I think Angle has the worst political instincts I've ever seen.

Does anyone really like her, as opposed to being broadly in favor of things she's presumed to be broadly in favor of (like a constitutionally limited government, say)? Or just for being not-Harry-Reid?

I mean, even if you thought it was a good idea to praise economic liberalization by pointing out that it works well for everyone, even dictators...couldn't you find a better way of saying it?

Sorry for ignoring the substance of your post, Eric.

I collectively want to be left alone.

Could some one parse that for me? Although since I claim mild schizophrenia it could make sense.

"They 'centre' society. However, for some libertarians, that is exactly what makes them right."

So...the fact that most people walk around using their legs instead of say, dragging themselves along by their tongues, is evidence that we've been coerced into uniformity?

Or do most people tend to use what actually works well?

That's ridiculous. Everyone knows Castro is the only dictator with good ideas.

That's exactly right Dave.

The biggest problem was praising Pinochet.

He is a horrible dictator because he saw a commie takeover of his country coming so he took it over first, killed as many commies as he could find and then stepped down and left a functioning democracy.

And for that he can never be forgiven.

Does anyone really like her, as opposed to being broadly in favor of things she's presumed to be broadly in favor of (like a constitutionally limited government, say)? Or just for being not-Harry-Reid?

Do you think that any Harry Reid supporters really like him personally, as opposed to being broadly in favor of the things he's presumed to be broadly in favor of?

I'll say this much for the left, they understand the importance of electing people to office who'll vote the right way. The right seems to regard that sort of thing as being less important than personality.

Veeshir, FWIW, I made a T-shirt which pisses off the left more than it does the right.

It got me in trouble with the commie copycat cops too!

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/10/graves_and_grav.html

Things eventually got way out of hand, and I nearly lost Che's mind.

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/10/post_499.html

I'm not saying I like Pinochet, he was definitely a murderous dictator.

But for leftists he's a bad dictator, while Castro and Che are good murderous dictators.

That always makes me laugh.
So long as you say the right things, you too can be a good murderous dictator!

There is no point in further discussion of these issues: they are examples of irreconcilable value conflicts.

Which is why I predict an eventual Civil War II in this country. Just as slavery then was an irreconcilable value conflict, so is the new slavery, and it will not end peacefully.

I'm not saying I like Pinochet, he was definitely a murderous dictator.

But for leftists he's a bad dictator, while Castro and Che are good murderous dictators.

That always makes me laugh.
So long as you say the right things, you too can be a good murderous dictator!

Nice post. I still prefer the term "classical liberal" to small - l libertarian. It really pisses of lefties, which is a great bonus.

So glad you survived your encounter with the insane collectivist with your intellect in tact. That was funny.

And let's not forget, to raise another example, that other Friedman - Thomas - and his insipid praise for the Chinese system.

Anyway, yes, sometimes dictators do have good ideas. It's how they implement them - like Beijing does - that's the problem.

Is Paul Treanor--whose ludicrous writings you cited--someone who is supposed to be someone?

It was stimulating to read over his stuff and seek a distillate. Two of his lovely ideas are as follows:

But what if they are the creators of wealth, and they refuse to create when they are taxed? Well then let us all live in poverty, and let us imprison them, for trying to blackmail the state into lowering their taxes.

If you refuse to work, you will go to prison; implicit is that you will then be made to produce the work you selfishly denied the state; or perhaps he merely means to suggest that you get released from prison when you return to work?

The fundamental task of the state, in a world of liberal market-democratic nation states, is to innovate. To innovate in contravention of national tradition, to innovate when necessary in defiance of the 'will of the people', and to innovate in defiance of market forces and market logic.

"The role of the state is to innovate...when necessary in defiance of 'the will of the people'...and market logic." Indeed, it is hard to see what is allowed to impede the state from "innovating."

I have to give Mr. Treanor (whoever he is) his due: he's come up with about as good a packaging for totalitarianism as it's had in awhile.

It's amazing the things one must believe to be a leftist. I guess, if you can call yourself a "progressive" for your belief in a 19th century economic theory, that's been a dismal failure everywhere it's been tried, you can convince yourself of anything.

Everyone knows Castro is the only dictator with good ideas.

They like Hitler, too, they just won't admit it flat out. Bill Ayers estimated the Weather Underground would have to exterminate 25 million Americans to get the rest with his program....

Less radical and thus more insidious...the same people mocking Angle slavver all over Michelle Obama (...who is was neither elected to office nor employed by a federal agency, but somehow manages to wield power over schools and companies anyway) appropriating Nazi diet propaganda. "Fat kids are a threat to national security" is just a reboot of "your body belongs to Germany!"

Being a libertarian doesn't mean one has to support total atomization of society, it means that collective action takes place (or doesn't) on a **voluntary** basis. If the author of this reprehensible piece believes that individuals are somehow enslaved or oppressed by a market failure, a politically (classically) liberal society will allow for him and his like-minded friends to create their own remedy for that failure.

What it boils down to, of course, is a knowledge problem, one I doubt this fellow is able to overcome. Communitarians, like Communists, cannot possibly deliver on their promise of better living through coercion. Coercion works on a very small subset of behaviors that are prima facie aggressive and destructive. Once a society begins to expand the law to prohibit or even prescribe behavior based on law, it will being to deteriorate, as we are now.

Did anyone else think of the Monte Python line, "I thought we were an autonomous collective" while reading that? If you tried to parody leftard doublethink, you couldn't come close to Treanor's breathtaking anti-achievement. He really does suffer from some sort of moral insanity, but it makes for a gut-bustingly funny read.

I'm reading the essay against libertarianism you linked above, and am reading it with great amusement. I'm not a libertarian, at any rate I was never baptized as one, so I figured I was "permitted" to read it. It's really a hoot.

The author writes:

"[Libertarianism] is specifically associated with the United States, and to a lesser extent with Britain and its former 'white colonies' (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Many libertarian authors know only North American political culture and society."

As I said, I'm no libertarian, but out of curiosity I wrote down a few names that one associates with libertarianism: Hayek, Rand, Popper, Von Mises, Friedman. Hmm. All native Europeans except for Friedman, whose parents were immigrant Hungarian Jews.

But I'm sure the author is right. Perhaps these are only minor figures...

If I understand this guy's post, true freedom comes only from being a dictator. Because of course, in a socialist society, the average proletarian's decisions have as little influence as the free market he decries. The only person with the power to actually do the things he describes is the dictator.

And since when has socialism created any kind of diversity whatsoever? A limited number of planners tend to have a limited number of ideas.

Holy crap, Eric, you didn't even cite the worst part of this belch of lunacy! Look at how he winds up the piece:

"The fundamental task of the state, in a world of liberal market-democratic nation states, is to innovate. To innovate in contravention of national tradition, to innovate when necessary in defiance of the 'will of the people', and to innovate in defiance of market forces and market logic."

By this definition Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were ideal expressions of the State and who, really can disagree? He goes on to even more alarming, surreal gibberish:

"The state goals below are derived from contra-libertarian values:

* to restrict tradition and heritage, to limit transgenerational culture and transgenerational community - especially if they inhibit innovation
* to restrict 'national values', that is the imposition of an ethnic or nation-specific morality
* to permit the individual to secede from the nation state, the primary transgenerational community
* to limit market forces, and their effects
to permit the individual to secede from the free market"

But if individuals are permitted to secede from the nation-state, what is to prevent a pure, market-driven (or ethnic, traditional) society to spring up in direct opposition to this crackpot's statist "innovations?"

Truly insane.

My HTML-fu does not please the Master, but I think you can see what's mine and what's his.

This guy's comments on innovation coming exclusively through the state would indicate that Russia should have beaten us in innovation long ago. I can categorically tell you that Soviet innovation was absolutely hopeless.

In December 2002, communism was collapsing all over the world. I wanted to see what the creaky old system was like before it died completely.

So I visited Cuba, and loved the place. The weather was gorgeous, the people were friendly. (This is why I visited Cuba and not the USSR.)

But the economic system? Not so much.

What I remember the most was the restaurants. Most of them were owned by the State, and had horrible food. Others were privately run, and had horrible food.

Why?

Because the State had a monopoly on purchasing from farmers. The restaurants had to get the food from the State, and the farmers only sold the State the worst swill they could get away with. Service was better in the private restaurants than the State places, but the food was no different, just more expensive.

I stayed in a pension house, which is someone opening up their apartment so I could sleep in their master bedroom. It was very nice. The couple I stayed with was great. They let me eat with them if I paid for the food, and the food was great because some farmers snuck out to private markets and sold the food illegally to private households. It was delicious; I asked them why they didn't start a restaurant. Well, private restaurants have to account for every bite of food they sell, to make sure it came from the State.

There are some good restaurants, although I never saw any of them. They buy the awful food from the State and throw it in the trash. Then they buy private food and serve it. This all costs the earth, of course.

Thanks to my trip to Cuba, I have flown on Soviet jets. The Yakolev Yak-42D, to be precise. My trip was in 2002 and my plane was maintained in such a way I thought it was 50 years old. I learned later it could not have been older then 1982, when that series was first built.

After flying on the Yak, and riding in Soviet Ladas, and seeing a Soviet Moskvitch (their alleged mid-level luxury car, sort of like a Toyota Camry in concept, nothing like one in quality), I can tell you that Soviet engineering is the anthesis of innovation.

Basically, if the Soviet vehicle could do the following, it was considered Finished, and no further time-consuming, expensive development was done.

• Start.
• Attain a reasonable speed.
• Stop
• Rust (judging by the examples on the road, this appears to be most important.)

The idea that someone might want to accomplish these tasks with any kind of bourgeois "comfort", "style" or even "reliability" was, of course, a violation of all the ideals of Communism and was not tolerated.

As a result, it is downright embarrassing to see this guy say that Capitalism prevents Innovation, and urges conformity on an unhappy world. How many brands of jeans are there in the USA? How many different cars, from lowly Kias to magnificent Mercedes, are there? Car and Driver magazine tested a Zil and found it hopeless compared to even Cadillacs, much less the best cars from Europe.

Did you realize that in East Germany, a Trabant literally costed as much as a Porsche 911? You would order a Trabant and wait 10 years for it. It would arrive and still be one of the most horrible cars ever made. If you put the equivalent aside in West Germany you would have a new 911. Most people think the 911 is, well, a slightly better car than the Trabant, which takes a snappy 33 seconds to get from zero to 56mph. (It will never reach 60). Its 26hp lawn mower engine spews incomprehensible amounts of pollution into the air, so even from an environmental perspective you are doing the greens a favor by buying a Porsche.

So I am sorry. If you run a coersive society, you can tell your subjects "It's the Trabant or nothing" and there is nothing they can do. In our society you can buy a 911 or an S-Class. Or even a Kia, if you want to be cheap. It's still crushingly superior to the Trabant or Lada.

Well, I think I have given enough examples of the truly remarkable level of Soviet (and Cuban) consumer innovation to make my point. I loved my visit to Cuba but after I came back, Castro threw a bunch of minor league dissenters in jail for 26 years. Too much for me, so I never went back.

But I'm glad I went. You really don't appreciate how horrible Communism is until you see it close up - and I didn't even have a close encounter with the guns and the guards, just the difficulties everyday people had surviving, and the laughably poor living conditions they had to endure. Laughable, of course, only if you aren't stuck there for good.

David

Treanor's essay is the product of a first- or second-year philosophy student, and that is all. The banality, pedantry and contradictions are quite obvious. Give him a few more years and he'll master that total inscrutability that every successful modern practitioner requires to be a "good citizen" of the modern European bureaucracy.

As to Pinochet. The truth is that he remains widely admired in Chile, not as a murderer but as a reformer. One would think that Thomas Friedman would augment his praise for Chinese despotism with the Chilean example!

Heh. Of course he wouldn't do that. Pinochet doesn't have the required ideological "bloodline".

Mr. Scheie says "if anyone should receive credit for the idea, it was Milton Friedman, not Pinochet." Mr. Friedman certainly deserves credit for coming up with the idea, but somebody deserves credit for implementing it. If Jimmy Carter got it adopted in the US, we'd give him credit for that.

All of this reversal is necessary in order to argue that socialist dictatorships are free.

We saw a lot more of it when there were more socialist dictatorships.

Since then the left has gotten a big pass. The media won’t report when lefties say these things and they just don’t say it as much since there is no international revolution to carry water for.

It's nice that after two years of Obama the moderates seem to be remembering… and that your writing articles about things like this. The party line is things like 'healthcare reform' are good and we are evil for being against them... when really, they're taking away our freedom to buy healthcare up and above what the government wants us to have.

Here's what it boils down to: Every statist thinks that he's the new-and-improved version of Dr. Frankenstein and, this time, he'll be able to command his Monster to do his bidding (which, naturally, is utterly benign, beneficial and entirely devoid of human weaknesses like self-interest, jealousy, greed, etc.). It's a utopian fantasy, and a hellishly dangerous one at that.

Mr. Dennis,

I think he is talking about a different kind of innovation similar to what John Dewey said when he alleged the purpose of school was to make kids as unlike their fathers as possible.

Its moral innovation.

And that is almost always horrible.

We already know the True and the Right to a vast degree. We just need to obey it.

It's very unfortunate, and unfortunately understandable, that so many these days speak of political theories as methods rather than as goals. This is understandably because those who commit this grave error have no goals other than power.

The libertarian cares for Liberty, regardless of the system which best achieves it. By keeping our eyes on the higher ideal of Liberty, we immunize ourselves from the dangers of material methodologies; we are assured that the What and the How are moral because we know that the Why is moral. With our eyes thus open, as our host so rightly says, "...if we consider what the alternative has done to many millions of people, I'll take freedom any day."

Treanor's been kicking around for a while. Steven Den Beste took him down in a couple of posts back in '02:

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Thefringeofthefringe.shtml

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Moreonthehyperfringe.shtml

What the "stomach turning" author fails to address is that with true freedom, individuals can choose whether or not to act collectively on a matter of common concern. This kind of "collectivism" is voluntary for entry and exit, and the individual is completely free. Planned, forced collectivism gives the individual no choice, and therefore can in no way be construed as freedom, regardless of the outcome it produces. FREEDOM IS FREEDOM. Mr. Treanor has thought himself into an idiot's corner from which he cannot escape.