9 Comments

Libertarianism is a good bias, but a terrible ideology. Civil society requires laws, judgment and punishment. Doing away with judgment and punishment will lead to societal decline. Doing away with laws in order to avoid having to judge is a fool's plan. It is moral and intellectual laziness.

The epitome of Modern politics is to claim credit for giving a minority of society a benefit while dismissing concerns of the societal costs as bigotry / racism. But there is always a cost! Wokeism is the taking of minority rights to the extreme - that anything that benefits even just one person is worth doing no matter the cost to the larger population.

What are the costs of extreme individual accommodation? Read the Nellie Bowles article. It is a story of massive failure. The politicians are at fault but the citizens deserve blame - they elected the politicians who junked principles of civil society. Good for the citizens of San Francisco for trying to correct their mistake. I wish the citizens of Baltimore would show similar wisdom.

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Doing away with laws, judgment, and punishment is not libertarian, it is anarchism.

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Nellie, wife of Bari Weiss, writes (so well):

"San Franciscans are now saying:

We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned."

Seems like preparation for a huge electoral wipeout of Democrats coming in Nov. Which I hope for, so want to hear more about why it might not happen.

When voters stop voting Democrat, we'll see in the vote count that they're learning.

Too bad she didn't find any folk also saying: "wanting Voter ID laws, like virtually all other global democracies, to avoid real and imagined voter fraud, is not voter suppression."

She didn't mention Biden's many many actual failures (gas prices, Afghanistan, Covid lockdown, huge inflation), but was able to bad mouth Trump in an offhand way:

"Trump’s shadow seemed to loom over even the smallest local office. "

Trump was demonized so much by so many Dems, that anybody anti-Trump was considered good. I note that Arnold, too, still demonizes Trump more than honestly criticizing Biden's policies & results in comparison.

Trump's "mean tweets" are gone - also many of his policies that were producing GREAT results.

Trump was doing more deregulation than anybody since Reagan; not mentioned, possibly not thought of, by Arnold.

I was NeverHillary in 2016; then became against the anti-Trump criticism not based on results. That's not "moral ire", it's more an attempt at intellectual honesty. Which so many anti-Trump intellectuals seem to avoid actually noting.

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‘… progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic…’

But not when imposed en masse on healthy people and children, when it is done with great gusto and brutality.

Funny old World.

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June 18, 2022
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Libertarianism as a 'deal' is not bad. I can agree to tolerate behavior I would prefer to be banned and allow you the leeway to ruin your own life, in exchange for the right to keep you at a distance and for a credible promise that no one is going to demand I be my brother's keeper and bail you out when things go South.

Unilateral license, on the other hand, freedom for thee but disorder and involuntary socialism to subsidize and bail you out for me, is not libertarianism at all, and one doesn't have to go to 'True Scotsman' lengths of ideological definition for this to be true.

In my view, these 'libertarian victories' are not really libertarian at all. Some things look freer on one side of the coin, but the other side combining it with statist progressivism makes it a terrible mix.

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This is correct, but maybe from the Californian POV not helpful.

Let's model California as a place where liberatrians (usually Dem voting ones) are a second power such that the left has to actually negotiate with that. The predictable compramise is "we let people do stuff, and make taxpayer pay for the consequences".

If actual conservatives had been the secondary power, then there would be some other kind of compromise. That might have had bad effects too, but they'd be different ones.

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Globalization - the great sucking sound of outsourcing manufacturing jobs, is also a Libertarian "success", as well as Republican and, under Clinton, a Democratic success.

But Reps & Dems both prefer to blame Libertarians.

(Clinton elected in '92 because H. Ross Perot was against globalization and his working class conservative voters didn't vote for Bush 41. A bit similar to Nixon being elected in '68 due to racist ex-Democrat Wallace running and reducing the Dem vote.

Third Party "success" means the big party they're most like loses to the other big party.

That's political reality in America. Third Party idealism, to change the Overton Window, remains a thing.)

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I have seen libertarians take credit for influencing politics even without getting elected by pressuring the major parties to shift in a more libertarian direction. If they want to take credit they should probably accept some of the blame too.

But I wouldn't put all the blame on them either: arguably many of the problems with open borders or free trade come from our heavy welfare and regulations. Libertarians also opposed those things, but with less success. I think many now would say that even if they support free trade and open borders in principle, there would need to be a substantial reduction in the size of the State before such policies would be practical.

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June 20, 2022
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In 1974, Perot offered a bet for the outcome of the Navy-Air Force football game. All of us losers at the US Naval Academy had to get an H. Ross Perot haircut - it was kinda fun and bonding-conducive, tho I've almost never had such a short haircut since.

(The winners were, hmm, let's DDG it:

"In 1974 Perot made a bet with 40 Air Force Academy cadets on the football game with Navy, Perot's alma mater. The bet: If Navy won, the cadets would cut their hair into Perot-style crewcuts; if the Air Force won, Perot would finance the cadets and a date to a vacation spot of their choice for a weekend. Navy, and Perot, lost.")

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/12/02/Personality-SpotlightNEWLNH-Ross-Perot-Billionaire-philanthropist/7606358333080/

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