Freedom Democrats - Online Community for Libertarian Democrats

Joe The Plumber, Communism and Socialism...

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:32:51 -0700

Although I think "Joe the Plumber" is a joke, I nonetheless have to disagree a bit with this commentary by Doug Mataconis, echoed elsewhere, that "the constitution predated the ideas of communism and socialism," or that the "founders" were unaware of these ideas. As Roderick Long points out, correspondence between Jefferson and Adams addressed the ideas of communism vis a vis Plato's Republic. In "the Republic," the ideal political structure is more or less formed around the abolition of both private property and the private family unit.

Writes Adams to Jefferson:

I am very glad you have seriously read Plato, and still more rejoiced to find that your reflections upon him so perfectly harmonize with mine. Some thirty years ago, I took upon me the severe task of going through all his works. With the help of two Latin translations and one English and one French translation, and comparing some of the most remarkable passages with the Greek, I labored through the tedious toil. My disappointment was very great, my astonishment was greater, and my disgust was shocking...

Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness, more infallibly contrived to transform men and women into brutes, yahoos, or demons, than a community of wives and property. Yet, in what are the writings of Rousseau and Hel- vetius wiser than those of Plato ? " The man who first fenced a tobacco yard, and said, ' this is mine,' ought instantly to have been put to death," says Rousseau. " The man who first pronounced the barbarous word Dieu, ought to have been immediately destroyed," says Diderot. In short, philosophers, ancient and modern, appear to me as mad as Hindoos, Mahometans, and Christians. No doubt they would all think me mad, and for any thing I know, this globe may be the Bedlam, le Bifetre of the universe.

After all, as long as property exists, it will accumulate in individuals and families. As long as marriage exists, knowledge, property, and influence will accumulate in families. Your and our equal partition of intestate estates, instead of preventing, will in time augment the evil, if it is one. The French revolutionists saw this, and were so far consistent. When they burned pedigrees and genealogical trees, they annihilated, as far as they could, marriages, knowing that marriage, among a thousand other tilings, was an infallible source of aristocracy. I repeat it, so sure as the idea and the existence of property is admitted and established in society, accumulations of it will be made, — the snowball will grow as it rolls. '

Ironically, Adam's son, John Quincy, didn't quite see eye to eye with his old man on this matter. It is well known that John Quincy Adams, along with the likes of President James Monroe, attended Roberts Owen's 1825 lectures for the communal utopian experiment in New Harmony, Indiana. Owens at the time had gained considerable international acclaim for his ideal social structure: essentially, mini Platonic Republics, consisting of no more than a couple of thousand of people on tracts of land of around 1000-2000 acres; the social structure characterized by the abolition of private property and communal raising of children, largely independent of the private family.

Interestingly, one of the participants in the New Harmony Society experiment, which of course, ultimately failed, was Josiah Warren, who would go on to later influence the rise of the American Individualist Anarchist movement--the original ideological source of American "libertarianism." Warren considered the failure of new Harmony the direct consequence of the "lack of individual sovereignty and private property."

But really, in the US, the debate has never been private property vs collective property. The debate has always been self-government vs Hierarchy, the Jefferson v Hamilton debate.

Writes Jefferson to Du Pont de Nemours:

"We both love the people, but you love them as infants, whom you are afraid to trust without nurses, and I as adults, whom I freely leave to self-government."

It's been a rout in favor of "The Hamiltonians," of which Joe the Plumber is a member, along with the overwhelming majority in both parties...

Amazon and North Carolina

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:38:19 -0700

Looks like Amazon has dropped it's click through affiliate program with all NC residents as a result of the NC legislature passing Senate Bill 202 to begin taxing all internet sales, including affiliate related referral sales. North Carolina, which has 11-12% unemployment rate and which currently faces a 4 billion dollar budget shortfall, seems to be moving toward the New York model in terms of attempting to tax anything that moves over the internet.

The NC legislature is certainly on a roll as of late, having recently enacted a State-wide smoking ban that extends to restaurants and bars. And Bev Perdue's tax and spend publicity campaign has caused her own approval numbers to plummet.

btw, NC residents can retain their Amazon affiliate business by simply signing up with an intermediary like Skimlinks.

From hoodlums to hereos: the liberation of Christopher Street

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:34:17 -0700

Forty years ago today (Sunday, 28 June) a group of marginalized Americans stood up to police harassment, creating the Stonewall riots. According to the story at Wikipedia, these people were marginalized even within the gay community. The rioters didn't have any agenda or organization, they just got tired of living in fear of the cops and saw an opportunity to turn the tables.

Back then, they were surely seen as troublemakers by mainstream society. Ten years ago, the site of their resistance became a national historical landmark. Today, the resisters are guests at the White House. (Google also has a small memento on the results page if you search for "stonewall riots")

While there is still legal discrimination against gays, it has been greatly constrained. The mainstream recognition of the accomplishment on Christopher Street (site of the Stonewall Inn) largely reflects mainstream acceptance of gays. However, I like to think that this shift in attitude towards the event reflects a little more than just a recognition of the historical importance of the Stonewall Riots. There are probably other events that could be viewed as a symbol of progress on gay rights, but by recognizing Stonewall, Americans recognize that sometimes society benefits from having a few troublemakers.

The Tragedy of the Uncommons

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:21:15 -0700

The vote by the House of Representatives on Friday to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act may be a death blow to the liberaltarian movement. Or the chance for it to really take off. How can both be true?

The Republican attack machine went into overdrive to oppose the bill. By calling it cap and tax or a national energy tax they did everything possible to throw the word tax into the debate. Republican rhetoric is still the same as it was thirty years ago. For the most part, in watching the debate online and elsewhere, I was surprised with how easily the Republican were able to tap into the Tea Party anger. With each political battle, the possibility that the Tea Party movement could actually be an independent check on both parties fades. It is becoming increasingly apparent that they are the foot soldiers of the Republican Party and take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh.

For a while, I wasn't sure if the Tea Parties represented the Ron Paul wing of the Republican Party that was liberated to speak out when Bush handed over the White House to Obama. If they really worried about the expansion of government power they should have spoken out about seven years earlier. At first, I could sympathize with the silencing impact that partisan peer pressure can have when your party occupies the White House. I'm not so sympathetic anymore. I don't doubt that there are some libertarians in the Tea Party movement that were opposed to Bush and continue to hold an independent streak. But I think they have been overwhelmed by the larger movement of Faux News followers that repeat whatever talking point is thrown at them. This is not a way for the Republican Party to reform itself. It is a strategy for the Republican Party to keep its base conservative white working class base angry at Democrats for the economic mess created by Bush.

I would add that the liberal blogosphere seems to have no problem in maintaining their independent streak in the face of Obama in the White House. I don't know if this is a product of personality; conservatives are more willing to defer to authority. The result, for me, is that I am even more encouraged to be a libertarian Democrat because I can see that even in power, the Democratic Party will continue to have a diverse group of competing factions. The GOP does not tolerate dissent, even out of power. There is no appealing faction in the Republican Party I could ally with.

The reason the rise of the Republican Tea Party movement could be a death blow to the "libertarian" movement is explained by Brink Lindsey's earlier concerns about the negative associations of the Tea Party movement:

Conservatism today has degenerated into a species of especially unattractive populism, pandering to the pro-torture-and-wiretapping, anti-gay-and-Mexican prejudices of a dwindling, increasingly sectarian, increasingly regional “base.” . . . I worry that good free-market ideas are going to get tainted by association with an increasingly brutish identity politics for angry white guys and the women who love them.

Consider the contrast. The House passed a bill to begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They were opposed by a conservative movement that continues to deny the science behind global warming. The House's bill creates a free market solution to reducing emissions, much like how the first President Bush responded to the problem of sulfur dioxide and acid rain. Opponents claimed that this was either fascism, socialism, or communism, or maybe all three. The Congressional Budget Office, the same institution that the Republicans are using for their claims that Kennedy's health care bill will bankrupt the nation, estimated a rather low cost per household once the bill is implemented by 2020. So the conservatives had to cook up their own numbers with almost no basis in reality.

From a left libertarian perspective, this is generally a good bill. I have concerns that in the early years, too many emission allowances are just given away for free. But over time this is phased out and the system moves to over 70% of the allowances being auctioned off and used to fund tax credits. It's about as close to a citizen's dividend bill as I could ask for in today's political climate. I do not sympathize with the conservatives ranting about how this will ruin America.

Down the road, I do have serious concerns about health care and what some Democrats are proposing. I continue to oppose an individual mandate and a Massachusetts model that allows for some board to decide if something qualifies as insurance or not. But I think that conservatives marginalized themselves during this fight over the energy bill with the level of discourse, or the lack thereof, they brought to the debate. And unlike the energy bill, the Republicans in the Senate are not needed for health care reform because it can be pushed through under reconciliation. In the one major area where Democrats could have benefited from a constructive dialogue, the Republicans turned a cold shoulder. Which makes it less likely they'll want to work with Republicans on health care. Thanks a lot GOP.

Libertarians suffer when good free market policies are associated with the Republican Party and its Tea Party following. My hope is that the continued demagougery of the right will scare away more rational libertarians. I don't have much in the way of evidence for this, but it's my hope.

Hobbesian Catch-22

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:24:25 -0700

Regarding this post post: Tank Man and Tank Commander over at Lawyers, Gun$, and Money. Noting it's post date, I imagine the subsequent event of Neda being gunned down by Iranian statist thugs makes the point that enforcers willing to shoot can de-legitimize regimes, but I also suspect that it also served to reinforce in Robert Farley's own mind why he pays taxes.

The gist of Farley's post addresses the "Hobbesian State of Nature" problem in the context of the "modern nation state as an extremely efficient killing machine." At issue is the advancement of information technology coterminous with this evolution of the State that periodically exposes the underlying brutal core of State legitimacy to a global audience. The willingness of enforcers to shoot lies at the core of the legitimacy any State, "liberal" or authoritarian. However, the very act of shooting itself, if done in the open, and not intra muros, can serve as a de-legitimizing action. Hence, the Hobbesian Catch-22.

Farley nonetheless accepts the brutal nature of the State, indeed embraces it, because he finds the coercive State necessary to solve the "State of Nature" problem and the "Collective Action" problem.

The modern nation-state is nevertheless tolerable because it substantially reduces private coercion (replacing it with less arbitrary public coercion), creates a relatively safe space in which commerce and the production of wealth can be undertaken, provides regulation necessary for the conduct of a modern (socialist or capitalist) economy, provides social services, and because it creates a sense of identity and political efficacy. Its murderous tendencies notwithstanding, I'd rather live in a nation-state than not, and would prefer a more complete and capable state to the rump that libertarians envision.

An interesting thing about those who ascribe to the "Hobbesian State of Nature" problem is that they tend to nonetheless dismiss Hobbes solution to the problem, namely the requirement of an absolute Leviathan. Hobbes rejected the idea that a constitutional government, or politics itself, resolved this problem. Frankly, if humans were actually so arbitrarily uncooperative, Hobbes would have a point. Constitutions and separation of powers would hardly constrain a naturally brutish people.

The Hobbesian State of Nature is in no small part rooted in biblical concepts of original sin and a fallen human race. We really should be progressing beyond such nonsense at this point in terms of our understanding of the human evolutionary dynamic. It should be clear that a human race consisting of psychopaths is not evolutionary stable. The ability to abstract cooperation, in the end, IMHO, lies at the heart of the explanation of human evolution. Authoritarian coercion, no doubt, can produce collective action and engender cooperation. However, given the ability of humans to reason abstractly, there may be a point of contention that violent coercion is the only way to ensure cooperation. The likes of Farley are quick to accept the "murderous tendencies" of the State, just as long, I suppose, they don't have to bear the brunt of such tendencies. If the gun turns against them, i imagine they might have a different opinion on the matter. If Farley found himself in the role of the "tank Man," I suspect he would suddenly have a higher opinion of the "libertarians."

H/T to TGGP for pointing at this post.

"Down with a state!"

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:08:45 -0700

While reading an LA Times article about the budget woes of California, I started thinking about what form it'd take if, hypothetically, my view that as long as government exists determining who pays for it should be based on resources use, in both the natural sense and in who utilizes the force of government the most, were applied at state level.

For an easy, relevant example, use Cali. Might as well...

Imagine the tax & spending structure of California were torn down & rebuilt on that basis, with the worst of what the state government does outright eliminated, & the burden of what was left tilted towards the people & organizations that most use Arnold & co. Anyone that knows something about how California works (or, in this case, doesn't), I submit the following mental exercise to you: I know that such a proposal would be rejected on all sides by the political establishment of their state, but what interest group in particular do you think would be the loudest, and why? If, by some miracle such a radical reform were put into place, what would the policy there look like that followed the philosophy?

Note: I say this as someone not from there, and don't profess to be an expert on the state in the slightest. If you feel this is just absolutely stupid for that reason, then ignore it. If you don't know any more about California than I do, but you can contact someone who does, feel free to pose the scenario to them.

Universal Right to Assembly and Free Speech...

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:13:44 -0700

From the Statement from the President on Iran

The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

Too bad there isn't a State on the face of the earth which actually recognizes such rights(in the negative sense)...

Here's how the US "stands" with those who actually want to exercise such rights in conjunction. You will be subject to a DHS threat assessment, possibly penetrated by any number of three-letter acronym federal police organs, surrounded by a highly militarized security force, and will likely be cordoned off into a "free speech zone" miles away from the actual event. Eventually, some clever bureaucrat, in these tough fiscal times, is going to come up with the idea to sell corporate sponsorships for these "zones." We await the day of The NexTel Free Speech zone...

Monopoly Money

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:04:24 -0700

Some stories just speak volumes. All emphasis mine:

Border guards in Chiasso see plenty of smugglers and plenty of false-bottomed suitcases, but no one in the town, which straddles the Italian-Swiss frontier, had ever seen anything like this. Trussed up in front of the police in the train station were two Japanese men, and beside them a suitcase with a booty unlike any other. Concealed at the bottom of the bag were some rather incredible sheets of paper. The documents were apparently dollar-denominated US government bonds with a face value of a staggering $134bn (£81bn).

How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America's fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia.

No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales. But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.

You have to wonder about the logic of a world where such documents are even remotely considered to actually be worth that much.

The global financial/monetary system is just amazing... and by "amazing", I mean "absolute top to bottom nonsense".

Paleo Nonsense...

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:17:01 -0700

VDare/WND/Taki Columnist Ilana Mercer is on a quarry of sorts to discredit anarchist strains within the libertarian movement. Mercer, who calls herself a "paleolibertarian," advocates a Ron Paul-Geert Wilders type of fusionism, meaning cultural purity("We come from Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. That makes our civilization special, and certainly worth preserving"), restricted, militarized borders, and strong US support of Israel against the Palestinians, whom she considers more or less to be "savages."

Her latest screed against the "anarchists" involves a recent column by Kent McManigal at The Examiner. Mercer cites McManigal's article as an example of the type of "idiocratic, shock jockery" that threatens the legitimacy of the libertarian movement proper. Actually, McManigal has maintained a blog for a number of years that I have read from time to time. He's a solid libertarian thinker. He's no "shock jock," nor is he trying to be the Howard Stern of the libertarian movement. As a free thinker, and in a moment of self-admitted levity, McManigal posed a question of the ethicality of "cannibalism" in terms of libertarian justice. Because libertarian justice is so "thin," these types of questions often serve as an intellectual sport of sorts for free thinking libertarians.

Here's my "consistent" answer from an anarchist perspective. Obviously, homicidal cannibalism violates a "thin" NAP. Necro-cannibalism may not violate a "thin" NAP, but if we employ a "thicker" context for NAP, as we should in this case, it's not difficult to establish that Necro-cannibalism would largely be in violation. My methodology for "thickness" relies on Hayekian social theory. Human burial and "respect for the dead" dates back to 130,000 years ago. Although there have been outliers in terms of cultural acceptance of cannibalism, human social institutions and social customs for the most part have evolved to reinforce the human evolutionary trait of "respect or the dead." Anthropophagy is almost universally a taboo practice, one that finds little social acceptance. Taboo means in this instance implies that implicit contracts, if not explicit ones, would be violated by one engaging in such behavior. The social framework simply wouldn't support it. Frankly, Necro-cannibalism usually only rears it's head in survivalist situations. The movie, "Alive," documented how members of the Uruguayan Rugby team, after crashing in the Andes, made voluntary contracts with one another to have their flesh eaten if they died during the course of their 72 day stranding. Contextually, in such a case, there would be no violation of NAP, but such is really an example of a rare exception.

Since the United States is not under any threat of invasion by Necro-cannibalistic hordes, the bogeyman of cannibalism is an utter red herring. However, it's surprising how often the knee-jerk specter of cannibalism is thrown up against libertarian social theory.

The fact is that Ilana Mercer's conception of libertarianism is inconsistent, despite her claims to the contrary. Putting forth Ron Paul as the champion-bearer of consistent libertarianism is a tenuous claim. The fact is that Paul is Mr. Strict Constitutionalist, Secure-the borders guy when talking to conservatives, but is a libertarian anarchist when in the company of knowledgeable libertarians. Paul, as a follower of the Rothbard-rockwell wing of the Austrian School, is likely an anarcho-capitalist at heart. He probably leans toward the Hoppean version of it. Hoppe's property rights argument against the free flow of labor can be turned into a Reductio ad absurdum argument against the free flow of capital itself.

Arguments that a welfare state for labor necessitates a police State enforcement against the free flow of labor itself sort of implies similarly that a welfare state for corporations necessitates the need for a police state enforcement against the free flow of capital. Hmmmnnnn.....

Mercer's support of Israel as a cultural imperative sounds suspiciously like the Neocons who advocated coercive, western democracy in the Middle east for a primary reason of recognition of Israel. I'm not for any violence, systemic or otherwise, against the the jewish people, but the fact that the jews suffered great, systemic historical violence at the hands of christian europe doesn't give them the right to return the favor to the Palestinians.

Kent McManigal over Ilana Mercer...

Change Alert!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:02:11 -0700

221 Democrats voted for the 100 billion dollar war supplemental, 170 Republicans against. So that's the change apparently, Repubs and Dems merely changing uniforms. Score is still the same though...

Oh yeah, for cover, President XYZ appears on a friendly network to serve up some red meat about some other media boogeyman(just substitute Fox news for the NY Times). Water carrier on said friendly network property later that night wonders if Repub hypocrisy on "supporting the troops" can be used as a talking point. I've seen this rerun before...

That's all. Feel free to return to the regularly scheduled broadcast of the Letterman-Palin reality show...lol

Yes, the "Boot" Fits the Left Foot, too...

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:39:56 -0700

B-Psycho's recent post points out the "Rovian" traits many in the political left are starting to exhibit, exempli gratia, the politicization of DHS. Of course, DHS has been politicized from day one, with Karl Rove hitting the democrats over the head in the 2002 midterms with respect to federal unionization of DHS employees. Conservatives certainly embraced DHS as a means to penetrate/spy on anti-war/peace groups, muslim groups/mosques, anarchist groups, detention/expulsion of "illegal immigrants," etc...

Michelle Malkin circa 2004 testified to the Senate in favor of the Homeland Security Enhancement Act where she praised the Patriot Act, the tearing down of the "wall" of separation between the various law enforcements to deal with the "terrorist threats," and advocated further extending this "cooperation among local, state and federal authorities to secure the homeland," particularly with respect to the inclusion of immigration services in a National Security State model.

However, it was this same Michelle Malkin circa 2009 who played a leading role in publicizing the "Right Wing Extremist DHS Report". Even though this report was apparently first made public by Stephen Gordon(over at the Liberty Papers), he nonetheless relied on the network of the Political Right for popular dissemination. Not unsurprisingly, the Political Left was thusly just itching for the first opportunity to score political points from any evidence of "right wing extremism."

Markos Moulitsas: "Attempt by Cons to justify their critique of prescient DHS report are an extra special dose of stupid." Frankly, I'm not exactly sure how "prescient" this assessment actually is, given that I'm pretty sure the "Extremism and Radicalization Branch" of DHS passes these type of "intelligence assessments" of the ideological/political spectrum up and down the food chain constantly. I've read this assessment described as if it were some type of public bulletin, when in fact is was a "leak" of one of the many assessments this branch makes. 3 months earlier, a "left wing extremist" threat assessment by the Strategic Analysis Group(another "group' within the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division of DHS) was leaked that warned against anarchist elements resorting to cyber sabotage, specifically mentioning groups like Recreate 68, an activist, left grassroots group that that describes itself as being fed up with being sold out by the Dem Party. Last year, a specific "threat assessment" issued by "Transportation Security Operations Center" of the DHS was leaked that detailed how the RNC Welcoming Committee planned to use protest tactics to disrupt traffic flows at the GOP convention in Minneapolis. The RNC-WC was successfully penetrated by the FBI and there are now people from that protest group now rotting in a cage.

Now maybe the likes of Kos are all too happy now to use the DHS as a political tool now that the Dem party controls the government(specifically, to bash conservatives), but just as Malkin found out, the Stasi Police State likely took notes at Malkin's testimony, duly noting that Malkin and her anti-immigration ilk might at some point need be the subject of a possible threat assessment themselves. So to all those partisan Dems who are cheering on the DHS now, but make comments that they are being sold out by the Dem Party when it comes to issues like single-payer Health Care, should be forewarned that they too will likely be the subject of a "threat assessment." And if you don't think that the DHS is not going to internally issue "threat assessments" in 2012, examining the possibility of protest movements that could erupt if Barack Obama was defeated in his re-election bid, then you simply aren't paying attention.

The undeniable statistical fact is the greatest organized violence threat against, say, minorities, women, and gays is "Law Enforcement" itself. This is documented repeated and extensively by the likes of Radley Balko and Charles Johnson(RadGeek). RadGeek's latest documentation. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Of course, the political right and the political left will shout out "9-11" and "Oklahoma City," respectively, to justify which foot wears the "Boot." But the real lessons to be learned from those 2 events is (1) don't bomb innocent Muslims abroad over oil and (2) don't gas innocent children at home as part of a PR campaign to make your local ATF look good. Otherwise, expect blowback...

"Public Good" , or "Tyranny"?

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 06:32:08 -0700

Are speed limits a public good, or just a form of tyranny? Apparently, the answer depends on who you ask. I view speed limits from within the public goods paradigm -- that there is a conflict between the driver's desire for rapid transportation (or power tripping) and the general public's desire to avoid high-speed collisions. However, others seem to disagree and even consider it to be an altruistic act to undermine the enforcement of speed limits...implying that they view speed limits as a form of tyranny.

In this second category are the drivers who map out speed traps for Trapster. Trapster is part of the newest generation of Internet applications that rely on a community of volunteers to construct a map of speed traps for the benefit of the community of users. As far as I am aware, Trapster and similar systems provide no rewards to users who contribute information. This behavior seems to be driven by anti-authoritarian sentiments among the contributors ("F**k the police!") or perhaps by a more focused opposition to speed limits.

This issue raises a fundamental problem in the "public goods" justification for governmental action: if people disagree about whether the "public good" is actually good, then can it legitimately be considered a public good? At what point does it simply become tyranny? Some Georgists have argued that community collection of land rents would address this problem by dispersing the net value of the "public good" evenly among all citizens. I don't follow this line of thought, and am driven towards more traditional libertarian responses, either by devolving governmental power to the smallest geographic level and allowing citizens to "vote with their feet", or limiting governmental action to areas where that action is supported by almost all of the people in the jurisdiction.

Dem Health Care Plan: Mandates, Nanny-Statism

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:56:57 -0700

Cato has a first look at the details of the Kennedy Plan released on Monday. There will be an individual mandate requiring everyone to purchase health care insurance that will be enforced by the tax code. The bill would give the Secretaries of Treasury and Health and Human Services the power to assess the penalties. Everyone will be required to submit information on their insurance status over the previous year to the Secretary of HHS.

There will be mandate requiring employers to provide all workers with health insurance or pay a penalty tax. There may or may not be an exemption for small businesses.

A new federal bureaucracy, the Medical Advisory Council, will be created that will essentially determine benefits/requirements of qualified insurance plans.

States will be required to set up gateways or connectors, similar to the Massachusetts’ concept.

There will be some type of "public plan" operating in competition with private insurance, details of which being fairly sketchy at this time.

The Obama Admin is staffing HHS with Nanny Statists that will likely use the Medical Advisory Council as a means to impose a whole of Nanny-State provisions/requirements in the name of preventative care and wellness. Needless to say, if you are a pot or tobacco smoker, you probably would want to avoid signing up for the "public plan option." Of course, I would posit that ending the massive annual farm bill corn subsidies--that ends up subsidizing cheap High fructose corn syrup, energy-dense junk food--would go a lot further in ameliorating the "obesity problem" than having big brother appear on your monitor every morning to lead in you in your daily jumping jacks regimen.

Bottom line, the Kennedy plan looks quite bit like MittCare. In MittCare, the strategy is universal coverage first, then cost control later. Arnold Kling examines this strategy, in terms of KennedyCare, at the federal level. Kling's Stagnant One party state thesis sees the "public option" in KennedyCare purposely driving away republican support(Dems will pass KennedyCare with 51 votes in the Senate if necessary) to get the dessert of "universal coverage." The "spinach" of cost control will be a bipartisan affair. I will predict that a great deal of the bi-partisan spinach will start with a healthy dose of Nanny-Statist cost controls in the "public plan."

My 2 cents on KennedyCare

It's proto-facist, corporatist attempt of preservation of our 3-tier health Care system oligarchy. I don't need to wade through hundreds of pages of details of KennedyCare or long expositions contrasting the technical differences between KennedyCare with respect to, say, HillaryCare, to reduce this issue to it's basic essence. Is Health Care a Public Good or a Private Consumption Good? If it's a Public Good, then we should abolish our quasi public/private 3-tiered system for a public 1-tier system. Our current 3-tier system is basically:

Tier I: medicaid for the low-income; public hospital emergency room treatment for the uninsured; uninsured paying cash for routine care

Tier II: broadly, the middle-class tax-advantaged, group employee benefit of private insurance; also includes those who can afford private, individual insurance outside of a group policy

Tier III: medicare recipients and the wealthy who largely have open-ended, free-choice fee-for-service health care system with little or no rationing of care

Tier I has an explicit rationing of care. Tier II has a tacit rationing of care. Tier III, not so much in terms of rationing.

In contrast, a single tier system budgets through some central authority mechanism an annual top-down health care budget funded by one's ability to pay, and the distribution of rationing is distributed more or less equally throughout the population largely without special privileges.

Of course, I highly doubt the AMA, the Insurance Companies, medicare recipients, Tier III etc... would especially be receptive of a single-tier public good health care system. I imagine many in Tier II wouldn't be particularly receptive either. But, if it's clear that the US simply won't tolerate a single-tier public good health care system, then Health Care really should be a private consumption good. In such case, you should eliminate all the corporatist, licensing cartel regulatory crap in order to approach a model something more along the lines of this or this. However, free-market medicine is an anathema to the public choice interests that want a continuation of the current tiered model.

So you end up with a model that is neither a public good nor a private consumption model. Instead, it's an outright Public Choice model. Yet, I can't help but think how within the next decade--when you begin to have droves of baby boomers going from Tier II to Tier III, i.e., medicare-- how politically sordid this whole model is going to become. Listen, you can't subsidize open-ended medicare by forcing every Gen Y and his/her brother to buy health insurance and Nanny-Stating the poor to death. Eventually you are going to have seriously begin rationing health care for medicare recipients. When that happens, the game is up. KennedyCare is single tier/payer or bust...

Eye of Newt...

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:26:06 -0700

Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee traveled to Virginia Beach last Friday to participate in a GodTV telecast event at Rock Church. Huckabee experienced a laying on of hands from Lou Engle, whereupon he was inspired to proclaim God was responsible for the Proposition Eight victory in California. Newt used the event to inform the audience that America was under attack from pagans.

We are in a period where we are surrounded by paganism, and paganism is an offense.

So Newt continues to cast his lot with the Christian Dominionists and the culture war. In this brief post last year concerning Right Wing Progressivism, it was mentioned that Newt likely saw the culture war as phase II of the "Reagan Revolution." Although it was largely assumed that the culture war was on it's legs these days, it's clear Newt doesn't think so. It's also fairly apparent that Gingrich's maneuvering to insert himself into the Sotomayor debate is an attempt to reignite the culture war, with the success of such an effort perhaps being a precondition for moving forward with his own presidential ambitions.

Is "Open Source" Socialist?

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:08:15 -0700

Kevin Kelly's article in Wired, The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online, has sparked some debate in the libertarian community. Kelly's Thesis: The open-source software model is socialist in nature, and the success of this model online will lead to the revival of Socialism in the political sphere. Kelly's thesis is tinged with the "irony" that it's largely libertarianism that is driving this "neo-socialist" paradigm.

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.
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When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.
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We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections.

Arnold Kling, who sees a correlation between "neo-socialism" and civil societarianism, worries about State power being viewed as the natural progression of such cooperation. Larry Lessig, however, rips into Kelly's thesis, arguing that Kelly is misrepresenting both socialism and libertarianism/capitalism. Lessig argues that the essence of "socialism" is coercion, whereas the essence of what Kelly is describing is "liberty." Lessig then devotes a few paragraphs to argue that libertarianism/capitalism is wrongly conflated with a dog-eat-dog type of non-cooperative social theory, in the process invoking Adam Smith, Hayek and "emergent" public goods(sounding quite a bit like Kling's civil societarianism).

In reality, "neo-socialism" sounds like libertarian socialism, or the old 19th century anarcho-socialism, where the means of production are part of the commons, meaning free and equal access for all. Of course, the 20th century meaning of the term "socialism" changed to signify "the means of production" being collectively owned by the State. This is quite a bit different than the former meaning. Collectivism imposes coercive obligations, duties, requirements on agent participation within the group or social order as a precondition for whatever "positive liberties" the social order offers. Kelly's use of the term "collectivist" to describe "neo-socialism" conflates "the Collective" with "the Commons," a not uncommon error(note: social institutions, collective action models built around managing "the commons" is not collectivism). Collectivism implies a coercive social order and in this sense, Lessig's critique of Kelly's thesis is correct.

However, even if we revert to the original meaning of the term "socialism," it's fairly apparent that "Open Source" itself is not exactly a "socialist order." Richard Stallman, who thinks all software should be part of the commons(other than that, you should be "free" of any other collective obligations in the use of software, which is the meaning of "free" in free software. Free means freedom/liberty not "price." After all, you are free to charge money for distributing "free software.") devised the GNU "copyleft" license that requires derivative works be made available under the same "copyleft" license and that any such improvements can't link to code under a non-copyleft license or that a non-copyleft software application can't build from linking to copyleft code/libraries. Nonetheless, by last count, there are roughly 50 alternative "free software licensing" schemes(e.g. BSD, MIT), many of which that do not require derivative works to remain part of the commons.

In terms of social networking--"the frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time"-- Kelly seems unaware of the most of popular social networking sites/platforms are closed, proprietary systems, although most typically expose developer APIs to 3rd parties. There is a coordination effort by the major players to develop a standard ("OpenSocial") that will allow interoperability between the social networking platforms, but this type of cooperation hardly exemplifies any definition of socialism.

Kelly's thesis suffers from the simple fact that the knowledge economy isn't socialist either in the collectivist or anarcho sense. The idea that the popularity of wikipedia, Facebook and Flickr is going to translate into increased popular support for collectivist, State Socialism is nonsense. Indeed, the real danger to the knowledge economy is the collectivist, Statist enforcement of IP law, which taken to it's logical conclusion would outlaw reading itself. The undeniable fact is that a knowledge economy requires a robust "commons" to actually work, and Open Source accomplishes this; but it's also fairly apparent that an open source knowledge economy would have to support a healthy "private means of production" as well.