The New Libertarians
via gulcher vinay. Professor Caskey is an Objectivist scholar looking at the changes in Libertarian thought over the years. What does it mean to be a Libertarian anymore?
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I have mostly lost hope for a libertarian candidate for president next time. I believe the economy is going very well and people will wrongly credit President Obama (who I generally support) for it. They will elect a similar Democrat. Then we will have a recession, since expansions don't last forever. Usually when an incumbent is running, the other party doesn't run a strong candidate, e.g. Mondale, Bill Clinton (possibly an exception to this rule), Dole, Kerry, Romney. When that happens, maybe a libertarian Republican or Libertarian can run. I would like it to be a Libertarian, someone in a position to talk about things the Rs and Ds don't like to talk about b/c it invites criticism of their own party. Even if they didn't win, it would be amazing to have a serious discussion of moving in a libertarian direction.
The work and debt issues are *structural* problems that need to be addressed. The part of the economic *cycle* we're on is expansion. This doesn't fix the structural issues at all. We should be using this expansion to fix the structural issues right now.
Hidden Inflation:
The inflation issue simply isn't true. Every time someone tries to explain the hidden inflation thing, it always ends up in absurd claims. Usually it ends up being a complex way of saying *everything* on earth is getting less valuable b/c earth is going to worms or just the stuff that the listener sells is decreasing in real value, while the stuff he wants to buy is not. It sounds like a complex expression of psychological depression. You have not offered these arguments; it's just what I hear from people who claim hidden inflation. Maybe it's a moot point because I think stable predictable inflation, even if it approaches 10%, is no problem at all. It costs nothing for me to change my hourly rate in Quickbooks and on my letter of engagement.
Effects of living in a capital:
It is certainly true that Madison benefits from being the capital. We like to think we have great policies attracting top notch entrepreneurs, companies, and employees. We benefit from both.
I have been involved with many deals that involve companies outside the state or the US buying goods and services from Madison companies not affiliated with the gov't/UW using employees not affiliated with the gov't/UW. I have been involved with several companies that employ workers to hand assemble products and subassemblies and ship them to non-gov't customers in China, Brazil, and India.
The narrative that most everything good going on is somehow related to corruption is just false. Countless people every day think of new ways to solve problems, and you'll hardly hear of them unless you're a customer, vendor, competitor, or see them at a trade show / professional org. This is what drives the economy. People who rightly want to make the economy freer and more open will tell you how god-awful things are because saying things are pretty good and could get better doesn't sell well.
93M unemployed?
The 93M figure rings false to me, but I really have no knowledge whatsoever about it. The unemployment rate in electronics is probably 0% or very close to it. I may live in a bubble of people who are going to shows, finding new customers, making money for investors. I see a lot of great work going on with no regard for or involvement with the gov't.
"The technology sector has come under scrutiny in recent weeks. A series of high profile IPOs coming to market at punchy valuations raised questions over a second technology bubble. Investors grew nervous, sold out of many high profile names, leaving some stocks 30% off their highs. Investors now need to examine whether this is the start of a broader sell off for technology, or whether the rout merely corrected some imbalances.
With hindsight, a sell-off in certain high profile companies had started to look inevitable. Twitter's (TWTR) initial public offering saw shares over 90% higher at one point during its first day of trading. This was in spite of some question marks over how it was going to monetise its vast user base. Even home-grown group AO.com (AO.) saw shares rise 44% on their first day's trading in February of this year."
My wild guess is earnings will rise and stocks will rise faster, resulting in a 50% real increase in money invested in large cap stocks (by this I mean appreciation + dividends - inflation according to GDP deflator). Then there will a spike in rates and inflation, the usual histrionics from people too young to remember inflation, and a couple years of recession. My market guesses have never been reliable at all. I'm certainly not confident enough to write puts or buy calls now, even thought I'm in an extremely bullish mode right now.
The number of employed software developers, the largest IT occupation segment, increased by only 1.75%, to 1.1 million, a gain of 19,000. The unemployment rate for developers last year was 2.7%, which is still elevated. Software IT service jobs increased by 35K in 2013-but that is EXACTLY the number of jobs for H1-B categories (referring to tech visas given out to work in the US) (Computerworld, 1/2014)
2.The bureau noted that the civilian labor force dropped by 806,000 last month, following an increase of 503,000 in March.
The amount (not seasonally adjusted) of Americans not in the labor force in April rose to 92,594,000, almost 1 million more than the previous month. (CBS News 2 days ago)
3.First-time financing (companies receiving venture capital for the first time) dollars decreased 25 percent to $1.2 billion in Q1, while the number of companies fell 24 percent from the prior quarter to 271. First-time financings accounted for 13 percent of all dollars in Q1, which is the lowest percentage total in the history of the survey. Companies receiving VC funding for the first time in Q1 accounted for 28 percent of all deals, which is the lowest percentage total since Q3 2009. (Moneytree Report 4/2014)
4. Hopefully straightlinelogic will see this post and weigh in on inflation numbers, it is his expertise.
5. Producers will produce. The question is, what could they produce without the huge regulatory and policy burdens and back door crony deals shifting money away from startups into old line mature industries. After all, all net new jobs 95% come from startups, mostly high tech startups. I am very happy for your successful business and really glad you aren't tucked under the govt wing of Madison. But so many in your town are, which makes your perspective antidotal
In all seriousness, if you know of some who are willing to move to Madison, I can have them in a job earning six figures, depending on experience, instantly. It would actually be a great help to me to have some EE resumes of people in Madison or willing to relocate here. By EE's I mean embedded SW, hardware layout/debug, C++/C#. Send all these EEs struggling in the bad economy to me.
Median household incomes have decline five years in a row http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonk...
In addition median household income is less than in 1989 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonk...
To suggest the US in an expansion is beyond absurd.
You're calling it counterfeit b/c you think monetary policy is too loose?
If there were a fixed number of goods and services in the world and we weren't experiencing deleveraging, then a 4% increase in the money supply would equal roughly a 4% decrease in the value of money. The number of goods and services isn't fixed, though, so this is all moot. I won't needless repeat the Keynesian ideas of putting unused productive capacity to use. I similarly know the Austrian arguments that say that capacity is best put to the use people making things people actually want by leaving the money supply alone, even if some capacity appears needlessly unused. I'm a monetary pragmatist, not an ideologue.
You cite some historic income data that show median income is falling, even as we produce more. This is a huge problem. I think America had a golden age of income parity after WWII, and we've been sliding into what the levels of income disparity the rest of the world has ever since. This is why we see calls for protectionism and calls to blame the wealthy. Neither one of those will work; I don't have the solution.
All of this has nothing whatsoever to do with the current expansion. It almost seems like you think the word "expansion" means "no structural problems". In that case we haven't seen "expansion" in my lifetime. I just mean real GDP (indexed using the GDP Deflator, regardless of the merits of that index) growing for the past three quarters.
There has never been an expansion that leaves the average family behind.
Socialism does not produce wealth and if you are too dense to see that the US has been heading toward a more socialist system, you are blind.
Regarding an expansion never leaving the ave family behind, you certainly are using a different definition of expansion.
Clearly socialism does not produce wealth.
Call me dense, but I don't see the trend toward socialism. This is just my anecdotal perception, not based on facts. All my life I've heard ideologues yelling that some ideology was destroying the world, and it hasn't happened. I'm making a logical fallacy by suggesting b/c it hasn't happened yet it won't happen in the future. I'm just saying I don't personally run into evidence of an ideological shift of any kind in my life.
Your appalling lack of knowledge of history is amazing. I am sure someone said the same thing when Hitler was coming to power. Not to mention the Soviet Union, Moa, Pol Pot, etc. The ideology of socialism is responsible for over 100 million deaths in the last century. The ideology of environmentalism is responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people in the last century, but you bury you head in the sand.
If you don't see an ideological shift, then you are not looking, let's start with the NSA, the millions of new regulations, the idea that the president can decide to cut out bond holders, the idea that the EPA can fine people without taking them to court and arguing in court they should not be held to the 4th and 5th amendment because this would slow them down. What about arbitrary ID checks, sobriety checks, inside the border checks. You position is so absurd as to be laughable.
You're saying you have a right to generate fake USDs? You're saying the Fed Reserve can't tinker with the money supply? That's it's job. Maybe we shouldn't have quazi-gov't institution controlling monetary policy, but we do.
I'll ignore the Godwin's Law related stuff.
Regarding surveillance and executive overreach, I hope it's not an ideological shift. I hope there's a backlash. I would like to see happen during this expansion, but if not I have hopes of reform-minded presidential candidate running with the unusual position that if elected they will do less, promote the idea that the exec branch is not allowed to as much.
Hope is not facts - those are clear shifts in moving the US to a totalitarian state and the reaction has been underwhelming. Short of armed force the government has made it clear it doesn't give a damn about the 4th and 5th amendments.
The man who found the $5 note he misplaced 30 years ago wants to know, though, exactly how much value has it lost and where the heck did that value go!? It's hard to quantify how much value was lost. $5 would buy him a VHS movie rental, and now he can rent an average movie for $5 without leaving his home. So maybe no value was lost. If he looks at how long a phone call to the UK the $5 will buy, he might think his $5 bill got way more valuable. That's bogus, though, because a small bag of groceries that he could have bought with that that $5 now costs $10. So where did that value go then? The value was never in the medium of exchange in the first place. Value is in human beings serving one another in mutually agreed trades.
"Brink Lindsey, then Vice President for Research at the Cato Institute, called on libertarians to abandon the doctrine that a good government is one that protects the rights of its citizens, abandon the non-aggression principle, and instead adopt the moral standard of social justice advanced by Rawls. By Lindsey’s reasoning, free markets are not moral because they protect individuals’ rights to keep the fruits of their own labors and to freely contract with other individuals doing the same but are moral because they benefit the poor. Period."
Well, that sucks.
Much like Plato's forms, it's an interesting thought exercise.
However, try to apply it and you're hurtling toward utopia.
In the exercise, one imagines that one has no knowledge of the qualities or particulars of one's existence.
From there one could supposedly best choose what is just: because one would be driven by the fear of assigning oneself the short end of the stick once knowledge of existence returned.
To me, this is little more than "do unto others..." dressed up as serious academics.
The sticking point for me always was, as I'm sure it is for any Objectivist who thinks about the problem - if I have no knowledge of the particulars of my existence, then how do I know what to value so that I might make a choice?
In order to value justice, there must be a self to perform the evaluation.
And that self, unless the evaluation is to be no more than whim, must understand why it is valuing one thing over another.
But, this is not allowed in Rawls' "Initial Position".
The evaluation must be, in an Objectivist sense, self-less.
I believe that it is this self-lessness which make Rawls' philosophy so attractive to the Libertarian Left.
I'll read the full article later, but if the gist is that Cato has been overtaken by the Left Libertarians, then write them off.
They are co-opted.
They are gone.
Now we must discern between the divisions of Libertarians even more so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAWr98im...
I think that we can be righteous and ineffectual or we can compromise and make incremental gains. Perhaps we can change the minds of people who have only heard of 'social justice' and never had anyone say to them 'you have value for your own sake - but you must stand up and claim it'...but we have to be visible to these people first. The path to that is compromise like hell and win a bunch o'elections.
Sigh.
Jan
perhaps we've had too many people compromising because like a Cruz or Paul standing for principles makes a clear difference. Romney did not win by getting closer to democrats. That said, certainly there will be specific political issues where compromise needs to happen. NOT losing rights, however
k
A.R. was right when she didn't want any association with Libertarianism. Instead of evolving into a political entity that an Objectivist could vote with, it is instead, devolving into the very thing it was created to overthrow. Too bad.
If Objectivists were the only advocates of freedom in the political arena, the liberty movement would be much smaller and much less influential.