Reality, 2: Libertarianism, 0

In reality, Libertarianism NEVER works, because it is an overly simplistic theology, based on the erroneous assumption that we all have completely free choices at all times, free of any constraints. The ideas sometimes sound reasonable, but always fall apart when subjected to even the most cursory of examinations. Two examples today, since we haven’t time to write about them all:

Number A: cell phone usage on airplanes, currently not allowed. The policy is under review and in a public comments period (go here to weigh in with your opinion). A discussion erupted yesterday between those who are for and against, because, hey, Americans argue. The pro-loud-cellphone-user-everywhere Libertarians said, in brief, “tough s***, don’t fly. My right to dominate the space around me by bellowing into my Shoephone outweighs your right to sleep, concentrate, work, etc. ” When reasonable, rational adults attempted to point out that not everyone can just choose not to fly, the Libertarians kept saying “you chose this job, this family, this location to live, so AMFYOYO. Make different choices. Government should not be allowed to control my behavior.”

Letter 2: Libertarians think that men should not have to pay child support , since men have “no right to make reproductive choices”. This bit of twaddle is an offshoot of the “men’s rights” movement, which Libertarians love. They are demanding the ability to choose to default on their obligations because they assume that the women they impregnate have the free choice to raise or not raise the baby, get an abortion or not, etcetera. The idea that these are easy choices available to every woman, everywhere, at all times is obvious nitwittery, of course, but Libertarians hold onto it nonetheless. (They also ignore the fact that men DO have the right to make choices: we can wear condoms, get our tubes tied, or just not f*** with someone who can get pregnant.)

These are but two examples of the obvious bankruptcy of Libertarian theology (you can claim it’s not a religion, but is sure as Hell acts like one). There are many others, like certain Bitcoin adherents, regulatory opposition, preeves who want to be able to marry their daughters and so on. Their argument is always “freedom” and is predicated on the idea that we all have unlimited freedom of choice because we have no limitations placed upon us by external factors. That assumption is, of course, composed of very high-grade fertilizer (anyone here ever take Econ 101? Big takeaway: “resources are scarce”) and like all concentrated fertilizer, it blows up when subjected to pressure.

Real life for real people is fraught with resource scarcity and limited choices. That is why businesses exist, governments exist, houses and clothing exist, medicine exists, and so on. Hell, it’s why cellphones exist, ferchrissakes. We do not live in an ideal world, and our solutions to the imperfections that surround us are likewise imperfect and full of restrictions. That, Gentle Reader, is what we in the Reality-Based Community call “Life”. Real Life.

Libertarians can try all they want to make reality fit into their ideology, but they will fail; just like the Flat-Earthers, Birthers, Truthers, and Science Deniers. Reality will always win in the end, no matter how hard you fight against it.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

R.I.P. Rush: former rock band’s song is used in a Walmart commercial.

You all remember Rush, right? They used to be a rock band. But it’s time to order the flowers and start tuning your bagpipes, because that band as you knew it has died.

Geddy and Alex, you see, are endorsing Walmart by letting them use the song “Working Man” in a TV commercial. Walmart, one of the worst employers on Planet Earth, has Rush’s blessing to use its song as a way to help whitewash their appalling record of abusing workers, stealing from honest taxpayers, and paying its own working men and women so little, many of them are on public assistance.

To compound the idiocy, the band has recently claimed to have renounced their collective worship of Libertarian anti-goddess Ayn Rand. But now they show their true colors by jumping in between the sheets with the real-life Galts of the 21st century, the billionaire Walton family of Walmart infamy. These boyos are not on your side, America.

The former rock band Rush has been revealed as a load of profiteering, smirking, exploiting, greedy, manipulative, hypocritical Teabaggers. From this cranky writer to Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee, and Neal Peart: your once-proud band is dead, having become nothing more than a propaganda tool for the 1%. The “Working Man” Lee and Lifeson wrote about is being further ground under the heels of the most regressive employers of the modern age while you play chorus to their Dickensian practices, and if there were any justice in this world, he would spit in your sneering, self-absorbed faces.

Rush is dead. The “musicians” of Rush live on, but their band is no more. Let’s all line up to relieve ourselves on Rush’s grave.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Libertarians think Fiction is Reality.

300,000 people in West Virginia can’t use their tap water for anything but flushing their crap down the dumper because an unregulated toxic chemical facility just upstream from Charleston’s water supply sprang a leak: it’s so bad, people in 6 counties can’t bathe, wash their clothes, cook, clean, and such. Sensible people asked for some regulations, but the Libertarians blocked them, because the “free market” would magically make the tank farm’s operator do everything necessary to make the place safe and squeaky-clean. Of course, that turned out not to be the case.

Last year, a town in Texas suffered a devastating and deadly explosion because a barely-regulated fertilizer plant blew up. This being Texas, only a few sensible people argued for regulations, and the Libertarians blocked them too, because the “free market” is a peachy and perfect way to ensure safety and cleanliness in industry. In fact, the libertarians are STILL blocking new regulations even after that blast, so that town (or another) could blow up again at any moment.

Time after time, this silly-arsed idea that businesses are somehow innately good and will always do the right thing when left to their own devices has been proven false. And yet its adherents still insist that it is true, that we just need to get rid of even more government and then it’ll work, honest, really, pinky-swear. That’s like a compulsive gambler telling you that if he just had more money to bet, he’d be on Easy Street.

This ideology does not work in real life. Smart people who live in the real world and have read Adam Smith know that a regulated free market is what works best. But because a czarist Russian exile had an understandably huge hate-on for Commies and wrote a few novels, somehow a lot of otherwise sane and intelligent individuals decided that a whole philosophy should be based on those novels; and indeed, a new economic theory be created out of the whole cloth and immediately declared valid, based largely on those novels. Fiction, to libertarians, is reality.

And that, friends, pretty well sums up Libertarianism: it is a theory, based on fiction, that has no basis in reality. People have been trying for decades to make it real, to make it work, to take it from marionette status and turn into a real boy. All that has been realized from their efforts is that Libertarians have grown a very large set of donkey ears as their Ayn Rand-based Pleasure Island has gone morally, intellectually, and financially bankrupt.

Libertarianism has failed. It is dead. Stop trying to make the corpse move; bury it and try something based in the real world next time.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

On Edit – more than one cranky reader has pointed out that the band Rush is no longer espousing libertarianism in their more recent lyrics. Apologies to Rush, and anyone else offended by the reference, which I have removed. Thanks to those who pointed out the error.

One of the best investments out there: Unemployment Insurance.

A return of $1.61 on a $1.00 investment is awesome, and you just can’t beat it. So why do all the “run our government like a business” types oppose it? Anybody with any actual business experience knows that you can’t hardly get that kind of bang for the buck.

The answer, alas, is that the right-wing nutjobs who oppose UI are uniformly incapable of doing basic math. The lot of them live in a fantasy world full of Ayn Rand and Laffer Curve claptrap, acting as if their fervent belief will somehow make their crazy ideology come true. Belief is NOT a substitute for actual numbers on investment and returns.

Speaking of investment; looking for a job costs money, and it is money well spent. As ChisholmTrailDem reports:

The last time I searched for a job my expenditures for just that purpose, while on UI mind you, was nearly $3000, most of it on fuel to go looking for a job, before I finally found one. And all of that came right out of my UI benefits, right along with all my other financial obligations.

No one seems to be talking about the cost of looking for a job. And those expenses come right out of UI checks. Now, not only can these people who have lost UI benefits not pay their bills, they also now have no money to look for a job.

Once again, Business 101; you have to spend money to make money. Teapublicans seem to think that money magically appears if you think it will. In reality, if you have no money to invest, you’ll get no return.  People need Unemployment Insurance to invest in finding a job. So if you want people to earn a living, then Someone. Must. Provide. The. Capital. Required. That, friends, is how business works.

And there isn’t anybody else out there who is providing that investment. Not neighbors, not churches, not anybody. If the Government wants fewer people on public assistance, then the government must invest in getting people to work. Spending nothing provides nothing in return.

Spending money on Unemployment Insurance provides a proven and positive return. So the Repubs need to shut up, nut up, and pony up.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Note to the Radical Right: Wake the F***ing F*** up

During this week’s election, the electorate’s centrist majority whupped a lot of ass upon the Radical Right. Mr. Blunt and Cranky was quite pleased to see how many of these teabagging nimrods received their walking papers: he was not pleased (though also not surprised) that the “Republican” leadership is determined to live in denial. Thus, the ever-so-gentle title of today’s post.

Listening to Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader McConnell’s comments (let’s not even think of the rantings of others like lil’ Donnie Trump) over the past day or so, it is plain that they still think that the Radical Right has the blessing of the majority of Americans: never mind that many of the Tea Party’s poster children went down like the Hindenburg yesterday. Never mind that the billions of dollars’ worth of dark money they spent to buy elections made not bit of difference. Never mind that their frantic efforts to suppress the vote had all the effect of a snail’s fart in a tornado.

No, regardless of the facts on the ground and what they signify, there are entirely too many of these zeebs who still think that today is the first Wednesday of November 2010. News flash: it is 2012, and the Right today must acknowledge that fact. But the Radical Right is unwilling to see the will of the people for what it is: a repudiation of partisan zealotry and excess.

The candidates that lost were, in the main, those that were perceived as having ties to the Tea Party, Social Darwinism, the 1%, pick the term you like. For the “Republicans” to deny this is to seal their doom. They need to climb out of their comfy little bubble and look at this basic fact: the more extreme they get, the more often they get kicked in the wedding tackle.

The Dems, on the other hand, have moved to the middle and scored some big wins.  The Teabag-slurping Repubs must wake up, search their souls, learn from the ass-whupping they endured this year and likewise move towards the center; not continue to move farther towards the fringe. If they can do that, they can win elections and gain the power they lust for. If not, well, pleasant dreams to them as they sleep their way past the end of their brief period of relevance.

Mr. B & C

Maybe Government Should be Run Like, You Know, a Government

As your friendly neighborhood blogger blunts and cranks his way through the 2012 Silly Season, he is glad to see (and he is not the only one to have expressed this sentiment) a serious debate on the proper role of government. As a radical centrist, it is not likely that his own personal views will be put into action, but these questions have been inadequately considered for far too long now, and just the fact of a discussion could make this election year potentially more useful than has become the norm.

At one time, the U.S. Government pretty much did what nobody else could or would do: make laws, protect the public, build big stuff that didn’t make a lot of profit, set standards, make war, and such. Normal government functions, in a tradition that goes back for thousands of years. As governments tend to do, it gradually became less and less efficient, and thus more and more wasteful.

From time to time, various efforts were made to cut out waste, and these encountered various degrees of success, though none were completely successful. One idea that gained wide acceptance during the last few decades was to make government “run like a business”. In theory, an inefficient business fails of its own accord, according to market conditions. So treating government in a like manner would ensure efficiency and thus success.

This is a seemingly well-constructed bit of logic, and when presented convinced a large number of Americans to go along with the idea. However, as a student of logic, Mr. Blunt and Cranky was long ago taught to examine the premises behind any seemingly logical statement to see whether or not it is true (true is not the same thing as logical). This one fails to hold up under scrutiny.

Government is not a business: businesses sell products/services to earn a profit (or to break even in some cases). Government supports businesses, of course (for a variety of reasons) by providing services, infrastructure and incentives, but government’s core product is not inherently profitable: the maintenance of a reasonably safe and orderly society. Examples:

• Military, to protect the people from foreign threats
• Law enforcement and firefighters to protect the people from local threats
• Infrastructure like roads, utilities and such to facilitate commerce

 

There is a reason why businesses don’t tend to go into these areas: they are not profitable. Regardless of any Randian pipe dreams you may have heard, these “products” have never been profitable (some isolated bits and pieces are, and businesses do flock to those few profitable chunks), and no rational business person would ever undertake them.  Government built and/or enabled the building of nuclear power plants, our ground and air transport systems, utility grids, radio and television, communications wired and wireless, and a host of other essential services. None of these create or have ever created a profit for the government that may be viewed on a balance sheet.

 This does not mean that the services provided by government are worthless: cash is not the only measure of worth, after all. Businesses make profit in part by utilizing these government-enabled services, but the government itself does not. People profit in a certain sense by having safety, water, roads and such, but government does not record a monetary profit.

Governments “profit” not in the monetary sense: successful (“profitable”) governments are those that preside over an orderly society full of citizens who are reasonably satisfied with their lot in life, who are reasonably satisfied with the job that their government is doing; and if satisfied, they return elected officials to office for additional terms. The public-sector “profit margin” could be determined by election/re-election statistics, approval ratings and poll numbers.

If we accept that definition of governmental profit, then the margin is pretty darned low these days. Maybe government should be run like a government, since running it like a business has been steadily decreasing the “profit margins” of all three branches of government.  The experiment has failed, time to go back to what works.

Mr. B & C