The discussion of why inequality is bad seems to have gone off the rails in the exchanges that I've been reading. The libertarians were saying egalitarianism was motivated by envy, and then DeLong defended himself by saying that he was motivated by a hatred of spite, which hardly seems like a firm ground for a tax code.
Really, the cleanest argument for income egalitarianism and a progressive tax code is that an extra dollar gives less happiness to the rich than to the poor. So, for example, $10,000 dollars might make a poor person happy but wouldn't make an appreciable difference to a rich person's life. This is why the rich spend more and more readily than the poor: dollars mean less to them.
I'm sure this is a naive question to people in the field, but is it really true that weath is relative? Obviously to some extent -- somebody at the top of the heap can hire someone lower down to clean their house/cook their dinner/whatever. But once you get up into the higher levels...eh? Really?
I mean, there having enough to buy your way out of doing unpleasant tasks (which IS relative) and then there is having enough money to basically do whatever you want, all day every day. Once you reach that point, are there any meaningful distinctions between hugely rich and hugely, hugely rich? Bill Gates still gets 24 hours in his day, and he still has only three-score years and ten. If we're talking about redistributing from the top 1%, what on earth are they really going to lose?
Or is this just the kind of political argument that blurs filthy-rich and middle-class aspirational, so that everyone feels equally attacked?
4- really, Idealist? Because of all the (bad) reasons one might vote republican, this is at least (arguably) sensible. If this is the wrong reason, what on earth is the right one?
9: Not the seething anger, but it does have the glorious lunacy. My memory is faulty (read it twenty years ago), but: that bit where a family is watching a ballet on TV in which some of the dancers are loaded down with weights?
Also, this: the cleanest argument for income egalitarianism and a progressive tax code is that an extra dollar gives less happiness to the rich than to the poor. So, for example, $10,000 dollars might make a poor person happy but wouldn't make an appreciable difference to a rich person's life.
makes perfect sense to me but most economists would fight you on it tooth and nail. You're reading too much into the declining marginal utility of income. The idea is that (all else equal) each dollar means less to any given individual, so my $1,000,000th dollar this year will mean less to me than my first, but this does not mean that my $1,000,000th dollar will mean less to me than your first will mean to you. We simply don't have any way to do inter-personal utility comparisons in that way. It could theoretically be the case that I experience orgasmic waves of utility buying my 6th porsche this year, while your internal utilometer barely budges when you scrape together a dollar in change to buy yourself a biscuit, the only thing you'll eat all day.
I'm making an argument I don't myself buy, mind you, but it's the standard economic argument nonetheless (at least insofar as one sticks with positive economics).
Or is this just the kind of political argument that blurs filthy-rich and middle-class aspirational, so that everyone feels equally attacked?
I think this is the right answer. I remember reading some time ago that people in all economic castes tend to identify with wealthier cases when it comes to their perceived tax burden, but identify with the middle class (or lower castes) when assessing their own wealth. I'd have an even bigger boat than Mr. Jones, but for the incredible tax squeeze on middle-class guys like myself.
I thought the cleanest argument for taxing the rich was that old radical Adam Smith's:
[t]he subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state....
Rawls thought that the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons was just like the problem of other minds. If so, it's just as unpersuasive, from a practical point of view. It's not like it's impossible to figure out whether someone is happy. Anyway, no axiom in economics is more plausible than the principle that (ceteris paribus) $100 makes more difference to a pauper than to a billionaire.
I'm not even sure why I linked this. I just read it and was rocked back a bit: You think I want to scar Cindy Crawford's face? You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
26 You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
Of course she does- your real worth is directly proportional to your net worth, don't you know? Your redistribution schemes are tantamount to defacing the beautiful edifice of the wealth of the wealthy... uh... not sure I can continue in this vein.
I'm pretty much with 18. Redistributional policy isn't primarily a good idea because of marginal curves, it's a good idea because helping people that need help is the right thing to do. Of course, there's little defending that beyond "cause I said so".
15 is certainly right in what is stated, but makes the huge omission of not recognizing that there's lots of good, useful social science that's not economics. And you can look at those sorts of interpersonal questions with tools like psychology. (Or some other flaky field. heh.)
Snark aside, this really is more or less what libertarians think.
I don't think that's true. I think Mike J is right that DeLong took the conversation down a strange road (AFAIK; I haven't really followed it). It is a pretty weak argument for redistribution, and I think there are better arguments available. (I suspect that the conversation started on a narrow point, and then moved, untethered.) And I suspect that Jim Henley would agree with the point the Galt is making about this argument without agreeing as to the force of her rhetoric.
(NB: I'm slightly in the tank for libertarians (rather than schmibertarians) post-Padilla.)
The argument from marginal utility is strong, and can be backed up by plenty of evidence from empirical psychology, but it still concedes too much to the libertarians.
The impulse to fairness is not some indirect way of calculating utility, it is a deeply rooted part of moral psychology. We have an instinctive sense that cooperative ventures should be designed so that they benefit everyone involved. If someone is working in a cooperative operation, and not gaining from it, we intuitively think they are exploited. This instinct can be refined by different rules--should people be compensated according to their effort? Their actual results? None of these refinements can keep us from thinking, though, that radical disparities in benefits are evidence of exploitation. Without this kind of moral instinct, cooperation, and with it human society would be largely impossible.
Wealth redistribution is motivated by the simple fact that the economy is a cooperative enterprise, and thus should benefit all involved. Libertarians short circuit this argument by pretending the wealthy attain their wealth entirely on their own. Jane’s fictional hero John Galt became wealthy because he invented and marketed a better metal, without any help from anyone else ever. In the Randian world, there are no real cooperative ventures. Even families are despised. As a result, fairness simply ceases to be a moral principle.
I'm slightly in the tank for libertarians (rather than schmibertarians) post-Padilla.
Don't get me wrong, libertarians are great on civil liberties. But on economic issues this sort of thing is where they're coming from (although I grant that not every libertarian is going to put it the way Galt does).
My kids like me to read themthis book about a beautiful fish with shiny scales, who finds happiness by sharing his shiny scales with the other fish. It seems like a really basic lesson, but one that anyone who references Ayn Rand novels in their blog titles misses.
The difference between the story of Rainbow Fish and the demented story of throwing acid on Cindy Crawford’s face is that the other fish actually become prettier through his generosity. An important premise in Galt's argument against redistribution is that the government can do absolutely no good with the money it gets from taxation. They might as well be taking money and setting it on fire. But this premise is obviously false.
John Galt became wealthy because he invented and marketed a better metal, without any help from anyone else ever.
Hank Rearden is the metal baron. Galt is the physicist who sets up the nerd hideway in CO where he and the other wankers hide from the cruel world behind a magic cloud and wait for the women to show up to do their housework and beg to fuck them.
32: By and large, I would rather have the primary aim of the government be to make its citizens happy than to make them get what they deserve. Suppose the citizens of a certain country were all happier than they deserve to be, and one policy would make them happier and another less. Which policy should their government adopt?
I don't mean to defend every utility-maximizing principle that runs contrary to desert. But even the undeserving poor should pay lower taxes.
Paging Jacqueline Passey- is there something about being an objectivist chick that makes their self-descriptions so cringe-inducing?
I understand what she means by wealth being relative- if we declared tomorrow that all dollars were actually worth a thousand dollars (and all other currencies in the world as well to keep things even), it wouldn't help that poor people now make 10 million a year because the median wage is now 50 million.
However, she seems to think that wealth redistribution give poor people joy due to seeing rich people put in their place, rather than due to the fact that it allows said poor to eat. Maybe she's describing some middle class psychosis, where once you have enough to meet basic needs you'd feel richer if there weren't other obscenely rich out there and you'd be closer to the top.
43: It is, because it involves surprising a basic moral instinct, something that is probably an evolved psychological module.
Of course, by that standard, my moral views are depraved as well, because I basically favor surprising all intuitions that come from a feeling of moral disgust (at homosexuality, for instance.) It's all reflective equilibrium.
Libertarian economics are pure wankery. In their mind the market is moral, and there's no possibility of exploitation. If owners of capital can get a worker to make something for 15 cents, and turn around and sell it for 10 dollars, well, the owner "deserves" every penny of that profit.
The other reason I can't take libertarians seriously on economics is the complete historical vacuum in which they operate. Hey fuckers, we tried your way already. It's called feudalism, childrern working textile factories, and coal miners dying by 45 of black lung.
Let's query "upper-middle-class." In particular, while I understand why a correlation could exist between good (defined as (non-racially) white, (non-sexually) straight, and all present) teeth, by what causal chain would socio-economic status effect the length or thickness of one's hair?
48- What, you've never seen all those hair-care commercials and the crap they sell in the salon? Or maybe she's just talking about affording nice extensions.
47- Presumably that would include slavery as well? If you can pay someone $1/hr to beat the crap out of 10 people so they make something for free, and you can then sell it for $100, it's all good? Although where does the libertarian objection to government involvement come in- do they object to laws enforcing ownership of slaves, or do they object to laws saying you can't hire people to whip and chain others? (I suspect the latter- the only government libertarians approve of is enforcement of contracts and ownership rights, yes?)
36 - No, libertarians say things like "So, both your children want to use toy X at the same time? Well, obviously the answer is to buy another X." And then look at you blankly when you point out that toy X is in fact a computer, and you can't just buy one. Surely if someone really *wanted* to have enough money to buy unlimited pcs for their family, they'd get it!
I'm on a mailing list about a libertarian theory of education. They honestly do say things like that.
Jane Galt's thoughts are bizarre. Yes, I love the idea of higher taxation for the very rich simply because it would make me happy to see them with less money. That's fucked up.
47: Not being a libertarian, take what I say with a grain of salt, but given the extent to which libertarians privilege property rights and view civil liberties as essentially stemming from same, I'd expect that most of them would object to the ownership of slaves in that it's an abrogration of one's ownership of oneself and one's products. Hayek, f'rinstance, doesn't seem like he'd be down, although John Norman does.
The commenters are too fast: Harrison Bergeron and Jackie 'too many names' Passey came to mind immediately.
so is Vonnegut a good antidote for Randian 'thought?' I've not read much of him: I wonder if lovers of the stiff Randian style can handle the more playful/less direct style of Vonnegut?
DeLong followed with a subtle attack on Marxism. Or not so subtle, or I shouldn't characterize the post, just a very selective excerpt with little editorial addition. His commentere were displeased.
Could the Terror or Whites vs Reds happen here? I don't doubt it.
#18 Smith said that, but the argument was originally from Sir William Petty.
Inequality is bad because it means that some people have very little control over how their life goes, which is a state of being which is known to have bad mental and physical health consequences. If we were all floating around on lilypads eating the grapes brought to us by flower fairies, then I would not be in favour of progressive taxation to redistribute the nicest fairies and the biggest lilypads.
However, we actually live in a capitalist economy, where the very richest of the rich are rich because they have a legal claim on goods produced by the labour of others, a claim which is in the final analysis preserved by the threat of state violence. To dramatise this matter somewhat (and to adapt Marx's famous vampire metaphor), it is rather as if Ms Crawford were preserving her radiant beauty by bathing every day in the blood of 40 virgins. In which case I presume we would ask her to cut down on the virgins' blood, even if this meant that she ended up not being as beautiful as she wanted to be.
The problem is that she's treating wealth as a brute fact, similar to Cindy Crawford's good looks -- but the amount of money in one's bank account is not determined by DNA in the same way as one's height, metabolism, etc.
People should resent rich people, because the best way to become extremely rich is to get people to waste the better part of their adult life working for you and paying them less than they're work, then congratulating yourself on how hard you've worked to become rich. Oh, you can also talk a lot about how all labor contracts are freely entered into, even though such ideas have only a tenuous relationship to reality.
I've been reading liberation theology, and now I'm reading Marx. My incivility is unlikely to let up any time soon.
i've always assumed libertarians & conservatives & other people with funny ideas have different psychologies for people 'out in the world' from those they actually interact with, like family or coworkers. its just never occured to them that people in palestine or poor people or whatever migh actually be like the people they intereact with daily.
btw, McArdle herself is the primary proof that Brad DeLong is right here; you only have to read a few pages of her output to be very sure indeed that she gets quite a lot of psychological pleasure from knowing that there is a poor underclass in existence that she can feel superior to (because she made good life choices stemming from a superior character, natchurally). The primary reason I stopped reading her blog was that I became disgusted with the oleaginous pleasure she seemed to be taking in her descriptions of inner city squalor and fecklessnes. It's positively Lovecraftian.
62: Cindy Bathory had the knights and the castle, and was stopped only because of the usual competitions and power struggles of the nobles.
"Her crimes, arrest, and imprisonment can be seen in the context of a financial wartime power struggle she and her family eventually lost to the Habsburgs. The Bathory family's influence had declined in its base, Transylvania, after their involvement in the Long War with the Turks and subsequent betrayal at the hands of their allies. After her husband's death, the Emperor had refused to pay debts owed to the late "Black Beg". Elizabeth's relative Gabriel Bathory (listed as a brother, cousin, or nephew depending on the source) was involved in anti-Habsburg intrigue following the Long War and she was said to have been linked to these activities[3][4]."
Note that the "marginal utility" argument isn't a prime motivator of redistribution, but rather a counter to a specfic anti-redistribution argument. That is, we want to redistribute income because we find that some people are living in squalor, and yes "squalor" is hand-waving. The objection to redistribution is that you're just stealing from the rich to give to the poor; and the counter to this is that it's ok because, at some margin, it helps poor people far more than it hurts rich people. But this last point is not the reason that we want to redistribute, but a reason that it's allowable. Please insert "some say" as appropriate throughout.
And that's why we're not throwing acid at anyone, nor do we want to.
#18 Smith said that, but the argument was originally from Sir William Petty.
Fair enough, but if you tell a member of the Federalist Society that Sir William Petty favored income taxes, and for what reasons, he will glaze over. Whereas if you remind him that Smith said it, and why, it will make your point.
I grant that there are some cases of redistribution which maximize utility but aren't permissible. It isn't permissible to tax the glum and give to the cheerful, even if that maximizes glee. Nor would it be permissible to start throwing acid, even if the citizenry would enjoy the spectacle.
Still, I would take the 'prime motivator' here to make the citizenry happier. The point about marginal utility explains, in abstract, how this is possible through redistribution, not why it is allowable. I would want to redistribute to the poor in order to make them happier, not for the sake of something else (e.g. justice). Even if there were no squalor, and everyone were living a minimally decent life, it would be permissible to tax the rich more heavily than the poor.
69: Even flat-tax advocates seem to grant that it's permissible to require the rich to pay more tax money in absolute terms, as opposed to there being a "citizen's fee" of a defined monetary value that everyone must pay regardless of income.
Of course, our taxophobia has led to more and more government services being financed through fees and fines, which disproportionately affect the poor. I'm sure that if we looked at the actual financing of government, with taxes, fees, and fines all taken into account, the lower classes would be paying a disproportionately large amount, compared with their collective wealth. In this, government has decided to follow capital's example -- perhaps that's what's meant by "running government like a business."
#68: you are of course right. Petty is an incredibly obscure figure even to economists and I wouldn't have heard of him myself except he's in "Fifty Major Economists" by Stephen Pressman which is a jolly excellent book.
Hey, folks I think, tho I can't speak for him, that DeLong is a historical economist and sincerely fears the Terror. We must incrementally achieve justice,with the caution of scientists.
Now darn, seems to me that the Terror is so unlikely in this country...well, perhaps I should stop before my inner Marat shows. But I fear stasis, an irrevocable economic structure of injustice more than I fear the guillotine. Thirty years of stagnant wages and little political outcry or establishment outrage. We are on our way.
Not quite -- I meant something more like "as libertarians discuss progressive taxation the likelihood of a HB-esque scenario being spun approaches 1" -- but I see I misspoke by writing "mention of the story", making your reading more in keeping with what I wrote, and your reading is probably valid across some subsets of USENET or what have you.
BTW: children of libertarians can end up with severely fucked-up lives -- is this intended as an introduction to some personal revelations?...
I really like the frank admission that wealth is only enjoyable because the rich know other people are in poverty.
(35: Actually I hate that book, and am appalled that you read it to your kid. Sharing is all well and good, but the fish mutilates herself so that the other fish won't be envious? I'd be cooler with the lesson if the fish didn't actually have to take scales from her very body. Even though I realize it's supposed to be a Christian metaphor and everything, but, still. Ick.)
Sharing is all well and good, but the fish mutilates herself so that the other fish won't be envious? I'd be cooler with the lesson if the fish didn't actually have to take scales from her very body. Even though I realize it's supposed to be a Christian metaphor and everything, but, still. Ick.
Can anyone recommend anything short and interesting on the apparent fundamental lack of empathy that characterizes conservative and libertarian political thought?
Aw jeez, teofilo, I think you just linked me to five years of work. I gor EH.net, I got Austrians, I got this page, I got the vast Marxists.org. Thru Marxists somehow Saturday I found a Critical Theory page. I this week downloaded Keynes (3 books, including the bigun) and Dialectic of Enlightenment. I got more Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas than I can shake a mouse at.
Dilettantes have it rough you know. Philosophical Pessimism is attractive because you can say technology, and the social sciences are technology, is irrelevant and read about Medieval Castles and Troubadours and pretend to be educated.
I though I told everybody I stopped reading in 1983. I had my reasons.
77. Mmm, I didn't think of reading it as self mutilation that does mute things a bit. But isn't the fish male?
I have long recognized The Giving Tree as creepy, though, and I believe that is part of the intent of the author. This is the same man who wrote "A Boy Named Sue"
87: I thought it was a she, but who knows. It doesn't really matter--I'm just bugged by the idea of giving things away to buy friends, which seems to be what the story advocates.
When PK was littler, I used to just change the ending, so that the fish, when it discovered everyone else envied it, said something like, "oh! but i get my pretty scales from eating a particular kind of seaweed, i'll show you where it is." Of course, he was too little to realize that the fish was progressively less shiny.
I became disgusted with the oleaginous pleasure she seemed to be taking in her descriptions of inner city squalor and fecklessnes.
This seems to be right of a whole range of libertarian/schmibertarian thinkers.
The irony being, of course, that none of them could cope for 10 minutes if actually placed in that squalor and left to better themselves through their own brilliance.
It's all much of a muchness with their deluded self-belief that they've succeeded in their lives through sheer talent rather than through living in a society structured to their benefit and in which they've been given every advantage.
It is relevant because generosity to the point of self mutilation is coded female in our culture, a fact which The Giving Tree leans on. The fact that Rainbow Fish is male makes me think that there is less weirdness intended by the author, to the extent that he might just say "its only a story about sharing; you're reading into it." Not that he should have the final word, or anything
Well, obviously there are individuals and behaviours I despise more. However, I'm not sure rapists form a proudly self-identifying class in *quite* the same way as libertarians.
And I appear to have been hallucinating, because nobody claimed that the songwriter who came up with The Father of the Boy Named Sue was a Baptist. Mea culpa.
RE: "This does not mean that my $1,000,000th dollar will mean less to me than your first will mean to you. We simply don't have any way to do inter-personal utility comparisons in that way."
I do. It hurts me more to have to wait five extra minutes for the butler to bring me my mojito than it hurts you to be waterboarded and then disemboweled by Donald Rumsfeld.
norbizness is banned -- and weren't the oaks really hurting the other plants by blocking the light? Is it really so wrong to trim them, so that all may live?
I think "ax" is a pretty broad category and encompasses a number of implements of destruction, some of them verging into hatchet territory but generally larger, and that "hatchet" denotes a particular tool.
Wikipædia describes a tomahawk as "a type of axe native to North America, traditionally resembling a hatchet with a straight haft". (This suggests to me that Weiner's 104 is approximately correct.) They originally had stone heads but later on brass and iron were common.
Also: is 'hache' French for 'ax' as this Wikipædia page suggests? Cause if so that makes the notion that a hatchet is "just a small ax" pretty much out-and-out accurate.
This argument itself is idiotic, but there are plenty of colorable libertarianish arguments focusing on the problems of "redistribution" rather than the distribution itself, I.E. regulatory capture and the like. I think what gets you from that to this is a sort of argumentative creep--admitting that the current distribution is borked grants a lot to your adversery, so it's easier to make shitty arguments about how the distribution is really fine rather than the hard technical arguments about how redistribution will make a shitty situation even worse.
These type threads always wierd me out because I have pretty substantial libertarian instincts and I don't *feel* like a wanker. Although I suppose that perception is infinitely susceptable to self-delusion.
So Glenn, you aren't in theory opposed to throwing acid in pretty people's faces, you just worry that it will end up backfiring in some way -- acid splashback on the throwers, that sort of thing?
I was wondering why we didn't seem to have any libertarians here; they're legion elsewhere on the the internet. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with libertarianish tendencies, and the libertarians do make some good points (not very many imo, but reasonable people can differ). The problems come when you take it to insane lengths, as a rather large number of libertarians do.
No, I'm worried that if we acknoweldge the legitimacy of acid-throwing we risk having some very unsavory characters wrest control of the vats and start throwing acid in the wrong direction. Which is pretty much what bush has done, see his tax cuts exhibit one.
That's what makes the Reynolds style of "libertarianism"(needs scarier scare quotes) especially grotesque. Libertarianism is supposed to be about opposing the expansion of governmental power, even if that power could be used to do good things in the short term. Reynolds et. al. are favoring the expansion of governmental power to do unilaterally bad things. That's bad.
Wouldn't it really blow this Jane Galt's mind if someone explained to her that the beauty regime in which Cindy Crawford (as well as Galt herself) exists and hypothetically might attract the ire of potential vitrioleurs or vitrioleuses is itself dependent on patriarchy and capitalist control of the means of production?
I'm about to go to sleep now, but I'm hoping taht tomorrow we can have a discussion of Brad deLong's post in which he talked about being a sensible center-left technocrat who wanted to engage with sensible reality-based center-right technocrats. I was particularly struck by Atrios's reply, though Max Sawicky had some interesting responses too. (I refuse to wade into the comment section at eschaton.)
What I really liked about what Atrios said was that he acknowledged the way that being anti-ideological was itself an ideology.
So what is it that I see in Mrs. Swift? Well, I cannot tell you what exactly, except perhaps it's because she laughs at all of my jokes. For some reason, and I may be wrong about this, I get the distinct impression that there would come a day when [Jacqueline Passey] would turn to me and say, "I don't get it. Is that supposed to be funny?"
Beauty, like wealth, is relative--it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women, or handsomer than the men, around them.
This is just such a fucking stupid question that I find it hard to focus on anything else, or even, honestly, on this comment thread. So, so, so stupid. So priviledged, so the work of somebody who's never actually had to worry about food or shelter.
There is not one damn thing relative about wealth as we know it in the US. Wealth is an absolute ability to NOT HAVE YOUR CHILDREN'S BRAINS POISONED BY LEAD. It is good, nourishing food, it is warm beds, it is educations in schools with smaller class sizes and more qualified teachers. It is your children not having to sign up to be send to the Iraqi meat grinder to pay for higher education. It is time, time with your spouse, with your children, with the things in your life that you find fine.
Taking Mazzaratis and yachts and third homes away from the stupidly rich in order to pay for food, shelter, schooling, and, yes, a civilized amount of lesiure time so that you can have a life with your family, friends, and hobbies is not the same as spoiling Cindy Crawford's looks with acid. It's not even a little like it. I can scarcely imagine the perspective that produces such an assertion.
one link you guys missed is that high-status(cool) guys are both attractive to women, and able to get laughs consistently. bosses & professors are examples, but actually physically attractive guys who are just cooler than the other people they hang out with are laughed at, because they're the leaders of their group, and people follow along when they say something with 'laugh cues'. so some girl likes the guy, and attributes it to humor. then a bunch of other guys try to be funny but shortcircuit out the step of being cool and important.
134: yeah, but even poor people buy status symbol stuff. i'd like a culture where that was discouraged, instead of actively encouraged (for rich&poor both).
The irony being, of course, that none of them could cope for 10 minutes if actually placed in that squalor and left to better themselves through their own brilliance.
ahhh but there's always a just so story about how "there but for the grace of God I too could have gone, had it not been for my intelligence, character and good old-fashioned pluck. I lived among these people for a while, did I tell you that? Just like Diane Fossey".
The really idiotic thing about that Rush song is that this is the whole principle of forestry management. If someone hadn't been planning to harvest the timber at a roughly equal rate, there probably wouldn't have been a forest there in the first place.
Also, maples grow faster than oaks, for fuck's sake. If you planted maples and oaks side by side, it would have been the maples that shaded the oaks. Oak is one of the slowest-growing trees there is.
136: To the extent that that's true, it's like saying, 'We have big problems in our culture in how teenagers and parents interact. Too many teens sass back at their parents and too many parents commit incest with their teenage daughters and knock them up.' Seriously, we have, on the one hand, (I emphasize again) poor children being poisoned with lead paint and pipes because their parents can't afford to move, and then, on the other hand, we have shallow people buying status symbols. These are not comparable problems. They are dissimilar in more ways and more important ways than they are similar.
Yeah, there are often those just-so stories. I love them. Getting into one of those 'come-up hard' pissing contests with libertarians is like taking sweeties from a baby. I've never gotten into one of those competitions I didn't win.
All very infantile of course since their personal narrative is totally irrelevant to the truth of their political position. Still fun though.
re:137
The question is whether the libertarian *aesthetic* can be seperate from liberterian theory. The aesthetic is what gets you all the ayn rand, horatio alger, and technology-as-eschaton crap.
but its the same people who can't move who fall into status seeking behaviour. thats like exactly whey i'm not a libertarian: status just isn't something the rich pursue, we all fall for it. its what everyone is doing, even when it means lead pipes for the kids.
re:139
I think you have the direction of causality reversed. The personal narrative isn't cover for the odious political positions, the political positions are a way of sustaining the coherence of the narrative.
I don't know. I had to set aside a 'self-regard' hour, spent in front of the mirror, every morning for years before I got really good at it.
Even now, if I let my guard slip and my 'chops' weaken through lack of practice, I find myself admitting that lots of good things about my life are a matter of pure blind luck and many of the rest, the result of help from, and cooperation with, other human beings. The price of heroic self-regard is constant vigilance!
well, the reason politics is such a natural foundation to build on is that it appears natural. The substrate of the self-regard is so deeply buried that they themselves are not conscious of it, especially since they are so resistant to any excavation.
I guess my point here is that assholes are assholes. Libertarians may possess a greater ratio of assholes for various sociological reasons, but they are assholes because they are assholes, not because they are libertarians. If a libertarian is not an asshole, he may be right, he may be wrong, but he is worth engaging. This contrasts with most subtypes of modern american conservative, who are assholes in essence as well as in fact.
Libertarians may possess a greater ratio of assholes for various sociological reasons, but they are assholes because they are assholes, not because they are libertarians. If a libertarian is not an asshole, he may be right, he may be wrong, but he is worth engaging.
Agree entirely. I used to write off libertarians as hopelessly naive engineering nerds whose lack of exposure to actual people limited their ability to understand the various issues that arose in the affairs of actual people. But when they (here distinguished from the "schmibertarians") stepped up on civil liberties (in a way that no Republican organization and not that many Democratic organizations did), I started reading some of them, and I realize that my characterization was a caricature. At a minimum, those are people with whom I feel comfortable in political deals.
Worth noting that Jane's all-but-expressly a schmib (or propertarian or whatever). Lumping her in with libertarians like Henley is unfair.
John Holbo very effectively covers some of the 'aesthetics of self-reliance vs. the policies of self-reliance' in an entry over at his (and his wife's) blog. I think it's a very good point that what a lot of libertarians, especially the conservative ones, seem to be more interested in is an aesthetic outcome than a strictly pragmatic one.
Lumping her in with libertarians like Henley is unfair
as with failures of policies of appeasement other than 1938, successful English football teams other than 1966 and Australian pop groups other than INXS, the reason that people always talk about Jim Henley and Julian Sancheze when the subject is "reasonable, humane libertarians" is that they're basically the only examples.
more benign? No. more variable, yes. Conservatives, in their modern republican form, represent a dull, plodding, and predictable type of evil. You know what you are getting with a conservative. You can safely deliver the bphd/dsquared double barreled mixed metaphor broadside to them with little fear that you are gonna hit innocent bystanders.
With a libertarian you have no such guarentee. He might be a Henley-type or he might be a Reynolds type, so you don't get the intellectual freefire zone. I think this is why libertarians piss liberals off so much. They want them to either get with the program or be entirely villifiable. Threads about libertarians at the big liberal blogs are often even nastier than the ones about conservatives. Conservatives are acknowledged as in-theory worse, but they don't earn the same degree of visceral oppobrium.
re: 151
What about reason and the various blogs associated with them? Also, say, Will Wilkinson. Those are the ones I read, and I could come up with others if you asked me.
I think you are suffering from a bad case of sample bias. On the national stage, Libertarians are only gonna get the microphone when they borrow the republicans, which is naturally gonna bias towards the schmibs. The internet is also skewed because of the first mover advantage associated with reynolds and co. and the fact that the whole singularity-techno-eschaton thing predisposes certain subsets toward being early adopters with blogs.
Also, there are libertarians who split the difference between wanker and legit. Tierney is an asshole some, but not all, of the time for example.
I'm with dsquared on this. The vast majority of libertarians are wankers of the schmibertarian school. People like Henley are in a tiny minority.
A neat rhetorical trick the libertarians have pulled is to identify themselves as the party of 'liberty'; when, of course, you find a robust defence of civil liberties from old-school liberals, left-libertarians, anarcho-socialists, anarcho-capitalists, council communists, mutualists, municipalists, some strands of Tory opinion, and huge swathes of old-school social democratic opinion among many others. Without, in many of these cases, the crushing Randian self-delusion and the enthusiastic sucking of capital's cock.
Also, re:
On the national stage, Libertarians are only gonna get the microphone when they borrow the republicans, which is naturally gonna bias towards the schmibs.
Dsquared and I are British. I don't know about dsquared but in my own case I'm fairly sure that the connection between libertarianism and access via republicanism to a particular national stage isn't really a factor since it isn't my nation's stage in question.
I am unfamiliar with the british political scene, so I wanted to avoid generalizing where I wasn't sure I could. I've seen dsquared tool on plenty of american schmibs, plus he cited american libertarians, so I figured I should constrain my comment to the context I was familiar with, where I think it holds.
I also think your comment about the "trick" elides the very distinction I am trying to pinpoint. If we want to define libertarian as being equivilent to propertarian or schmib, that's fine, but then we have a whole bunch of people we need a new term for because they don't fit in any of the existing categories.
That's quite wrong, Matt. I discussed this w a friend just recently. Conservatarian nutcase think tanks are influential all over Europe, despite being completely out of the mainstream, and they that position in large part because they've been so heavily subsidized by corporations. The more consistently antigovernemnt elements are politically marginal. They're in eclipse here and in the UK, but not on the continent or esp. Central Europe.
Merkel flirted w flat taxes in freaking Germany for chrissakes.
Glenn might be right about "Reason"; I've never read that blog because I really (no *really*) can't get past the Matt Furey "Combat Conditioning" ads they have at the top. I don't know who Wil Wilkinson is either.
Personally, I'm pretty comfortable setting the bar of Taking Them Seriously pretty high for case-by-case personal interactions with self-described libertarians. It's not just that 80%+ of them are wankers, which is certainly true. But then there's the fact that the remainder, who would otherwise be reasonable people, feel the need to self-identify as part of a group of people, the vast majority of whom are wankers. Usually, I find, otherwise-reasonable libertarians of the latter stripe have some serious intellectual idea about how liberals want to run your life and big government and taxes and have a strong attraction to the idea of 'limited government' without a concurrent strong idea of what precisely the practical meaning of the phrase is. These are serious oversights if one is to have a conversation about politics and public policy, and so it's an uphill battle for a self-described libertarian to convince me that it's worth my time to talk to them about such things.
151: I think dsquared's overstating it. To the extent that we're talking about libertarians who do not insist in pointing out, with every reference, that taxes are theft, then it seems to me we're really talking about people who (a) are very good on civil liberties, (b) want every government program to be pass a very high justificatory bar, and (c) want a general presumption against the government as Nosey Parker or nanny. That puts them on the wings of the two major parties (which depends on emphasis).
If we're talking about people who insist on voting for Libertarians out of Principle!, yes, they're often annoying and idiotic. That's pretty true of Principled! Dems who are leftier than thou and end up voting for Nader. (A principled Republican being such a rarity, it's more charming than annoying.) I admit that there seem to be a high number of idiots among the libertarians, but I think that's a function of their relative lack of power; no need to conform utopian fantasies to actual governing if you are never going to govern.
I think this thread largely takes flight from a mistake.
McCardle doesn't think the value of beauty is relative. She think's it's like wealth in this way -- the more of it in the world, the better. She's stipulating the opposite for the purpose of her hypothetical, which admittedly, was rhetorically extreme, but which I am surprised was too much for weaker stomachs here. Her point is directed solely against a certain kind of egalitarianism. Namely, one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor. Maybe this view is so crazy that no one here holds it. But I doubt it, frankly.
How framing this hypothetical shows that McCardle herself takes pleasure from the existence of the poor (as suggested by D^2, who really ought to know better) I really can't say.
Also, I think the line suggested by Rob H-C as a justification for redistribution is a mistake: "Wealth redistribution is motivated by the simple fact that the economy is a cooperative enterprise, and thus should benefit all involved."
That's not what motivates me. I think wealth should be redistributed to people who lack the necessities for a flourishing human life even if they have never participated in the economy in any appreceable way (refugees in the Sudan, Amazon tribes, poor people on the moon, should we find them). Maybe I should independently find compelling the proposition that Bill Gates made his money via a collaboration with the nation's homeless, but I hope one need not believe this in order to support significant transfer payments (be they private or public).
one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor
The argument actually made by the people she linked is that reducing the wealth of the rich might be a good thing even if it doesn't increase the wealth of the poor, because the wealth of the rich harms the wealth of the poor; so reducing the wealth of the rich would be a benefit to the poor. I really doubt that anyone here thinks the wealth of the rich should be reduced if it's of absolutely no benefit to anyone.
Consider the DeLong sentence she blockquotes:
I'm enough of a touchy-feely sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor.
Utility transferred from the poor = the poor have less utility = the poor are harmed.
JG may have in mind a different position, but it wouidn't be the first time the position she'd attacked wasn't quite the one her opponents held.
Namely, one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor. Maybe this view is so crazy that no one here holds it. But I doubt it, frankly.
Yeah, see, that's what makes you and McArdle both kind of terrifyingly hostile. Is that really what you think you're arguing against?
Any sane person who advocates redistribution advocates it because it benefits the recipients of the redistribution. You may not agree with their understanding of what benefits the recipients are likely to reap, or how they will come into play, but to suggest that redistribution is in anyone's mind valuable because of the damage it inflicts on the rich rather than because of any benefit to anyone else is a horrifying accusation, and one which reflects a complete misunderstanding of everything liberals stand for.
How framing this hypothetical shows that McCardle herself takes pleasure from the existence of the poor (as suggested by D^2, who really ought to know better) I really can't say.
I don't think that dsquared is making that charge on the basis of this post alone. He says,
"you only have to read a few pages of her output to be very sure indeed that she gets quite a lot of psychological pleasure from knowing that there is a poor underclass in existence that she can feel superior to (because she made good life choices stemming from a superior character, natchurally).
It looks like he's characterizing her worldview based on various previous readings. Best not to misread someone's charge if you're going to scold them for a willful misreading of someone else, baa.
171: Ever since I read this post the little man inside my head has been saying "You're quite hostile" in the voice of the honky dude from It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. Who is the bigger honky, me for gratuitously quoting Public Enemy or you for not getting it, I will leave to the readership.
She on the saner side among the wingnuts, at least supposed to.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:37 PM
The discussion of why inequality is bad seems to have gone off the rails in the exchanges that I've been reading. The libertarians were saying egalitarianism was motivated by envy, and then DeLong defended himself by saying that he was motivated by a hatred of spite, which hardly seems like a firm ground for a tax code.
Really, the cleanest argument for income egalitarianism and a progressive tax code is that an extra dollar gives less happiness to the rich than to the poor. So, for example, $10,000 dollars might make a poor person happy but wouldn't make an appreciable difference to a rich person's life. This is why the rich spend more and more readily than the poor: dollars mean less to them.
Posted by Mike J | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:40 PM
This is just cribbed from "Harrison Bergeron."
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:40 PM
I'm voting Republican
Right decision, wrong reason.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:42 PM
Longer Jane Galt.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:43 PM
1 is one strange sentence.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:44 PM
Bah, dagger beat me to it.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:45 PM
I'm sure this is a naive question to people in the field, but is it really true that weath is relative? Obviously to some extent -- somebody at the top of the heap can hire someone lower down to clean their house/cook their dinner/whatever. But once you get up into the higher levels...eh? Really?
I mean, there having enough to buy your way out of doing unpleasant tasks (which IS relative) and then there is having enough money to basically do whatever you want, all day every day. Once you reach that point, are there any meaningful distinctions between hugely rich and hugely, hugely rich? Bill Gates still gets 24 hours in his day, and he still has only three-score years and ten. If we're talking about redistributing from the top 1%, what on earth are they really going to lose?
Or is this just the kind of political argument that blurs filthy-rich and middle-class aspirational, so that everyone feels equally attacked?
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:48 PM
Harrison Bergeron doesn't have the seething anger or glorious lunacy of Galt's post.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:48 PM
4- really, Idealist? Because of all the (bad) reasons one might vote republican, this is at least (arguably) sensible. If this is the wrong reason, what on earth is the right one?
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:48 PM
Because of all the (bad) reasons one might vote republican, this is at least (arguably) sensible
Throwing acid in Cindy Crawford's face?
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:52 PM
Do I really have to be the one to link to this?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:52 PM
good teeth, long thick hair, and all the other accoutrements of an upper-middle-class upbringing
Where do you even begin to argue with someone who thinks like this?
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:53 PM
9: Not the seething anger, but it does have the glorious lunacy. My memory is faulty (read it twenty years ago), but: that bit where a family is watching a ballet on TV in which some of the dancers are loaded down with weights?
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:55 PM
Also, this: the cleanest argument for income egalitarianism and a progressive tax code is that an extra dollar gives less happiness to the rich than to the poor. So, for example, $10,000 dollars might make a poor person happy but wouldn't make an appreciable difference to a rich person's life.
makes perfect sense to me but most economists would fight you on it tooth and nail. You're reading too much into the declining marginal utility of income. The idea is that (all else equal) each dollar means less to any given individual, so my $1,000,000th dollar this year will mean less to me than my first, but this does not mean that my $1,000,000th dollar will mean less to me than your first will mean to you. We simply don't have any way to do inter-personal utility comparisons in that way. It could theoretically be the case that I experience orgasmic waves of utility buying my 6th porsche this year, while your internal utilometer barely budges when you scrape together a dollar in change to buy yourself a biscuit, the only thing you'll eat all day.
I'm making an argument I don't myself buy, mind you, but it's the standard economic argument nonetheless (at least insofar as one sticks with positive economics).
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:57 PM
15 is an even better illustration of why I could never be an economist.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 12:59 PM
Or is this just the kind of political argument that blurs filthy-rich and middle-class aspirational, so that everyone feels equally attacked?
I think this is the right answer. I remember reading some time ago that people in all economic castes tend to identify with wealthier cases when it comes to their perceived tax burden, but identify with the middle class (or lower castes) when assessing their own wealth. I'd have an even bigger boat than Mr. Jones, but for the incredible tax squeeze on middle-class guys like myself.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:00 PM
I thought the cleanest argument for taxing the rich was that old radical Adam Smith's:
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:00 PM
isn't the problem just that beauty isn't purely relative?
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:00 PM
15 was me.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:03 PM
Yes, we see that.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:04 PM
She on the saner side among the wingnuts, at least supposed to.
She's really not. She's just less self-consciously mean-spirited about it.
I expect this from Labs, LB, but not from you.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:04 PM
Rawls thought that the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons was just like the problem of other minds. If so, it's just as unpersuasive, from a practical point of view. It's not like it's impossible to figure out whether someone is happy. Anyway, no axiom in economics is more plausible than the principle that (ceteris paribus) $100 makes more difference to a pauper than to a billionaire.
Posted by Mike J | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:05 PM
Didn't LB once have a post wondering what libertarians really think? This is what libertarians really think.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:12 PM
I see 20 was unnecessary. Sorry.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:12 PM
I'm not even sure why I linked this. I just read it and was rocked back a bit: You think I want to scar Cindy Crawford's face? You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
Wow.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:18 PM
You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
Snark aside, this really is more or less what libertarians think.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:21 PM
Acid, in its finite chemistry, scars the faces of rich and poor alike.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:24 PM
26
You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
Of course she does- your real worth is directly proportional to your net worth, don't you know? Your redistribution schemes are tantamount to defacing the beautiful edifice of the wealth of the wealthy... uh... not sure I can continue in this vein.
Posted by TJ | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:30 PM
I'm pretty much with 18. Redistributional policy isn't primarily a good idea because of marginal curves, it's a good idea because helping people that need help is the right thing to do. Of course, there's little defending that beyond "cause I said so".
15 is certainly right in what is stated, but makes the huge omission of not recognizing that there's lots of good, useful social science that's not economics. And you can look at those sorts of interpersonal questions with tools like psychology. (Or some other flaky field. heh.)
Posted by ptm | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:33 PM
Snark aside, this really is more or less what libertarians think.
I don't think that's true. I think Mike J is right that DeLong took the conversation down a strange road (AFAIK; I haven't really followed it). It is a pretty weak argument for redistribution, and I think there are better arguments available. (I suspect that the conversation started on a narrow point, and then moved, untethered.) And I suspect that Jim Henley would agree with the point the Galt is making about this argument without agreeing as to the force of her rhetoric.
(NB: I'm slightly in the tank for libertarians (rather than schmibertarians) post-Padilla.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:35 PM
The argument from marginal utility is strong, and can be backed up by plenty of evidence from empirical psychology, but it still concedes too much to the libertarians.
The impulse to fairness is not some indirect way of calculating utility, it is a deeply rooted part of moral psychology. We have an instinctive sense that cooperative ventures should be designed so that they benefit everyone involved. If someone is working in a cooperative operation, and not gaining from it, we intuitively think they are exploited. This instinct can be refined by different rules--should people be compensated according to their effort? Their actual results? None of these refinements can keep us from thinking, though, that radical disparities in benefits are evidence of exploitation. Without this kind of moral instinct, cooperation, and with it human society would be largely impossible.
Wealth redistribution is motivated by the simple fact that the economy is a cooperative enterprise, and thus should benefit all involved. Libertarians short circuit this argument by pretending the wealthy attain their wealth entirely on their own. Jane’s fictional hero John Galt became wealthy because he invented and marketed a better metal, without any help from anyone else ever. In the Randian world, there are no real cooperative ventures. Even families are despised. As a result, fairness simply ceases to be a moral principle.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:36 PM
Beauty, like wealth, is relative--it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women...
I appreciate writers who pause once and awhile to reflect on what they have written. You know, just to check for embarrsingly wrong statements.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:44 PM
I'm slightly in the tank for libertarians (rather than schmibertarians) post-Padilla.
Don't get me wrong, libertarians are great on civil liberties. But on economic issues this sort of thing is where they're coming from (although I grant that not every libertarian is going to put it the way Galt does).
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:44 PM
My kids like me to read themthis book about a beautiful fish with shiny scales, who finds happiness by sharing his shiny scales with the other fish. It seems like a really basic lesson, but one that anyone who references Ayn Rand novels in their blog titles misses.
The difference between the story of Rainbow Fish and the demented story of throwing acid on Cindy Crawford’s face is that the other fish actually become prettier through his generosity. An important premise in Galt's argument against redistribution is that the government can do absolutely no good with the money it gets from taxation. They might as well be taking money and setting it on fire. But this premise is obviously false.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:45 PM
Honestly, I don't understand how libertarians ever manage to raise children. Don't they tell their children to share their toys?
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:46 PM
But this premise is obviously false.
False, but, again, rather important to libertarianism.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:46 PM
36: The children of libertarians can end up with severely fucked-up lives. Trust me on this.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:47 PM
John Galt became wealthy because he invented and marketed a better metal, without any help from anyone else ever.
Hank Rearden is the metal baron. Galt is the physicist who sets up the nerd hideway in CO where he and the other wankers hide from the cruel world behind a magic cloud and wait for the women to show up to do their housework and beg to fuck them.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:50 PM
39: Jesus. I'm glad I never read the thing.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:52 PM
32: By and large, I would rather have the primary aim of the government be to make its citizens happy than to make them get what they deserve. Suppose the citizens of a certain country were all happier than they deserve to be, and one policy would make them happier and another less. Which policy should their government adopt?
I don't mean to defend every utility-maximizing principle that runs contrary to desert. But even the undeserving poor should pay lower taxes.
Posted by Mike J | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:52 PM
39: Oops. My point still stands.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:57 PM
The view Jane Galt espouses is completely morally depraved.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 1:58 PM
Paging Jacqueline Passey- is there something about being an objectivist chick that makes their self-descriptions so cringe-inducing?
I understand what she means by wealth being relative- if we declared tomorrow that all dollars were actually worth a thousand dollars (and all other currencies in the world as well to keep things even), it wouldn't help that poor people now make 10 million a year because the median wage is now 50 million.
However, she seems to think that wealth redistribution give poor people joy due to seeing rich people put in their place, rather than due to the fact that it allows said poor to eat. Maybe she's describing some middle class psychosis, where once you have enough to meet basic needs you'd feel richer if there weren't other obscenely rich out there and you'd be closer to the top.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:00 PM
43: It is, because it involves surprising a basic moral instinct, something that is probably an evolved psychological module.
Of course, by that standard, my moral views are depraved as well, because I basically favor surprising all intuitions that come from a feeling of moral disgust (at homosexuality, for instance.) It's all reflective equilibrium.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:02 PM
"Surprising"?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:03 PM
Libertarian economics are pure wankery. In their mind the market is moral, and there's no possibility of exploitation. If owners of capital can get a worker to make something for 15 cents, and turn around and sell it for 10 dollars, well, the owner "deserves" every penny of that profit.
The other reason I can't take libertarians seriously on economics is the complete historical vacuum in which they operate. Hey fuckers, we tried your way already. It's called feudalism, childrern working textile factories, and coal miners dying by 45 of black lung.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:04 PM
Let's query "upper-middle-class." In particular, while I understand why a correlation could exist between good (defined as (non-racially) white, (non-sexually) straight, and all present) teeth, by what causal chain would socio-economic status effect the length or thickness of one's hair?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:04 PM
46: Shit, a spell check mistake
should be "suppressing"
I meant to replace a typo with the second option the computer gave me, but accidentally used the first.
I'm having a rough day over here.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:07 PM
While reading this thread I have been listening to ABBA's "Money, Money, Money." Awesome.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:08 PM
47 - I concur with your second point.
Posted by ptm | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:10 PM
48- What, you've never seen all those hair-care commercials and the crap they sell in the salon? Or maybe she's just talking about affording nice extensions.
47- Presumably that would include slavery as well? If you can pay someone $1/hr to beat the crap out of 10 people so they make something for free, and you can then sell it for $100, it's all good? Although where does the libertarian objection to government involvement come in- do they object to laws enforcing ownership of slaves, or do they object to laws saying you can't hire people to whip and chain others? (I suspect the latter- the only government libertarians approve of is enforcement of contracts and ownership rights, yes?)
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:10 PM
39: You forgot his magical free-energy device. That's important, damn it.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:11 PM
36 - No, libertarians say things like "So, both your children want to use toy X at the same time? Well, obviously the answer is to buy another X." And then look at you blankly when you point out that toy X is in fact a computer, and you can't just buy one. Surely if someone really *wanted* to have enough money to buy unlimited pcs for their family, they'd get it!
I'm on a mailing list about a libertarian theory of education. They honestly do say things like that.
Jane Galt's thoughts are bizarre. Yes, I love the idea of higher taxation for the very rich simply because it would make me happy to see them with less money. That's fucked up.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:13 PM
47: Not being a libertarian, take what I say with a grain of salt, but given the extent to which libertarians privilege property rights and view civil liberties as essentially stemming from same, I'd expect that most of them would object to the ownership of slaves in that it's an abrogration of one's ownership of oneself and one's products. Hayek, f'rinstance, doesn't seem like he'd be down, although John Norman does.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:15 PM
Hayek wasn't really a libertarian, was he.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:17 PM
55,
Slavery = Bad.
Indentured Servitude = teh awesome.
Posted by TJ | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:20 PM
In the U.S., Hayek is usually described as a "libertarian", but the denomination that he preferred was "Old Whig" (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke).
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:23 PM
The commenters are too fast: Harrison Bergeron and Jackie 'too many names' Passey came to mind immediately.
so is Vonnegut a good antidote for Randian 'thought?' I've not read much of him: I wonder if lovers of the stiff Randian style can handle the more playful/less direct style of Vonnegut?
Posted by paul | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:33 PM
Brad DeLong responds to Galt and Mankiw
The best thing in this post in James Galbraith channeling Veblen in the comments.
Main Currents of Marxism
DeLong followed with a subtle attack on Marxism. Or not so subtle, or I shouldn't characterize the post, just a very selective excerpt with little editorial addition. His commentere were displeased.
Could the Terror or Whites vs Reds happen here? I don't doubt it.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:35 PM
how the fuck was feudalism anything like libertarian paradise? 'gold rush boom town wild west' seem more like what they're going for.
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:44 PM
#18 Smith said that, but the argument was originally from Sir William Petty.
Inequality is bad because it means that some people have very little control over how their life goes, which is a state of being which is known to have bad mental and physical health consequences. If we were all floating around on lilypads eating the grapes brought to us by flower fairies, then I would not be in favour of progressive taxation to redistribute the nicest fairies and the biggest lilypads.
However, we actually live in a capitalist economy, where the very richest of the rich are rich because they have a legal claim on goods produced by the labour of others, a claim which is in the final analysis preserved by the threat of state violence. To dramatise this matter somewhat (and to adapt Marx's famous vampire metaphor), it is rather as if Ms Crawford were preserving her radiant beauty by bathing every day in the blood of 40 virgins. In which case I presume we would ask her to cut down on the virgins' blood, even if this meant that she ended up not being as beautiful as she wanted to be.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:45 PM
The problem is that she's treating wealth as a brute fact, similar to Cindy Crawford's good looks -- but the amount of money in one's bank account is not determined by DNA in the same way as one's height, metabolism, etc.
People should resent rich people, because the best way to become extremely rich is to get people to waste the better part of their adult life working for you and paying them less than they're work, then congratulating yourself on how hard you've worked to become rich. Oh, you can also talk a lot about how all labor contracts are freely entered into, even though such ideas have only a tenuous relationship to reality.
I've been reading liberation theology, and now I'm reading Marx. My incivility is unlikely to let up any time soon.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:46 PM
i've always assumed libertarians & conservatives & other people with funny ideas have different psychologies for people 'out in the world' from those they actually interact with, like family or coworkers. its just never occured to them that people in palestine or poor people or whatever migh actually be like the people they intereact with daily.
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:46 PM
btw, McArdle herself is the primary proof that Brad DeLong is right here; you only have to read a few pages of her output to be very sure indeed that she gets quite a lot of psychological pleasure from knowing that there is a poor underclass in existence that she can feel superior to (because she made good life choices stemming from a superior character, natchurally). The primary reason I stopped reading her blog was that I became disgusted with the oleaginous pleasure she seemed to be taking in her descriptions of inner city squalor and fecklessnes. It's positively Lovecraftian.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:50 PM
62: Cindy Bathory had the knights and the castle, and was stopped only because of the usual competitions and power struggles of the nobles.
"Her crimes, arrest, and imprisonment can be seen in the context of a financial wartime power struggle she and her family eventually lost to the Habsburgs. The Bathory family's influence had declined in its base, Transylvania, after their involvement in the Long War with the Turks and subsequent betrayal at the hands of their allies. After her husband's death, the Emperor had refused to pay debts owed to the late "Black Beg". Elizabeth's relative Gabriel Bathory (listed as a brother, cousin, or nephew depending on the source) was involved in anti-Habsburg intrigue following the Long War and she was said to have been linked to these activities[3][4]."
Peasants be damned, ya know. Just food.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 2:55 PM
Note that the "marginal utility" argument isn't a prime motivator of redistribution, but rather a counter to a specfic anti-redistribution argument. That is, we want to redistribute income because we find that some people are living in squalor, and yes "squalor" is hand-waving. The objection to redistribution is that you're just stealing from the rich to give to the poor; and the counter to this is that it's ok because, at some margin, it helps poor people far more than it hurts rich people. But this last point is not the reason that we want to redistribute, but a reason that it's allowable. Please insert "some say" as appropriate throughout.
And that's why we're not throwing acid at anyone, nor do we want to.
Posted by DonBoy | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 3:03 PM
#18 Smith said that, but the argument was originally from Sir William Petty.
Fair enough, but if you tell a member of the Federalist Society that Sir William Petty favored income taxes, and for what reasons, he will glaze over. Whereas if you remind him that Smith said it, and why, it will make your point.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 3:16 PM
I grant that there are some cases of redistribution which maximize utility but aren't permissible. It isn't permissible to tax the glum and give to the cheerful, even if that maximizes glee. Nor would it be permissible to start throwing acid, even if the citizenry would enjoy the spectacle.
Still, I would take the 'prime motivator' here to make the citizenry happier. The point about marginal utility explains, in abstract, how this is possible through redistribution, not why it is allowable. I would want to redistribute to the poor in order to make them happier, not for the sake of something else (e.g. justice). Even if there were no squalor, and everyone were living a minimally decent life, it would be permissible to tax the rich more heavily than the poor.
Posted by Mike J. | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 3:22 PM
69: Even flat-tax advocates seem to grant that it's permissible to require the rich to pay more tax money in absolute terms, as opposed to there being a "citizen's fee" of a defined monetary value that everyone must pay regardless of income.
Of course, our taxophobia has led to more and more government services being financed through fees and fines, which disproportionately affect the poor. I'm sure that if we looked at the actual financing of government, with taxes, fees, and fines all taken into account, the lower classes would be paying a disproportionately large amount, compared with their collective wealth. In this, government has decided to follow capital's example -- perhaps that's what's meant by "running government like a business."
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 3:28 PM
#68: you are of course right. Petty is an incredibly obscure figure even to economists and I wouldn't have heard of him myself except he's in "Fifty Major Economists" by Stephen Pressman which is a jolly excellent book.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 3:39 PM
This post from DeLong sure has generated the responses...
Reality Based Technocrat
Atrios
On Inequality ...Yglesias
Fear of a Populist Planet ...Sawicky
Hey, folks I think, tho I can't speak for him, that DeLong is a historical economist and sincerely fears the Terror. We must incrementally achieve justice,with the caution of scientists.
Now darn, seems to me that the Terror is so unlikely in this country...well, perhaps I should stop before my inner Marat shows. But I fear stasis, an irrevocable economic structure of injustice more than I fear the guillotine. Thirty years of stagnant wages and little political outcry or establishment outrage. We are on our way.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 4:10 PM
You know who was an interesting guy? Pareto.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 4:19 PM
Isn't there a version of or corollary to Godwin's Law that deals with mention of the story "Harrison Bergeron"?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 4:29 PM
What, something like "as liberals discuss libertarian economic views the probability of someone mentioning HB approaches 1"?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 4:32 PM
Not quite -- I meant something more like "as libertarians discuss progressive taxation the likelihood of a HB-esque scenario being spun approaches 1" -- but I see I misspoke by writing "mention of the story", making your reading more in keeping with what I wrote, and your reading is probably valid across some subsets of USENET or what have you.
BTW: children of libertarians can end up with severely fucked-up lives -- is this intended as an introduction to some personal revelations?...
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 4:43 PM
I really like the frank admission that wealth is only enjoyable because the rich know other people are in poverty.
(35: Actually I hate that book, and am appalled that you read it to your kid. Sharing is all well and good, but the fish mutilates herself so that the other fish won't be envious? I'd be cooler with the lesson if the fish didn't actually have to take scales from her very body. Even though I realize it's supposed to be a Christian metaphor and everything, but, still. Ick.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 4:54 PM
is this intended as an introduction to some personal revelations?...
Not personal per se, but similar. I might do a post on this.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:01 PM
Sharing is all well and good, but the fish mutilates herself so that the other fish won't be envious? I'd be cooler with the lesson if the fish didn't actually have to take scales from her very body. Even though I realize it's supposed to be a Christian metaphor and everything, but, still. Ick.
I bet you hate The Giving Tree too.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:08 PM
The Giving Tree always struck me as creepy.
Can anyone recommend anything short and interesting on the apparent fundamental lack of empathy that characterizes conservative and libertarian political thought?
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:12 PM
LB agrees.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:17 PM
Aw jeez, teofilo, I think you just linked me to five years of work. I gor EH.net, I got Austrians, I got this page, I got the vast Marxists.org. Thru Marxists somehow Saturday I found a Critical Theory page. I this week downloaded Keynes (3 books, including the bigun) and Dialectic of Enlightenment. I got more Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas than I can shake a mouse at.
Dilettantes have it rough you know. Philosophical Pessimism is attractive because you can say technology, and the social sciences are technology, is irrelevant and read about Medieval Castles and Troubadours and pretend to be educated.
I though I told everybody I stopped reading in 1983. I had my reasons.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:21 PM
I forgot my good line. There is as much economics online as porn. I swear.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:24 PM
Dilettantes have it rough you know.
(grin)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:26 PM
I keep trying to figure out how much of her schtick is ambition-driven and how much is quasi-Randoid true belief.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:31 PM
79: You know me so well.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:31 PM
77. Mmm, I didn't think of reading it as self mutilation that does mute things a bit. But isn't the fish male?
I have long recognized The Giving Tree as creepy, though, and I believe that is part of the intent of the author. This is the same man who wrote "A Boy Named Sue"
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:36 PM
But isn't the fish male?
I fail to see how this matters.
This is the same man who wrote "A Boy Named Sue"
I believe this also comes up in the thread I linked in 81. That was a good thread.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:37 PM
87: I thought it was a she, but who knows. It doesn't really matter--I'm just bugged by the idea of giving things away to buy friends, which seems to be what the story advocates.
When PK was littler, I used to just change the ending, so that the fish, when it discovered everyone else envied it, said something like, "oh! but i get my pretty scales from eating a particular kind of seaweed, i'll show you where it is." Of course, he was too little to realize that the fish was progressively less shiny.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:46 PM
I became disgusted with the oleaginous pleasure she seemed to be taking in her descriptions of inner city squalor and fecklessnes.
This seems to be right of a whole range of libertarian/schmibertarian thinkers.
The irony being, of course, that none of them could cope for 10 minutes if actually placed in that squalor and left to better themselves through their own brilliance.
It's all much of a muchness with their deluded self-belief that they've succeeded in their lives through sheer talent rather than through living in a society structured to their benefit and in which they've been given every advantage.
It's hard to think of a group I despise more.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 5:58 PM
It's hard to think of a group I despise more.
What about Nazis? Or rapists? Or Republicans?
Posted by Mike J. | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:06 PM
Or Welshmen?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:07 PM
When PK was littler
I totally read this as "When PK was Hitler" and was about to invoke Godwin on your ass.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:18 PM
Shel Silverstein was a Southern Baptist? That goes oddly with my image of him as a songwriter.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:23 PM
The fish is male. I'm looking at the book now.
It is relevant because generosity to the point of self mutilation is coded female in our culture, a fact which The Giving Tree leans on. The fact that Rainbow Fish is male makes me think that there is less weirdness intended by the author, to the extent that he might just say "its only a story about sharing; you're reading into it." Not that he should have the final word, or anything
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:25 PM
re: 91
Well, obviously there are individuals and behaviours I despise more. However, I'm not sure rapists form a proudly self-identifying class in *quite* the same way as libertarians.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:25 PM
Shel Silverstein was not a Southern Baptist.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:31 PM
a great song
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:35 PM
"The trees are all kept equal... with hatchet.. axe.. and SAW!"
Posted by norbizness | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:39 PM
And I appear to have been hallucinating, because nobody claimed that the songwriter who came up with The Father of the Boy Named Sue was a Baptist. Mea culpa.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:40 PM
RE: "This does not mean that my $1,000,000th dollar will mean less to me than your first will mean to you. We simply don't have any way to do inter-personal utility comparisons in that way."
I do. It hurts me more to have to wait five extra minutes for the butler to bring me my mojito than it hurts you to be waterboarded and then disemboweled by Donald Rumsfeld.
Capiche?
Posted by John Galt | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:44 PM
Who is John Galt?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:50 PM
(I swear I haven't read that book.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:51 PM
norbizness is banned -- and weren't the oaks really hurting the other plants by blocking the light? Is it really so wrong to trim them, so that all may live?
Also, isn't a hatchet just a small axe?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 6:55 PM
Don't ask me, Matt, Neil Peart's Illusionist-era handlebar moustache was writing lyrics for the group back then.
Posted by norbizness | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:15 PM
isn't a hatchet just a small axe?
Isn't an island just a small continent?
They look similar, but they are wielded for different purposes (mainly, trimming branches vs. splitting logs).
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:25 PM
I think you could probably split a log with an island, provided you handled it right.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:27 PM
You could, sure, but proper shillelagh technique gets tricky with something so small.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:32 PM
I think "ax" is a pretty broad category and encompasses a number of implements of destruction, some of them verging into hatchet territory but generally larger, and that "hatchet" denotes a particular tool.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:44 PM
And where do tomahawks fit in?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:46 PM
Don't tomahawks have stone heads? I thought they did anyway. Will go look and find out.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:49 PM
Wikipædia describes a tomahawk as "a type of axe native to North America, traditionally resembling a hatchet with a straight haft". (This suggests to me that Weiner's 104 is approximately correct.) They originally had stone heads but later on brass and iron were common.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:53 PM
Also: is 'hache' French for 'ax' as this Wikipædia page suggests? Cause if so that makes the notion that a hatchet is "just a small ax" pretty much out-and-out accurate.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:56 PM
ARTFL says yes.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 7:59 PM
Even a small axe is still used for cutting down trees rather than trimming them.
(For those keeping track at home, Rush sucks, and Marley is actually great even though Marley fans are annoying. So the pro-equality side wins.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:00 PM
My former roommate was a really by-the-book Ayn Rand libertarian type, now he's literally on public assistance. Ironic?
Speaking of The Giving Tree, a book I love, have you seen this? http://www.worth1000.com/emailthis.asp?entry=13824
Posted by Stroll | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:01 PM
This argument itself is idiotic, but there are plenty of colorable libertarianish arguments focusing on the problems of "redistribution" rather than the distribution itself, I.E. regulatory capture and the like. I think what gets you from that to this is a sort of argumentative creep--admitting that the current distribution is borked grants a lot to your adversery, so it's easier to make shitty arguments about how the distribution is really fine rather than the hard technical arguments about how redistribution will make a shitty situation even worse.
These type threads always wierd me out because I have pretty substantial libertarian instincts and I don't *feel* like a wanker. Although I suppose that perception is infinitely susceptable to self-delusion.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:11 PM
So Glenn, you aren't in theory opposed to throwing acid in pretty people's faces, you just worry that it will end up backfiring in some way -- acid splashback on the throwers, that sort of thing?
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:16 PM
You do not, ideally, use a hatchet for splitting logs. For that you want a maul.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:19 PM
I was wondering why we didn't seem to have any libertarians here; they're legion elsewhere on the the internet. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with libertarianish tendencies, and the libertarians do make some good points (not very many imo, but reasonable people can differ). The problems come when you take it to insane lengths, as a rather large number of libertarians do.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:19 PM
119 -- I think 106 was suggesting that the proper use for a hatchet was trimming branches, not splitting logs.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:21 PM
"The trees are all kept equal... with hatchet.. axe.. and SAW!"
As a pimply kid I heard this as a rallying cry for Marxist revolution. Rush will lead us in the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie!
Posted by strasmangular me | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:22 PM
119: Or, you know, a chainsaw.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:24 PM
No, I'm worried that if we acknoweldge the legitimacy of acid-throwing we risk having some very unsavory characters wrest control of the vats and start throwing acid in the wrong direction. Which is pretty much what bush has done, see his tax cuts exhibit one.
That's what makes the Reynolds style of "libertarianism"(needs scarier scare quotes) especially grotesque. Libertarianism is supposed to be about opposing the expansion of governmental power, even if that power could be used to do good things in the short term. Reynolds et. al. are favoring the expansion of governmental power to do unilaterally bad things. That's bad.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:25 PM
123 -- chainsaw seems like a really clumsy tool for splitting -- doesn't it work much better crosscutting?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:25 PM
Yes.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:27 PM
I confess that I've never split a log with anything. Or crosscut one, for that matter.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:28 PM
I was wondering why we didn't seem to have any libertarians here
They smell funny.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:32 PM
Wouldn't it really blow this Jane Galt's mind if someone explained to her that the beauty regime in which Cindy Crawford (as well as Galt herself) exists and hypothetically might attract the ire of potential vitrioleurs or vitrioleuses is itself dependent on patriarchy and capitalist control of the means of production?
Posted by minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:38 PM
Probably not, no.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 8:49 PM
I'm about to go to sleep now, but I'm hoping taht tomorrow we can have a discussion of Brad deLong's post in which he talked about being a sensible center-left technocrat who wanted to engage with sensible reality-based center-right technocrats. I was particularly struck by Atrios's reply, though Max Sawicky had some interesting responses too. (I refuse to wade into the comment section at eschaton.)
What I really liked about what Atrios said was that he acknowledged the way that being anti-ideological was itself an ideology.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 9:01 PM
129: and acid.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 9:03 PM
So, Sisyphus Shrugged (linking here), links to this Jon Swift dude, who apparently fits the mold:
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09- 4-06 9:23 PM
Beauty, like wealth, is relative--it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women, or handsomer than the men, around them.
This is just such a fucking stupid question that I find it hard to focus on anything else, or even, honestly, on this comment thread. So, so, so stupid. So priviledged, so the work of somebody who's never actually had to worry about food or shelter.
There is not one damn thing relative about wealth as we know it in the US. Wealth is an absolute ability to NOT HAVE YOUR CHILDREN'S BRAINS POISONED BY LEAD. It is good, nourishing food, it is warm beds, it is educations in schools with smaller class sizes and more qualified teachers. It is your children not having to sign up to be send to the Iraqi meat grinder to pay for higher education. It is time, time with your spouse, with your children, with the things in your life that you find fine.
Taking Mazzaratis and yachts and third homes away from the stupidly rich in order to pay for food, shelter, schooling, and, yes, a civilized amount of lesiure time so that you can have a life with your family, friends, and hobbies is not the same as spoiling Cindy Crawford's looks with acid. It's not even a little like it. I can scarcely imagine the perspective that produces such an assertion.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:08 AM
For the Humor thread referenced in 133:
one link you guys missed is that high-status(cool) guys are both attractive to women, and able to get laughs consistently. bosses & professors are examples, but actually physically attractive guys who are just cooler than the other people they hang out with are laughed at, because they're the leaders of their group, and people follow along when they say something with 'laugh cues'. so some girl likes the guy, and attributes it to humor. then a bunch of other guys try to be funny but shortcircuit out the step of being cool and important.
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:22 AM
134: yeah, but even poor people buy status symbol stuff. i'd like a culture where that was discouraged, instead of actively encouraged (for rich&poor both).
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:25 AM
The irony being, of course, that none of them could cope for 10 minutes if actually placed in that squalor and left to better themselves through their own brilliance.
ahhh but there's always a just so story about how "there but for the grace of God I too could have gone, had it not been for my intelligence, character and good old-fashioned pluck. I lived among these people for a while, did I tell you that? Just like Diane Fossey".
The really idiotic thing about that Rush song is that this is the whole principle of forestry management. If someone hadn't been planning to harvest the timber at a roughly equal rate, there probably wouldn't have been a forest there in the first place.
Also, maples grow faster than oaks, for fuck's sake. If you planted maples and oaks side by side, it would have been the maples that shaded the oaks. Oak is one of the slowest-growing trees there is.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:32 AM
136: To the extent that that's true, it's like saying, 'We have big problems in our culture in how teenagers and parents interact. Too many teens sass back at their parents and too many parents commit incest with their teenage daughters and knock them up.' Seriously, we have, on the one hand, (I emphasize again) poor children being poisoned with lead paint and pipes because their parents can't afford to move, and then, on the other hand, we have shallow people buying status symbols. These are not comparable problems. They are dissimilar in more ways and more important ways than they are similar.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:33 AM
re: 137
Yeah, there are often those just-so stories. I love them. Getting into one of those 'come-up hard' pissing contests with libertarians is like taking sweeties from a baby. I've never gotten into one of those competitions I didn't win.
All very infantile of course since their personal narrative is totally irrelevant to the truth of their political position. Still fun though.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:40 AM
re:137
The question is whether the libertarian *aesthetic* can be seperate from liberterian theory. The aesthetic is what gets you all the ayn rand, horatio alger, and technology-as-eschaton crap.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:41 AM
but its the same people who can't move who fall into status seeking behaviour. thats like exactly whey i'm not a libertarian: status just isn't something the rich pursue, we all fall for it. its what everyone is doing, even when it means lead pipes for the kids.
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:43 AM
re:139
I think you have the direction of causality reversed. The personal narrative isn't cover for the odious political positions, the political positions are a way of sustaining the coherence of the narrative.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:48 AM
its probably more of an outgrowth of the narrative that happens when the person starts thinking abotu politics.
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 12:53 AM
re: 142
Yes, I suspect there is something to that. Libertarianism for some of these people does seem to be a way of sustaining a certain heroic self-regard.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:00 AM
heroic self-regard usually seems stunningly effortlessly achieved though.
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:10 AM
re: 145
I don't know. I had to set aside a 'self-regard' hour, spent in front of the mirror, every morning for years before I got really good at it.
Even now, if I let my guard slip and my 'chops' weaken through lack of practice, I find myself admitting that lots of good things about my life are a matter of pure blind luck and many of the rest, the result of help from, and cooperation with, other human beings. The price of heroic self-regard is constant vigilance!
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:14 AM
well, the reason politics is such a natural foundation to build on is that it appears natural. The substrate of the self-regard is so deeply buried that they themselves are not conscious of it, especially since they are so resistant to any excavation.
I guess my point here is that assholes are assholes. Libertarians may possess a greater ratio of assholes for various sociological reasons, but they are assholes because they are assholes, not because they are libertarians. If a libertarian is not an asshole, he may be right, he may be wrong, but he is worth engaging. This contrasts with most subtypes of modern american conservative, who are assholes in essence as well as in fact.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:20 AM
So libertariansare generally more benign than conservatism? I can't agree with that.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:26 AM
Libertarians may possess a greater ratio of assholes for various sociological reasons, but they are assholes because they are assholes, not because they are libertarians. If a libertarian is not an asshole, he may be right, he may be wrong, but he is worth engaging.
Agree entirely. I used to write off libertarians as hopelessly naive engineering nerds whose lack of exposure to actual people limited their ability to understand the various issues that arose in the affairs of actual people. But when they (here distinguished from the "schmibertarians") stepped up on civil liberties (in a way that no Republican organization and not that many Democratic organizations did), I started reading some of them, and I realize that my characterization was a caricature. At a minimum, those are people with whom I feel comfortable in political deals.
Worth noting that Jane's all-but-expressly a schmib (or propertarian or whatever). Lumping her in with libertarians like Henley is unfair.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:33 AM
John Holbo very effectively covers some of the 'aesthetics of self-reliance vs. the policies of self-reliance' in an entry over at his (and his wife's) blog. I think it's a very good point that what a lot of libertarians, especially the conservative ones, seem to be more interested in is an aesthetic outcome than a strictly pragmatic one.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:49 AM
Lumping her in with libertarians like Henley is unfair
as with failures of policies of appeasement other than 1938, successful English football teams other than 1966 and Australian pop groups other than INXS, the reason that people always talk about Jim Henley and Julian Sancheze when the subject is "reasonable, humane libertarians" is that they're basically the only examples.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:53 AM
more benign? No. more variable, yes. Conservatives, in their modern republican form, represent a dull, plodding, and predictable type of evil. You know what you are getting with a conservative. You can safely deliver the bphd/dsquared double barreled mixed metaphor broadside to them with little fear that you are gonna hit innocent bystanders.
With a libertarian you have no such guarentee. He might be a Henley-type or he might be a Reynolds type, so you don't get the intellectual freefire zone. I think this is why libertarians piss liberals off so much. They want them to either get with the program or be entirely villifiable. Threads about libertarians at the big liberal blogs are often even nastier than the ones about conservatives. Conservatives are acknowledged as in-theory worse, but they don't earn the same degree of visceral oppobrium.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 1:58 AM
re: 151
What about reason and the various blogs associated with them? Also, say, Will Wilkinson. Those are the ones I read, and I could come up with others if you asked me.
I think you are suffering from a bad case of sample bias. On the national stage, Libertarians are only gonna get the microphone when they borrow the republicans, which is naturally gonna bias towards the schmibs. The internet is also skewed because of the first mover advantage associated with reynolds and co. and the fact that the whole singularity-techno-eschaton thing predisposes certain subsets toward being early adopters with blogs.
Also, there are libertarians who split the difference between wanker and legit. Tierney is an asshole some, but not all, of the time for example.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:10 AM
I'm with dsquared on this. The vast majority of libertarians are wankers of the schmibertarian school. People like Henley are in a tiny minority.
A neat rhetorical trick the libertarians have pulled is to identify themselves as the party of 'liberty'; when, of course, you find a robust defence of civil liberties from old-school liberals, left-libertarians, anarcho-socialists, anarcho-capitalists, council communists, mutualists, municipalists, some strands of Tory opinion, and huge swathes of old-school social democratic opinion among many others. Without, in many of these cases, the crushing Randian self-delusion and the enthusiastic sucking of capital's cock.
Also, re:
On the national stage, Libertarians are only gonna get the microphone when they borrow the republicans, which is naturally gonna bias towards the schmibs.
Dsquared and I are British. I don't know about dsquared but in my own case I'm fairly sure that the connection between libertarianism and access via republicanism to a particular national stage isn't really a factor since it isn't my nation's stage in question.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:15 AM
Levy and Silber too...
But when we get a dem president, at least a liberal one, you might come to think Henley, et al are really evil nutcases.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:21 AM
I am unfamiliar with the british political scene, so I wanted to avoid generalizing where I wasn't sure I could. I've seen dsquared tool on plenty of american schmibs, plus he cited american libertarians, so I figured I should constrain my comment to the context I was familiar with, where I think it holds.
I also think your comment about the "trick" elides the very distinction I am trying to pinpoint. If we want to define libertarian as being equivilent to propertarian or schmib, that's fine, but then we have a whole bunch of people we need a new term for because they don't fit in any of the existing categories.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:28 AM
That's quite wrong, Matt. I discussed this w a friend just recently. Conservatarian nutcase think tanks are influential all over Europe, despite being completely out of the mainstream, and they that position in large part because they've been so heavily subsidized by corporations. The more consistently antigovernemnt elements are politically marginal. They're in eclipse here and in the UK, but not on the continent or esp. Central Europe.
Merkel flirted w flat taxes in freaking Germany for chrissakes.
Google the Stockholm network.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:35 AM
Glenn might be right about "Reason"; I've never read that blog because I really (no *really*) can't get past the Matt Furey "Combat Conditioning" ads they have at the top. I don't know who Wil Wilkinson is either.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:36 AM
Personally, I'm pretty comfortable setting the bar of Taking Them Seriously pretty high for case-by-case personal interactions with self-described libertarians. It's not just that 80%+ of them are wankers, which is certainly true. But then there's the fact that the remainder, who would otherwise be reasonable people, feel the need to self-identify as part of a group of people, the vast majority of whom are wankers. Usually, I find, otherwise-reasonable libertarians of the latter stripe have some serious intellectual idea about how liberals want to run your life and big government and taxes and have a strong attraction to the idea of 'limited government' without a concurrent strong idea of what precisely the practical meaning of the phrase is. These are serious oversights if one is to have a conversation about politics and public policy, and so it's an uphill battle for a self-described libertarian to convince me that it's worth my time to talk to them about such things.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:36 AM
I haven't read much Reason but my impression is they're wankers.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:39 AM
#160; that's good enough for me!
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 2:55 AM
151: Unfair, sir! What about the Go-Betweens? (Or twee-pop band the Cat's Miaow, although I'm willing to accept "schmaustralian" in that case.)
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 7:41 AM
151: I think dsquared's overstating it. To the extent that we're talking about libertarians who do not insist in pointing out, with every reference, that taxes are theft, then it seems to me we're really talking about people who (a) are very good on civil liberties, (b) want every government program to be pass a very high justificatory bar, and (c) want a general presumption against the government as Nosey Parker or nanny. That puts them on the wings of the two major parties (which depends on emphasis).
If we're talking about people who insist on voting for Libertarians out of Principle!, yes, they're often annoying and idiotic. That's pretty true of Principled! Dems who are leftier than thou and end up voting for Nader. (A principled Republican being such a rarity, it's more charming than annoying.) I admit that there seem to be a high number of idiots among the libertarians, but I think that's a function of their relative lack of power; no need to conform utopian fantasies to actual governing if you are never going to govern.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 7:58 AM
I think this thread largely takes flight from a mistake.
McCardle doesn't think the value of beauty is relative. She think's it's like wealth in this way -- the more of it in the world, the better. She's stipulating the opposite for the purpose of her hypothetical, which admittedly, was rhetorically extreme, but which I am surprised was too much for weaker stomachs here. Her point is directed solely against a certain kind of egalitarianism. Namely, one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor. Maybe this view is so crazy that no one here holds it. But I doubt it, frankly.
How framing this hypothetical shows that McCardle herself takes pleasure from the existence of the poor (as suggested by D^2, who really ought to know better) I really can't say.
Also, I think the line suggested by Rob H-C as a justification for redistribution is a mistake: "Wealth redistribution is motivated by the simple fact that the economy is a cooperative enterprise, and thus should benefit all involved."
That's not what motivates me. I think wealth should be redistributed to people who lack the necessities for a flourishing human life even if they have never participated in the economy in any appreceable way (refugees in the Sudan, Amazon tribes, poor people on the moon, should we find them). Maybe I should independently find compelling the proposition that Bill Gates made his money via a collaboration with the nation's homeless, but I hope one need not believe this in order to support significant transfer payments (be they private or public).
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 8:47 AM
reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor
Who then, pray tell, would it benefit?
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 8:53 AM
one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor
The argument actually made by the people she linked is that reducing the wealth of the rich might be a good thing even if it doesn't increase the wealth of the poor, because the wealth of the rich harms the wealth of the poor; so reducing the wealth of the rich would be a benefit to the poor. I really doubt that anyone here thinks the wealth of the rich should be reduced if it's of absolutely no benefit to anyone.
Consider the DeLong sentence she blockquotes:
Utility transferred from the poor = the poor have less utility = the poor are harmed.
JG may have in mind a different position, but it wouidn't be the first time the position she'd attacked wasn't quite the one her opponents held.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 8:54 AM
Namely, one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor. Maybe this view is so crazy that no one here holds it. But I doubt it, frankly.
Yeah, see, that's what makes you and McArdle both kind of terrifyingly hostile. Is that really what you think you're arguing against?
Any sane person who advocates redistribution advocates it because it benefits the recipients of the redistribution. You may not agree with their understanding of what benefits the recipients are likely to reap, or how they will come into play, but to suggest that redistribution is in anyone's mind valuable because of the damage it inflicts on the rich rather than because of any benefit to anyone else is a horrifying accusation, and one which reflects a complete misunderstanding of everything liberals stand for.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 8:55 AM
"You're quite hostile."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 8:57 AM
Ah, ignore 165, 166 makes it clear what is being addressed.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 8:58 AM
Wait, LB actually said 'quite' in the post. Was that on purpose?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 9:00 AM
168, 170: I'm not following you. What's the question?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 9:02 AM
How framing this hypothetical shows that McCardle herself takes pleasure from the existence of the poor (as suggested by D^2, who really ought to know better) I really can't say.
I don't think that dsquared is making that charge on the basis of this post alone. He says,
It looks like he's characterizing her worldview based on various previous readings. Best not to misread someone's charge if you're going to scold them for a willful misreading of someone else, baa.Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 9:02 AM
171: Ever since I read this post the little man inside my head has been saying "You're quite hostile" in the voice of the honky dude from It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. Who is the bigger honky, me for gratuitously quoting Public Enemy or you for not getting it, I will leave to the readership.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09- 5-06 9:09 AM