To serve, protect, and/or scare the hell out of

Birchibald T. Barlow: But suppose for a second that your house was ransacked by thugs, your family tied up in the basement with socks in their mouths, you try to open the door but there's too much blood on the knob-

Mayor Quimby: Ah, er, what is your question?

Barlow: My question is about the budget, sir.

The Simpsons, "Sideshow Bob Roberts"

The government of Sacramento County, California (Hat tip to Hit and Run), like many government bodies in that state, needs to cut spending somewhere. When it was suggested, in light of the fact that Sacramento's murder rate is the lowest it's been in decades, that part of the cuts needed to make up the county's $180 million might come out of law enforcement spending, the sheriff's deputies union decided to skip any attempt at anything even vaguely resembling rational discourse and responded with an ad campaign that included, well, this:

The ad, put out by the Sacramento County Deputy Sheriff's Association, shows a terrified-looking young girl with a large, burly arm and hand wrapping around her and clamping over her mouth. Below the image in large text are the words "Your child's safety is at risk!", followed by a few sentences in smaller print about an ominous upcoming budget meeting.

While the image as a whole is about as subtle as a shotgun blast in the face, when looked at in parts it's also a model of the use of subtly reinforcing details that create an aura of fear, helplessness, despair, and corruption. The girl's panicked eyes are tilted so far back in her head that's she seems to be looking almost straight up, suggesting the towering size of her attacker. Her own hands are partially visible, pitifully small , pushing against the hand and arm of her attacker in a clearly futile attempt at resistance. His index finger is just below her nostrils, and his thumb is poised pincer-like just above them, moments away from stopping her breath.

The assailant's hand and arm is the only part of him visible on camera, and the dark material of his shirt sleeve against the dark background makes the hand look almost disembodied. His evil is intangible, sourceless, omnipresent, and literally faceless, seemingly striking from nowhere. At the same time, the hair on the back of his hand is dark and fairly dense, his veins and knuckles bulge, his skin is rough, and his fingernails are dirty-looking; he is crude, animalistic, and brutishly masculine, especially when juxtaposed with the girl's pristine fragility.

Even the letters of the ad's dire warning, white text on a black background, look gritty, damaged, stained, and besieged. The white is irregularly speckled with little black dots that get more common the closer you get to the letter's edge, and at the outer borders of some of the letters are larger black marks and splotches that seem to be in the opening stages of invading or consuming the words.

I'm quite accustomed to public employee unions treating their budget as some sort of inalienable patrimony that ought to exist independently of the community's actual needs, and of responding to the prospect of budget cuts with hysterical threats about the catastrophe that will ensue if they are no longer kept in the manner to which they are accustomed. Similarly, images of children in peril or vulnerable-looking females being sexually menaced is hardly unknown in political propaganda. Nevertheless, this is the first time I've seen an argument over personnel cuts reach the point of "Here's a photo of what it will look like when your daughter is kidnapped, raped, and probably murdered because you reduced our budget." The centrality of hysterical fear in politics is something I've become pretty inured to over the years, so it comes as a surprise to discover that I can still be surprised by this sort of thing.

Is actually learning some basic facts about a politician before you start worshipping him too much to ask?

So, President Obama has announced the deployment of more troops to Afghanistan. To their credit, more liberals have attacked this decision than I expected. In many such cases, however, my respect is somewhat tempered by the fact that many of them are getting indignant about the fact that their beloved has betrayed them by doing exactly what he had always explicitly said he intended to do. Obama advocated the idea of escalating in Afghanistan well before he was elected, after all. He became the "peace candidate" because he was Not Bush, and Bush was a warmonger, and so Not Bush must be a great lover of peace. QED.

The result is actually remarkably similar to the subject of a recent post, the myth of Leon Trotsky the good Communist. Both men have an admiring mythology built around them that is not only at odds with the facts, it is explicitly contradicted by the glorified hero's own words!

This is a predictable outcome of both the way Barack Obama ran his presidential campaign and the way most of the media covered it. The elections always heavily emphasize general concepts tied to strong emotions- Freedom, Hope, Compassion, Children, Patriotism, Danger, Those Other People We Can't Stand- but Obama went further in emphasizing cheery platitudes and good vibes over actual policy and political philosophy than any other major politician I can recall in my lifetime. He was a unifier, he was pragmatic, he was nonideological, he was understanding he was hopeful, he was an historic milestone in America's racial history, he was Not Bush. Most of the mainstream media, thoroughly biased in Obama's favor and not especially politically incisive even at the best of times, indulged this.

John McCain often wasn't all that much better, his persona heavily dependent on his military service and on the reputation as a "maverick" that he had received during his stint as the media's favorite Republican earlier in the decade. I'll say this much for McCain, though: I doubt anyone supported him because they had fallen under the impression that he was a peacenik or a supporter of gay marriage or an opponent of big business.

It's not that Obama didn't have concrete beliefs- his campaign site had an extensive platform outlining his proposed policies. And yet, such was the fervor around him that he was able to rally a passionate following with the most vacuous campaign since "Tippecanoe and Tyler too". He isn't anti-war, but he's a man of powerful charisma who seemed like he ought to be, and who people wanted to be anti-war, and that was enough.

Palin 2012: Somewhat Less Godawfulness You Can Believe In

I’m actually a little sad to see Sarah Palin go. I was no fan, but of the four candidates and running mates during the election- McCain, Palin, Obama, Biden- I found her the least objectionable. I admit that my opinion may be shaded by my reflexive sympathy for virtually anyone who manages to inspire such an impressive eruption of raw hate from the Democrats, but put alongside the relentless denigration of private life in voluntary society and creepy calls for “service” to the state that dominated the rhetoric of both McCain and Obama, she seemed like the only one of the four to have any real regard at all for the value of activities other than glorious self-sacrifice to the Fatherland. Perhaps that’s part of the reason her large number of children seemed to hit such a raw nerve with some; it suggests an unseemly interest in selfish, uncommunal, drearily bourgeois activities like family.

However much both McCain and Obama may talk about community and family and the like, at the core of both of their visions is the idea that service to the state is the highest of all callings and the basis of a virtuous and meaningful life, unlike the petty selfishness of voluntary society. One of the things that has always repulsed me about both the great bulk of the American Left and the neocon and “national greatness” portions of the Right which John McCain exemplifies is their disrespect for the things of normal, day-to-day life for the average person- work, family, business, social groups and organizations, personal interests, neighbors.

It’s a common attitude, widely shared by fascist militarists, spoiled lefty bohemians, and five-year old boys, but it was troubling to see how pervasive this juvenile attitude has become in both parties. Despite the frequent cracks made about her intelligence, it sometimes made me feel like Palin was the only adult in the whole campaign.

I realize that it’s rather sad to praise a politician for being merely authoritarian rather than implicitly totalitarian. What can I say? If you’ve been kicked in the crotch five or six times in a row, a mere kidney shot comes as a sort of relief.

Next, scarification!

Here’s something both amusing and frightening (Hat tip to Billy Beck): there are actually people getting Barrack Obama tattoos. American politics has been getting more messianic since 9/11, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that it’s reached this level. Dismayed, but not surprised.

It’s especially absurd when you consider that Obama has been in office for less than a month, and thus no one has any idea what his lasting image will be. If he ends up in some sort of scandal or public opinion of him just goes sour, having his face indelibly drawn into your flesh could get really embarrassing a few years down the line. (Imagine going through life with Ross Perot's face on your bicep.) People who have the name of some cute barfly they met 3 hours ago tattooed on themselves at least have the excuse of being drunk.

Visit scenic Illinois: Third-World government at First-World prices!

Today, I am proud to be an... Illinoisian? Illinoisite? What the hell are we called, anyway? It doesn't matter. You know, other states can claim their petty distinctions- their monuments, their scenic mountains and forests, their low murder rates. But how many other states in the Union will soon be able to claim the distinction of having two consecutive governors go to prison for corruption?

A story for election night

I'm finally getting things up and running again. I'll have some new stuff shortly, but in in observance of the election I thought I'd repost something I wrote a while back.

Your Sacred Duty to Vote: A Parable

I was reading the paper one morning when I heard a knock on the door. I hadn't been expecting a visitor, but I quickly got up and opened the door. On my front step, to my surprise, was my next-door neighbor, holding a baseball bat in his hands.

"Uh… Can I help you?" I asked.

He nodded eagerly, and said, "I've come so we can play a game. You'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, I'll break both of your legs. If it comes up tails, I'll break your arms. I play this game with all the neighbors every few years. Sounds pretty fun, don't you think? You're lucky; in some places people don't get to play my game." He smiled, clearly quite pleased with himself.

"This is absurd!" I exclaimed. "I'm not playing your game. Get off my property!"

He sighed, looking very hurt. "Fine," he said. "I'll flip the coin." He produced a quarter from his pocket and tossed it into the air. It landed on the concrete path in front of my house, heads facing up. "Well, the coin has spoken." Before I could react, he swung the bat, hitting me in the leg. I gasped and sank to one knee. He swung again and again at my shins, leaving me sprawled on the ground.

Through the pain, I cried out, "You broke my legs!"

"Well, yes," he replied. "The coin came up heads. What are you so upset about, anyway?"

Incredulous, I yelled, "You have no right to go around beating people up!"

He seemed baffled at this. "Sure I do. You consented to this when you chose to live on the same block as me. Besides, you refused to exercise your right to flip the coin, like I offered. If you won't participate in my game, you have no right to complain about the outcome."

His reasoning seemed a bit off to me, but I was in too much pain for any deep logical analysis. "Well," he continued, "It's been a pleasure serving you, but I've got to get going. Lots of houses left to visit today. See you in two years!" With that he smiled, gave a polite nod, and was on his way.

Sheep's clothing

As the old Vulcan proverb says, only Nixon could go to China. His reputation as a devoted Cold Warrior meant no one could plausibly accuse him of being soft on Communism for opening relations with China, whereas a dove who attempted it would have been.

I was put in mind o that by the recent $700 billion dollar bailout passed by Congress. The bailout had more support from Democrats than from Republicans. Barack Obama voted in favor of it, as did McCain. If the economic situation gets worse, the next president will be in a position to further expand the state's role in the economy, perhaps significantly so.

I wonder if Democrats felt more comfortable giving hundreds of billions of dollars away to banks precisely because of the public perception that Democrats are opposed to powerful business interests (something even many opponents of the Democrats believe.) Consider Obama himself: he's been accused of being an extreme liberal, a Marxist, a terrorist sympathizer, and a secret Muslim, but how often does anyone accuse him of being a tool of powerful business interests? To the overwhelming majority of the American people, the idea is too absurd to even entertain, even among people who hate Obama.

Thus, I wonder if a Democratic president and legislature might actually be more prone to being a tool of politically connected plutocrats than Republicans would be. To a great extent, legislation intended to aid particular economic interests can fly under the radar, because almost everyone (conservatives included) buys into the myth that interventionism is bad for big business. People might attack a proposed regulation for being innefectual or misguided, but the idea that regulation might be what the major players in the field being regulated want is quite foreign to most people. Nevertheless, being excessively blatant about it can still make people notice, as the public's anger over the bailout shows.

A Democratic government could probably push the envelope farther than the Republicans could- the widespread presumption that Democrats are hostile to the wealthy and powerful would mean that the Democrats would have to get really blatant about it before people started asking questions and catching on, whereas everyone expects the Republicans to be on the side of big business.

On the other hand, the false perception of McCain and the Republicans as devoted supporters of free markets- promoted by the dishonest and the ignorant on both sides of the political spectrum- would provide Republicans with cover as well. After all, if even the Republicans think that the government should intervene, you know something needs to be done!

I'm not sure which factor would be stronger in an economic crisis. I should note that the Democrats' image as enemies of plutocracy would probably make it easier for them to get away with passing genuine pro-market reforms- not that it would ever actually come up, of course.

It never ends...

I was in a fairly good mood until I found this article, via Psychopolitik:

Too busy playing video games to watch presidential ads on television? Barack Obama has found you, too, by becoming the first presidential candidate to buy ad space inside a game.

Nine video games from Electronic Arts Inc., ranging from the extremely popular "Madden 09" football game to the street racing "Burnout: Paradise," feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign. The ads — they appear on billboards and other signage — remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign Web site.

I doubt it was intentional, but the way the lede gives the impression of a relentless hunter-"Barack Obama has found you, too"- seems wonderfully appropriate. The hunter being not Obama in particular, but the overwhelming importance of politics and the state in American life.

This apparently will apply mostly to sports games, where it's much easier to fit ads for real products into the game setting, and I'm mostly an RPG/strategy guy, so it doesn't reach me directly. Still, it frustrates me that there are ever-fewer places in our culture where one can avoid this crap.

Ayn Rand once remarked (quoting from memory, probably not exact), "I'm interested in politics so that one day I won't have to be interested in politics." That's always resonated with me. The need to guard against aggression is never-ending, and would remain so even in a fully free society, but the maddening thing about our current situation is that it feels as if there is never a moment's peace- the state and it's machinery of legitimation never stops poking, probing, trying to work its way into everything.

A grim legacy

You know, if "hockey mom" becomes a permanent part of the American political lexicon, I am going to be really pissed. The whole "Sport+Parent" method of describing supposed voting blocs has got to be one of the most annoying innovations in political rhetoric of the last decade.

Sarah Palin thoughts

Well, by now everyone knows that John McCain has selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. It’s a relief for me; there used to be a bit of speculation (or perhaps just neocon wishful thinking) that he would pick Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, and if that had happened I would have had to make some Alec Baldwinesque threat to flee to New Zealand if McCain won. Palin doesn’t impress me, but things could be a lot worse. Plus, it would be amusing if Palin eventually ends up as President, just to hear the shrieks of anguish when America’s first female President turns out to be a Republican.

Don’t judge me harshly. Sometimes spite is all I have.

I expect her sex to be a benefit, on net. The chance to vote for a woman for Vice-President will probably win over some independents, and some of the mushier former Clinton supporters, and bring out a lot of voters who otherwise wouldn’t have voted at all. I expect that to more than offset the number of votes her sex costs the ticket. Potential McCain voters repelled by the idea of voting for a woman seem more likely to just stay home than vote for a liberal Democrat. Plus, having a mother of five on the ticket will help cancel out the public’s perception of McCain’s uncuddly personality and eagerness to send the kids of potential voters to die in foreign hellholes.

It’s interesting to see liberals attempting to attack Palin (e.g. here) for seeking the vice-presidency on the grounds that she’s a woman with young children. I hadn’t thought that it would be the Democrats, circa 2008, saying that ambitious women should get back in the kitchen. Actually, I shouldn’t be surprised; one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that mainstream liberalism’s feminism is actually quite shallow. (Hell, a lot of mainstream feminism’s feminism is quite shallow, if it threatens to conflict with the needs of the Democratic Party.) Expect to see more criticism of Palin on those lines.

Since it’s already being said online by members of the rank-and-file, I wonder how long it will be before some liberal pundit insinuates- or outright says- that Palin is irresponsible for failing to have her mentally disabled child killed in the womb.

It’ll be fun to see all the conservatives who said that Obama, a state legislator turned freshman senator, lacked the necessary experience to be President turn on a dime and insist that of course a few years as a small-town mayor and two years as a governor provides more than adequate preparation to serve as the Vice-President for a man who is already 72 years old.

I just wish campaign season was over with already.

Great moments in American democracy

You know, there’s political stupidity, and then there’s… Well, this guy:

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (April 23) - A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in northern Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

Now, let’s not be too hard on him. I know giving a speech at Hitler’s birthday party “simply because he was asked” looks bad, but it could happen to anyone. A good friend of mine back once attempted to run for vice-president of the college anime club, and ended up being tricked into attending cross burnings on three separate occasions.

Besides, maybe he has some sort of explanation or excuse.

"I'll speak before any group that invites me," Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta."

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Black people, the Nazi Party- pretty much the same thing, right?

You can view Mr. Zirkle’s official campaign site here. There's some profound political insight there. Did you know that Saint Augustine's insufficient hostility to prostitution led directly to the destruction of the Roman Empire? Neither did I until, until Tony Zirkle set me straight!

In which I succumb to the inevitable and write about Ron Paul

I haven’t talked about the Ron Paul candidacy here before, because it wasn’t something I had an especially strong opinion about either way; I feel neither the intense enthusiasm for him of the Mises Institute/ lewrockwell.com paleolibertarians nor the hostility of the Voluntaryist/ Agorist anti-voters or Reason/Cato “cosmopolitan” libertarians.. I’ve liked Paul for a long time, enough that I’d seriously consider breaking my eight-year nonvoting streak if he somehow got to the general election, but my natural inclination is not to get excited or hopeful about things, and that goes double for politics. I seriously doubt that he’s a racist; more to the point, I don’t think his policy views are racist. I’ve finally got some thoughts on it, mostly inspired by the recent revelations about the racist content of some of Paul’s newsletters.

I’ve never thought Paul had any chance of winning. His potential value is as an educational tool. If you don’t think he’s useful towards that end because of his stances on abortion and immigration, or you think the taint of racism on Paul will become associated with libertarianism as a whole, or you just think electoral politics are an inappropriate strategy in general, I’m fine with that. I certainly don’t think it’s some sort of libertarian litmus test, and I think it’s unfortunate that some Paul supporters have tried to turn it into that.

Likewise, I can understand “purist” libertarians who reject Paul because of the content of his newsletters, though I think that’s an overreaction. Racism is not logically incompatible with libertarianism, but it can be considered anti-libertarian in another sense- widespread racism would have a tendency to undermine support for libertarian values, in both individual minds and societies, by giving people an additional incentive to violate those values. Hating a group of people doesn’t make it impossible to support respecting and defending their rights, but it certainly makes it harder. So racism should not be a non-issue to libertarians, even though it is not in itself a rights violation that can be justly countered with force.

With all that said, a certain aspect of the recent uproar over the racist content of some of Paul’s old newsletters sticks in my craw. It’s actually not new, but the Paul affair has made me think about it more.

Specifically, it’s the way a lot of Paul’s libertarian detractors- and detractors of paleolibertarians in general- draw the boundaries of libertarian purity. Consider the war issue. The paleolibertarians, most obviously at the Mises Institute and lewrockwell.com, have been resolutely antiwar. On the other hand, outfits like Reason and the Cato Institute have no problem welcoming vocal hawks into their ranks. (Cato’s position was against the war, but they still had pro-war thinkers like Brink Lindsay among their ranks; Reason had no official line, if memory serves, but it likewise has had no problem having hawks on its staff...)

That’s not necessarily wrong. Brink Lindsay’s views on Iraq don’t mean that he has nothing of value to say on free trade. But, reading comments on many libertarian websites, many libertarians will accept warmongers, but seem to consider racists –even if they do not support racist laws- to be morally beyond the pale. Indeed, some would seem to expand that to anyone with conservative moral or cultural views. This is quite at odds with my interpretation of libertarianism. For instance, I think that supporting an aggressive war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people is worse than having made or endorsed racist remarks 15 years ago, or for that matter today. But that’s just me. Then again, I’ve noticed that a lot of Paul’s (and paleolibertarianism’s) loudest detractors- Tom Palmer, Virginia Postrel, Timothy Sandefeur, Brink Lindsay- are or were themselves pro-war, so I shouldn’t be surprised that their values are not in line with my own.

Likewise, I think having and tolerating supporters of military aggression, mass murder, and the warfare state among us is a hell of lot more likely to corrupt or poison the libertarian movement as a whole than tolerating people who don’t want to live near blacks and think gays are going to go to Hell, however distasteful the latter group may be. Thus, I think the call to purge the paleolibertarians from the movement is ridiculous, even if the paleos really are the ogres that the “cosmopolitan” libertarians say they are. (Which I doubt.) I’m a big-tent sort, and I don’t think Sandefeur, Postrel, Lindsay, et al. should be drummed out of libertarianism, but if I had to choose I’d throw them over the side a hell of a lot faster than I would Han-Hermann Hoppe

However, I can understand people wanting to cut Paul loose for racism while continuing to accept war supporters on purely strategic grounds, and I’d have a lot more sympathy for the cosmopolitan libertarians if I thought that was all this was about. Electoral campaigns are tools, and there’s no shame in discarding one that’s broken. Racists are generally hated more than warmongers, so associating with the former looks worse than the latter. The revelations about Paul’s newsletters may well mean an end to Paul’s usefulness as a conveyor of libertarian ideas, though I’m hoping it doesn’t. The American public and (perhaps more importanatly) the respectable press and intelligentsia seem to consider saying nasty things about nonwhites to be much worse than advocating slaughtering them en masse. But I expected more sense from libertarians.

More thoughts on some related issues coming soon.

Finally!

For once, the featured letter in the morning's Chicago Tribune didn't make me cringe. It's a nice criticism of the Chicago media's infatuation with Senator Barack Obama. The letter writer points out the elephant in the room- for all the yammer about Obama rejecting "ideology" and being some sort of universally appealing figure, Obama is a resolute big-government statist who would further the erosion of our liberty. And he's right- the media has been so focused on the man's ethnicity and skill with crowd-pleasing platitudes (Mr. Obama approves of hope, apparently) that they seem to keep sliding over his actual beliefs. The writer gets a nice whack in at the supposed goodness of "bipartisanship," too.

If you're not from Illinois, you may not understand why I found this such a breath of fresh air. It seems pretty rare to find any reference to Obama in the mainstream press here that isn't fawning over him. I don't know what the coverage is like in other states, but in Illinois it's absolutely relentless. You can't open the paper without some article or column about how unifying or caring or bipartisan or hopeful or positive or charismatic Obama is. It's like being force-fed cotton candy. Kudos to the Tribune for prominently featuring some dissent.

Maintaining the public trust

I have no particularly strong animus against Gerald Ford, and I hadn’t intended to comment on his death one way or the other. But I ran into something that deserves comment.

I just finished reading this morning’s Chicago Tribune’s editorial pages. Most of the letters to the editor and the lead editorial were about the late Gerald Ford. The tone was universally worshipful- he was benevolent, he was wise, he was a compromising moderate who united people. In particular, his decision to pardon Nixon was praised as a great act of statesmanship, a way to restore American trust in government by avoiding the spectacle of a former president being put on trial. That jumped out at me. It is interesting that these people, who consider faith in government and the presidency a good thing, implicitly recognize and acknowledge the fact that to maintain the people’s all-important trust in government it is necessary to distract them from criminal acts committed by their leaders. Letting Nixon go to trial for his crimes like some commoner would have encouraged the public to think about the fact that the state’s highest official had broken the state’s own laws, and we can’t have that!

I doubt they think of it in precisely those terms- few people are that Machiavellian. But it remains the underlying principle of their argument.

The elections contain potassium benzoate! (That's bad.)

Some quick election thoughts:

Santorum was voted out. That good. Big-government conservatives like him are the reason I gave up being a Republican (and eventually, a conservative), and it's always nice to see one of his ilk go. It's worth noting that Santorum didn't even try to hide behind the quasi-libertarian rhetoric many Republicans use: He came out quite explicitly against the idea of small government. I don't know if I should be pleased by his honesty, or disturbed that vice no longer feels any need to pay tribute to virtue.

Joe Lieberman was reelected as an independent, no doubt thanks in part to the fact that the Republican Party seemed to favor him over their own candidate. That's bad. Lieberman is the worst of all possible worlds: in favor of war, in favor of economic statism, and in favor of moralistic intrusions on personal freedoms and free expression. So I suppose it's no wonder that the Republicans are in love with him.

Ron Paul got reelected. That's good. There's an old Jewish legend that if the number of righteous men alive on Earth ever drops below a certain threshold, God will destroy the world. I'm hoping something similar applies to Congress, but I doubt the universe is that kind.

As a whole, I feel pretty much indifferent to the result, for reasons outlined below. I still don't think the Democrats will be any better than the Republicans, but it's hard to imagine them being worse. Of course, I've been surprised before…

Your Sacred Duty to Vote: A Parable

A most curious thing happened the other day. I was reading the paper one morning when I heard a knock on the door. I hadn't been expecting a visitor, but I quickly got up and opened the door. On my front step, to my surprise, was my next-door neighbor, holding a baseball bat in his hands.

"Uh… Can I help you?" I asked.

He nodded eagerly, and said, "I'm in the mood for a game. You'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, I'll break both of your legs. If it comes up tails, I'll break your arms. I play this game with all the neighbors every few years. Sounds pretty fun, don't you think? You're lucky; in some places people don't get to play my game." He smiled, clearly quite pleased with himself.

"This is absurd!" I exclaimed. "I'm not playing your game. Get off my property!"

He sighed, looking very hurt. "Fine," he said. "I'll flip the coin." He produced a quarter from his pocket and tossed it into the air. It landed on the concrete path in front of my house, heads facing up. "Well, the coin has spoken." Before I could react, he swung the bat, hitting me in the leg. I gasped and sank to one knee. He swung again and again at my shins, leaving me sprawled on the ground.

Through the pain, I cried out, "You broke my legs!"

"Well, yes," he replied. "The coin came up heads. What are you so upset about, anyway?"

Incredulous, I yelled, "You have no right to go around beating people up!"

He seemed baffled at this. "Sure I do. You consented to this when you chose to live on the same block as me. Besides, you refused to exercise your right to flip the coin, like I offered. If you won't participate in my game, you have no right to complain about the outcome."

His reasoning seemed a bit off to me, but I was in too much pain for any deep logical analysis. "Well," he continued, "It's been a pleasure serving you, but I've got to get going. Lots of houses left to visit today. See you in two years!" With that he smiled, gave a polite nod, and was on his way.
----
Okay, I'm being a bit silly here. But the "If you don't vote, you can't complain" argument has always annoyed me, and my natural habit is to think in analogies and metaphors.

Like Alien Vs. Predator, but scarier

I'm torn on how to feel about the upcoming election. On the one hand, I hate the thought of Democrats winning; on the other hand, I hate the thought of the Republicans not losing. It's a quandary. I find it hard to imagine that the Democrats would be worse than the Republicans, but my predictive record isn't good in that regard: I never thought Bush would be worse than Clinton, either. Just thinking out loud here, lots of wishy-washy indecision ahead:

1. When our Iraqi adventure goes down in flames, I think it would be good to have Republicans in full control. Not because the Republicans would handle it better, but so that they take full blame. Ten years down the line, I don't want to see the Republicans justifying some new intervention by saying, "Well, Iraq was going fine until the Democrats screwed it up." This seems like a cynical political calculation, but it could save lives in the decades to come.

2. I'm not convinced that the Democrats would be any less violent abroad. My concern here is that, since they are often perceived as the weaker party on foreign affairs, they might find it necessary to throw American military strength around to prove they're not the pack of wimps the Republicans say they are.

3. I think the Democrats are worse in regards to nanny statism. It seems like it's usually them behind smoking bans, attempts at food restrictions, etc. Republicans are worse on things like sexual freedom, but here's the thing: I don't think a Republican regime would be very likely to succeed in carrying out any significant restrictions on sexual freedom, whereas I think a Democratic administration would actually have a pretty good chance of getting their preferred forms of oppression passed and left intact by the courts. So, regardless of who is objectively more malevolent, I think Democrats are the greater menace in regard to personal freedoms.

4. On the other hand, I would also like to see the Republicans punished at the polls, to discourage them from future warmongering. This is a big consideration, potentially enough to outweigh the others. It is also, of course, incompatible with point #1.

5. It might be good for civil liberties in an indirect way if the Democrats win. More power for the Democrats might make the Republicans a little more cautious in embracing new police state measures, since it would serve as a reminder to conservatives that those powers could be wielded just as easily by some future Democratic administration. I may be giving Republican foresight too much credit, though.

So, who to root for? For the first time in my life, I honestly don't care. In every other election I've followed, I always preferred (or at least hated less) one side over the other, however slightly. My lingering preference for the Republicans has been beaten out of me by the last six years, but I don't find myself loathing the Democrats any less than I used to.

And you want to know what really sucks? The elections fall on my birthday this year, as they did in 2000. So, once again, I'm getting whichever bastards will be screwing my country over for the next few years as my present. Happy birthday to me.

More LRC stuff

Over at the Mutalist Blog, Kevin Carson has a great post on the Libertarian Reform Caucus, as well as some thoughts on libertarian strategy. Check it out.

More thoughts on the Libertarian Reform Caucus

Okay, I've had some time to look at the Libertarian Reform Caucus page a bit more thoroughly, and I have some thoughts on it.

I think the underlying problem is that the reformers are mistaken as to what a libertarian political party is useful for at this particular point in history. The LRC places its political hopes in the idea of getting libertarian candidates elected in the near future. To quote from the FAQ:

Our premise is that many voters could support more incremental steps to roll back the State. We’re for smaller government -- across the board -- and feel very comfortable that that is a principled approach. More importantly, we believe that voters are ready for such an approach…now!

I'd like to share their optimism, but I don't buy this. I don't think any serious libertarian reform is going to be happening in that time frame, no matter what we do. My experience is that people talk about supporting freedom in the abstract, but quickly change their tune when concrete examples come up. The culture is too statist for any serious reform, and in that sort of climate the Libertarian Party is not going to be winning pluralities unless it ceases to be libertarian.

That doesn't, however, mean that all is lost, or that there is no useful work to be done for liberty. What we need more than anything else is education- letting people know we're out there, letting them know that an alternative exists. When the state screws things up, we'll be there to say, "I told you so. Here's something better." Having a Libertarian Party can be useful to this political education, because by putting up candidates and advertising them, it helps remind people that this alternative exists. Weakening the message weakens our ability to do that- change the Party to appeal to the majority of the American public circa 2006, and it ceases to be an alternative to the statist worldview. We will be offering only a slight modification of the status quo, not a serious change. That is not going to grab people's attention.

Case in point: the Iraq War. The new platform contains no strong stance against our involvement in Iraq and our attempts at "nation building," and thus misses an ideal "I told you so" opportunity that will exist as the public turns more and more against the war. This is an especially big loss, because my experience has been that the war issue has been especially powerful among young people. This is a golden opportunity to show them that left-wing statists like the Greens aren't the only principled enemies of war, and it's being squandered.

Another serious problem is that moderating the libertarian message will make it easier for non-libertarians to apply the label to themselves, thereby diluting the word and bringing real libertarians into disrepute. Imagine if every conservative statist and government-connected business interest starts calling himself "libertarian," because the word has been diluted to mean anyone who supports a few reductions in government here or there. Consider the damage already done by conservatives who dishonestly use libertarian rhetoric, and multiply that many times over. All the ills of the statist mixed economy would be laid at the feet of "libertarianism," and it will be all the harder for real libertarians to get the public to listen. We've already lost the word "liberal" to the statists; I don't want to lose "libertarian" as well.

I don't doubt the admirable intentions of the LRC. But I think their desire to grab a few quick tactical victories will lead to strategic defeat.

Thoughts on the recent Libertarian Party convention

I am not strongly interested in electoral politics. I have not voted in an election for any level of government since the 2000 election (when I voted for Browne), though I do not take the hard-line Voluntaryist position that voting is always wrong. That said, I have a few thoughts on the recent controversy concerning the Party convention in Portland:

1. I agree with the idea of eliminating the Pledge. I agree that it is potentially off-putting to minarchists and libertarian sympathizers, without any compensating benefits.

2. The decision to weaken the antiwar plank, and the failure to come out strongly against involvement in Iraq is a huge mistake, not merely as a matter of principle but on purely pragmatic grounds. This is ironic: the Libertarian Reform Caucus, the group largely behind the toning down of the platform, bases its arguments on the idea that the Party must dilute itself to appeal to a larger portion of the electorate. The war, however, is one of the few issues where the majority is actually on our side, or at least moving in that direction. LRC supporters vehemently deny being crypto-Republicans, and I'm sure most of them are sincere, but this is the sort of thing that makes people suspicious.

I'll probably have more about this when I've had more time to peruse the Libertarian Reform Caucus homepage. Stay tuned. The website Boston Tea Party has more stuff on this topic, as does the personal site of its founder, Thomas Knapp.