manunderstress.com

I have latched on to the GOP-are-statist-hypocrites meme and I am not letting go. I fucking love it when Libertarians rip on the GOP! If the Republitards were in power right now we would have a similarly sized stimulus package with a different name. Something like, “Heterosexuals, Guns n’ Freedom- Why Do You Hate America Act?”

Under Bush and a Republican Congress we had an explosion of growth on all fronts: spending that put Lyndon Johnson to shame, huge deficits and a doubling of the national debt, corporate bailouts, further centralization of education, protectionism, expansion of Medicare, increased regulation, undeclared wars, civil-liberties violations and other unchecked executive power, and more. Bush did not veto a single spending bill in eight years. His cutting of tax rates in 2001 and 2003 has to be judged in the context of growing spending. Milton Friedman pointed out that the level of spending, not taxation, is the truer gauge of the government burden. The money has to come from somewhere. Removing it from the economy through borrowing is as economically damaging as taxation — more so when you figure that the government will perpetrate inflation to manage the debt.

That was bad enough, but the Republicans added rank hypocrisy to the mix by claiming to favor free markets.

Why regulation is stoopid.

It’s tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

Via the libertarian aware Onion:

WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.
…
The current economic woes, brought on by the collapse of the so-called “housing bubble,” are considered the worst to hit investors since the equally untenable dot-com bubble burst in 2001. According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent.

End of the world hedge funds? Cool. Apocalypse investing… Armageddon insurance…a whole new way to look at diversifying your portfolio. I was thinking about gold but this is much more interesting.

I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.

Who could have guessed Tuesday’s turnout!?! OMG, what an unpredictable world we live in! The Socialist Lady and the Endless War guy. Fuuuuuck me. Oh the sweet choices Democracy has laid before us yet again.

If you think I’m being facetious, get yourself a beer.

Say what you will about Ron Paul, the man made a mark, and if he runs for the election as an independent, he’ll make an even bigger one. I’ve never seen more steet signs and freaking airplanes and, good god, the Ron Paul meet-up emails in my inbox. But alas, the United States is not ready to mix reason with politics. It still prefers dynasty and fear, and the shit-sturm und drang of empty rhetorical pandering, to boring sound argument.

I’m not crazy about all of RP’s positions. I don’t agree with his stance on abortion, or his hard-line views on immigration or even his seductive yet somewhat over-simplified foreign policy (considering the mess we’ve made for ourselves is one we ought to atone for in my book.) But I think he’s got more of a coherent vision of the proper role of government in the United States according to its original charter (hint: think smaller) , than any other candidate. Government is too big, too intrusive, and has proven time and time again that it does not work. Both parties have lost sight of this.

Fans of utopia will chide me for being so simplistic. They will say “Don’t be so naive. Government can fix anything- it just has to be done in the right way.” This is the core fallacy of the modern status quoticians: the belief in a top-down, self-engineered utopia delivered by a big shiny government to your doorstep for free. Energy issues? Let them eat ethanol. Poverty? Just raise the minimum wage, and we’ll all become rich. Terrorism? Just start toppling rogue governments halfway across the world. Blowback? What blowback? At best, the idea that the powerful government can solve all of our woes, is misguided. At worst, it has brought us war, broken and unethical wealth redistribution schemes, disastrous protectionism and other economic meddling, and unconstitutional invasions of privacy (wiretapping, drug policy.) All of these scenarios have one thing in common: the oft ignored hidden consequences that are birthed by the “noble” intentions of government.

When Ron Paul talked about “blowback” he was lauded by both the left and right for making a connection that few politicians dared make. Why stop there? Blowback, mostly in the form of unintended consequences, is visible in all government policies. Prohibition put small business out and strengthened organized crime, just like the drug war today creates international crime and puts money in terrorists hands. The creation of the unnecessary Homeland Security bureaucracy contributed to the ineffective handling of Katrina. The training of the Mujahideen led to the rise of the Taliban and you know what.

This is not to say that government can’t ever get it right, just that usually it doesn’t, and that its actions often end up causing more harm than good. Furthermore, when government meddles we never get to see how people and markets and society adjust to a problem naturally. Patience! Economic stimulus plans are naive, needed pain is just put off until tomorrow. But we’ve grown so accustomed to the government “doing something” that we erroneously think of it as a physician. All of the leading candidates just sprinkle promises of money and programs and war to fix everything. They promise what they can’t deliver and it’s that false hope that gets them elected.

America is on the greatest crack bender ever.

I spent Thanksgiving as I usually do, with family, all of whom live nearby. This year it was at my parents house in Woodstock. I have never hosted a holiday dinner, since being single and with no “responsibilities” means there are no familial expectations demanded of me. I don’t wrap presents, or if I do, they are wrapped with newspapers and duct tape. Not having endorsed/validated the family idea yet, by creating my own, I’m simply not liable. Those game rules do not apply. But I still love to parasite off the holiday meal trough: vegetables of any sort to counter a not very nutritional bachelor’s diet. Plus they pity me like a hobo, or rather, an utterly, incomprehensibly free man.

This year we managed to talk about politics at the dinner table without anyone having an embarrassing explosion. It was strange. Of course, we’ve all changed over the years… I hardly ever read The Nation, and my father has either hidden or thrown away the signed photo of George and Laura Bush. Although while his disenchantment is real, I don’t think he’d ever vote for a Democrat. In fact, one thing everyone seemed to agree on was the ineptness of the Bush administration. Hardly news these days, it’s downright boring to catalog the many wrong turns of Dubya. It’s so bad no one cares…we’ve all gone hopelessly apathetic. But we also agreed that we didn’t like many of the candidates for the next go around, but then disagreed on our projections of the inevitable Clinton vs. Giuliani deathmatch. I brought up Ron Paul and thought it was interesting that while everyone claimed to “like him,” no one takes him seriously as a contestant for American Idol: President. I thought depressingly to myself that America is not ready to talk about fiat money or blowback, that despite our losses they have not been great enough as to have us question the actual status quo itself. We still prefer the popularity contest, the confetti, some “tough talk” on terror, millions of dollars wasted in ads and marketing, and some juicy wedge issues thrown in just to keep the culture wars exciting, and everyone distracted.

Factcheck.org gettin all meta-psychological on our ass. Now I’ve been a pious fan of research cherry-picking watchdog groups for about as long I’ve been politically aware and internet enabled, and perhaps therein lies part of the problem, one man’s statistically sound study, another man’s crock-full-a…

But Factcheck, who remain all too infrequent and obscure, contemplate the mind-bending proposition that perhaps de-obscuring the truth just leads to further obscuring, by way of a complex pattern of downwardly spiraling retardation, which manifests itself mainly in dumb people. While I agree with the premise, which is that most people who walk upright and get occasional haircuts are intellectually not much further along than the Bonobo, but do we have to draw attention to it? Perhaps they should go the logical step further and simply pronounce that, “all I know is that I know nothing.”

That’s the end game.

Now, even if you don’t believe the government should be involved in public education or health care, this is still money that could be spent elsewhere. In other words, it’s your money, beeyatch! Wake up! See “What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy.” Imagine if this money had been spent on national defense? We could have one of those utopian missile defense programs or even individual apocalypse-proof bubble suits. I’m more in favor of the latter, as it allows for travel.

The implementation of capital punishment is flawed, both morally and logically. Everyone understands the emotions of revenge, no matter how self-serving and ultimately futile they are. We’re human after all. The problem is that the legal system kills and jails innocent people at staggering numbers. So revenge comes at the price of further innocent death. Ironic vicious circle, anyone?

As many have argued, why would you put the government, who can’t even fix holes in roads, in charge of deciding who lives or dies? The result of course, is that our legal system has put many innocent people to death, and locked many thousands more away. This is the moral contradiction CP supporters just can’t get around. Supporting capital punishment, is supporting a system that has jailed and put to death thousands of innocent people. That’s where the Innocence Project comes in, working with DNA evidence to exonerate the thousands of wrongly convicted. As you can imagine, death row gets priority.

There’s a good and quite emotional documentary on The Innocence Project, called After Innocence. Highly recommended on awareness raising factor alone. It’ll haunt you. It should haunt you…depending on your state, your tax money kills innocent people.

Not really surprising that out of the 2008 Presidential Candidates the Democrats are leading what in my estimation is the most important polling metric, the Myspace friend count. Democrats have always been slightly hipper…or had more time to waste on Myspace.

Barak Obama 113270
Hilary Clinton 50364
John Edwards 40566

Now what is really surprising is that Ron Paul, a libertarian running as a Republican, is nowhere on the “official” polls, but hugely popular on the internet. I thought it odd that McCain was ahead of him but then realized the McCain-Myspace debacle of a few months ago probably got McCain a lot of unintentional “friends,” fudging the numbers. Plus, Paul is smoking McCain on Facebook, which might say something interesting about younger voters, and he has more Youtube and Meetup subscribers than any other candidate, Elephant or Donkey. “Dr. No” as supporters lovingly refer to him, is definitely getting the Howard Dean style grass-roots-internet-monster momentum going. Good thing we all know how that can turn out.

John McCain 37451
Ron Paul 33904
Mitt Romney 25273
Fred Thompson 6070
Rudy Guliani (profile set to private!)

Politicar2, originally uploaded by anewvoice.