Brainstorming

I stumbled across this article at American Thinker today that detailed how Obama won the Presidential election:

Anyone hoping to launch a successful counterattack must first analyze Obama’s campaign and assess the factors that contributed to its success. To assist in such efforts, I have constructed a block diagram [1] of the post-nomination campaign’s components, interactions, and successive stages [2]. A study of this diagram will, I think, reveal interactions that are too complex to be sorted out and comprehended from a verbal description alone.

[...]

The diagram is colored according to the phases of the campaign, which, like a military campaign, can be divided into the resources provided by the terrain, available forces and weapons, strategy and tactics, and objectives to be taken [3].

Click on the link above to actually see the diagram - it’s pretty impressive, honestly.  This got me thinking, though, especially with the LP State Convention coming up - what should be our plan?  What resources does the Libertarian Party have here?  What tools do we have to leverage these resources?  What objectives can we hope to take?  Realistically, we have to accept that, at the present time, our strategic space is very limited.  If we’re lucky, we might match Belgium’s performance in World War 1 - slow the enemy down and remain a viable force through the end.  If we’re unlucky, we might match Belgium’s performance in World War 2 - slow the enemy down for a couple of days but ultimately get overrun.  At the present time, we’re, at best, a minor annoyance for the major parties.  We don’t get enough votes for either major party to bother currying any real favor with us, much less view us as any serious, credible threat.  This means that, unless we identify our strengths and weaknesses and develop an appropriate plan based on our resources and capabilities, we’ll be doomed to continue our string of Luxembourg-esque performances[1].

So, what resources are provided by Nevada to the Libertarian Party, or, really, any third party in this state?

• Voters are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the wild government spending in Washington.  This happens when you rack up trillions of deficit spending and give half of it to bankers and hedge fund managers.
• The economy is dismal.  People are looking for a change.
• After rampant corruption and profligate spending for the better part of a decade, fiscally conservative people have largely given up on the Republican Party.
• The Democratic Party is, understandably, taking the freedom loving, socially liberal minded voters for granted.  Whenever anyone asks the Democratic Party to do anything about, for example, gay marriage or the Drug War, the answer is always “We’ll get around to it.”
• Nevada politics has long had a “live and let live” attitude, which is how we ended up with legalized gambling, legal brothels, some of the most liberal marriage and divorce laws in the country, and no blue laws.  This vein isn’t as deep as it used to be - the recent influx of less libertarian minded residents has drained it somewhat - but it’s still there.  Ron Paul, for example, would have won Nevada during the GOP primaries were it not for some questionable practices at the end.
• The state government has been laughably mismanaged for years, with both parties playing ridiculous games of chicken against a steadily dwindling per-capita tax base.
• Neither party has historically been dominant throughout Nevada’s history, nor does it look like that will change anytime soon.
• Between the remnants of Ron Paul’s campaign in Nevada and various Libertarian-leaning social groups at the university level, there is a large field of activists ready and willing to be tapped, provided the State LP can prove its legitimacy and effectiveness.

What tools can the Libertarian Party bring to bear to maximize its advantages in the state?  Unfortunately, things are much less positive here:

• The biggest Libertarian personality in Nevada is Wayne Allen Root, who has been largely blacklisted by the existing State LP leadership.
• The Libertarian Party in Nevada generally averages about 1-2% of the vote each year in the races that it manages to enter.
• There are fewer than 10,000 registered Libertarians, accounting for less than 1% of the voting electorate.
• The State LP has, at most, a few dozen activists, organized in fewer than half of Nevada’s counties.

On the other hand, we do have a few things going for us:

• Unlike the Independent American or Constitutionalist Parties, we’re not a bunch of whacko millenialists, and, unlike the Greens, we’re not a bunch of tree hugging hippies.  In other words, as far as third parties go, the Libertarians are fairly normal.  This is the conscious result of numerous purges in the State party over the past decade.
• The number of activists with direct ties to the Libertarian Party has doubled since the beginning of 2009.

In short, for the first time in a long, long time, the ground is increasingly favorable for the Libertarian Party here.  Unfortunately, we simply don’t have the tools to usefully exploit that - at least, not yet.  This brings us to what should be our near-term objectives, will will necessarily be limited in scope:

• Prove to Nevada that the Libertarian Party is normal.  Many people shun third parties because they believe that third parties consist of reality-challenged idealogues.  Ron Paul’s campaign was successfully derailed by the media presenting him as a 9/11 truther with Nazi sympathies; much of this was due to Ron Paul failing to control his message and failing to realize that, when someone asks you if you think 9/11 was a government conspiracy, you answer no.
• Become credible.  This is accomplished by gaining significant votes for Libertarian candidates - enough votes to actually swing elections and earn much needed publicity.
• Build a party apparatus.  Right now, the LP in Nevada is a few people that get together for drinks and the occasional meeting.  It needs to be more than that.
• Most importantly, stay on the ballot.  The other objectives will be impossible to meet if we fall off of the ballot for any reason.

This brings me to what our near-term strategy must be:

• Use the Republican Party’s loss of favor to encourage the media to come to Libertarians for a “conservative” voice.  This will increase exposure in the state and curry favor with the media.  If we build up long term relationships with the media, they will be less inclined to completely misrepresent us.
• Contact and work with what’s left of Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty group and the various student organizations in Nevada’s universities to create a like-minded coalition capable of generating voter registrations and attracting the youth (terrible voters but great volunteers).
• Stage successful community outreach programs that highlight the Libertarian agenda.  The various anti-bailout “Tea Parties” taking place around the country would be an excellent starting point.  Small four man protests, on the other hand, should be avoided.  This will almost certainly involve a coalition of like minded groups to pull off.
• Get organized in as many counties as practical.  Currently, there are only local affiliates in four counties, and Nye County’s presently pending affiliation is shaky at best.  This must be addressed as soon as possible, especially since rural races are relatively low hanging fruit, requiring less time and energy to successfully pursue.  This will almost certainly require abandoning, severely reducing, or completely restructuring the current dues-paying load for non-affiliated counties; presently, the total cost to become a member of the Nevada LP is $50 ($25 to the National LP, $25 to the State) for non-affiliated areas.  This is rather steep, especially since the major parties don’t require dues at all to join.
• Raise some money outside of “Welcome to the Party” sources.  The 1776 Brigade is a good start, albeit miserably executed.  There are numerous ways to raise money - banquets, meet & greets, general donations, actually asking people - all methods should be pursued.

These are my thoughts.  Hopefully somebody will be willing to add to them.

[1] - Luxembourg was overrun in both World Wars within a day.

Excitement with the NVCLP

Saturday was the Organizing Convention for the Nevada Capital Libertarian Party, and, I’ll have to say, it wasn’t bad.  Some highlights:

• I’m the Secretary!  That’s what happens when you bring a laser printer to a convention, I suppose - everybody figures you’re on the ball and all secretarial or something.  Sadly, it’s not a Secretary-General position, so my world domination schemes will have to wait a while longer.
• The convention was moderately well attended.  We figured we could realistically expect about 10 people and, happily enough, we got 12.  One of those new faces is the Washoe County Rep in our Executive Council, so that’s a good sign.  Fresh blood is always a good thing.  Keep in mind that, no, twelve is not a big number, but it’s a bigger number than we’ve had in this area in a long, long time.  Baby steps, people.
• Robert’s Rules of Order are always fun to watch in action when you’re dealing with a group that’s barely familiar with them.  It’s also amazing how necessary they are, even with smaller groups.
• I finally met some of the people from State - they’re good people.  They’re definitely a good fit for the current state of the party - a little unorthodox but, overall, motivated and hard-working.  Not a single crank or bitter hippie in the bunch.  Again, strange as it might sound, this is progress.

Now that we have something of an organization at play, the next step is to get to work.  This means creating all sorts of committees, organizing the few registered LIBs we have in our area, and growing that number so we can actually get out of the single digit percentage abyss that we’re in today.  For better or worse, nobody’s going to listen to us unless we can muster at least 10% of the vote and, most importantly, do that consistently.  I think we have a good crew, and I think that, with a little hard work and determination, we’ll be able to do it, but it’s not going to be an easy road.

The Chicago Cubs and Mark To Market

(Via Instapundit) Andy Kessler at Forbes.com wrote an interesting piece about the Mark Cuban’s failed purchase of the Chicago Cubs.  There was one particular excerpt that stood out for me:

So here we sit in early 2009. Banks aren’t lending much, so assets are being quickly revalued back to some rational cash-flow multiple. A house is increasingly worth what your income cash flow can afford to carry mortgage payments, not what the next sucker will pay to take it off your hands. Same for stocks. Earnings were and are king. Low-debt or debt-free companies with earnings potential once the economy bottoms out will be the next wave of winners. Debt-ridden companies have a long workout ahead.

This got me thinking - the entire point of mark to market accounting is that the value of something is determined only by what the next sucker will pay to take it off your hands.  Consequently, is it really that surprising that, once it became the method proscribed by law to determine the value of securities and bank assets, financial institutions treated these assets the same way that many people treated real estate?  Is it also particularly surprising that, sooner or later, securities values would crash down the exact same way that real estate values crash?

This is where a purely libertarian understanding of the bailout can become somewhat troublesome.  When it’s federal regulations that effectively orders businesses to make excessively risky decisions, does the federal government have a responsibility to bail out those businesses when the risks sour?

Post-Meeting Madness

Last night was the last meeting for our local affiliate of the Libertarian Party before our Organizing Convention on January 24th.  It was actually rather productive - we changed our affiliate’s name so it doesn’t tick off half of the state and we pulled together a draft of our soon-to-be-adopted bylaws that we could actually live with.  I certainly have no complaints.  Best of all, we pulled all of this off in about two hours.  Any time you’re able to get some Libertarians together and get them to agree to some sort of governance structure in less time than it takes to watch all of the Lord of the Rings is a pretty serious accomplishment for everyone involved.

With that in mind, if you care at all, here’s what you need to know:

• The Organizing Convention is being held on Saturday, January 24th at the Plaza Hotel & Convention Center in Carson City, Nevada, from 1-3 p.m.  More information can be found the Libertarian Party of Nevada web site.
• Our regional affiliate has been renamed - we’re now the Nevada Capitol Libertarian Party.  We’re still affiliating Washoe and Douglas counties and Carson City into one regional affiliate.

All in all, things are looking up for the ol’ LP in this state.

A Libertarian Quandary

I haven’t been paying too close to the story behind John Travolta’s kid, but this post at American Atheists got me thinking - where does the line between a parent’s right to raise a child as they see fit collide with a child’s rights?  An excerpt:

I often get asked where religious liberty should end, and I often respond with “there’s a gray line”.

But the death of children is clearly over that line.

[...]

ANY parent responsible for killing their own kid due to idiotic teachings cannot blame the teachings — they must take the responsibility for believing the idiocy and pay the price. Religious liberty ends BEFORE the kids’ well-being is endangered.

This is one of those subjects where I have reservations.  In many respects, my thoughts on when a child’s rights are being overrun parallels the Supreme Court’s take on indecent literature - I’ll know it when I see it.  For example, you’re not going to catch me declaring that a parent’s right is so paramount that they should be allowed to, say, beat a child with a wrought iron poker, sexually molest their children, or set up binding arranged marriages without the child’s consent.  Conversely, I’m also not going to agree with somebody that declares that, for the good of children and society, all children must attend public schooling at the exclusion of all other educational methods, or that we should forbid parents from feeding children junk food.  However, things start to get a little fuzzy when I begin to work my way into the margins.

Take education, for example.  I believe that parents should have the right to choose how their child is educated, at least to a point.  That point, at least for me, ends when they’re educating their kid in a way that makes them absolutely useless, if not blatantly malicious, once they become adults.  For example, if you’re sending your child to a school whose primary purpose is to spread intolerance and hate (I’m thinking of some of the more extreme Pakistani madrassas as a particularly good example), I don’t care what rights you think you have as a parent - that right stops when you train your kid to kill mine.  Another example would be really poor home schooling; yes, I know that home-schooled children do pretty well overall, but I’m sure there’s some parent out there that thinks that the right to home school  means they have the right to pretend that Chick Publications should be used as some sort of base curriculum.  Sorry, but if you’re “educating” your child to become an ignoramus that believes that dinosaurs walked with men 6,000 years ago (no, seriously - I’m not making this up) and refuse to give your child a chance to experience a post-Medieval education because it violates “the word of God”, I have a problem.  Sorry, but the kind of thinking that says that everything in the King James Bible is true and that every advancement in science, philosophy and art that’s come out in the past millenia or so was a mistake is also the kind of thinking that far too often says that, in an ideal world, I shouldn’t be allowed to disagree with you and should be burned at the stake.  I have a big problem with being burned at the stake.  Seriously - it hurts. Past that, though, where should the line be drawn?  For that matter, how should the line be enforced?  Who should enforce it?  This is where things start to get rather murky in a hurry.

Medicine gets even more convoluted.  Every cure, every palliative, every medical procedure, every medical product has some benefit and at least a little risk involved.  When it comes to children, parents become understandably risk-averse - this is why stories about vaccinations causing autism still carry traction.  Sure, it’s probably not true, but what if it is?  If parental risk assessment was even remotely rational, our parks wouldn’t be anywhere near as boring as they are today, and parents actually understand park rides.  How well do you think many parents hold up when dealing with a complex subject that requires over a decade of intense schooling and continuing education to even wrap your mind around a small subset of it?  Consequently, though I instinctively believe that failing to provide medical services for your child when you have the capabilities to do so is morally wrong and probably some sort of child abuse, I can definitely understand how there’s some real gray area here.  If you believe that it’s less risky to rely on God than it is to rely on modern medicine, I’d strongly disagree with you and use everything in my power to convince you otherwise, but it’s a little hard for me to force you to incur risk to your child, even if it happens to statistically be much less risk than the path that you’re choosing.  The one area where I’m less willing to bend on this, however, is vaccinations - unfortunately, when you choose to take a risk and not get vaccinated, you’re putting everyone else at risk, too, thanks to the double-edged sword that is herd immunity.  If you, your child, and I get vaccinated, there’s no way my infant is going to get sick.  On the other hand, if you decide to not vaccinate your child and he or she gets sick, the chance that my child might get sick goes up rather fast, which, from where I’m sitting, passes the “your freedom to move your fist ends at my face” test.

What does everybody else think?  Seriously, I’m open to suggestion here - how do we figure this out?

Thus It Begins…

Although it was nice to be away for a few days, sans Internet access and sans work responsibilities, it’s nice to be back.  Honestly, I was starting to get restless by the end of the weekend.  Due in part to that restlessness, I feel like touching on something big - something grand.  Today is a good day for grand ideas - with the year almost over and the economy in trouble, everybody is feeling a little introspective, and I’m feeling no different.

I think… no, I intuit, if it can even be called anything that serious, that humankind is at an inflection point.  Since the 1700’s or so, humanity has become increasingly specialized.  There was a time when it was possible for one man to achieve a solid understanding of all that was knowable; we called this person a “Rennaisance Man“.  Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to achieve this sort of understanding - even individual fields have different specialties that you can drill into and get lost in.  For example, pretend you want to achieve a solid understanding of computers - how they work, how to make them do what you want them to do, perhaps even be able to come up with some new, novel use for them.  It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?  It’s all a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, after all… or is it?  Okay, that’s not fair - quantum computers are still about a decade away from being anywhere close to mainstream; at this point, quantum computing is probably at the same place that the computer that we know and love was in 1950.  Let’s step away from there and just focus on normal, ordinary binary computers.  Now, what branch of computers do you want to focus on?  Do you want to focus on gigantic mainframes, the kind of computers that you see at your mother’s house, or something in between?  How about a cluster of computers like your mom’s, all working together to generate performance that would blow a mainframe out of the water?

Whoa there, you’re thinking to yourself.  Let’s just focus on the kind I see on my desk. Fine - I can work with that.  So, is that a Windows machine on your desk, or are you one of those using a Mac?  Perhaps your IT guy is a real propellerhead and has you using a Linux workstation, of all things, which opens up a huge can of worms.  Okay, okay - you’re probably using a Windows machine, like roughly 90% of the world, give or take.  Fine - Windows XP or Windows Vista?  Or, is your IT department still limping along with Windows 2000?  Windows NT 4?  Or, ye gods, Windows 98?! Okay, it’s probably Windows XP, and even if it’s Windows 2000, the differences are small enough where we can probably safely ignore them for now.  So, what flavor of XP is that on your desk?  Home, Professional, or Media Center?  Wait, are you in a third-world country where Starter Edition is sold?  Are you using a tablet?  If so, that means we’re talking about Tablet Edition… crap, okay, hold on - are you reading this article from work?  If so, you’re probably using XP Pro.  We’ll just assume you’re not using the 64-bit version, since that raises all kinds of fun issues, like Windows on Windows and 64-bit native drivers.  Fine.  Let’s dig into that little machine on your desk…

Let’s start with logging in.  Do you log into your computer with a password and all that good stuff?  Okay, you’re probably using your XP Pro machine in an Active Directory environment - you don’t want to know what understanding that would entail (You in the back with the Novell eDirectory login screen - shut up! We’re trying to keep this simple!).  Seriously, we’re just talking about the login screen here.  Don’t care?  That’s okay - we’ll move on.  Go ahead and log in… now, what do you want to do with your computer?  Maybe you want to play like the big boys with little command-line scripts.  Maybe there’s something about that little black box that you find absolutely mesmerising.  Fine.  Here’s the list of commands for CMD, the default command line in Windows XP.  Have fun.  Not enough control for you?  Okay, well, you can always use Windows Script Host, where we can unleash the object-oriented train wreck that is WMI upon your unknowing soul.  This’ll help with that, by the way.  Wait - you want results in real-time?  Powershell might be helpful, but do you want v1 or are you feeling daring enough to try the latest Community Technology Preview of v2?

Wait - you don’t even know what you want to automate yet.  That’s fine.  Let’s start with something familiar.  Go ahead, play with Microsoft Office.  Perhaps you just want to write a script that automates pulling data from one Excel sheet into another.  Sounds good - that’s what Visual Basic for Applications is all about, after all… or is it?  Perhaps .NET is more to your liking?  Don’t tell me you don’t like Visual Basic… we might have to throw down Visual C#, or worse, Visual C++… oh boy.  Or, you could just make a good ol’ fashioned macro - that could be fun.  I’m not even going to begin to explain what a lambda expression is, or why XML is all over the place now, much less what a singleton is, and if I have to dig into Java and explain beans, I quit.  JSON?  That’s it… we’re done here.

We’re just talking about that computer on your desk, right?  Right off the bat, we’re faced with a conundrum - how deep do we feel like delving?  Are we shifting into programming, or just basic system administration?  If we’re dealing with programming, what are we programming, exactly, and what terminology are we going to be using?  What programming language(s) are we playing with?  What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?  If we’re talking about system administration, how local is it?  What do we need to control, and on how many computers do we need to control it?  How do we feel like exercising that control?  Each of these decisions requires increasingly in-depth knowledge of the platform, and, at each point that we drill down, we take time away from ourselves that allows us to drill out.  The time that you spend staring at all of the namespaces in root/cimv2 is time that you’re not spending working with Powershell cmdlets, which would also be time that you’re not spending working with the VBA class model, which is also time you’re not spending dealing with other platforms entirely.  At each point, your ability to understand the forest is diminished as you delve further and further into it, looking for that one tree that you need to get your job done.

This is just computers we’re talking about.  I’m not even going to touch on economics, physics, chemistry, law, medicine, etc.  The list goes on.  Meanwhile, we have journalists, specializing in their own schools of thought, trying to explain to everyone else these other specialized schools of thought and how they’ll affect everyone else, followed by politicians that are neck-deep in their own highly specialized schools of politics and punditry doing their damndest to prove they matter by writing laws that meddle in fields that even the specialists barely understand.  Take dealer franchise laws, something that’s remarked upon fairly frequently when discussing the Detroit bailout but never really explained.  They nearly sunk Chrysler when DeSoto went under in ‘62.  They cost GM a handsome sum when they canned Oldsmobile.  But, does anybody actually know what one of these laws looks like?

You will now - I present to you Nevada Revised Statute 482.36352:

NRS 482.36352 Termination or discontinuation of franchise: Notice; grounds; protest by dealer; hearing.

1.  Notwithstanding the terms of any franchise, a manufacturer or distributor shall not terminate or refuse to continue any franchise unless it has received the written consent of the dealer or:

(a) It has given written notice of its intention to the dealer and the Director; and

(b) Either of the following conditions occurs:

(1) The dealer does not file a protest with the Director within the time allowed by this section; or

(2) After the dealer has filed a protest and the Director has conducted a hearing on the matter, the Director issues an order authorizing the manufacturer or distributor to terminate the franchise or permit it to lapse.

2.  The notice required by this section must be given to the dealer and the Director:

(a) At least 15 days before the effective date of the intended termination or the date on which the existing franchise is to expire if the grounds for the termination or refusal include any of the following:

(1) Except as otherwise provided in NRS 482.36396 to 482.36414, inclusive, transfer of any ownership or interest in the franchised dealership without the consent of the manufacturer or distributor unless that consent has been withheld without good cause;

(2) Material misrepresentation by the dealer in applying for the franchise;

(3) Insolvency of the dealer or the filing of any petition by or against the dealer under any law governing bankruptcy or receivership;

(4) Any unfair business practice by the dealer after the manufacturer or distributor has issued a written warning to the dealer to desist from that practice;

(5) Revocation of a dealer’s license under this chapter;

(6) Conviction of the dealer for a felony; and

(7) Closure by the dealer for a period longer than 14 days, unless the closure was caused by a force beyond the control of the dealer.

(b) At least 60 days before the effective date of the intended termination or the date on which the existing franchise is to expire if the grounds for the termination or refusal do not include one or more of those set forth in paragraph (a).

Ê The notice required by this section must include a statement of the particular grounds for the intended termination or refusal to continue a franchise.

3.  A dealer who has received a notice pursuant to this section may file a protest with the Director:

(a) Within 10 days after receiving the notice if it states one or more of the grounds specified in paragraph (a) of subsection 2;

(b) Within 30 days after receiving the notice if it does not state one of the grounds specified in that paragraph; or

(c) In either case, within 30 days after the end of any appellate procedure provided by the manufacturer or distributor.

(Added to NRS by 1981, 698; A 1985, 1831; 1999, 2507)

NRS 482.363521 Termination or discontinuation of franchise: Compensation of dealer.

1.  Upon the termination or refusal to continue a franchise, the manufacturer or distributor shall compensate the dealer for:

(a) The dealer’s inventory of new vehicles, including new vehicles not of the current model year if delivered to the dealer during the 18-month period immediately preceding the effective date of the termination or refusal to continue the franchise. As used in this paragraph, a “new vehicle” is one which has not been damaged, materially altered or registered with the Department or with the appropriate agency of authority of any other state, the District of Columbia, any territory or possession of the United States or any foreign state, province or country.

(b) The dealer’s inventory of parts and accessories which:

(1) Have been purchased by the dealer from the manufacturer or distributor; and

(2) Are listed in a current parts catalog of the manufacturer or distributor.

(c) Any special tools purchased by the dealer from the manufacturer or distributor, less a reasonable allowance for depreciation.

(d) Any equipment, furnishings or signs purchased by the dealer from the manufacturer or distributor, less a reasonable allowance for depreciation.

(e) Except as otherwise provided in subsection 4, the fair rental value for 90 days, and any additional period allowed by the Director after considering the difficulty of finding a new tenant for the dealer’s premises affected, after the effective date of the termination or refusal to continue of the portion of the dealer’s place of business that was used by the dealer to sell or service vehicles or other products of the manufacturer or distributor.

2.  Compensation paid pursuant to paragraphs (a) to (d), inclusive, of subsection 1 must be paid in an amount at least equal to the greater of:

(a) The amount actually paid by the dealer for the vehicles, parts, tools and equipment; or

(b) The amount currently paid by other dealers in this State for the vehicles, parts, tools and equipment.

3.  If compensation is paid pursuant to paragraph (e) of subsection 1, the dealer shall allow the manufacturer or distributor paying the compensation the use and possession of the premises affected.

4.  The manufacturer or distributor is not required to pay compensation pursuant to paragraph (e) of subsection 1 if the dealer has been convicted of a crime involving fraud in connection with his application for or operation of the franchise.

5.  This section does not relieve a dealer of his obligation to mitigate damages resulting from the termination or refusal to continue the franchise.

(Added to NRS by 1987, 2200; A 1999, 2508; 2003, 20th Special Session, 300)

So, in short, according to Nevada state law, if GM decides it wants to kill a dealership, they would have to give the dealer two month’s notice, hope and pray the dealer doesn’t appeal to the Director, then buy every car on that lot, every sign at the dealership, all of the tools, all of the spare parts, and then pay rent on that location for three months.  That’s assuming the dealer doesn’t fight it.

Now, multiply those costs by 1,750 and assume that, if Nevada’s business friendly climate is any indication, that other state franchise laws might be far more restrictive.  That’s the law GM has to work with, times fifty.  These are the sorts of laws that journalists have to explain to those that don’t want to read state revised statutes until their eyes bleed.  These are the sorts of laws that federal lawmakers(!) have to contend with when deciding if we should use the federal purse to loan some money.

These are just dealer franchise laws.  These are just the dealers we’re talking about - we’re not even touching on management or labor.  As for labor, you don’t want to know what labor laws in Michigan look like.  Labor Disputes and Employment Relations, anyone?  Check out the section on Solicitation of Strikebreakers to get a general feel for what’s going on there.  It goes on like this.  Does anybody really understand what’s going on?  Are they talking to the people that write the checks?

The world is full of these examples - full of little trees, planted all over the place, each doing a magnificent job of making life ever more complicated and more difficult to fully understand.  This is natural - we have 6 billion people, each of them more educated than ever before, each able to dig deeper than ever before.  Unfortunately, our lives are still organized in a very forest-centric sort of way; our political structures, for example, are built around the idea that it’s possible for a few hundred people to see the forest from the trees and govern appropriately.  Clearly, even under the best of times, this is well-nigh impossible - there’s just too much there there for anybody to really get a solid grasp on.  This is why a hands-off approach to government is necessary - there is simply no way anymore that a government can interfere with much of anything without causing myriad unwanted side-effects that few can foresee, much less understand.  There is risk in this, sure - but it’s not like the choice is between risk-free public government management and risk-full private self-government.  It never was.  Public government has risks - just ask its employees.  Heck, ask those that have to pay for those employees.

Wordpress is telling me that I’ve already cranked out over 2500 words, which means I probably should have stopped a loooong time ago… so I’m done.

On Gold Bugs & Central Banks

One of the fun aspects of being a big-L Libertarian again is listening to people discuss whether or not we should have a central bank such as the Federal Reserve, along with what powers such an entity should enjoy if it should be allowed to exist.  Of course, such arguments are largely moot; the United States Federal Reserve has existed for nearly 100 years and there is, at least at present, very little political or voter interest in doing anything about it.  Even so, a decent summation of the arguments against central banking can be found at the Campaign for Liberty:

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments.  Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns.  And the central bank’s ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred.  For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.

Now, it’s fairly obvious to anybody that’s paid attention that, though a single dollar doesn’t buy as much as it did in 1913, we not only have more dollars collectively than we used to (Ford’s infamous $5 per day in 1914 doesn’t even come close to sniffing minimum wage now, nominally speaking), our buying power is far better than it was in 1913.  For example, in 1929, the average American spent nearly 1/4 of their income on food.  Nowadays, it’s less than 10%.  Of course, many of the price changes are due to better technology and increased production across the board, but it doesn’t change the fact that, in terms that matter (i.e. “How much can I buy with the money I have?”), people are far better off now than they ever were in 1913.  None of this is new - in fact, it’s elementary Econ 101.  However, take a look at what is supposed to be the root cause of all of this…

…for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns.

It’s a monetarist argument - They’re manipulating our money and distorting our markets! However, what if the monetarist policies of central banks matter less than either side thinks?

From The Big Picture:  SO AGAIN - HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

But Cooper describes another type of inflation that is derived from what he calls “private sector credit creation.” Unlike public sector central bank money creation which creates high powered money out of thin air and does not produce additional debt, private sector money creation involves the simultaneous creation of offsetting debt. People borrow for new projects and for new consumption. Positive feedback loops and natural human tendencies toward herd behavior keep the process going until a point of excess is reached and the debt becomes a major problem. Once that point of excess is reached there is very little the central banks can do. Deleveraging and asset price deflation become unstoppable.

[...]

Cooper’s work is based upon the work of the late Hyman Minsky who developed the Financial Instability Hypothesis. Minsky thought financial markets were inherently unstable, given to credit-driven booms and busts. Until recently, Minsky has been generally ignored by the economics profession.

In other words, when credit dries up and everybody has to pay their bills, the economy grinds to a halt for a while until people get their debts paid off.  This causes deflation due to money leaving the system (the money supply is contracting faster than the supply of stuff to purchase - people are still making stuff at about the same rate, but they’re spending much less - so the remaining money pool becomes worth more), which, naturally, makes it harder to pay down loans.  This makes sense - any time a bunch of people decide to do something, the cost of doing that thing is almost invariably going to go up.  In this particular instance, the cost of paying back a loan increases; the dollar you’re giving back to the bank now can buy more than it could a few months back, so it’s worth more to you now, so your cost increases.  Eventually, you reach a point where you’re not in quite so much of a rush to pay back the bank and choose to buy something for yourself instead; at the same time, the banks have used your money to pay back their loans, so they can loan more money again, and thus the cycle continues.  At each point, there’s little for the central bank to do, monetarily speaking - they can make it a little harder to loan money when times are good by increasing interest rates, and they can make it a little easier to loan money when times are bad by decreasing interest rates, but it still doesn’t change the fact that the cycle is still coming and that the central banks really have little control over the direction or intensity of that cycle.

Interesting stuff.

The First Meeting

Well, the first meeting of the Northern Nevada Libertarian Party completed without incident.  We had seven people show up, which may not sound like much, but was actually pretty impressive considering how it was thrown together in about a week.  In fact, it looks like we might be a little too agile for the state LP; they didn’t get the e-mail out to their mail rolls about the meeting until this morning.

I like catching everyone off guard.  It’s a good thing.  It means we’re doing something right.  Always attack, never react - let the enemy do the defending and the reacting.

Fortunately, it appears we have a good, well grounded group starting.  Nobody was talking about protests or discussing the constitutionality of arcane Federal projects that have been around for over a century - we just all agreed that the government needs to be smaller, that it needs to intrude less in people’s lives, and that as long as we’re all heading in the same direction, we’ll do just fine.  Some, I’m sure, came to that conclusion from a different direction than others, and that’s okay - as long as we all have the same general destination in mind, this will turn out all right.

There will be a meeting on December 10th at 6 p.m. at (I think) the Washoe Flats Steakhouse, where we’ll hopefully be able to build on this last meeting and get to work on dealing with the various arcane details that are part and parcel with developing a new political party.  There’s much to do - mailing lists to compile, state and national bylaws to address, and the small matter of coming up with a coherent political strategy that will satisfy enough people across a number of counties.  I feel confident that we’ll get this done - it definitely appears that each person that was there tonight brought something to the table, and I know there are a number of potential contributors waiting in the wings that will easily add to what we’re looking to accomplish.

We live in exciting times.

Doing Something About It

I know that I’ve been historically harsh about the Libertarian Party in the past, especially lately.  Their foreign policy is, I still think, a little nuts - if the bullies that beat the crap out of me for no particular reason in school were any indication, leaving everyone else alone will not result in peace or prosperity.  To quote “Team America“, some people are just assholes, and pretending that it’s a virtue to imagine otherwise is dangerous.  There’s also the attitude that I’ve stumbled across when I talk to many “Libertarians”, the complete unwillingness to work with others and compromise, the firm death-grip embrace of the idea that “symbolic” action is the same as real, honest-to-God political action (or at least a solid substitute)… ugh.

That said, the Republicans and Democrats have abandoned me.  Nobody, and I mean nobody, is pushing for fiscal conservativism anymore.  Nobody is pushing for smaller government, either in funding or in roles.  The only question that anybody has any interest in addressing right now is, “Which way shall we grow the government this election cycle,” with the unfortunate side-effect that both sides have decided that it’s far better to cut funding to the other side’s programs to the bone so we have a government that’s 50% schizophrenic and 50% underfunded.  The result is a government that tries to do far too much with far too little, a concept that Nevada is at the forefront of.  In fact, I have a message for Republicans everywhere, especially in this state: 

Smaller government does NOT mean cutting the funding of programs to the point where no government program does what it’s supposed to do anymore.  It means eliminating programs so there’s still money for programs that people actually want.

Coincidentally, yes, I’m sorry to say, most people want some government programs.  Until we come up with better alternatives to them, they’re going to stick around… which, in a roundabout sort of way, brings me to where I’m going with this…

With the help of some Libertarians, I’m helping to create and join the Northern Nevada Libertarian Party, which, at least for now, will serve as a catch-all to organize Libertarians and libertarian-minded individuals throughout the parts of Nevada that aren’t currently organized (i.e. everywhere except Clark County).  Yes, this even means I’ve paid dues to the national LP, which means that, yes, I am officially a Libertarian again… officially.  It’s either that or try and cherry-pick among Republican and Democrat candidates for various offices, which isn’t entirely out of the question, either, but not particularly likely.

So… what’s the point?

If Obama’s victory in the primaries has indicated anything, it’s that the Blue Dog Democrats are relegated into minority status in the Democratic Party and will remain there for at least the next four years.  Meanwhile, the Republican Party is doing a fine job of mimicking Chernobyl while doing its absolute best to pretend that the semi-libertarian wing of its party doesn’t exist.  In short, the United States is starting to veer into single-party territory and the GOP has absolutely no plan or idea what it’s going to do about it.

This, believe it or not, bodes well for the Libertarian Party… if it’s willing to take advantage of the situation.

US politics needs two parties.  It doesn’t matter which two parties it is - it’s a very rare event indeed when the US experiences more than four years of single party dominance.  Consequently, if the GOP continues to circle the drain, the LP has a decent chance of forging a coalition among the fiscally conservative elements of the GOP and the socially liberal budget hawks of the Democratic Party (i.e. the so-called “Blue Dog Democrats”).  It won’t be as ideologically pure as the LP would currently like it to be, and compromises will almost certainly have to be made, but it will be a party that has a far better chance of pushing a freedom-promoting agenda through our political system than anything we’ve seen to date.

My goal is to get started on that at the local level.  In order to accomplish anything, the LP must start locally - it’s the only place it can really afford to do anything, to be honest.  National elections are huge, expensive, exhausting affairs with a very poor return on investment for third parties.  On the other hand, it’s entirely possible for a dedicated locally oriented third party to direct resources at a specific race or two, slowly building support on a district-by-district level, and organically grow into something relevant.  As time passes, each locally oriented branch combines into a relevant state tree, which in turn can branch into other states… well, you get the idea.

The seed has been planted.  I’m grabbing a handle on the plow.  Anybody care to join me?

Why the Libertarian Party Failed

Or, at least, why it has failed thus far…

There are two comments that, I think, sum up the LP’s problem nicely:

Robert Burr:

2. The Libertarian Party is just too beyond the American mainstream. It is both its blessing and its curse. There is a considerable number of people, anywhere from 10 to 20% of the U.S. population who are loosely libertarian. However, these small “L” libertarians are more moderate than the party and much of its platform. This perpertually dooms the party to appealing to only a small segment of the population. On the reverse side, this has probably also prolonged the party’s lifespan. The LP has been around for 36 years. Compare that to the last effects of the Reform Party, the Progressive Party, etc.

Thomas W Cornell:

Now I know why the UNR group will not affiliate with the Young Americans for Liberty even though that group has now been officially endorsed by Ron Paul.

I am also aware that one of the organizers of the group will not state who she was going to vote for.

I can only assume that the UNR group is just another Republican front like the Republican Liberty Caucus.

The problem with the Libertarian Party isn’t just that it’s not in the mainstream - it’s that it’s a religion. It’s one thing to have extreme views, which the Libertarian Party certainly has plenty of.  It’s quite another to decide that any freedom-loving organization that doesn’t wish to associate with you anymore is an apostate heresy that’s clearly in league with the High Demon Republicrat.  Most political parties are inclusionary - they invite as many different disparate coalitions as possible to join with them, with the hope that they’ll find just enough in common to get some votes and at least satisfy some of the demands of the group.  Not the Libertarian Party, though.  They’d rather be principled, even if it means that their principles will never see the light of day.

This approach is seriously flawed.  Actions speak louder than words.  The only way a political party can display action is by winning elections. Yes, the Libertarian Party can be somewhat disruptive by sponsoring various initiatives such as the usual medical marijuana measures that seem to enjoy success from time to time.  Unfortunately, most of those only occur via voter initiatives, which means that the Libertarian Party platform is effectively locked out of any government that happens to still believe in some sort of representative democracy.  This, for better or worse, includes the ever-growing Federal government, which means that, in the long run, the current LP strategy is a losing one.

The Libertarian Party needs to win elections, and it needs to start doing that sooner than later.  The Libertarians need to realize that it’s okay to settle a little; it’s called picking your battles. The gold standard isn’t coming back.  We’re not privatizing every single roadway.  Mentioning either of those things turns people off just as fast as trying to push “intelligent design” in schools or removing the word “God” from the Pledge of Alliegance.  Instead, let’s focus on issues that really matter to voters.  Reframe the Drug War arguments so they make sense - stop focusing on demand and focus on supply.  You want marijuana to become legal?  Tell the farm lobbies that they’re welcome to grow it as a highly profitable cash crop - this has the advantage of eliminating the drug dealers that make it a “gateway drug” in the first place while also finally giving you the kind of financial backing that you need to get something like this through a legislature or two.  Forget about allowing every single weapon under the sun - urban areas will never allow the legalization of automatic weapons no matter what the Constitution says and there are really good, practical reasons for this.  Instead, push for concealed carry permits - yeah, they require registration, which is unfortunate, but it’s a far better compromise than “ban all handguns”, which is the direction most city councils and their voters take these days, Heller be damned.  For the love of all that is good and holy, stop trying to make monetary policy a central issue. That’s not something you throw at the voters - seeing as neither microeconomics nor macroeconomics are a standard part of any primary education in the United States, you might as well be speaking some obscure Austrian dialect of German for all the good it’ll do you.  Save that plank for once you’re in a position to actually do something about monetary policy, and not a minute sooner.  It’s not like you’re going to overturn the Federal Reserve via voter initiative anyways.

Finally, stop treating the Constitution like it’s the Bible.  Does it deserve more respect than it currently gets?  Of course.  However, the key to actually doing something useful in American politics these days is to acknowledge the simple reality that, at the moment, the Constitution is being interpreted rather flexibly at the moment.  If you really want to do something about that, get yourself elected so that you can pick Supreme Court justices that are a little less inclined to play fast and loose with the interstate commerce clause.  Otherwise, you just sound like that guy at the sporting events that keeps quoting esoteric and obscure rules that the refs are never going to enforce, no matter how loud you yell.

Real change comes from winning elections.  Anything less than this is simply an exercise in feel-good futility.

I’m Back & With A Vengeance

Between moving and work, I haven’t had much time to write anything as of late.  That changes now.

Barack Obama is our new President.  No big surprise there, though, to be fair, I was reasonably impressed with McCain’s performance.  He didn’t run a perfect campaign, of course, but to be able to at least make it competitive during an economic downturn and complete hatred for the incumbent party should be commended.  That said, his election has inspired me to actually get involved in politics again - back in college, I was mildly involved in the College Libertarians and the local Libertarian Pary branch, and I think it’s high time I jumped back in.

This has, sadly, led to a bit of a problem:  How? And, equally importantly, with whom?

The trouble, of course, is that I’m not a Republican - I’m an atheist who believes in a sane drug policy and fiscal conservativism.  Needless to say, the Republican Party ran away from the likes of me the instant they embraced “Compassionate Conservativism”.  Once in a while, they’ll throw the more libertarian-minded people a bone and let Ron Paul get some attention, but therein lies the rub:  I don’t want to be a sideshow.  I’m not a Truther, I don’t believe that if we pack up our military and go home that everyone will just leave us and our friends alone (as if that works in a schoolyard, much less the real world), and I don’t believe that there’s any value whatsoever in exhausting energy on our current government’s variances against the official positions laid forth in the Constitution.  No, we don’t rely on a literal interpretation of the Constitution.  We haven’t since we started having a professional full-time army and never bothered to amend the Constitution to allow that.  Perhaps we should, but we don’t - the sooner we accept reality and find a way to work with it, the better off everyone will be.

So, okay, maybe not the Republicans… perhaps I should sign up for a stint with the old LP?  Sure, their foreign policy is insane, but it’s small enough where my voice would be heard.  Besides, major political parties consist of various disparate coalitions of individuals with entirely different needs and wants - I mean, what does a poor retiree, an environmentalist, and a Hyphenated-American have in common?  Very little, except they all predominately vote Democrat.  Surely that means there’s room in the LP for someone who enjoys fiscal conservativism, social liberalism, and a strong foreign policy.  There’s just one small, tiny problem… what Libertarian Party?

That’s right - the second largest metropolitan area  in the state of Nevada, with over 300,000 residents, does not have an active local branch of the Libertarian Party.  The situation here is so bad that the UNR College Libertarians decided to rename themselves:

I propose we disassociate ourselves with the word: “Libertarian” as I believe that it damages our mission of spreading the word on campus. Not only do our values not fully line with the party; their apathetic, isolationistic, and stubborn attitude is damaging and dangerous towards our cause. The Libertarian Party was an idea that our parent’s generation created, and it has failed. I suggest we find new and more effective ways of transforming our campus, our state, and our nation, and this is why I propose we change our name to that of a national organization we can actually be proud of: Students for Liberty. I suggest we change our club constitution to include our party stance, our goals, and eliminate all ties with that of the Libertarian Party. Through this, under the support of the newly founded Students for Liberty organization, we can effectively become more attractive to like-minded Americans.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Libertarian Party has failed.  Completely, totally, and utterly failed.

Anybody care to speculate on how that happened?

Here we go…

Oh goodie - Bob Barr is running for President as a Libertarian (LA Times):

WASHINGTON — Bob Barr, a former congressman from Georgia and a former Republican, today announced his candidacy for president as a Libertarian who would rein in federal spending and foreign wars.

“The government has run amok fiscally,” he said at a press conference. Saying that during the first quarter of this year the private sector was losing millions of jobs while the federal government was “hiring with enthusiasm,” Barr added, “As the American people see their standard of living falling, the standard of government keeps going up.”

So far so good…

“There’s not a great deal of substance there in terms of a commitment to cutting the size of government,” Barr said He said no one who had authored the McCain-Feingold campaign reforms that cap individual donations could call himself a conservative, “at least with a straight face.”

Fair enough, though, according to Army of Dog, some liberals are still afraid of what McCain wants to do to the government.

Barr also lashed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying that if Iran threatens Israel’s existence, the United States should “obliterate Iran.” Calling the New York senator’s statement “tremendously dire,” Barr called the possibility of Iran possessing nuclear weapons “remote” and said he has seen “no evidence that indicates that is an imminent likelihood.”

Saying both the Republican and Democratic Parties have “bought into a system of running a charity called the United States of America,” Barr blasted programs that use public funds to educate the children of illegal immigrants and maintain foreign military bases “that have no more efficacy in the 21st century.“

And there’s why nobody takes the Libertarian Party seriously.  The Libertarian Party’s idea of foreign policy can be best summed up as, “Take our toys, go home, get out of any and all alliances, and pretend we can just chill out in the Western Hemisphere for the rest of all eternity without anyone messing with us.”  I wish I was kidding - here’s the official LP foreign policy plank:

American foreign policy should seek an America at peace with the world and the defense — against attack from abroad — of the lives, liberty, and property of the American people on American soil. Provision of such defense must respect the individual rights of people everywhere.

The principle of non-intervention should guide relationships between governments. The United States government should return to the historic libertarian tradition of avoiding entangling alliances, abstaining totally from foreign quarrels and imperialist adventures, and recognizing the right to unrestricted trade, travel, and immigration.

Keep in mind here that the United States government hasn’t used the “historic libertarian tradition” outlined above since, oh, the First Barbary War in 1801 and the Monroe Doctrine.  Also keep in mind that, in many cases, many of the governments we deal with on a day by day basis don’t respect the individual rights of their citizens, which means it’s a little difficult to find a Libertarian way of dealing with those governments without, y’know, not respecting the individual rights of the people “represented” by that government.  Fortunately, according to the Libertarian Party, it is quite possible for us to exercise a right to unrestricted trade, travel, and immigration when we keep to ourselves and avoid foreign entanglements - this has plenty of historic fact behind it, if you ignore impressment, piracy, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and any other issue this country has had while pursuing an isolationist foreign policy.

Look, I’m all for Libertarianism - I love the idea of a small domestic government and low taxes.  It sounds great.  However, if the Libertarian Party ever wants to be taken seriously in this country, they need to realize that, for better or worse, the past 200 years of American history did, in fact, happen, and there were some very valuable lessons to learn from that time period.  Trying to roll back the clock and pretend nothing happened between now and then while also pretending that, if we just magically wave our Constitutional wands, nobody will ever mess with us again is pure lunacy.  We have a strong foreign policy for a reason - every single time we’ve tried to not have a strong foreign policy, we’ve received the shaft each and every time without fail.  Until the LP comes to grips with that, I just can’t bring myself to vote for them in good conscience anymore.

More on government

This isn’t a continuation of my Small l post so much as a spur, a small branch line to an isolated resource hole somewhere.

Army of Dog had an interesting point today:

In the world of lefties taking guns away from law-abiding citizens who carry them for self defense will keep criminals and psychopaths from using guns to kill innocent people. Just how in the hell that happens no one seems to know. They just believe it and it doesn’t matter if banning guns makes you more, less, or equally safe, because as long as they can feel better about the situation, actual results are meaningless.

The difference between a liberal and a conservative is generally how they view the efficacy of governmental action. To understand why, let’s take a brief step into the wayback machine…

There’s just one problem - government actually is good at certain things. Government excels at solving any problem that the entire public, by necessity, is interested in.

The difference between liberals and conservatives is where, precisely, that line should be drawn. A liberal will tell you that the government is great at managing the economy and working the excesses out of it, and that it should because, by necessity, the entire public is interested in the economy. Conversely, a liberal will also tell you that the government is not so great at managing the private lives of its citizens - people will do what they want to do, after all, so there’s no point in regulating, say, what goes on in people’s bedrooms. A conservative will frequently issue the opposing position on both sides, declaring that government is more of a hindrance than a help in the economy, imposing unwanted inefficiencies and distorting market economics, but that government is great at handling moral issues, which the public, naturally, should be interested in. As a libertarian, I think both sides are right, wrong, nuts, and cogent simultaneously, which probably just means I need more medication.

Back to Army of Dog’s point, from a liberal perspective, they have a rather optimistic view of how well government can regulate market economics, which is precisely how they define gun control - if government eliminates supply, there will be no more guns. Of course, many of the same liberals that think that government can eliminate the supply of guns through market regulation are also the same ones that point out that the government can’t regulate drugs, but, realistically, we can’t ask all people to be as consistent politically and philosophically as yours truly, now can we? Point being, the reason liberals think that gun control works, regardless of statistics indicating otherwise, is because they believe in government and its ability to perform socially responsible actions for the public. More importantly, they believe that, since the government can be a force for public good, it is in everyone’s interest to allow government to solve these problems.

Of course, before anyone says anything, conservatives are absolutely no better at this - they just believe that liberals are focusing on the wrong problems. The approach is still the same - the government has the ability to positively mold the public. The difference is that, instead of gay rights, you have the protection of marriage. Instead of protecting the people from economic dislocations, conservatives prefer to protect businesses… and so on. If you have a conservative telling you that they should allow prayer in public school and a liberal saying they should ban it, they’re both talking out of the same side of the argument - government should have a role in whether there should be prayer in school or not. Is this right? Well, it depends on your point of view and whether you feel that the public should, by necessity, be interested in that specific issue.

Herein, of course, is the rub - we as a country really can’t agree what the government should be involved in. That’s why I said that government excels at solving any problem that the entire public, by necessity, is interested in - not should be interested in. When government attempts to tackle issues that the a significant portion of the public isn’t interested in, it fails miserably - see the War on Drugs, abortion regulation before Roe v. Wade, gun control, and more.

In the end, both conservatives and liberals enjoy talking about personal rights and liberties, and both conservatives and liberals have faith that the government can be used to affect positive changes in the issues they care about. From where I’m sitting, they’re both wrong, and I guarantee you I’m not the only one that feels that way.

Small L

I’m having a little trouble finding something interesting to blog about, so I’m just going to throw down something that I’ve been thinking of doing for a while. For whatever it’s worth, it’s lightly inspired by one of Rachel’s latest articles.

Politically and philosophically, I’m a small-L libertarian - I think that a smaller, limited government is best, and that citizens should allow their government to tell other citizens what do do as little as possible. That said, as I’ve made abundantly clear in the past, I definitely prefer a muscular foreign policy. I’m also not into some of the stranger parts of Libertarian dogma, such as privatizing our road system and abolishing public property. There’s a question that begs itself in these stances, however - when should government intervene?

To understand why many conservatives and libertarians have problems with government, it’s best to understand how the oft-heralded alternative of free markets work. Think of a retail establishment for a second. In a retail establishment, you have two players - the operators of the retail establishment and the consumers. The consumers want to get as much as they can for as little time and money as possible. The operators want the consumer to maximize spending in their store. Equilibrium is achieved when the consumers and the operators get what they want enough where both are happy with the situation. This is the most efficient method of distributing goods we’ve been able to come up with - it keeps everything between the entity that needs the good and the entity that is either producing or delivering the good.

The problem with government is that, by its very nature, everyone is involved, or, at the very least, a group of people are involved that reflect neither the interests of the consumer or the producer. A decent example of where this could be a problem would be in contraband - the customer wishes to purchase a good, the producer wishes to sell the customer a good, but the government steps in (for whatever reason) and forbids the transaction. Alternatively, the government can raise taxes to a high enough level on that good where it’s impossible for the consumer and the producer to achieve satisfaction. The end result is the same - neither the consumer nor the producer can get what they want. In Libertarian and some conservative circles (depending on the context), this can be a big problem. After all, what right does anybody have to tell two consenting adults what they can do with their time and money? Consequently, government is seen as overbearing and inefficient - it restricts these transactions and its interference makes it less likely that the consumer and producer will find an arrangement that’s maximally mutually beneficial. The Big-L Libertarian answer is to simply come as close to abolish government as humanly possible.

There’s just one problem - government actually is good at certain things. Government excels at solving any problem that the entire public, by necessity, is interested in. Take law enforcement, for example. At one point, law enforcement was largely a privatized, for-profit endeavor, engaged in by the likes of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. It was fairly effective, but there were two big problems with this approach:

1. Only the people that could afford the services could receive them.
2. The methods of the for-profit groups weren’t transparent to all parties involved - they only needed to be somewhat transparent between the entity purchasing the service and the entity providing the service.

The trouble with this arrangement is that law enforcement is something which all citizens have a vested interest in. In a just society, you want the law to apply equally to all people. If only the well-off are able to afford law enforcement, only the well-off will receive justice. That’s a problem, and is precisely the sort of role that government is great at stepping into. Equally importantly, government can also be a wonderful tool for ensuring that every possible party can have a say in the activities upon whatever government is tasked to do. In the example of the police, for example, government can circumscribe what limits the police in the process of solving or preventing a crime (How much force are they allowed to use? Do they have to read you your rights?).

As great as that sounds on paper, though, there are some very practical limits to the performance of a government. To start with, since our government, by its very nature, must be responsive to every single entity that addresses it (note that responsiveness does not correlate to satisfaction), it’s going to be extremely inefficient. To understand why, pretend you have a job where you’re assigned to do something but, whenever someone comes up to you and asks you a question, you have to respond with an answer. You don’t have to provide a detailed answer and you don’t necessarily have to provide the right answer on the first try, but you must come up with an answer of some sort. It doesn’t matter what your actual duty is going to be - if enough people are interested in what you’re doing, you’re going to be answering a lot of questions, and it’s going to take you a while to finish that task, whatever it might be. The second problem with government is that, by its very nature, it’s very difficult for it to do something that’s against the will of the majority at any point in time. Going back to our example, let’s pretend that not only can people ask you questions, they can also tell you what to do. If enough people tell you to do something else, you must do that instead. However, if enough people change their minds, or if enough people come in after the first group come in and tell you to do what you were originally doing, you have to go back to doing that.

Now, imagine that person being your doctor or a teacher. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Those are big weaknesses. Sometimes, things just need to get done - if too much time is spent talking about it, it may never get done, whatever it may be. Consequently, government action only makes sense in situations where either time is not a pressing issue or where a vast majority of the people involved simply don’t care about the particulars - they only care about the end goal. A great example of the former situation is the Interstate highway system; since it’s an organic system, it didn’t need to be finished quickly. Consequently, even though the Interstate Highway project began during the Eisenhower administration, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t finished until 1991, if you can ever considered it finished at all. A great example of the latter situation is the military; though people certainly care whether or not the military, say, abuses prisoners or shoots civilians, there’s not much desire by the public or the government (Harry Reid notwithstanding) to legislatively define strategy, troop movement, or logistics.

Note that, thus far, we haven’t even touched on morality. When should government intervene for the protection of its own citizens? What should government protect the citizens from, exactly? That, I’m afraid, will need to be a topic for another time.

Gas-related self-rightenousness

Ah, the joys of going to Fark, finding a story about a congressman in Michigan wanting to increase gas taxes, and then watching the ensuing aftermath…

Most of the comments were along this vein:

Quel 2008-03-20 05:45:56 PM
Lets see:
-Less people on the roads, requiring less repairs and reducing pollutants.
-Lots more tax revenue.

Doesn’t sound too bad to me. Use some of that 50 cents/gal to fund projects to boost alternative fuels.

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chimp_ninja 2008-03-20 04:26:03 PM
burndtdan: the problem with this idea is that a vice tax doesn’t work on something that is a necessary part of the lives of citizens. if you tax cigarettes, they can quit smoking. if you tax gas, they can’t suddenly stop going to work or magically put an alternative fuel infrastructure in place.

Gasoline taxes are tricky for exactly this reason– regressive impact. At the same time, you do want people to use buses, trains, or even carpools. You want people to walk a few blocks to get their groceries. You want an incentive to buy locally-produced foods and goods instead of shipping them in from China. You want people to demand higher fuel economy from car companies. You even want people to frickin’ check their tire pressure once in a while.

Gas is ~$8/gallon in most of Europe, where incomes are lower. People find ways. If you phase in a significant gasoline tax, it will send a message to towns and cities– plan and zone appropriately so that people don’t need to drive everywhere, and get off your ass and put together a working mass transit system appropriate for the size of your town. For some places, that might mean a fleet of buses burning biodiesel. For bigger cities, it might mean light rail and a subway/el.

As for the botched headline– this should be a conservative/libertarian principle. Burning gasoline creates externalities (carbon dioxide, other emissions) which presently aren’t accounted for. By including the cost of cleanup (including future R&D to make petroleum-derived fuel obsolete) in the price of fuel, you’re advocating personal responsibility– use as much gas as you like, but you’d better clean up your mess.

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dallashockey 2008-03-20 05:46:31 PM
good. tax it like cigarettes. like a sin tax. we all know what emissions are doing to the world. killing it and people. tax the hell out of it and maybe people wont be so selfish and they might learn to carpool or take public transit or even better yet. QUIT BUYING CARS THAT GET shiatTY GAS MILEAGE!

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kc987654 2008-03-20 06:07:28 PM
Catsaregreen: You know, some folks actually need a vehicle that gets crap gas mileage, everything from farmers to small-bidness owners to families with more than 1 kid. (I have 1 kid, drive a Scion. If and when kid No. 2 comes, I’m getting something bigger with less gas mileage.)

But, alas, most Farkers are against soccer moms in SUVs since most of them live in the basement and the only MILF’s they’ll ever get close to doing are their own moms.

/Bring back $1/gallon
/Eventually the commodity traders are gonna lose their arses on oil and unleaded gas futures too
/Sits back, enjoys popcorn

Yes, I feel sorry you won’t be able to drive a Suburban to haul around 2 kids and yourself…

/if you can’t afford the gas don’t breed

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defects 2008-03-20 05:47:42 PM
Cagey B: If people want this tax to do what it’s supposed to do, they should probably jack up that tax to about $2.00/gallon, and use any proceeds to invest in alternative fuel R&D AND subsidizing diesel fuel for freight transportation.

IF you really want to get people to drive less.

FAIL.

There is no reason to subsidize a by-product, let alone so a shipping company can profit from it. Diesel is a by-product of gasoline production. A better idea would be to ban 18 wheelers from traveling more than 100 miles. All freight should be shipped by rail. We’ve all seen the commercials about how many tons of freight can be moved on one gallon a diesel by rail road. This would mean less wear and tear on the road infrastructure. Sure some truckers would lose their job but with the increase rail activity they could easily find work there. It’s not like driving a truck requires an 8 year degree.

That last comment is my personal favorite for so many reasons. If there was ever an off-hand comment that perfectly illustrated the sheer contempt that most so-called “liberals” have for the working man, this one was it. Did your job just disappear due to some government policy? Oh well - it’s not like your job requires any real skill anyways. I hope you don’t mind being unemployed while you learn a new trade since we just legislated your old one away.

I’m not even going to get into the fact that most of Nevada isn’t within 100 miles of a rail line, and that, in the west, that’s not that uncommon. I’m also not going to go into too much detail about how, while rail is comparatively cheap for large volumes, it’s generally not as fast as a truck (more stops, that sort of thing), which can make transportation of perishables somewhat tricky. I’m especially not going to go off on the simple fact that the entire reason our supermarkets have so much variety in them in fresh produce, regardless of season or location, is because we no longer have to pretend it’s 1803 and only eat what’s grown locally and hasn’t been consumed by locusts. It would also be highly unpolitic of me to point out that, if we make living in small, dense cities highly desirable by making it a poor investment to live in the suburbs, only poor people are going to live in suburbs… which, of course, means that gas taxes will still be highly regressive.

If you ever need to know who supports the likes of Obama, look at the above posts and remember this:

- They think they know what you should drive better than you do.
- They are willing to dictate your ability to have children based on what you drive.
- They believe that higher taxes are good for people and a way of enforcing “personal responsibility”.
- They are willing to take your livelihood away if it helps them feel better about the environment.

In short… they know better than you, and how dare you suggest otherwise.

Folks, these people are the lifeblood of left-leaning politics today. These people have hooked on to the “progressive” idea of an intellectual elite dictating rules to the plebes hook, line, and sinker. Do you want to know how people like Stalin, Mao, and Hitler came to power? The answer is simple - because each one of them convinced people like those mentioned here that he agreed with them and he could make their little petty utopian fantasies into reality. The worst part, of course, is that each man succeeded, to the detriment of every single person that didn’t share those “dreams”.

These people aren’t for the poor. These people aren’t compassionate, responsible, or even intelligent. They’re cold, heartless, selfish little imps whose sole desire in life is to tell everyone else how wrong they are and show them how it’s supposed to be done.

I say they’re welcome to their Party. I say they’re welcome to their candidates. I say they’re welcome to their philosophy. I also say they’re welcome to the product of their beliefs when every single freedom-loving American in the country (not necessarily every single American, mind you) votes for anyone but them and they lose yet again.

No argument here.

Via Instapundit, a couple of articles from former Big-L Libertarians… and I couldn’t agree more. An excerpt from Stephen Green:

I stopped voting Libertarian for local candidates, leaving lots of blanks on my ballot. Next year, I’m not sure which party I’ll support for President, much less which candidate. From here, it looks as if the Republicans have become wrong and corrupt, the Democrats are stupid and corrupt, and the Libertarians have gone plain crazy.

I’d like to follow that up with a personal anecdote. For the first couple of years that I was in college, I was just going through the motions - I didn’t get involved in much, I barely tried in my coursework, and I just wasn’t focused. Consequently, when I stopped going to class in 2000, I didn’t think I was missing all that much. After two years of working retail (lousy hours, worse wages), though, I began to realize that the best I could hope for with my education and experience was just more of the same, and it scared the crap out of me. I wasn’t interested in topping out at $35k/year, working 60-70 hours a week, and dealing with hostile customers day in and day out. I had dreams, damn it. So, I went back to school. This time, though, I was going to do it right - I was going to get involved.

This was mid-2002, about a year after 9/11.

One thing that I always wanted to get involved in was politics, and I couldn’t stand either of the major parties. I didn’t like (and still don’t) the Democratic proclivity towards tax-and-spend. I didn’t like (and still don’t) the religious baggage of the Republican platform. I needed a third way.

Cue the Libertarian Party.

It was great, and the thought process went quite similar to Mr. Green’s:

Being a Libertarian was hard work, but I set right at it. I even went so far as to read the entire party platform. Pro-choice? Right on! Free trade? Hell, yes! Privatize all the schools? Start with mine! Abolish that Social Security Ponzi scheme? I was never going to see a dime, anyway! Bring all our troops home from Europe and Japan and South Korea and everywhere else and close half our embassies and cut defense spending at least in half and forget about enforcing freedom of the seas? Whoa, Nelly! “But,” I rationalized, “they don’t really mean all that stuff. A Libertarian president wouldn’t be that naive.”

I actually did one better - I thought I could change that from the inside. Yeah, their foreign policy was a little naive, but platforms can change. It’s a small party. How hard could it be? So, I joined the Campus Libertarians. I started attending meetings with the Washoe County Libertarians. I even started attending meetings with an anti-PATRIOT Act coalition - yeah, I wanted a strong foreign policy, and I wanted to stop domestic terrorists, but I sure as heck didn’t want to throw our rights down the toilet in the process.

It didn’t take long for me to start seeing some problems. The first issue was local - ReTRAC. Reno had a very serious problem that had been an issue since the 1930’s - there were trains running directly through downtown. Downtown is the heart of Reno’s tourist economy - having trains regularly run through an area of heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic is a big problem, to put it lightly. Having trains run next to hotels at night can be a problem if you plan on sleeping in those hotels. Due to some unfortunate zoning decisions, most of the casino-based tourist sector was crammed in an area within three miles of the train tracks, so moving the tourist sector wasn’t economical - even if it could be done, it would have gutted downtown, leaving it an urban wasteland. Many solutions had been considered over nearly 70 years. As early as the 1930’s, Reno considered moving the train tracks out of town - this was deemed too expensive and failed. Every other project considered since that time suffered the same fate. Meanwhile, the problem was only getting worse. More people were flooding the area. Reno itself was growing. Traffic was getting worse. Downtown Reno was becoming a disaster. Locals didn’t want to go there - even if there was anything for locals to do there, which there wasn’t, it was far too difficult and inconvenient to get around. Why go somewhere where, if you hit the area at the wrong time, you’d be stuck for up to fifteen minutes while a freight train passes? Meanwhile, many of the more marginal casinos downtown were closing, and they weren’t being replaced by anything, leaving blighted, abandoned buildings everywhere. Something had to be done, and if anything was ever going to be done with downtown, the first thing that had to get fixed was the trains. This is where ReTRAC came in.

ReTRAC is a giant concrete-lined trench dug in the same location as the original train lines. It drops the trains approximately 30 feet, keeping the noise out and the people away from the trains. Traffic would be able to move freely, pedestrians wouldn’t have to fear for their safety, and the trains wouldn’t have to blow cautionary whistles through town. There was one problem, though - it was going to be expensive.

At the time, it wasn’t particularly popular around town - if a majority of people in Reno wanted the trench, it would’ve been a very slim one. Meanwhile, the railroads offered some money for construction for a trench, but there were two catches - construction had to start soon, and it had to be a trench. Moving the trains wasn’t going to fix the problem; with the way Reno was (and still is) growing, there weren’t many places for the trains to get moved to, and any place they moved them would start experiencing the same problems in a few years anyways. Some people wanted either some underpasses or some overpasses, which would have solved the traffic problem but would’ve been an aesthetic nightmare and would have done little for the noise.

From where I was sitting, the trench looked like an expensive but necessary solution. I asked the local Libertarians what they thought. They didn’t like it, which was not surprising. I understood why. It was going to be expensive and much of it was going to be taxpayer funded. So, I asked them what they thought the solution to the problem was. Should they move the tracks? No way - that would almost certainly require eminent domain. Should they build bridges or overpasses? No way - that would require taxpayer money. Ultimately, no matter what solution should be used, it was a “downtown problem, and downtown should pay for it”.

Right off the bat, I saw some pretty serious problems with this logic. First off, it wasn’t just downtown Reno or customers of business down there that would benefit from it - anybody that went through downtown would be better for it. This included employees of downtown casinos, university students, anybody needing to use either of the nearby hospitals, or anybody using the city bus system. Secondly, a quick look around downtown made it quite clear that there was no way enough money could come from there to pay for anything - half of the businesses didn’t even have serviceable paint jobs, and the other half were empty. Worse yet, that wasn’t going to change unless something could be done to improve access to the area, which would be impossible with freight trains blocking traffic throughout the day. So, I became the only Libertarian in Washoe County to think the train trench was a good idea.

This alone didn’t bother me. I understood that the train trench was against Libertarian philosophy and dogma - as far as I was concerned, it was the exception that proved the rule. If City Council didn’t restrict zoning back in the 1950’s, there wouldn’t be a bunch of casinos by the tracks anyways - from where I was sitting, the city made the mess through excessive government interference, so it was going to take some action to get it cleaned up. Sometimes, cleaning something up requires more than just not making a mess - if you have dishes scattered through your house, it’s not sufficient to decide to not scatter any additional dishes. You’re going to have to pick them up and carry them to the sink. From where I was sitting, the train trench was in that vein.

Then came Iraq.

Most of the local Libertarians I was talking to weren’t big fans of our involvement in Afghanistan, arguing that, if we just left the world alone, the world would leave us alone. I’d regularly point out that the United States had tried that in the past, and that such an approach had already led to two World Wars that we stumbled into half-prepared and almost too late to make a difference. We’d smile and nod at each other as each side understood where the other side was coming from, but not really agreeing with each other.

Then, Bush invaded Iraq.

I figured we made the mess in Iraq, so the least we can do is clean it up. If Iraq had WMDs, it was probably because we sold them to Iraq so they could use them against Iran. Besides, we were already there anyways, with no-fly zones and sanctions that, in conjunction with some epically corrupt leadership, was absolutely crushing the people there. So, let’s put a stop to it - invade Iraq, kick the old leaders out, and see if we can’t get something more positive going there.

The Libertarian Party, locally and nationally, felt very different.

Before we even fired a shot, many of the local Libertarians were preparing anti-war protests around town and declaring that “it’s all about the oil”. They started screaming that, if they simply spoke up more before the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush wouldn’t have been “emboldened” enough to invade Iraq in the first place. Meanwhile, they argued, what was our military doing overseas in the first place?

That’s when they lost me, and, by the looks of things, countless others who would love to support the Libertarian Party if they weren’t completely insane regarding foreign policy. I could understand them not wanting to invade Iraq and not supporting the invasion once it happened - considering how things were there up until very recently, it would have been a rational decision. But, when they claimed that the reason 9/11 happened was because we wouldn’t leave the world alone… I didn’t buy that, and still don’t. Heck, when I play FreeCiv, I try to keep to myself and focus on technology and industry, yet my neighbors will demand favors from me and attack me without provocation - if that dynamic is obvious enough to put it in a computer game, how could it not be obvious to an entire political party?

So, it is with great sadness that I also list myself as one of the disenfranchised libertarians. Some day, I hope an organization will exist that speaks for myself and others like myself, representing our common interests so people will realize that, yes, they do need to listen to us. Maybe I’ll be the one that creates it. Until then, though, I’ll be another individual voice screaming into the cacophony.

For the love of…

Okay, I’m definitely against state-sponsored religion. However, when someone purchases something from the state and they want it customized, why would they not be allowed to put “God” on it?

Please note that the snarky libertarian in me is wondering what government is doing selling anything anyways. This is why government should really do as little as possible, folks - anything that government does is guaranteed to be political. That’s the nature of the beast.

A not entirely disagreeable article

Via Instapundit, I found this article explaining why Libertarians are happy. All in all, I don’t disagree with much of it, though there are a few points I’d like to address.

First, the reason Ron Paul’s numbers are so low is because he’s nuts. There. I said it. Unfortunately, he’s one of the “programmatically antiwar”, as the article puts it, and it shows. It’s one thing to have a rational, ethical dislike of the Iraq war. It’s quite another when you make it clear that you never see a reason to use force, a position which most of America doesn’t agree with. It has nothing to do with him being a Libertarian. It has everything to do with the moonbat Libertarian foreign policy platform that pretends everything from 1915 on never happened.

Second, I know that hindsight is 20/20, and I wasn’t around to see the ’60s (thank goodness). However, I took exception to this:

The civil-rights movement is an instructive case. Mr. Lindsey includes it in his list of libertarian victories, but it is a perfect example of the inability of libertarians to find a political and moral framework suitable to the big questions of American public life. If people ought to be able to do what they want, then certainly hating blacks–either by oneself or in the company of like-minded souls–is nobody else’s business, including the federal government’s. To the extent that libertarians are remembered at all for their role in the civil-rights era, it is not for marching on Selma but rather for their enthusiastic support of states’ rights and the freedom of white racists to associate with one another.

The solution to this problem is easily revealed in an earlier paragraph:

…the libertarian vision of personal morality–described by Mr. Doherty as “People ought to be free to do whatever the hell they want, mostly, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else…”

Put another way, as far as Libertarians are concerned, yes, you’re free to hate blacks, but you’re not morally allowed to use that hatred to hurt them or restrict their ability to do the same (and vice-versa). Since many states at the time had laws that hurt blacks, federal intervention was necessary to rectify this. In short:

Individual rights > State rights > Federal rights

That said, federal rights can be used to override state rights on occasions when state rights are infringing on individual rights. That’s why we have the constitution we have - it enumerates what powers are available to the federal government, explicitly restricts them to those powers, and then commands it to defend the liberties of the people covered by it.

Other than that - good article.