We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Just another stone in the bucket:
The Republican promise of smaller, less-intrusive government is getting harder and harder to believe. Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to pursue a political strategy based on big spending.
It’s not always easy to see how radically Bush has transformed the GOP — from Reagan’s admonition that “government is the problem” to Dubya’s own assertion that “when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” But it’s a real transformation — and an expensive one.
I have never been a big fan of GW Bush’s domestic policies, although the primary complaint from the loyal oppo has generally been along the lines that he isn’t a big enough spender/regulator. Still, the refrain that “But Kerry would have been worse” is starting to wear a little thin.
Between the Rovian big spenders and the prudish blue-noses pushing their own nanny state, the Republican Party’s status as a better home for libertarians than the Democrats is getting more and more dubious. Truly, libertarians are being cast into the wilderness, with their only company a smattering of gibbering anchorite “true believers” and associated hucksters. Why, its getting almost as bad in the US as it seems to be in Britain!
In what is almost certain to become a long-running series devoted to the topic, let us now note one of the ways in which the Republicans are fools:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, like his immediate predecessor, John Ashcroft, has pledged to make obscenity prosecutions a priority. The department is expected to announce soon the creation of a special unit within its criminal division to focus on adult obscenity cases.
Surely no additional comment is needed, but let us note that there are apparently federal laws against obscenity in spite of a rather clear and unqualified statement in the Constitution of the United State to the effect that “Congress shall make no law… , ” so let us pause a moment to lob a brickbat or two at the apparently illiterate Justices of the Supreme Court who have upheld such laws.
I frankly haven’t been paying much attention to President Bush’s Social Security reform, ehrm, thingie (hard to call it a proposal because I don’t think he’s really proposed anything concrete), but I gather that the spineless wimps in Congress are coalescing like a school of jellyfish around a “bipartisan” proposal to raise the hell out of taxes and do absolutely nothing to create private ownership. Sounds like I, personally, can look forward to paying several thousand dollars more per year to support Social Security.
Business as usual in Washington. Just think how much worse it would be if John Kerry had won! (Sadly, I’m not sure if I mean that ironically or not.)
In the relentless, frantic spinning that passes for political discourse among our anointed masters, though, the frothing anti-Bushie Paul Krugman sets a new high. Krugman frantically lets us know that under Bush’s latest Social Security thingie “the average worker–average pay now is $37,000–retiring in 2075 would face a cut equal to 10 percent of pre-retirement income.”
That’s right, folks – we should swat down whatever the evil Chimpler McBushiburton proposed because it might cause people who aren’t even born yet to take a 10% reduction in income when they quit working for their money.
How little coverage there is of this scandal, no?
When was the last time a felony fraud investigation into the campaign of a sitting Senator and presumptive Presidential nominee was almost totally ignored by the press?
This looks pretty open and shut to me, at least as far the fraud part goes. The only real question is whether the candidate knew, and that puts the candidate in the position they so frequently find themselves in – they either knew what was going on in their campaign, in which case they are guilty and unfit for office, or they didn’t know what was going on in their campaign, in which case they are incompetent and unfit for office.
One of my occasional forays in the United States has washed me up on the shores of historic Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod. Looking back over the Atlantic to the West Coast of Ireland has reminded me of how the weather can be just as bad over here as it is at home.
Anti-Americanism remains as popular at home as it is misunderstood here. What was originally considered a prejudice has now transformed into an orthodoxy, where the demonisation of the United States, its people, culture and contributions has acquired the power of an aesthetic reaction. The reaction is not an ideology, although the attacks are structured as such within various contexts, especially as formed by the Left or the Green movement who merge the USA with a wider system of empire, capitalism or oppression. Ideologies tend to wither if they drift too far from reality. Anti-Americanism has acquired the power of an aesthetic, a style derived from its audiences and reproduced from T-shirts of Che Guevara to a new orthodoxy amongst the educated elites. Like left-wing satire of the nineteen-eighties, it has ceased to be funny and its proponents look down on those who disagree with them.
Politics and style are a dangerous combination. Supporting Bush is not the same as accepting America on its terms, good and bad, but orthodox behaviour encourages polarisation in argument. When confronted with an anti-American style that is no longer based upon argument and is winning the culture war, you provide the ‘fishbone statement’ that will make these people choke. To stand up for the Stars and Stripes can be considered a form of private dissent, allowing you to needle those whose views you hate.
One can, I suppose, trace the end of the ideal of limited government in the United States from any number of events. I have heard the Civil War, Roosevelt’s court-packing schemes and the emasculation of Supreme Court jurisprudence on enumerated powers, even (half-jokingly) the extension of the franchise to women.
If these are all candidates for the beginning of the the end of limited government, I wonder if we aren’t witnessing the end of the end. Constitutional structure, jurisprudence, and the like were never more than temporary and imperfect restraints on the state, in the absence of real political backing and deep cultural roots for the ideal of limited government. There is precious little sign of either in the current landscape.
At this point, one looks around in despair for any sign that limited government has any political viability at all. The Republicans, whose commitment to limited government has been steadily waning for decades, appear to have abandoned it entirely now that they hold the reins of government.
While some libertarian types may have been upset with President Reagan’s deficits, he was at least singing from their hymn book: Government is the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush on the other hand has never even gone to the trouble of aping a small-government posture. Instead, Bush has adopted one of Reagan’s other famous lines, sans irony: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
This represents a fundamental shift in the direction of the Republican Party and a threat to its traditional alliances. The shift is self-evident. Instead of being the party that tries to rein in entitlement spending, the Republican Party is now the party of the $1.2 trillion Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Instead of being the party that is opposed to even having a federal Department of Education, the Republican Party is now the party of extensive intrusion into local schoolhouses by Washington, D.C. And instead of being the party of the rule of law and state’s rights, the Republican Party is now the party of Congressional intervention into the thoroughly adjudicated medical decisions of an individual family.
It scarcely need be said that the Democratic Party provides no hope whatsoever for limited government, outside of a few isolated issues. Of the Libertatian Party, well, the less said the better. Many small-l libertarians, pragmatic and incremental reformers such as myself, looked to the Republicans as the least worst alternative, with some hope that their authoritarian and statist instincts could be tempered by the political calculation that they couldn’t do without us.
It is apparent, however, that a new political calculation is afoot, one that relies not at all on believers in limited government, and thus consigns them to utter political irrelevance.
What if Karl Rove’s idea for a permanent majority actually worked? The GOP could convince soccer moms that it’s not so hard-hearted by implementing national health care piece by piece. It could pick up the votes of blue-collar union members by appealing to them on “values” issues that the Democrats can’t talk about without choking on their own bile. And the GOP could even pick up votes from socially conservative black and Hispanic voters who are adamantly opposed to gay marriage.
The electoral logic of Big Government Conservatism, in fact, is virtually inescapable.
At this point, I see no hope for limited government in the near or medium term. I don’t see any political home for us, anywhere that we can exert any meaningful influence. We can look forward only to the expansion of the state, until the entire political system is rendered chaotically fluid by some shock or upheaval. The most likely scenario I see for realignment and revival of limited government ideals would be the collapse of the Democratic Party, which would at least create an opening to reinvent the current, sterile Rep/Dem, Conservative/Liberal dichotomy as a new opposition between liberty and the total state.
Now that the animated corpse of Terri Schiavo has finally been allowed to die, some of the fault lines of American conservatism have been brought into sharp focus. The behaviour of quite a few on the left has not been very edifying either but certainly it is amongst the Republicans that the most remarkable behaviour has occured.
The term ‘pro-life’ may be a reasonable description for those who oppose killing late term foetuses but the broad political church of pro-lifers (with whom I actually share many positions) includes a section of conservatism which is so obsessed with the physical trappings of life that they have stretched the definition of human existance to the breaking point.
The origins of this conservative faction are not hard to see. It came about in opposition to those on the socialist left who treat abortion as not so much something to be tolerated but rather a sacred sacrament which they venerate with cult-like obsessiveness and even demand it should be supported by the tax money of people who abominate the practice. In resistance to this we now see some conservatives developing an equally extreme cult to whom being ‘pro-life’ means treating the intentional death of a fertilised egg as tantamount to murder and demanding the removal of the customary fiduciary role of a spouse in decisions such as the Terri Schiavo case when the spouse does not follow the ‘pro-life’ party line. Moreover these people describe courts which does not intervene in such a civil matter as ‘activist judges’ who should be opposed with force by the executive if they will not buckle under and act like a, well, activist judge. → Continue reading: The American Zombie Cult
Just to stir the pot in the peanut gallery:
Does anyone else find the use of the term “undocumented” to describe people who are in the US illegally to be more than a little disingenuous, misleading, and politically correct?
On The Voice of Reason (slogan: “A penny saved is a government oversight”), there is a pretty clear headed little essay of what I think is most the reasonable position on this absurdly emotive case.
Bill Quick puts up 11 excellent reasons for limited-government types to be pissed off at the current administration. I found little to quibble with.
Generally, I have found George W. Bush to be good, very good, on foreign affairs, and mediocre to bad on domestic issues.
Some readers may have heard of the Institute for Justice, a U.S. organisation which fights the legal battles of property owners resisting the odious power of what is called eminent domain. Eminent domain powers, which were originally designed to give governments the ability to seize private property to build facilities for so-called “public use” like an airforce runway, prison or road, have also been used by said governments to build things like condos purely in order to boost tax revenues. It goes without saying that such a power is a powerful force of corruption, since a large property developer who wants to build a supermarket or whatever can get his political chums to use ED to kick small businessmen and homeowners out of their property. The politicians get lots of campaign contributions. The whole business stinks, and flagrantly abuses property rights. In any event, if the re-development of an area really made financial sense, that would be reflected in the increased prices of the houses and shops targeted for demolition, in which case the issue can be left to the market.
The Institute for Justice is, quite possibly, the most important libertarian organisation now in existence. I can also recommend the Free Space blog for regular updates on this issue and I also love the book, Defending the Undefendable, by Walter Block, on the same subject.
I often do not see eye to eye with James Taranto but he does point out some good stories in his “Best of the Web” email newsletter. He highlighted this Drudge Report today. Drudge reports Michelle Zipp, editor of Playgirl magazine, was fired for being a Republican. It contains an e-mail from Ms. Zipp:
After your coverage of my article about coming out and voting Republican, I did receive many letters of support from fellow Republican voters, but it was not without repercussions. Criticism from the liberal left ensued. A few days after the onslaught of liberal backlash, I was released from my duties at Playgirl magazine.
After underlings expressed their disinterest of working for an outed Republican editor, I have a strong suspicion that my position was no longer valued by Playgirl executives. I also received a phone call from a leading official from Playgirl magazine, in which he stated with a laugh, “I wouldn’t have hired you if I knew you were a Republican.”
I just wanted to let you know of the fear the liberal left has about a woman with power possessing Republican views.
I would go further. The currently constituted Democratic Party is based on victimology. ‘Minorities’ must be victims. Victims must be helped. The only way to help victims is through regulation, law and massive Federal spending. If a member of a Democratically important minority breaks ranks, they are endangering the core beliefs which bind the party together. Thus that individual must be silenced or put in their proper place as a victim.
Minorities contain intelligent, hardworking and resourceful people. You can not keep them ‘down on the farm’. You can not pretend to speak for all of ‘them’ because they are not really a ‘them’. As any libertarian will tell you, there is no such thing as a Class. There are only individuals with temporarily aligned self-interests.
This is a problem for the Democrats. As soon as the underlying self-interests of their pet victim classes were met, those classes began to dissolve. The Democrats do not have an acceptance of this, let alone a plan to understand and deal with new alignments. All they can do is individually lash out against ‘class’ defectors. It solves nothing, it wins them no friends… but perhaps it makes them feel better.
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