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eyelessgameDecided to expand this and move it to my own diary. Maybe it'll exorcise some demons so I can concentrate better on work.
I promised I'd stop holding back and say what I really thought. Here it is.
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diony asked "how these people sleep at night."
I know enough people like this that I know how. Mostly, it's that I've had long talks with past and present conservative/libertarian friends and coworkers, and while I rant at them, I listen too.
They know it's horrible. They just don't believe the government could have done anything about it.
They honestly believe the government isn't good for anything at all. All the government can do, they believe, is take money from someone who earned it and give it to someone who hasn't. And that by doing so, it makes everyone poorer -- by reducing both's incentives to earn an honest living.
They see all government programs as graft of one sort or another -- thus they don't, for example, see Halliburton's war profiteering as being more offensive than FEMA's disaster prep. In both cases, the government is robbing people and paying off the core constituency of whatever party is in power. And in neither case do they believe any good is accomplished, at least not anything that wouldn't have been better done by a free market.
(As an aside, they understand the government can do one thing: it can shoot people. They are in fact often quite excited about getting it to shoot people they want shot.)
This is really what they believe. So they not only don't think the levee breaks were preventable (given that a free market didn't prevent them), they don't think the government could have helped the situation now (and is actually interfering with the help a free market would provide).
Now since they aren't blind to the real-life actual human suffering, and they are often smart enough to envision faster response times and better help, they must somehow resolve the cognitive dissonance to make a private, free market solution the best of all possible worlds. Which they do -- you can see it right now -- by blaming the victims for bad choices (note all this "the people who chose not to leave" bullshit) -- or (watch for it coming because you'll see it claimed soon) blaming past government handouts for permitting people to be indolent, which kept them poor, which kept them from being able to afford transportation to get out of the city themselves. The way to make the poor better able to get out, next time, is to provide more tax cuts to the rich.
I.e. the government must have less resources and must do less.
This comes round to something that I first heard from E.J. Dionne. Libertarians see a difference between a representative democracy and a tyrannical dictatorship only in degree, not in kind -- thus the sole virtue of democracy is that there's less of it.
I hope it's clear that I see this fundamentally as a religious belief -- "Governments Are Just Bad." These people can sleep at night because they believe, deep down, that this catastrophe was dictated solely by the Invisible Hand and was completely out of theirs. If it is worse than it needed to be, and it obviously is, the worsening must -- by the articles of their faith -- be placed solely at the feet of past heresies against the Invisible Hand, or, by implication (they would never say so directly out loud), to a Social Darwinist belief that all the darkies who got themselves drowned were simply unfit to live.
In the long term, their goal is to destroy government power. In the short term, they use government power to benefit themselves, because they consider all use of government power equally wrong.
They see that government today represents the power to transfer money, so they see nothing wrong with using it to transfer money to people who will keep them in power. They see representative democracy as a means to an end, that of gaining power, rather than being a virtue in itself. And they see the primary function of all government organizations not to accomplish tasks but to perform public relations -- since that's how you stay popular, which in turn is how you stay in power in a democracy.
Thus the FEMA director's absurd statement today that the primary challenge facing FEMA is "making the American people understand how big a catastrophe this is" -- as opposed to providing actual help to the dying victims.
The tragedy is that the people who believe this are running the government. Straight. Into. The. Ground.
Lake George -- nee New Orleans -- is a bathtub big enough for Grover Norquist to drown in.
I've been ridiculed, a lot, for my insistence through the years about how seductively evil libertarianism is and how big a threat it poses to this country and to the world. I try to take the ridicule mostly in good humor, especially as this angry young man grows older. But it seems that it takes things like this for people to say out loud just what libertarianism means.
It means babies die of dehydration, and corpses rot in the streets, eaten by rats.
I promised I'd stop holding back and say what I really thought. Here it is.
diony asked "how these people sleep at night."I know enough people like this that I know how. Mostly, it's that I've had long talks with past and present conservative/libertarian friends and coworkers, and while I rant at them, I listen too.
They know it's horrible. They just don't believe the government could have done anything about it.
They honestly believe the government isn't good for anything at all. All the government can do, they believe, is take money from someone who earned it and give it to someone who hasn't. And that by doing so, it makes everyone poorer -- by reducing both's incentives to earn an honest living.
They see all government programs as graft of one sort or another -- thus they don't, for example, see Halliburton's war profiteering as being more offensive than FEMA's disaster prep. In both cases, the government is robbing people and paying off the core constituency of whatever party is in power. And in neither case do they believe any good is accomplished, at least not anything that wouldn't have been better done by a free market.
(As an aside, they understand the government can do one thing: it can shoot people. They are in fact often quite excited about getting it to shoot people they want shot.)
This is really what they believe. So they not only don't think the levee breaks were preventable (given that a free market didn't prevent them), they don't think the government could have helped the situation now (and is actually interfering with the help a free market would provide).
Now since they aren't blind to the real-life actual human suffering, and they are often smart enough to envision faster response times and better help, they must somehow resolve the cognitive dissonance to make a private, free market solution the best of all possible worlds. Which they do -- you can see it right now -- by blaming the victims for bad choices (note all this "the people who chose not to leave" bullshit) -- or (watch for it coming because you'll see it claimed soon) blaming past government handouts for permitting people to be indolent, which kept them poor, which kept them from being able to afford transportation to get out of the city themselves. The way to make the poor better able to get out, next time, is to provide more tax cuts to the rich.
I.e. the government must have less resources and must do less.
This comes round to something that I first heard from E.J. Dionne. Libertarians see a difference between a representative democracy and a tyrannical dictatorship only in degree, not in kind -- thus the sole virtue of democracy is that there's less of it.
I hope it's clear that I see this fundamentally as a religious belief -- "Governments Are Just Bad." These people can sleep at night because they believe, deep down, that this catastrophe was dictated solely by the Invisible Hand and was completely out of theirs. If it is worse than it needed to be, and it obviously is, the worsening must -- by the articles of their faith -- be placed solely at the feet of past heresies against the Invisible Hand, or, by implication (they would never say so directly out loud), to a Social Darwinist belief that all the darkies who got themselves drowned were simply unfit to live.
In the long term, their goal is to destroy government power. In the short term, they use government power to benefit themselves, because they consider all use of government power equally wrong.
They see that government today represents the power to transfer money, so they see nothing wrong with using it to transfer money to people who will keep them in power. They see representative democracy as a means to an end, that of gaining power, rather than being a virtue in itself. And they see the primary function of all government organizations not to accomplish tasks but to perform public relations -- since that's how you stay popular, which in turn is how you stay in power in a democracy.
Thus the FEMA director's absurd statement today that the primary challenge facing FEMA is "making the American people understand how big a catastrophe this is" -- as opposed to providing actual help to the dying victims.
The tragedy is that the people who believe this are running the government. Straight. Into. The. Ground.
Lake George -- nee New Orleans -- is a bathtub big enough for Grover Norquist to drown in.
I've been ridiculed, a lot, for my insistence through the years about how seductively evil libertarianism is and how big a threat it poses to this country and to the world. I try to take the ridicule mostly in good humor, especially as this angry young man grows older. But it seems that it takes things like this for people to say out loud just what libertarianism means.
It means babies die of dehydration, and corpses rot in the streets, eaten by rats.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-02 08:53 pm (UTC)And how do they explain the fire department?
no subject
Date: 2005-09-02 10:32 pm (UTC)Kind of the way the free market is doing such an excellent job of keeping gas prices reasonable...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-02 11:44 pm (UTC)There are two challenges that society must help people face. One is valuing our own labor. One is valuing the labor of others.
Capitalism is great at making people value working. It's great at making people want to *do* stuff, and as far as I can tell a lot of the left's historical mistakes come from forgetting that. That reinforcement of the work ethic is central to both the American myth and the American virtues.
But it does so by setting up an adversarial system, wherein you win not just by setting a high value on your own work but on setting a low value on the work of others. This is great as long as people actively maintain a fair market, but there is a massive perverse incentive to subvert fair markets to get bargains.
And it's not limited to high-pressure salesmanship and false advertising. There's an incentive to maintain racism because it lets individuals and society get labor from minorities at a bargain. There's an incentive to maintain sexism because it lets individuals and society get labor from women as a bargain---including pregnancy, which surprisingly few libertarians want to reimburse the woman fairly for, and raising children, which is substantially undervalued by society in the case of parents and many individuals in the case of stay-at-home parents. There's an incentive to enslave people in foreign countries to get their labor cheaper, for Christ's sake. Practically speaking, there's an incentive to create a government, use it to loot people of their wealth, and then discard it.
It's underlying everything. People don't think other people are valuable because denying that value is the core of the *ethos* of the market, and that's a flaw because it makes the market a self-devouring beast. I assume that it's something economic technologists are working on, but I'm not certain, since obviously undervaluing other people is a legacy of previous ideas and not a market innovation.
I am not convinced that encouraging people to value others is the role of government, but if it isn't, then the kinds of conservatives you're talking about need to find something that is, and religion doesn't seem to be working.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 04:19 pm (UTC)So keep talking, please.