Month: December 2011

The “No True Libertarianism” fallacy

by David Atkins

A bunch of libertarians have taken great offense at my earlier post on libertarianism in Somalia. The key part of that post was:

This, by the way, is why racism, theocracy and libertarianism go hand in hand, when from a philosophical point of view they should have little to do with one another. The negative effects of the lack of a central government are so obvious in developing countries that wherever the social order fails as in Somalia, it must have been due to bad religion, or the defect of having been born to an inferior race.

Ron Paul fans must reassure themselves that such things would never happen to white, Christian folk. They’re immune from the Somali problem by virtue being of different stock and different values, you see.

The “Somalia” argument is a sore spot for libertarians. They either fall back on the old line of race and religious prejudice I outlined, or they claim that it isn’t true Libertarianism, you see: it’s anarchy. True Libertarians believe in just enough government to protect private property and personal safety; without those protections, they argue, anarchy ensues.

The only problem for libertarians is that they cannot point to even a single current or historical example of a government that functions as they imagine it should. They have no concrete, real world examples, so they ply their arguments in a theoretical construct.

Each and every example of places with little centralized government is dismissed by libertarians as an anarchistic situation, not a “true” Libertarianism. It’s the “no true Scotman” fallacy, Ron Paul edition. The hellish situation in Afghanistan is blamed on 30 years of war and tribal anarchy, rather than the lack of a central government. The case of Somalia is blamed again on war, on American intervention, and again on tribal anarchy. Historical examples of feudalism arising in the absence of a centralized state, or the repeated Dark Ages that arise after civilization collapses, are dismissed as either irrelevant to the modern world or invalid because of war and anarchy. The fact that corruption and the Mafia are more prevalent in southern Italy where tax collection and central government are weaker than in the North, is again dismissed as a cultural or anarchistic issue. It’s always the same argument.

Libertarianism, in other words, is infallible. Wherever it fails, it does so because the people weren’t ready for it, or there was too much violence to allow it to work, or because the government wasn’t powerful enough to protect people from harm.

Libertarians fail to realize that there has never been–and never will be–a government that functions according to their principles because it runs entirely contrary to human nature.

As any libertarian understands when it comes to statist authoritarians, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. When you decentralize and remove the modern welfare state, leaving only essentially a glorified police force in charge to protect private property and personal safety, one of two things happens:

1) The central police force turns into a right-wing military dictatorship invested in stamping out all leftist thinking, then appropriating the country’s wealth for themselves and their friends (e.g., Chile under Pinochet);

or

2) All central authority and protection break down completely as power localizes into the hands of local criminals and feudal/tribal warlords with little compunction about abusing and terrorizing the local population (e.g., feudal France, Afghanistan, Somalia, western Pakistan, etc.) As I said before:

Feudalism is the inevitable historical consequence of the decline of a centralized cosmopolitan state. That’s because the exercise of power by those in a position to wield it does not end with the elimination of federal authority: rather, it simply shifts to those of a more localized, more tyrannical, and less democratically accountable bent.

Urban street gangs in under-policed neighborhoods, mafias in under-taxed countries, and groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon invariably step in to fill the void where government fails. When the Japanese government wasn’t able to adequately help the population after the earthquake and tsunami, the yakuza helpfully stepped in to do it for them. The devolution of local authority and taxation into the hands of criminal groups willing to provide a safety net in exchange for their cut of the action is the invariable pre-feudal result of the breakdown of the government-backed safety net. It happens every single time. The people will want a safety net where utter chaos doesn’t prevent it: they’ll either get it from an accountable governmental authority, or from a non-governmental authority of shadowy legality. Both kinds of authority will levy their own form of taxation, be it legal and official, or part of an illegal protection scheme.

In its own way, the “No True Libertarianism” argument is very similar to the “No True Communism” of those on the far left, who argue that the fault of Communism lies not with the idea, but with the practice–despite the fact that no successful large-scale Communism has ever been implemented in the world. Neither ideology can fail its adherents. They can only be failed by imperfect practitioners.

Both ideologies run counter to human nature for the same reason: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The people with the money and guns will always abuse the people who don’t have the money and guns, unless there are multiple levels of checks, balances, and legal and economic protections to ensure the existence of a middle-class tax base with a stake in maintaining a stable society. The modern welfare state didn’t arise by accident or conspiracy: it evolved as a means of avoiding the failures of other models.

Libertarianism is a philosophical game played by those without either enough real-world experience of localized, non-state-actor tyranny, or enough awareness of history to understand the immaturity of their political worldview. Unfortunately, the harm they do to the social safety net and to governmental checks and balances is all too real, and all too damaging.

.

Imposing Political Correctness

by digby

I wrote about Ron Paul’s antebellum politics the other day. Here’s one way in which it plays out. Paul’s state chair in Iowa is a member of the Christian Right and an extreme one at that) and he’s been lining up social conservative support. One of the Pastors endorsing Paul is the Reverend Phillip Kayser who explains his reasons for supporting him to TPM:

Reached by phone, Kayser confirmed to TPM that he believed in reinstating BIblical punishments for homosexuals — including the death penalty — even if he didn’t see much hope for it happening anytime soon. While he said he and Paul disagree on gay rights, noting that Paul recently voted for repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, he supported the campaign because he believed Paul’s federalist take on the Constitution would allow states more latitude to implement fundamentalist law. Especially since Kayser believes that there is no separation of Church and State under his own interpretation of the Constitution.

“Under a Ron Paul presidency, states would be freed up to not have political correctness imposed on them, but obviously some state would follow what’s politically correct,” he said. “What he’s trying to do, whether he agrees with the Constitution’s position or not, is restrict himself to the Constitution. That is something I very much appreciate.”

When I talk about Ron Paul’s antebellum politics this is what I mean — a reversion to the way the country was fashioned before 1860. Indeed, these states’ rights arguments stem from the original arguments over slavery. In this case, the position is being held by someone who believes that gays should be executed under biblical law. The entire idea of inalienable rights under the US Constitution is called into question by this kind of states’ rights (which is interesting since the whole thing is supposedly predicated on an originalist view of the Constitution.)

Evidently, there is more support for this than just among the Paul supporters. I’ve had some conversations with liberals who see this as a logical outgrowth of people’s frustration with the federal government although I certainly don’t think they would be in favor of allowing former American states to secede so that they can execute gays. But that’s the game plan among many of these states’ rights advocates, so these battles will inevitably be had. Again. It’s the most long running feature of American political life.

Ron Paul, who is against drug prohibition, believes that states should be able to lock up people for drug possession:

Q: In your 1988 campaign you said, “All drugs should be decriminalized. Drugs should be distributed by any adult to other adults. There should be no controls on production, supply or purchase for adults.” Is that still your position?

A: Yeah. It’s sort of like alcohol. Alcohol’s a deadly drug, kills more people than anything else. And today the absurdity on this war on drugs has just been horrible. Now the federal government takes over and overrules states where state laws permit medicinal marijuana 1 for people dying of cancer. The federal government goes in and arrests these people, put them in prison with mandatory sentences. This war on drugs is totally out of control. If you want to regulate cigarettes and alcohol and drugs, it should be at the state level. That’s where I stand on it. The federal government has no prerogatives on this.

Q: But you would decriminalize it?

A: I would, at the federal level. I don’t have control over the states. And that’s why the Constitution’s there.

I guess I just don’t see why that is considered to be libertarian. Just because you break up state power into fifty entities instead of one, it doesn’t make their infringements on liberty ok, does it? On a philosophical and ideological level, libertarians should be clear that infringements of people’s rights should never be subject to the whims of the state — whether it’s Hawaii or the United States of America. So why doesn’t Ron Paul say this? There’s no reason that his quixotic career couldn’t also entail a drive to change the constitution, or ensure that all 50 states overturn drug prohibition. He has nothing to lose by stating the libertarian principles and saying that basic individual rights are inalienable.

But he doesn’t. He defends states’ rights to infringe on individual liberty as being under the Constitution but what he’s really defending are the Articles of Confederation. This isn’t libertarianism. It’s “tentherism” disguised as libertarianism.

.

The Year In Religion

by digby

There are a lot of top 10 lists going around, but this one is especially interesting. Peter Laarman at Religion Dispatches has put together a list of religious developments that have gone under the radar. They’re all fascinating little observations, but this one stuck out at me:

Latino Catholics Distinctly More Gay-Friendly Than Latino Evangelicals

A too-little-noticed 2010 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of Latino Catholics in California (57%) said they would vote to allow gay and lesbian couple to marry, compared to just 22% of Latino Protestants. This same Catholic-Protestant divide within the Latino community was evident across a wide range of public policy issues related to gay and lesbian rights. The Latino Catholic latitudinariansm on marriage tracks another almost-unreported finding , to wit: that the single most gay-friendly religious body in the U.S., bar none, is the lay Catholic community. Bishops, are you listening?

“Common ground” Religion Industrial Complex are you listening?

The bad news is that Evangelical Christianity is growing in leaps and bounds in the Latino world, but still. This is yet another example of how the Catholic Hierarchy and the social conservatives are out of step with many of those who they seem to think they represent.

.

This is how a powerful interest group gains influence in a contested presidential primary:

Last night, four GOP candidates—Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry—took part in a “tele-town hall” sponsored by Personhood USA, which was broadcast on the radio program of Steve Deace, an influential Iowa evangelical. The event demonstrated that a commitment to banning all abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, and threats to a woman’s health, is now the normative position among the party’s presidential contenders.

Indeed, the big news to come out of the forum was the rightward shift in Rick Perry’s already very conservative position. In the past, Perry has been committed to banning abortion with very narrow exceptions. But last night, he said he’d changed his mind, and now doesn’t support any exceptions at all. “This is something that is relatively new,” he said, citing a meeting with Rebecca Kiessling, a spokeswoman for Personhood USA who was adopted after her mother, a rape victim, tried and failed to abort her. “Looking in her eyes, I couldn’t come up with an answer to defend the exemptions for rape and incest,” he said. “And over the course of the last few weeks, the Christmas holidays and reflecting on that…all I can say is that God was working on my heart.”

Right. And so were his political consultants.

But if you want to see some real choots-paa get a load of this:

Bachmann distinguished herself with her dishonesty, claiming at one point that Obama is “putting abortion pills for young minors, girls as young as 8 years of age or 11 years of age, on [the] bubblegum aisle.” (Obama, of course, recently overrode an FDA recommendation to make emergency contraception available over the counter for all ages, infuriating women’s-health activists.)

In some alternate universe where one of these loons becomes president, they would still claim that here’s nothing they could practically do to advance this goal. (Well, Gingrich could — he’s going to arrest judges who don’t agree with him.) But there is huge value in getting these candidates on the record supporting something that was considered fairly cruel and barbaric outside of doctrinaire Catholicism until about five minutes ago.

This is a trend that’s gaining steam, by the way. And it’s fairly new in the political realm. The first time I saw congressional candidates taking this position was in 2010. And lest you think these people are just pandering to the fringe so there’s nothing to worry our little heads about, remember this from this past year:

[T]he GOP-led House of Representatives, with the blessings and encouragement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and extremist religious groups such as the Family Research Council, passed a bill in a vote of 251 to 172 that would, among other things, allow doctors and hospitals to “exercise their conscience” by letting pregnant women facing emergency medical conditions die.

And it’s entering the popular consciousness. Witness the glowing words applied to yet another sad young woman who made the decision to forego cancer treatment in order to give birth. Perhaps you’ll recall this earlier case as well, as reported by Robin Marty:

Did the “pro-life” cause really need an actual martyr? The conservative website “Hot Air” has published a doting ode to Stacy Crimm, a woman who refused chemotherapy that would save her life in order to not endanger her long awaited pregnancy.

And anti-choice supporters couldn’t be more proud of her.

Tina Korbe writes:

Crimm truly did have a choice: Even if abortion were illegal, she could have opted to receive chemotherapy. That she bravely chose to place her child’s life before her own recalls forcibly to mind why the phrase “a mother’s love” has such resonance. When we talk about abortion, rarely do we talk about the ache many women feel after they choose to abort their babies. Crimm’s physical suffering must have been unimaginable — and, yet, three days before she died, she was able to hold close the fruit of her choice in what Phillips said was a perfect moment. Would that her story might help all mothers see nothing is worth the sacrifice of their own child.

Crimm did have a choice, and acted out on her own wishes. But when you switch that to “nothing,” including the life of the mother, is worth ending a pregnancy, well, then that’s not really a choice, is it?

Your moment of zen

Somalia, libertarian paradise

by David Atkins

This is truly awful:

Somalia has been steadily worn down by decades of conflict and chaos, its cities in ruins and its people starving. Just this year, tens of thousands have died from famine, with countless others cut down in relentless combat. Now Somalis face yet another widespread terror: an alarming increase in rapes and sexual abuse of women and girls.

The Shabab militant group, which presents itself as a morally righteous rebel force and the defender of pure Islam, is seizing women and girls as spoils of war, gang-raping and abusing them as part of its reign of terror in southern Somalia, according to victims, aid workers and United Nations officials. Short of cash and losing ground, the militants are also forcing families to hand over girls for arranged marriages that often last no more than a few weeks and are essentially sexual slavery, a cheap way to bolster their ranks’ flagging morale.

But it is not just the Shabab. In the past few months, aid workers and victims say there has been a free-for-all of armed men preying upon women and girls displaced by Somalia’s famine, who often trek hundreds of miles searching for food and end up in crowded, lawless refugee camps where Islamist militants, rogue militiamen and even government soldiers rape, rob and kill with impunity.

But there’s no tyranny of taxation, regulation or big government deficits. That’s the important thing.

This, by the way, is why racism, theocracy and libertarianism go hand in hand, when from a philosophical point of view they should have little to do with one another. The negative effects of the lack of a central government are so obvious in developing countries that wherever the social order fails as in Somalia, it must have been due to bad religion, or the defect of having been born to an inferior race.

Ron Paul fans must reassure themselves that such things would never happen to white, Christian folk. They’re immune from the Somali problem by virtue being of different stock and different values, you see.

.

Kafka California

by digby

Who needs due process? After all, the authorities always *know* who’s guilty and who isn’t, right?

Hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks behind bars before authorities realized those arrested were mistaken for wanted criminals, a Times investigation has found.

The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. They were the result of a variety of factors, including officials’ overlooking fingerprint evidence and working off incomplete records.

The errors are so common that in some years people were jailed because of mistaken identity an average of once a day.

Many of those wrongly held inside the county’s lockups had the same names as criminals or had their identities stolen — problems that took days or weeks for authorities to sort out.

In one case, a mechanic held for nine days in 1989 on a warrant meant for someone else was detained again 20 years later on the same warrant. He was jailed for more than a month the second time before the error was discovered.

In another instance, a Nissan customer service supervisor was hauled by authorities from Tennessee to L.A. County on a local sex-crimes warrant meant for someone with a similar name.

In a third case, a former construction worker mistaken for a wanted drug offender said he was assaulted by inmates and ignored by jailers.

“I’m with criminals, and I was a criminal to them,” said Jose Ventura, 53, who had never been arrested before.

There are many, many reasons that a person can be wrongfully incarcerated. When you whittle away at the Fourth Amendment, take away the protections that give people the chance to challenge the government, you get more and more of this sort of thing, with less and less capability of sorting it out. Mistakes do happen — the government is not infallible. Any system that requires simply taking them at their word is pretty much a guarantee that innocent people will be left to molder in jail. If you think it can’t happen to you, think again.

.

Virtually Speaking with Susie

by digby

and ‘lil ole me:

Digby joins recovering journalist and class warrior Susie Madrak to explore the impact of current events on the daily lives of working class people.

Call in number to speak with the host
(646) 200-3440

Listen here:

Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on Blog Talk Radio

.

Factoid ‘O the Year

Bye bye Ben Nelson

by David Atkins

Like Digby, I’m not shedding tears over Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson’s retirement:

Senator Ben Nelson, a two-term Democratic centrist from Nebraska who faced a tough fight to hold his seat, announced Tuesday that he will not seek re-election.

“It’s time for me to step away from elective office, spend more time with my family and look for new ways to serve our state and nation,” Mr. Nelson said in a video statement.

“Simply put, it’s time to move on,” he added.

Mr. Nelson, a former governor, had been assessing his plans for months even as he raised money and was the beneficiary of party advertising. But even if Mr. Nelson were to run, Republicans saw Nebraska as one of their best opportunities to take over a Senate seat.

Mr. Nelson came under withering criticism at home for backing President Obama’s health care overhaul and also got caught up in a controversy over his demands for backing the economic stimulus legislation at the start of the Obama administration.

The announcement makes Mr. Nelson the seventh member of the Democratic caucus to decide to retire from the Senate after the current term. Several of them, including Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin and Jim Webb of Virginia are in swing states where they were likely to have encountered strong challenges.

I’m sure glad that we watered down and corrupted the Affordable Care Act with Cornhusker Kickbacks to bribe this guy, and thrilled that the DSCC spent over a $1 million on ads trying to defend his seat this year.

He was totally worth it, wasn’t he?

.