course, to cut government spending, which we should be doing even if revenues are up and even if we increase taxes. But we will never, in our lifetimes, have a budget of any level of government that goes down from one year to the next. Or even stays even. The most we can hope for is that a planned 20% increase will be held to, say a 12% increase -- whereupon we'll have to endure complaints that spending has been "slashed" 8% and how we are suffering!

Marlarky, baloney, bullshit. I weary of it.

But as he says, Obama is marginally less likely to invade someone, and might actually be a Kennedy type of character who would hesitate to kick the economy in the nuts, if he's really as "pragmatic" as this guy is hoping. We can all only hope.

McCain would be better, even with his lust for invasion, if only he were a real Republican conservative, who would cut taxes, reduce government impositions, reduce spending *somewhere, anywhere*, regulate less impulsively, and argue against government intervention in every aspect of human endeavor. But of course he's not a conservative in any of these areas, he's only, like all of his kind, a lifetime member of the Republican faction of the Politicians' Party.

So is Obama, though for a shorter lifetime, and so less embedded. A tiny flicker of nonpolitician hesitation would be a welcome relief at this point. Not to mention any little hope, however faint, that we won't try to play policeman or Superman to anyone outside our borders for the next four years.

But me, I'm voting Libertarian across the board. The heck with it. Maybe we'll get lucky and Obama will get the nod instead of McCain. But either way, I'm not voting for the Politician's Party this year either. Marginal variations in levels of oppression are welcome, but not worth my vote.

mac

The Three Ways to Pick a Candidate

There are three basic issues you can use to help you choose  a leader:  

1. Their ideology: What their philosophy of government is, what they  think the government's proper role is, and where they draw the line.  There can be a very significant difference here, but it's hard stuff.  Also, the two main parties in the US (and mostly elsewhere) are  primarily the Politicians' Parties whose ideology is limited mainly to  getting elected and reelected.

So if you're stuck with politicians, you can try:

2. Their character: If you can't get the other guy on their vision of  government, maybe you can get them on personality? Whether they are  stiff (Nixon) or at ease (Obama), whether they fool around, whether they are corrupt, -- and  best of all -- whether they are hypocrites, the number-one favorite of  all political campaigns and of the press: Palin doesn't believe in sex  education in school and look - her kid gets pregnant, which shows she  can't control her kids (who can?) and that her ideas don't work in the  real world. That's why the Demos are jumping on this -- not because  they would do any better, or because they really think sex education and condoms in  schools would make a terrific dent in the teen pregnancy rate (studies are mixed), but because it makes Palin look  foolish. Zing!  

3. Their competence: Would they once in office be able to actually run  things and get people to do what they want? This is a combination of basic competence (ability to get things done at all), plus their influence over the political process in Washington. For an example of the latter, Obama amuses us with promises to "go over the  budget line by line" and eliminate waste and unworkable programs; in reality, as being  a Senator he knows full well, he'd  run into the Congressional buzzsaw protecting special interests. (Unless of course the entire  Congress is Democratic, and then you can eliminate "waste" easiliy since that, as all know, is championed  only by Republicans!). 

Hillary ran into this early with  questions by ultraconservatives about whether, as a woman mind you,  she'd be competent to run the government and put her finger on the big  red button. Well, they don't wonder about that any more, but instead are  scared of her. (Belatedly, after she lost the nomination, there were  articles about how poorly she ran her campaign compared to Obama, whose  campaign machine ran like -- well, like a machine. I found that a far more interesting comparison.)  

The variant on this is the Experience quibble, which gets very muddy  indeed. Obama doesn't have much "experience" and neither does Palin --  presumably, the only person with experience for this job is a past  President, wouldn't you think? 

Then you get into the question of *what  kind* of experience -- legislative, or executive? Is a Senator or a  Governor better suited, experience-wise? Of course, when neither has been  in higher office more than 4 years, nobody can claim they have  experience enough with a straight face -- can they?  So as a campaign, you zig and zag among these three methods of deciding  on a candidate, pickiug your strength and their weakness, and forgiving  your guy/gal for their weakness but being very unforgiving of the other  gal/guy's weakness.  Which wouldn't be so bad if the voters, who know better, used any kind  of sophistication in making their decisions.  

The great thing about being a Libertarian is that the second and third  issues don't mean bupkus to us. We're voting for our candidate's  ideology -- his vision of how the country *ought* to be run. We don't  care if he's *actually* competent to be President -- he never will be!  He hasn't got a prayer, so who cares? What an enormous relief!

Nor do we care about his morals or  hypocrisy or character -- like I say, he's never going to win an  election, so we vote for him strictly as a powerful symbol of our  ideological beliefs about right government. It's quite relaxing not to  have to worry about any of this, or pay much attention to the noise at  the major-party level.  

And it's quite depressing to know full well that no matter which pair of  major-party candidates gets elected, we're just as screwed -- the  details may vary slightly, but the trendlines are just bad, bad, bad, because their ideologies mean they will choose bad options, push for solutions that don't solve anythng, and never, never learn from their mistakes.

But then, we voters don't either, so why should they?

 mac 

Libertarians Hunting Wabbit at Demo Convention.

Good quote from Reason Magazine's ongoing blogging coverage of the Democratic National Convention (Aug 08);

"Reason [Magazine] is a political magazine of ideas, with deeply skeptical, independent-skewing readers who have some specific fears about both a John McCain presidency and a Barack Obama restoration. Since the Democratic flock will be collected in one place, it's an excellent week for hunting wabbit. "

See http://www.reason.com/convention2008/ for more interesting and more sarcastic coverage than you'll get from the rest of the media....

Does Hillary Clinton Hate Our Freedoms?

In the Cato-@-Liberty blog post "Hillary Hates Freedom," David Boaz, Cato executive vice president and author of The Politics of Freedom, writes: "Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton operates with reckless disregard for individual freedom and the limited government that protects and sustains it. ... At her core, Hillary Clinton rejects the fundamental values of liberalism, values like individual autonomy, individual rights, pluralism, choice, and yes, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She seems to see no area of life that should be free from the heavy hand of government. And to her the world of free people seems a vast nothingness. ... The really scary prospect of another Clinton presidency is not what she would do to our medical care but what she would do to the 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' that is the foundation of our free society."

[Mac's comment: Unfortunately, Barack Obama isn't much better; nor is McCain on the Republican side...]