- Rand Paul named for anti-altruist and former Rothschild
paramour Ayn Rand whose followers included a long-standing gold-standard
advocate who later would become chairman of the FED, Alan Greenspan.
Greenspan wrote chapters advocating the gold standard that appeared in
one of Miss Rands books on capitalism. Ron Paul and Alan Greenspan have
always been on the same anarcho-libertarian page. Paul's son is merely
a carbon copy of that page. That page has nothing to do with Jeffersonian
liberty or with government regulation of corporations and high finance
to promote the common good. For super rich anarcho-capitalists regulation
is merely a commodity purchased by bankers from legislatures and bureaucracy
to rig markets to their liking. Rand Paul now ready to sell.
-
-
- Liberated From Libertarianism
-
- Maybe we can finally have a serious discussion in this
country about the lunacies of libertarianism.
-
- I doubt it. This is, after all, America. I doubt we'd
know an intelligent political discourse if it whacked us upside the haid.
-
- But now we have Rand Paul, son of Ron, marching toward
the United States Senate, with a mission to "take back our government".
Oh boy.
-
- I might be able to get a little bit excited about that
if it really was his goal. The truth is that the American government exists
almost entirely to serve the interests of the American plutocracy. If libertarians
want to break that evil connection, well, then, definitely give me a shout.
I'll be glad to pitch in.
- But, of course, you pretty much never hear them talk
about that part as they rant about the evils of government.
-
- What do libertarians actually want, Herr Doktor? It's
not entirely clear to me that they know themselves. They're pretty good
with the shibboleths, but always seem to have trouble beyond that. That's
because it is precisely on the other side of the sappy slogans where the
contradictions of libertarianism come glaringly into focus. This is the
place where naive but kindly people would say "Wot, I signed up for
that?", and that's exactly why libertarians don't want to go there.
-
- Such avoidance of reality is not only rarely a problem
in American political discourse, it's nearly a national religion. In this
sense, the discussion Rand Paul had with Rachel Maddow the other night
was doubly instructive. First, because Paul the national savior on
horseback du jour was reduced to repeated instances of the most basic,
and base, political maneuvering in order to come to grips with the implications
of his own ideology.
-
- And, second, because Maddow gave us a partial reminder
of what good journalism would actually look like in America. She didn't
actually get quite all the way to where she should have gone, but her polite,
thoughtful and semi-relentless questioning of her guest was as foreign
to what passes for journalism in this country today as would be six-headed
fourteen-dimensional gaseous creatures from a distant galaxy. Maddow is
fast becoming a national treasure, which says a lot about her, but, regrettably,
a lot more about her colleagues in the 'news' business.
-
- There are several key explanations for the rise of the
insane right over the last three decades, but surely one of them has been
the compliance of the mainstream media. Politicians have been able to make
the most absurdly ridiculous and hypocritical statements without fear of
being called on them. And if they ever were, they need only repeat the
same line in some slightly different variation, and that's the end of the
affair media lapdogs are well trained to cease and desist. One of
Maddow's great virtues which ought to be a sine qua non for anyone
calling themselves a journalist is her doggedness.
-
- To see what I mean, check out this paraphrased approximation
(not too far from verbatim, actually) of her conversation with Rand Paul
the other night:
-
- MADDOW: Congratulations on your big victory last night.
Do you believe that private business people should be able to not serve
black people or gays or any other minority group?
-
- PAUL: I don't believe in racism. I don't think there
should be any governmental or institutional racism. Now I'm going to go
into a long diversionary soliloquy about William Lloyd Garrison, an early
nineteenth century abolitionist, and also about when 'desegregation' [actually
anti-discrimination] legislation was passed into law in Boston...
-
- MADDOW: Yes, okay, that was pretty weird. But what about
private businesses who might want to not serve blacks or gays? Should they
have the legal right to do so?
-
- PAUL: We had incredible problems with racism in the 1950s
concerning voting, schools and public housing. This is what civil rights
addressed and what I largely agree with.
-
- MADDOW: But what about private businesses? I don't want
to be badgering you on this, but I do want an answer.
-
- PAUL: I'm not in favor of any discrimination of any form,
I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. What's
important here is to not get into any sort of "gotcha" on the
question of race, but to ask the question, "What about freedom of
speech?" Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent?
-
- MADDOW: The Civil Rights Act was created to take away
the right of individual business owners to discriminate, taking away their
right to make that decision. Which side of that debate are you on?
-
- PAUL: In the totality of it, I'm in favor of the federal
government being involved in civil rights, which is mostly what the Civil
Rights Act was about. I'm opposed to any form of governmental racism or
discrimination or segregation.
-
- MADDOW: The reason that this is something I'm not letting
go of this is because it effects real people's lives. This question involves
the matter of private discrimination in public accommodations. Should that
be allowed?
-
- PAUL: The debate involves a lot of court cases with regard
to the commerce clause. Many states are now saying that they have a right
to force restaurant owners to allow people to enter with guns even if the
owners don't want them to. So you see how this issue can cut both ways,
against liberals too.
-
- MADDOW: What if the owner of a restaurant or a swimming
pool or a bowling alley wanted to segregate their facility? Should they
be allowed to do so under your world view?
-
- PAUL: We did some very important things in the 1960s
that I'm all in favor of. That was desegregating schools, public transportation,
water fountains.
-
- MADDOW: How about lunch counters?
-
- PAUL: Well, if you do that, then can the owner of the
restaurant keep out guns? Does the owner of a restaurant own his restaurant
or does the government own his restaurant?
-
- MADDOW: Should Woolworths lunch counters have been left
to be segregated? Sir, just yes or no?
-
- PAUL: I don't believe in any discrimination. If you believe
in regulating private ownership, you have to decide on whether you also
want to force guns in restaurants when the owner doesn't want them. This
is a red herring being used by my political opponents. It's an abstract,
obscure conversation from 1964 that you want to bring up. Every fiber of
my being doesn't believe in discrimination, doesn't believe that we should
have that in our society, and to imply otherwise is just dishonest.
-
- MADDOW: I couldn't disagree with you more on this issue,
but I thank you for coming on the show and having this civilized discussion
about it...
-
- So, by my count, Maddow asks Paul the core question here
no fewer than eight times in a row. This is precisely what she should have
been doing, and in doing so she provides a huge service to American society.
If I were to fault her anywhere, it would be only for not identifying Paul's
diversionary tactics for what they were, calling them out, and thereby
pushing them off the table. I would have liked to have seen her say, "With
respect, sir, we're not talking about that. Or that, or that, or that.
We're talking about this."
-
- And she would have needed to do that several times over,
because Paul's game here is to shift the discussion to domains where he
is more comfortable, and where the problems with his ideology don't show
up so readily. Maddow says let's talk about discrimination in privately-held
public accommodations, and he says let's talk about my lack of prejudice.
She tries again and he wants to discuss governmental discrimination. She
repeats the question and he says let's talk about nineteenth century history.
She asks once more and he starts talking about censorship and the First
Amendment. She tries yet again and he changes the topic to guns, which
involves legislating behavior, rather than race, which concerns who you
are. She asks still another time and he cries foul, claiming that this
is some obscure red herring being used by his opponents for purposes of
political assassination.
-
- All of these are diversionary lies, meant to avoid the
unpleasant realities of what libertarianism would actually look like in
action. But the last lie is the most egregious. The entire reason for Rand
Paul's existence right now which is also almost literally true, given
that he has the unfortunate burden of being named for Ayn Rand, a twisted
soul if ever there was is his premise of reclaiming American government
in the name of liberty for the American people. That's who he is. That's
what he represents himself to be. That's his political shtick, his raison
d'être. What the Maddow interview reveals, however, is that he's
really just another politician trying to win office, not a crusader at
all. And what it also reveals is just how bankrupt are those libertarian
notions if you look at them at all closely.
-
- The ideology has some nice bumper-sticker like appeal,
especially for the more simplistic among us. I mean, who, after all, could
be against more freedom? And, indeed, when it comes to social issues, the
libertarians have it exactly right. The government shouldn't be in the
business of controlling women's bodies, or telling people what substances
they can imbibe, or who they can sleep with or marry, or whether they can
end their own lives should they choose to. But you don't need to be a libertarian
to get to those places. These are also progressive ideas as well.
-
- Where libertarianism breaks down is in assuming that
we can all just do what we want and it will work out great. And in assuming
that all private actors are essentially well intentioned. Neither of these
is true, and a libertarian society would leave each of us at the mercy
of these twin fallacies. And that's an ugly place to be, let me tell you.
-
- Suppose you bought a house and had a fat mortgage outstanding
on it. Now the guy who owns the plot next door decides to build an abattoir
on his land. You can't live in your house anymore because of the nauseating,
permeating, stink. You also can't sell it, because no one else wants to
live there either. And you're still stuck paying the mortgage, probably
plunging you into bankruptcy since you're now also paying rent to live
somewhere else. Why did all this happen? Because you voted for that libertarian
city council, and they threw out all the zoning laws on the books, preferring
maximum freedom for use of private property instead. Aren't you thrilled
about how that worked out?
-
- So you pack all your belongings in your car and decide
to drive away. But you turn around after going just a couple of miles,
because everybody drives on any side of the road they want to, whenever
they want to, and it's scary dangerous out there. Why? Because the libertarian
state government you elected true to its principles eliminated
all such driving laws as the restrictions on personal freedom they truly
are.
-
- So maybe you'll fly instead, eh? Oops. Sorry. That's
just as frightening. The new libertarian federal government eliminated
the FAA and all its restrictions on private carriers as an invasion of
their corporate liberties. No red tape here anymore! No onerous regulations!
Now each carrier can hire whomever it wants, at whatever salary, to do
whatever amount of safety inspection it deems appropriate. Or none at all.
No reason to worry, though. I'm sure a corporation would never cut corners
in order to maximize profits, right?
-
- Well, actually, never mind the flying off to a
better place idea is moot anyhow. You see, there's no airport in your town.
No private actors had either the resources or the motivation to build one.
And since government is evil, they never did the job either. Which is also
why you're about to lose you job, as well. With no ports, trains, highways,
internet or other mass infrastructure, the US is about to become an economic
actor more or less on the scale of Togo. Congratulations on that bright
move, my libertarian friend! How does the freedom of chronic unemployment
taste? Yummy, eh?
-
- But, really, what do you care, anyhow? Your water is
polluted because anyone can dump anything into it they want. Ditto with
your filthy air. And global warming is about to take out all the living
things on the planet, anyhow. We will be quite free to die, thanks to libertarianism.
-
- Well, all is not lost. At least you can walk down to
your local dining establishment and have a nice meal without having to
fear the presence of darkies or queers in the same room with you. That
pretty much makes it all worth it, no?
-
- We could go on and on from here, but why bother? The
point is made. The problem with libertarianism is that it is a child's
candy store fantasy. Lots of sugar, no nutritional value. It's the Mel
Gibson ("Freeeee-dom!!") of political ideologies. The ugly truth
is that we hominids are social animals, not atomistic asteroids, each flying
through space in our own little orbit. At the end of the day, the simultaneous
great delight and awful curse of our humanness is, ultimately, each other.
-
- That is not to say that individual liberty is not important.
It is, and I no more favor libertarianism's opposite number, totalitarianism,
than I do the lunacy of Ayn Rand, who spent her life (vastly over-)reacting
to the Stalinism of her youth. I don't want to live in either of those
worlds. It's just that it's naive and juvenile to believe that what is
required here is anything other than some sort of difficult balance between
the needs of the individual and those of society. That's the only solution
that works.
-
- One would think we might have learned this lesson of
late. We've just come through an era of wholesale foolish deregulation
in the name of setting free Americans and their productive capacities.
The whole of our ethos of political economy these last three decades could
easily be boiled down to a single bumper-sticker: "Government Bad,
Industry Good". So now we might wanna ask ourselves, as Sarah Palin
would put it (assuming she had a brain larger than a centipede's), "How's
that whole deregulatey depressiony thing working out for you?"
-
- Sorry, Mr. Paul. Just when we've seen precisely what
happens when greedy individuals with all the morality of mafia hit men
are allowed to do whatever they want by a government that is completely
coopted by them on a good day, and utterly AWOL the rest of the time, you
come talking to me about more 'freedom' from government intrusion?!?! Are
you joking?
-
- Government, as imperfect and downright lethal as it can
be when in the hands of those who use it for the wrong purposes, is the
instrument and expression of the public will. It is the tool through which
society conveys its values and seeks to achieve our mutual goals. And it
is meant to be triumphant over private actors because societal needs (which,
by the way, can, should and often do include government protecting individual
liberties see, for example, "Rights, Bill of") are broadly
more important than those of the individual.
-
- It would be a mark of our (return to) political maturity
if we could acknowledge that.
- If that's too much to ask, though, I wonder if my libertarian
friends would at least be willing to take ownership of the real implications
of their own ideology.
-
- I mean, if you guys are just going to practice deceit
and hypocrisy, why bother taking over the Republican Party?
-
- Those guys are already experts.
-
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- http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Liberated_from_Libertarianism.html
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