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Libertarians

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Zip said:
In my opinion foreign policy is one of the places where libertarianism falls down and hard.

Previously posted at http://uncommonsensecanada.blogspot.com/2007/05/divergence-of-thought.html

Emma Goldman the goddess of liberianism had  her dream come true. She was able to organize anarchist-organized farms, factory collectives, militia. Her libertarianism was founded on Anarchist literature. You cannot saay that foreign policy is one of the places where libertarianism falls donw hard. The war in Spain between Franco and the Anarchist was heavily influenced by Emma Goldman and  her anarchist views. She was able to persuade Lenin into a pictorial  (or Lenin persuading her into it)after she was deported from USA then later on from the Soviet Union.
 
Emma Goldman was I believe a Social Libertarian/Anarchist, I think the best example of a real Libertarian or Libertarians in power would be the founding fathers of the United States. Thomas Jefferson was a "Liberal" in traditional sense but today would be labeled as a Libertarian.

The main difference between Libertarian and Anarchist is how the law is enforced, Libertarians believe in well funded Police and Military as well as a well armed People. Where as an Anarcho-Capitalist would have private military and police organizations enforce the law with also the people being well armed, I believe there was even a study stating private enforcement could work without being corrupt.
 
The issue with private enforcement is that enforcement is an issue of sovereignty. What would happen if "my" cops came to arrest you for an alleged offense and "your" cops objected?

Actually this was the state of affairs during the Middle Ages in Europe, with every Duke, Baron and petty lord able to enforce his personal sovereignty over their small territories, and warring with others as the relative balances of power shifted.....
 
Thucydides said:
The issue with private enforcement is that enforcement is an issue of sovereignty. What would happen if "my" cops came to arrest you for an alleged offense and "your" cops objected?

Actually this was the state of affairs during the Middle Ages Cold War in Europe, with every Duke, Baron and petty lord the USSR and the US able to enforce his personal sovereignty over their small territories, and warring with >each< others as the relative balances of power shifted.....

Two or many, the game is the same.

As Graymatters said - who's in charge.
 
What you are talking about is a matter of scale. Internally, the USSR and United States had unquestioned sovereignty within their territories, but there is little discussion that either place is/was Libertarian.

I suspect that most people who believe Libertarianism is impractical or impossible are more concerned with the limited reach of a Libertarian State reducing their personal security to something like pre-Westphallian Europe, with bands of brigands contesting with local warlords for control of people and resources.

I would suggest they look deeper into the past; Classical Greece of the polis period or the Res Publica Roma made personal security contingent upon the activities of all free born men (indeed that was one of the definitions of free born people; the ability to take up arms and defend their and their neighbour's property).

Since Libertarians believe in personal responsibility, a Libertarian State would probably resemble the Swiss Confederation, with every citizen volunteer receiving the training and equipment to carry out local defense. (A draft would be out of the question, though). Don't forget in Switzerland, every male citizen has an automatic rifle and a minimum of 200 rounds of ammunition at home, and Switzerlans also has one of the lowest rates of gun crime on earth.
 
Thucydides said:
....

I would suggest they look deeper into the past; Classical Greece of the polis period or the Res Publica Roma made personal security contingent upon the activities of all free born men (indeed that was one of the definitions of free born people; the ability to take up arms and defend their and their neighbour's property).

....


Thucydides, the problem with the Classical reference is that back when you were a boy the world was much less densely populated.  Living within a city, under the protection, and control, of the Law, was a personal choice.  This may even have been true of slaves.

The rationale for that statement is that Exile was an available punishment.  Exile doesn't work if there is no place for the exiled to go.  Likewise those Brigands to which you refered lived in Spaces outside the Law, far from the Places where the Law was imposed.

In that world there was room for the individual, or at least the small community.  That is less true in modern Greece.

Britain imposed the Law on Sherwood Forest in the time of the Plantagenets.  The Tudors did it to Wales. The Stuarts/Stewarts dealt with the Borderers. The Hanoverians handled the Highlands.

In France the authorities finally got control of the Cevennes in the early 1800s.

West Europe (and Urban North America) has crowded out the Individual.

Now, on the plus side - America, Canada and Australia are too big, even with modern technology for the same level of conformity to be imposed uniformly, and in the rest of the world there is still space for the Individual to live outside of the law.

Places that come to mind:  Corsica, Sicily, the Sahara, Somalia, the Hindu Kush, Siberia....

Lots of opportunity for the determined Libertarian      ;D
 
Thucydides said:
Since Libertarians believe in personal responsibility, a Libertarian State would probably resemble the Swiss Confederation, with every citizen volunteer receiving the training and equipment to carry out local defense. (A draft would be out of the question, though). Don't forget in Switzerland, every male citizen has an automatic rifle and a minimum of 200 rounds of ammunition at home, and Switzerlans also has one of the lowest rates of gun crime on earth.



Domestic killings shock Swiss

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4755143.stm
Family slaughter might be a more accurate term - there have been 14 such cases in Switzerland in the last 11 months.

I do believe that if you check gun ownership is still pretty liberal,...just try getting bullets anymore.

 
Libertarianism as a social movement that will turn political. I suspect they will simply take over the carcass of the Republican party since there is a large organizational base and the constituency supports broadly libertarian ideas (even social conservatives, "neo-cons" and RINO's at least speak the language, even if they don't walk the walk). When will Canadaians start having T.E.A. parties of their own?

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/dc-tea-party-republicans-should-not-be-rejoicing-quite-yet/

D.C. Tea Party: Republicans Should Not Be Rejoicing Quite Yet

Posted By Jennifer Rubin On April 15, 2009 @ 1:30 pm In . Column2 05, Media, Money, Politics, US News | 110 Comments

On a rain-soaked Wednesday morning, for nearly four hours, people streamed into Lafayette Park across from the White House for the D.C. tea party protest. What unfolded was not exactly what the organizers, the media, or the Republican Party expected.

The rally started off with a glitch that wound up as a blessing in disguise for the organizers. Organizers had originally planned two rallies, one in front of the Treasury building about a block away and one in the park. After being assured by police that the Treasury location would be available, organizers were informed early Wednesday that they could not gather there. As a result, two locations were combined and a larger, more impressive gathering came together in the park. At its peak, the crowd topped 1,000 — perhaps 1,500 by an informal count.

These were hardly professional protesters — or dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. Many said they had never attended a rally before. One woman sporting a pink umbrella and pig-shaped balloon explained that the bailouts, spending, and lack of personal responsibility motivated her to come out from a Virginia suburb. Indeed, there were many out-of-towners — students from Pennsylvania, a couple from Kentucky, and many parent and children combinations. The dad from Maryland with his 11-year-old daughter said he’d never been to a political protest in his life but found it unconscionable to pass on thousands of dollars of debt to his daughter. It was in some ways a throwback to a bygone era of homemade signs, colorful costumes, and non-professional politicians. Not a single elected leader spoke from the small makeshift stage.

So what do these people want? While labeled a “tax protest” by many media outlets, the most common items mentioned by those attending and speaking were bailouts, runaway spending, the growing deficit, “generation theft” (i.e., passing on an unsustainable debt to their children and grandchildren), and a  loss of personal accountability. It was the sort of protest the Wall Street Journal editorial board would have designed if they were asked to come up with their ideal rally.

While some carried signs about immigration and even one vowing to do away with the Federal Reserve, the message was rather consistent and the tone hostile: they are very upset with the current administration and Congress’ handling of fiscal and economic issues.

But Republicans should not be rejoicing quite yet. Many protesters went out of their way to say they are upset with both parties and hold George W. Bush equally responsible for launching the now never-ending stream of bailouts. And the crowd, if anything, was libertarian in bent rather than conservative. These people are advocating less government, restraints on federal power, and a return to “constitutional government.” Social conservatives who seek expansion of state power on issues from abortion to support for faith-based programs may find themselves at odds with a newly invigorated movement to shrink government and enhance individual liberty.

It is not clear whether this is the making of a new political party or a flash in the pan. What it does show is that the absence of a single Republican leader does not hinder some impressive grassroots organizing. It also shows that young conservatives, who were out in abundance in Lafayette Park even in the pouring rain, do know how to organize through new media including Twitter. And it shows that for conservatives and libertarians, the Obama presidency is a powerful organizing tool. Just as the Left coalesced in opposition to George W. Bush, these activists are, to a large extent, acting out of resentment and anger toward the president and Democratic congressional leaders.

The proof will be in the pudding. If we see an influx of new candidates, activists, and volunteers stemming from the tea party movement, Wednesday will be seen as a significant day in modern political history and new media-based organizing. If the activists go home, never to be seen again, then the day will recede in memory as another failed attempt to shake the political status quo. Stay tuned.

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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/dc-tea-party-republicans-should-not-be-rejoicing-quite-yet/
 
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s National Post is a column attacking Prime Minister Harper:
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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/04/30/terence-corcoran-no-room-for-libertarians-in-harper-conservatism.aspx
Terence Corcoran: No room for libertarians in Harper conservatism

April 30, 2009

Recently, the editors of this page have run a series of short commentaries on the nature of Canadian conservatism by a rainbow coalition of writers — Andrew Coyne, Karen Selick, Deb Grey and others. The contributions were originally produced for a conference sponsored by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. But until today, one of the key Manning Centre speakers was missing from the series, which means that Post readers were unaware of The Night the Prime Minister Purged Libertarians from Canadian Conservatism.

Speaking on the eve of the Manning event to a room full of presumably like-minded conservatives, including Preston Manning, Mr. Harper delivered a rambling two-track message (See text below). First, he defended his Conservative government’s record, listing items that he said were solidly and uncompromisingly conservative: supporting the military, defending Israel, resisting national day care, dodging Kyoto, defending Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.

Canada’s Conservative government, he said, “has made a big difference in this country, and we should never forget it.” He didn’t specifically mention government spending and the big move to deficits, but he was clearly defensive. “This is not to say that we haven’t made compromises while governing. Indeed, compromises are an inevitable consequence of governing. I’m not talking about compromises about principles, or compromises in the name of expediency or opportunity. I’m talking about compromises that have to do with basic reality.”

The Harper Conservatives, in other words, were mugged by reality. They had to do it because of the recession and Wall Street. When the global recession struck, it was not the time to hold fast to ideas — balanced budgets, spending controls, small government. Why? “Because unlike various forms of Liberalism, Conservatism is a value system, not an ideology. It is a value system based on reality, on the realism of experience, not on abstract blueprints for society.”

Modern Liberals, said Mr. Harper, tend to believe that the solution to all problems lies in more government. “In fact, if a solution doesn’t involve more government, today’s Liberals dismiss it.”

Then Mr. Harper moved to the second track of his message, demolishing what he called “libertarians.” It was an odd message. In reality, libertarians are a mixed bag of people who roughly favour free markets, less government and greater individual freedom than we have now. Exactly how many libertarians exist in Canada, how many call themselves conservatives, or vote Conservative, isn’t known. But there can be no doubt that some core of conservative support comes from people who hold some libertarian views and favour smaller government.

What followed was Mr. Harper’s conscious rebuke of libertarianism. In fact, more words were spent undermining libertarians than Liberals. Libertarians, he said, “believe that the solution to all problems lays in less government. More specifically, they believe in individual freedom, freedom from government, the freedom that does in fact underlie the market economy.”

The essence of Mr. Harper’s conservatism is that it is a happy middle ground between two undesirable extremes, the small-government push of libertarianism and the big-government push of Liberalism. This middle ground is based on “conservative values,” which he defined by the three “Fs” — freedom, faith and family. Freedom, he said, can only exist if it is “used well,” as if to achieve public good.

Mr. Harper’s attempt to purge libertarians from Canadian conservatism reached its lowest point when he pretty much blamed libertarianism for the economic crisis. Wall Street, he implied mockingly, was the heart of libertarianism, and Wall Street and the libertarian free market tanked the economy.

“Look at Wall Street, the great free-enterprise global financial institutions that wanted so much freedom from government regulation — they were the first in line for government support when the recession hit. And now I read that now some of them are saying they don’t like that this government money may limit their freedom.”

This drew laughter and applause from the Manning Centre crowd, from the few hundred conservatives in the audience. As if Wall Street bankers were libertarians. Worse, as if Wall Street bankers were libertarians who deserved to have their banks nationalized and their compensation controlled by government.

Do libertarians pose some kind of threat to the Harper Conservatives? Apparently they do, judging by Mr. Harper’s attempt to eliminate them from the party. And he might be right.

National Post

Terence Corcoran is editor of the Financial Post. On Saturday, he will participate in a debate at the 13th annual Civitas National Conference in Toronto on the subject: “Mugged by Reality: The Role of Ideology and Pragmatism in Government.”
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Here (same source) are the PM’s remarks that dismayed the Post:

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Text of remarks by Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

Individual freedom is something Conservatives value. But it is not the only thing we value. Reality, my friends, is something we cannot lose sight of, as we are in government faced with, and entrusted with, guiding our country through the most challenging economic times the world has seen in generations.

Conservatives don’t believe that big government — the welfare state — is the solution to all problems, that is true. We didn’t believe it before this recession and we’re not about to believe it now. But neither can Conservatives believe today that the marketplace is the solution to all problems.

We are in a global recession principally because a lot of people on Wall Street (financiers, business people) and a lot of people in the private sector more generally (home owners, consumers) pushed or bought into a very un-conservative idea: that they could live beyond their means.

Regulators may have failed to prevent it, governments probably made it worse, but it was in the end a failure of the private sector to live according to the values we as Conservatives know to be true.

And also do not forget, because we certainly will not forget, that once the global economy begins to recover, the primary wealth creation of the future will come principally from the private marketplace — from a well-regulated private market place, yes, but in an irreversibly globalized economy, a marketplace just the same.

In the Canada of the future, we should be able to have one of the most free-enterprise, one of the most prosperous, societies on the planet. That would require us to govern according to conservative values.

What exactly are those conservative values?

I think we all instinctively recognize them when we see them, although it is sometimes difficult to define them. I like to summarize my idea of conservatism in three “Fs” — freedom, family and faith.

Individual freedom, political and economic, is one of our fundamental values. It is absolutely critical. But it must be tempered. First, individual freedom must be tempered by family. We are part of a chain in which we honour and build upon those who came before us and in which we hope and look out for the future of those who will come after.

Second, freedom must be tempered by faith that there is a right and wrong. It teaches us that freedom is not an end in itself, that how freedom is exercised matters as much as freedom itself.
Freedom must be used well. And freedom can only be maintained if it is used well. 

Now I know the libertarian says — and it’s a simple perspective I have a lot of sympathy for — the libertarian says: “Let individuals exercise full freedom, and take full responsibility for their actions.” The problem with this notion is, as conservatives know from experience, that people who act irresponsibly in the name of freedom are almost never willing to take responsibility for their actions.

I don’t speak just of individuals who may have ruined their lives, through drugs or crime or whatever. But look at Wall Street, the great free-enterprise global financial institutions that wanted so much freedom from government regulation — they were the first in line for government support when the recession hit.

And now I read that some of them are saying they don’t like that this government money may limit their freedom.

So I say again, my friends, Conservatives cannot be just about freedom. It must be about policies that help make sure freedom will lead to choices — to responsible choices, prosperous choices with wider benefits to all citizens.

Now friends, I am not here to tell you everything we are doing as a government is perfect. We are operating in a very difficult political and economic environment. Options are limited, risk is everywhere, but I can tell you we are on the right track.

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I am not a libertarian but I find Prime Minister Harper’s characterization of  them too facile by far. In the main, in the USA, large, intrusive governments provoked the crisis by social engineering projects – aimed at moving the “working poor” into the broader “middle class.” As policy it worked – despite all the sub-prime mortgages and foreclosures, tens of millions of working class Americans will pay off their mortgages and cross the barrier into the “propertied” middle class. What went wrong included failures to adhere to “sound” business/accounting practices – one of the things small governments ought to manage.

Prime Minister Harper doesn’t have many friends in the media and he is not popular in the country. Alienating the classical liberal wing of the coalition upon which Canadian” conservatism” rests is not a smart move,

 
Now I know the libertarian says — and it’s a simple perspective I have a lot of sympathy for — the libertarian says: “Let individuals exercise full freedom, and take full responsibility for their actions.” The problem with this notion is, as conservatives know from experience, that people who act irresponsibly in the name of freedom are almost never willing to take responsibility for their actions.

I don’t speak just of individuals who may have ruined their lives, through drugs or crime or whatever. But look at Wall Street, the great free-enterprise global financial institutions that wanted so much freedom from government regulation — they were the first in line for government support when the recession hit.

And now I read that some of them are saying they don’t like that this government money may limit their freedom.

Oh how soon the sheep will turn on the wolf. With a few stern sentences the PM has angered the herd. Not more than two years ago, these very same people stated that PM Harper's crap didn't smell. What happended? Two words "reality check"

Anyone wanting a small government is living on the wrong continent. You may have to move to Luxembourg to find small.

 
retiredgrunt45 said:
You may have to move to Luxembourg to find small.

Only if you are extremely rich so as to become one of the local decisionmakers.  Otherwise, I believe, you will find yourself as minion of the state.  Luxembourg is the EU in microcosm.  It is where the elite that wish to create the EU live.

Far better to move to Afghanistan, Zimbabwe or the Comoros.  Less government control there (I'm playing the futures on Zimbabwe).
 
Good question; where do you go for less government? Where is "Galt's Gulch?"

I think the microstate movement isn't viable simply because the assembled powers of the State will work to crush potential rivals that can physically harbour cash and talented individuals.

"Distributed Republics" running in parallel to the "real world" might take over; massive multiplayer games have parallel economies that actually interact with the real economy, throw in software to make transactions and interactions untraceable and we might have an outline of what the Libertarian future might look like.

Or we could dust off our memberships to the L5 society......
 
More on the trope of Libertarianism as a cultural phenomena:

http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2009/05/06/push-back-or-the-real-culture-war-21st-century-style/

Push back, or the real culture war, 21st-century style

Posted By Roger Kimball On May 6, 2009 @ 6:41 am In Uncategorized | 14 Comments

A specter is haunting America — the specter of freedom. Even as President Obama proceeds with his efforts to impoverish the country, the productive classes of society are waking from their dogmatic slumbers and banding together.

A few days ago, Arthur Brooks, the new head of the American Enterprise Institute, published a thoughtful article in The Wall Street Journal called “[1] The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism.” Here is an excerpt:

There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.

Despite President Barack Obama’s early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the “tea parties” that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop up those who engaged in corporate malfeasance and mortgage fraud.

The data support the protesters’ concerns. In a publication with the ironic title, “A New Era of Responsibility,” the president’s budget office reveals average deficits of 4.7% in the five years after this recession is over. The Congressional Budget Office predicts $9.3 trillion in new debt over the coming decade.

And what investments justify our leaving this gargantuan bill for our children and grandchildren to pay? Absurdities, in the view of many — from bailing out General Motors and the United Auto Workers to building an environmentally friendly Frisbee golf course in Austin, Texas. On behalf of corporate welfare, political largess and powerful special interests, government spending will grow continuously in the coming years as a percentage of the economy — as will tax collections.

So what should we do about it? The first thing we need to recognize is that we are not dealing with an economic but rather with a cultural, even — if it is not to off-putting a word — a philosophical issue. It is an issue, that is to say, about some basic principles about how we should live our lives. Mr. Brooks notes the irony of titling Obama’s monument of irresponsibility “A New Era of Responsibility.” “[2] Words must mean something,” Obama said recently. But it seems pretty clear that he wants to reserve to himself the prerogatives of definition. Mr. Brooks is right that the battle we face is a battle of ideas. “Social Democrats,” he writes,

are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the “sharing economy.” They are fighting a culture war of attrition with economic tools. Defenders of capitalism risk getting caught flat-footed with increasingly antiquated arguments that free enterprise is a Main Street pocketbook issue. Progressives are working relentlessly to see that it is not.

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It’s also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don’t have without regard for our children’s future.

Enterprise defenders also have to define “fairness” as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is “not fair at all,” according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory — even if the prey are wealthy.

I believe Mr. Brooks is also right that the socialist onslaught that is Barack Obama confronts us not only with challenges but also with opportunities. Battle lines, philosophical difference, moral alternatives are being drawn more sharply now than in decades. As Mr. Brooks concludes, “This is an exhilarating time for proponents of freedom and individual opportunity.”

The last several years have brought malaise, in which the “conservative” politicians in power paid little more than lip service to free enterprise. Today, as in the late 1970s, we have an administration, Congress and media-academic complex openly working to change American culture in ways that most mainstream Americans will not like. Like the Carter era, this adversity offers the first opportunity in years for true cultural renewal.

If this seems abstract to you, consider this letter, titled “Unafraid In Greenwich Connecticut,” which was sent to me by a friend and is making the cyber-space rounds. It’s by [3] Clifford S. Asness, Managing and Founding Principal of a fund called AQR Capital Management, LLC, in Greenwich, Conneticut. “The President,” writes Mr. Asness, “has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds.”

He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter”, was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.

I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm that offers hedge funds as well as public mutual funds and unhedged traditional investments. My company is not involved in the Chrysler situation, but I am still aghast at the President’s comments (of course these are my own views not those of my company). Furthermore, for some reason I was not born with the common sense to keep it to myself, though my title should more accurately be called “Not Afraid Enough” as I am indeed fearful writing this. . . . It’s really a bad idea to speak out. Angering the President is a mistake and, my views will annoy half my clients. I hope my clients will understand that I’m entitled to my voice and to speak it loudly, just as they are in this great country. I hope they will also like that I do not think I have the right to intentionally “sacrifice” their money without their permission.

Good stuff, is it not? And Mr. Asness provides some illuminating context:

The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him. Why is he not calling on his party to “sacrifice” some campaign contributions, and votes, for the greater good? Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.

Let’s also mention only in passing the irony of this same President begging hedge funds to borrow more to purchase other troubled securities. That he expects them to do so when he has already shown what happens if they ask for their money to be repaid fairly would be amusing if not so dangerous. That hedge funds might not participate in these programs because of fear of getting sucked into some toxic demagoguery that ends in arbitrary punishment for trying to work with the Treasury is distressing. Some useful programs, like those designed to help finance consumer loans, won’t work because of this irresponsible hectoring.

Last but not least, the President screaming that the hedge funds are looking for an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout is the big lie writ large. Find me a hedge fund that has been bailed out. Find me a hedge fund, even a failed one, that has asked for one. In fact, it was only because hedge funds have not taken government funds that they could stand up to this bullying. The TARP recipients had no choice but to go along. The hedge funds were singled out only because they are unpopular, not because they behaved any differently from any other ethical manager of other people’s money. The President’s comments here are backwards and libelous. Yet, somehow I don’t think the hedge funds will be following ACORN’s lead and trucking in a bunch of paid professional protestors soon. Hedge funds really need a community organizer.

This is America. We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years. When it fails it fixes itself. Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.

I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now.

Are you ready for yours?


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Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2009/05/06/push-back-or-the-real-culture-war-21st-century-style/

URLs in this post:
[1] The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104689179070747.html
[2] Words must mean something: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2009/05/04/obama-and-a-lesson-from-thucydides/
[3] Clifford S. Asness: http://www.aqrcapital.com/cliff.htm
 
Is cultural libertarianism finally going to turn political?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574388562244518116.html#

The Revolt of the Masses Electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships.By DANIEL HENNINGER

When the political world arrives at the point where even the Japanese rise up to toss a party from office after almost 54 years in power, it's time to see something's happening here, Mr. Jones.

The ever-entertaining Karl Marx described a society's least politically engaged people as the lumpen proletariat. Well, it's beginning to look as if the globe's lumpen proletariat has decided they've had about enough of the lumpen bureaucratariat. It could be a revolution under way, though not the one predicted by the boys at the barricades.

To Mr. Marx, the lumpen proletariat (often slurred into a single word, lumpenproletariat) was the most marginalized, hopeless, faceless swath of the underclass. Were he alive at this moment, it is not beyond imagining that Karl would have joined the charge against what has become a lumpen bureaucratariat—the permanent, often faceless overclass of gerrymandered politicians, bureaucrats for life and the public unions and special interests that swim alongside like pilot fish.

The vote in somnolent Japan suggests that electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships. The same weekend the Japanese unloaded the Liberal Democratic Party, German voters withdrew Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling majorities in the state legislatures of Thuringia and Saarland.

In the U.S., political handicappers are predicting heavy Democratic losses in the House next November. This just four years after ending GOP control of Congress in the 2006 elections and two years after sweeping into office Barack Obama and his Democratic partners.

Congress's approval rating remains stuck around 30%. This number may be more important as an indicator of public sentiment toward the nation's leadership than presidential approval.

Some search for an ideological trend toward the left or right in these votes, but the only evident trend is to strike out at whichever blob is currently in power. Even as Americans turned over their country to liberal Democrats, opinion polls showed that the British people were turning toward the Conservatives for relief from listless Labour.

What accounts for the global electorate's growing disgust with the political overclass? Try this: No matter the ideological cast of these governments, they all hold in common one policy: the inexorable upward march of national indebtedness. It has arrived at the edge of the cliff.

View Full Image

Associated Press

Representatives in Connecticut played solitaire on their computers as the House convened this week to vote on a new budget for the fiscal year.
Japan's gross debt is currently estimated at some 180% of its gross domestic product, the highest among the world's theoretically serious economies. Look elsewhere and one sees the same fiscal obesity.

As measured by the OECD, the growth in gross debt as a percentage of GDP since the dawn of the new century is stunning. The data isn't exactly comparable across individual countries, but the trend line is unmistakable.

In the U.S., debt as a percentage of GDP rose to 87% in 2009 from 55% in 2000. In the U.K., to 75% from 45%; Germany, to 78% from 60%; France, 86% from 66%. There are exceptions to this trend, such as Canada, New Zealand and notably Australia, whose debt has fallen to 16% of GDP from 25%. But for all the countries in the OECD's basket the claim of indebtedness on GDP grew to 92% from 69% the past nine years.

In short, the lumpen electorate works, and the lumpen bureaucratariat spends. They get away with it because they have perfected the illusion that no human hand causes these commitments. The payroll tax just happens. Entitlements are "off-budget," presumably in the hands of God. This is government without the responsibility of governance.

Unable to identify who or what has put them in hock to the horizon, national electorates are attempting accountability by voting whole parties out of power. Rasmussen recently found that 57% of voters would throw out Congress en masse if they could. Gerrymandered districts ensure that they can't.

Problem is, the lumpen bureaucratariat can't stop spending and borrowing and won't incentivize growth. Amid the phenomenal spending on the financial mess here, they tried to pass a cap-and-trade bill whose centerpiece was an auction of carbon credits to flow trillions of dollars toward the bureaucracies. Mr. Obama's people seem weirdly oblivious to the scale of their outlays, programs and dreams.

The decision by the voters of Japan to turn out the LDP after 54 years argues that in real democracies, political self-entrenchment and enrichment can arrive at limits. In 2000, more astonishingly, Mexicans defeated the PRI after 71 years in office, then re-elected the new party's candidate in 2006. Now it looks like similar forces are bubbling out of town halls across the United States. If American elections since 2006 (or 1994) tell us anything, it is that the target of their wrath is the party of the Beltway.

This is hardly a fair fight. The political overclass everywhere holds the power to print money and grab it back with taxes and inflation. Still, the election returns suggest that something is stirring. Maybe we should call it the revolt of the masses.

Write to henninger@wsj.com
 
Free Markets andCapitalism are two distinct concepts which have a very unique synergy, something I had not been able to articulate before. After all, China has "free markets" but not Capitalism, and many criminal organizations strive to monopolize markets to maximise their capital formation (aka profits).

Perhaps a more sophisticated view of Capitalism is it is about the creation and use of capital, while Free Markets presuppose the owners of the capital have the ability to make unfettered use of their capital.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/17/corruption-panic-and-incompete

Random Dude|11.18.09 @ 9:25AM|#

The difference is what we have currently is not slightly off from capitalism, but considerably in the opposite direction.

There are two components to a libertarian economic system: 1) the free-market and 2) capitalism. The first component deals with management and the second component deals with the production structure.

Capitalism requires the construction of physical savings to produce goods. The savings stock is mediated by various and non-uniform interest rates in a free-market system. Centralized price controls in the form of Fed rates isn't a slight aberration from the free-market--it is the polar opposite.

Secondly, the low rates have artificially tilted the production structure away from capital-formation, a. la. capitalism, to consumerism.

Historically, combining free-market and capitalistic systems in a liberal culture requires precise property boundaries. We have no such thing. The very words "systemic risk" could not happen in a liberal capitalistic culture. In our credit driven, faith-based economy, it can. This is why many Austrian economists believe in full-reserve banking.

Our current economic system is much more akin to a corporatist consumption economy. While I agree that there are poor defenses on behalf of free-market capitalism, your comparison is simply invalid. There was very little the Soviets could do to become "more communist." To become more free-market capitalist we could eliminate the 40% of GDP that is government based and all of its respective programs, eliminate the central bank, eliminate fractional reserve banking, go from a 1% savings rate to a 15% rate (or perhaps a 40% rate like China), and transform our economy from 70% of GDP being consumption to 50%.

These are all radical reversals of the last 100 years of economic and government policy. If we were not just "more capitalistic," but capitalistic at all, the entire economic system we have now would be burned to the ground.
 
Identifying a tool for pro Libertarians to use:

http://volokh.com/2009/12/10/addressing-the-most-important-weakness-of-conservative-libertarian-public-interest-law/

Addressing the Most Important Weakness of Conservative-Libertarian Public Interest Law
Ilya Somin • December 10, 2009 7:58 pm

I recently renewed my membership in the Federalist Society, and got a mailing asking to sign up with the Fed Soc Pro Bono Center. I was only vaguely aware of this organization’s existence, even though it is a potentially important effort to address the most important shortcoming of conservative and libertarian public interest law. Perhaps it will be more successful in that effort, if more people learn about it.

Over the last 30 years, conservative and libertarian public interest firms such as the Institute for Justice, the Center for Individual Rights, and the Pacific Legal Foundation have mounted a strong challenge to the previously dominant legal left, and won some important legal victories for property rights, economic liberties, and limits on government power. However, right of center public interest law suffers from a key weakness: the paucity of lawyers available to conduct follow-up litigation to enforce favorable precedents. Even the most important federal and state supreme court decisions don’t change the legal landscape all by themselves; they usually require extensive follow-up litigation to make sure that government officials comply and that their principles are enforced in other cases where similar issues come up. Often, the people victimized by government violations of constitutional rights are poor, politically weak, or unable to engage in protracted litigation to vindicate their rights. This is true in the area of property rights, and many others of interest to libertarians and conservatives. Left-liberal scholars and activists have long understood this crucial lesson, and they have created an extensive network to facilitate follow-up litigation to enforce their high court legal victories. In almost every major law firm, there are lawyers who do small-bore pro bono cases on behalf of various left-wing causes. These cases often build on and enforce favorable appellate decisions.

By contrast, conservatives and libertarians have been slow to grasp this point and act on it. That isn’t just my opinion. It’s also the view of Steven Teles, author of the leading academic work on right of center public interest law, and also of prominent leaders of conservative and libertarian public interest organizations, such as Chip Mellor, President of the Institute for Justice and the leaders of CIR (interviewed in Teles’ book).

The Fed Soc Pro Bono Center is a thoughtful effort to address the problem. The premise is simple: interested lawyers sign up at the Center’s website, and give their contact information, areas of expertise (e.g. — property rights, First Amendment, religious liberties, criminal law), what kind of work they can do (trial, appellate, etc.), and how much time they have per month. The Center then matches them up with public interest firms and other organizations that are looking for lawyers to work on specific cases (these organizations can also sign up at the website, and provide information about their needs). I doubt that the Pro Bono Center can cure the greatest weakness of conservative/libertarian public interest law all by itself. But it’s a step in the right direction. IJ’s Human Action Network is an older, somewhat similar initiative (but one that doesn’t have an explicit case-matching system).

Most lawyers, especially those working at large firms, have at least some time to do pro bono work. Indeed, senior partners often encourage junior associates to so such work because it is a great way for younger lawyers to get useful experience. At many firms, partners are happy to have associates take on such work even if they don’t necessarily agree with its ideological orientation; after all, it’s still valuable experience that can benefit the firm when the associate uses what he or she has learned in later work for paying clients. Obviously, there are also career benefits to the lawyer himself. Getting useful litigation experience can help your career, and it’s often easier for a young lawyer to get major responsibility on a pro bono matter than in a case on behalf of a paying client.

Conservative and libertarian law students often ask me what they can do to promote the cause of free markets and limited government if they are unable or unwilling to go into public interest law or academia. Here’s my answer to that perennial question: They also serve who litigate unglamorous but essential follow-up cases. Few important legal precedents ever amount to much without them.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: I have done various pro bono work for the Institute for Justice myself, and serve on one of the Federalist Society’s practice group executive committees (an unpaid position).
 
Libertarians know this already; large complex systems are non linear and ruled by chaos theory. No one and no bureaucracy can possibly know and understand what is going on, much less predict the outcome of changing inputs:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1551

Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority

In yesterday’s New York Times, David Brooks wrote perceptively about the burgeoning populist revolt against the “educated classes”. Brooks was promptly slapped around by various blogosphere essayists such as Will Collier, who noted that Brooks’s column reads like a weaselly apologia for the dismal failures of the “educated classes” in the last couple of decades.

Our “educated classes” cannot bring themselves to come to grips with the fact that fundamentalist Islam has proclaimed war on us. They have run the economy onto recessionary rocks with overly-clever financial speculation and ham-handed political interventions, and run up a government deficit of a magnitude that has never historically resulted in consequences less disastrous than hyperinflation. And I’m not taking conventional political sides when I say these things; Republicans have been scarcely less guilty than Democrats.

In the first month of a new decade, unemployment among young Americans has cracked 52% and we’re being officially urged to believe that an Islamic suicide bomber trained by Al-Qaeda in Yemen was an “isolated extremist”.

One shakes one’s head in disbelief. Is there anything our “educated classes” can’t fuck up, any reality they won’t deny? Will Collier fails, however to ask the next question: why did they fail?

The obvious and most tempting hypothesis for a libertarian student of history like myself is that the Gramscian damage caught up with them. And I think there’s something to that argument, especially when the President of the U.S. more beloved of those “educated classes” than any other in my lifetime routinely behaves exactly as though he’d been successfully conditioned to believe the hoariest old anti-American tropes in the Soviet propaganda arsenal. And is praised for this by his adoring fans!

I think there’s much more to it than that, though. When I look at the pattern of failures, I am reminded of something I learned from software engineering: planning fails when the complexity of the problem exceeds the capacity of the planners to reason about it. And the complexity of real-world planning problems almost never rises linearly; it tends to go up at least quadratically in the number of independent variables or problem elements.

I think the complexifying financial and political environment of the last few decades has simply outstripped the capacity of our “educated classes”, our cognitive elite, to cope with it. The “wizards” in our financial system couldn’t reason effectively about derivatives risk and oversimplified their way into meltdown; regulators failed to foresee the consequences of requiring a quota of mortgage loans to insolvent minority customers; and politico-military strategists weaned on the relative simplicity of confronting nation-state adversaries thrashed pitifully when required to game against fuzzy coalitions of state and non-state actors.

Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued tellingly in their 1994 book The Bell Curve that 20th-century American society had become a remarkably effective machine for spotting the cognitively gifted of all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds and tracking them into careers that would maximize their output. They pointed out, though, that the “educated class” produced by this machine was in danger of becoming self-separated from the mass of the population. I agree with both arguments, and I think David Brooks and Will Collier are pointing us at the results.

In retrospect, I think race- and class-blind meritocracy bought us about 60 years (1945-2008) of tolerably good management by Western elites. The meritocracy developed as an adaptation to the escalating complexity of 20th-century life, but there was bound to be a point at which that adaptation would run out of steam. And I think we’ve reached it. The “educated classes” are adrift, lurching from blunder to blunder in a world that has out-complexified their ability to impose a unifying narrative on it, or even a small collection of rival but commensurable narratives. They’re in the exact position of old Soviet central planners, systemically locked into grinding out products nobody wants to buy.

My readers might well ask, at this point, “Great. Does this mean we’re screwed?” If a meritocracy drawn from the brightest, best-educated people in history can’t cope with our future, what do we do next?

The answer is, I think implied by three words: Adapt, decentralize, and harden. Levels of environmental complexity that defeat planning are readily handled by complex adaptive systems. A CAS doesn’t try to plan against the future; instead, the agents in it try lots of adaptive strategies and the successful ones propagate. This is true whether the CAS we’re speaking of is a human immune system, a free market, or an ecology.

Since we can no longer count on being able to plan, we must adapt. When planning doesn’t work, centralization of authority is at best useless and usually harmful. And we must harden: that is, we need to build robustness and the capacity to self-heal and self-defend at every level of the system. I think the rising popular sense of this accounts for the prepper phenomenon. Unlike old-school survivalists, the preppers aren’t gearing up for apocalypse; they’re hedging against the sort of relatively transient failures in the power grid, food distribution, and even civil order that we can expect during the lag time between planning failures and CAS responses.

CAS hardening of the financial system is, comparatively speaking, much easier. Almost trivial, actually. About all it requires is that we re-stigmatize the carrying of debt at more than a very small proportion of assets. By anybody. With that pressure, there would tend to be enough reserve at all levels of the financial system that it would avoid cascade failures in response to unpredictable shocks.

Cycling back to terrorism, the elite planner’s response to threats like underwear bombs is to build elaborate but increasingly brittle security systems in which airline passengers are involved only as victims. The CAS response would be to arm the passengers, concentrate on fielding bomb-sniffers so cheap that hundreds of thousands of civilians can carry one, and pay bounties on dead terrorists.

Yes, this circles back to my previous post about the militia obligation. I’m now arguing for this obligation to be seen as, actually, larger than arming for defense (although that’s a core, inescapable part of it). I’m arguing that we need to rediscover CAS behavior in politics and economics — not because financiers or bureaucrats are dangerous or evil, but because even with the best will in the world they can’t cope. The time when they could out-think and out-plan the challenges of the day operating as an elite has passed.

The people who will resist the end of the engineered society, the managed economy and the paternalist state are, of course, the “educated classes” themselves. Having become accustomed to functioning as the aristocracy of our time, they will believe in anything except their own obsolescence as rulers. It remains to be seen how much longer events will permit their delusions to continue.
 
One of the tenants of Libertarian thought is to be able to make informed choices and to consent to mutually beneficial activities. This software tool has interesting implications (although the author of the blog in question clearly thinks it will uncover nefarious "right wing" conspiracies. Evidently he has not been following Climartegate nor the unfolding of the Stimulus package, the auto bailout or Obamacare).

Of course the initial app will probably be to generate "boycott" or "buycott" events for and against companies and corporations, but untangling the relationships between corporate rent seekers and the agents of the State will have a positive impact in the end, since most people do not approve of rent seeking behaviour in principle and will act to thwart it if they can (the emotional power of "muck racking" journalism in the early part of the 20th century rose from that distates, and the current slide in car sales by companies that took taxpayer funded bailouts are examples of this behaviour).

Disentangling rent seekers from the State is one of the prime goals for Libertarians, so I think this is the appropriate thread for this idea:

http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/archive/2009/09/24/sourcemap-a-hint-of-political-software-to-come

It's still in beta, but it's what it'll evolve into that's so interesting

From worldchanging.com comes an interesting posting about Sourcemap, an open tool for visualizing the supply chains that contribute to the products you buy.  It's a great idea:  name a product, and you can see where its pieces were sourced, who built what and where--in short, who's involved in making your life happen.

This is great, but it's the step after Sourcemap that really interests me:  when the app can fully trace the corporate ownership of the entities involved, as well as their publicly-available information things like campaign contributions.  Because the stuff you buy isn't just made by people and corporations; it's made by political movements and their supporters.  For good or ill, in the near-term future we're looking at being able to instantly, seamlessly, and completely boycott entire polities by simply filtering your buying options. Imagine an iPhone app where you aim the iPhone's camera at a product on the shelf in the store, and the iPhone tells you how in-line with your own political stripe (how green, or how Republican) the aggregate entity that built it is.  Instead of deciding which of sixteen varieties of spaghetti to buy based on the colour of the box or (God forbid) the price, you can do so based on whether the companies owners support progressive family planning programs in Africa.

The prospect is both terrifying and exhilarating.  Terrifying because products can no longer succeed or fail entirely on their own merits.  Politics will enter buying in a big way.  --Exhilarating because of the prospect of laying bare the world as it really is--a world where purchasing decisions have never been innocent, but we have previously never had the ability to follow through on that knowledge.

Of course the choice of who to support should be yours, and based on your values. I also suspect that immediate self interest (i.e. shopping for the best price) will continue to be the primary motivating factor for shoppers, and companies who attempt to pander too much to the "political" shoppers (of any stripe) will find themselves forced into a niche market and crushed by larger and more diversified competitors.
 
Libertarians not as a political party, but as a social movement part II:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11152

The Libertarian Vote in the Age of Obama
by David Kirby and David Boaz

David Kirby is an associate policy analyst, and David Boaz is executive vice president, at the Cato Institute. They are coauthors of "The Libertarian Vote," Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 580.
Published on January 21, 2010

Libertarian — or fiscally conservative, socially liberal — voters are often torn between their aversions to the Republicans' social conservatism and the Democrats' fiscal irresponsibility. Yet libertarians rarely factor into pundits' and pollsters' analyses.

In 2004 libertarians swung away from Bush, anticipating the Democratic victories of 2006. In 2008, according to new data in this paper, libertarians voted against Barack Obama. Libertarians seem to be a lead indicator of trends in centrist, independent-minded voters. If libertarians continue to lead the independents away from Obama, Democrats will lose 2010 midterm elections they would otherwise win.

We find that 14 percent of American voters can be classified as libertarian. Other surveys find a larger number of people who hold views that are neither consistently liberal nor conservative but are best described as libertarian. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 23 percent held libertarian views. A Zogby poll found that 59 percent considered themselves "fiscally conservative and socially liberal," and 44 percent agreed that they were "fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian."

Libertarians shifted back to the Republican column in 2008, supporting John McCain over Barack Obama by 71 to 27 percent. Although many libertarian intellectuals had a real antipathy to McCain, the typical libertarian voter saw McCain as an independent, straight-talking maverick who was a strong opponent of earmarks and pork-barrel spending and never talked about social issues. Also, the prospect of a Democratic president working with a Democratic majority in Congress at the height of a financial crisis scared libertarian voters.

Younger libertarians were more supportive of Obama. Pro-life libertarians are more Republican than pro-choice libertarians.

Few of the voters we describe as libertarian identify themselves as such. But the Ron Paul campaign and the burgeoning opposition to President Obama's big-government agenda suggest that small-government voters may be easier to organize than they have been in the past.
 
Governments and Bureaucrats treat people like a herd; but there is hope for social and political libertarianism so long as people act as a pack instead:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=103002A

A Pack, Not a Herd

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds : BIO| 30 Oct 2002 

So the snipers that paralyzed and terrorized the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are caught now. But it's worth thinking about how they were caught. After repeatedly slipping through the fingers of law enforcement, John Muhammad and Lee Salvo were caught because leaked information about the suspects' automobile and license number was picked up by members of the public, one of whom spotted the car within hours and alerted the authorities - blocking the exit from the rest area with his own vehicle to make sure they didn't escape. "You can deputize a nation," said one news official after the fact.

Yes. With proper information, the public can act against terrorists - often, as we found on September 11, faster and more effectively than the authorities. The key, as Jim Henley noted, is to "make us a pack, not a herd."

The problem is that this goes against the very grain of intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and so on. Within bureaucracies in general - and doubly within intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies - information is power, and power isn't something you want to share. And if you deputize a nation, doesn't that make the official deputies just a little bit less special?

The problem with this mindset is that it's all about bureaucratic turf, and not about getting the job done. Otherwise we'd have learned the lesson long ago. As Canadian journalist Colby Cosh remarks:


I'd have thought the Unabomber case would have taught police, I don't know, everywhere that it is better to be liberal than stingy in releasing information to the public. Remember the Unabomber - the serial killer who was caught because his prose style was recognized? Yeah, that guy. If Charles Moose and his merry men had actually succeeded in sitting on the information they wanted sat upon, Muhammad and Malvo might have been popping another D.C.-area shopper's head like a grape while you read this. Keep this in mind as you hear their police work praised in the days to follow.


That's a bit harsh, but to the point. There are good reasons police might want to keep some kinds of information confidential - they need details that will let them screen out calls from nutballs other than the real killer (though that didn't work very well in this case) and they don't want to create an unnecessary panic or start an orgy of finger-pointing and suspicion. These are worthy purposes, but like any virtue, they become vices if overdone, and police are overdoing them.

In fact, it seems pretty clear that the authorities, overall, view the citizenry as a herd, not as a pack. They see ordinary people as sheep, with themselves in the role of shepherd. Without close supervision, they assume, people will erupt into mob violence, or scatter in fear.

The evidence, however, doesn't support this approach. As sociologist Kathleen Tierney writes, the response of ordinary New Yorkers to the 9/11 attacks was "adaptive and effective:"


Beginning when the first plane struck, as the disaster literature would predict, the initial response was dominated by prosocial and adaptive behavior. The rapid, orderly, and effective evacuation of the immediate impact area - a response that was initiated and managed largely by evacuees themselves, with a virtual absence of panic - saved numerous lives. Assisted by emergency workers, occupants of the World Trade Center and people in the surrounding area helped one another to safety, even at great risk to themselves. In contrast with popular culture and media images that depict evacuations as involving highly competitive behavior, the evacuation process had much in common with those that occur in most major emergencies. Social bonds remained intact, and evacuees were supportive of one another even under extremely high-threat conditions.


What's more, such responses are typical, even though they often infuriate outsiders. For the government it's upsetting, because people aren't asking what to do. For the media it's frustrating, because there's no one in charge to interview. But we shouldn't assume that these frustrations have anything to do with effectiveness:


Effective responses to community crises often look messy from the outside, but that is part of what makes them effective. The failure to understand the emergence and complexity that is typical of major disasters often results in characterizations of disaster settings as chaotic and unorganized. Critical observers may express exasperation because "no one is in charge" - as if the activities of hundreds of organizations, thousands of small groups, and tens of thousands of individuals should be controlled in real-time by some single individual or overarching entity. These kinds of comments are often rooted in inappropriate militaristic command-and-control images of disaster management and in a mistrust of non-elites and non-experts. All such criticisms fail to appreciate the strengths of situationally-driven, problem-focused, locally-based, and improvisational response strategies like those observed in New York on September 11 and in the days that followed.


So while Chief Moose and the other talking heads were holding press conferences in which they castigated the press for reporting information, they should have been figuring out how to take advantage of the vast resources that a mobilized public can command. But the officials didn't want to, for fear of "vigilantes". Luckily for them, a leak saved the day.

Regardless of whether or not the D.C. snipers count as "terrorists" under your particular definition (they do under mine, but the authorities seem to be shooting for a much narrower standard) there seems little question that in coming weeks, months, and years we're going to be dealing with a lot of fast-moving, dispersed threats of the sort that bureaucracies don't handle very well. (Every domestic-terrorism victory so far, from Flight 93 to bringing down the LAX shooter to spotting the D.C. killers was accomplished by non-law-enforcement individuals, after all). Rather than creating new bureaucracies, we need to be looking at ways of promoting fast-moving, dispersed responses, responses that will involve members of the public as a pack, not a herd. Even if doing so reduces the career satisfaction of shepherds.

As David Brin says:


Amid all the noise and posturing, nobody proposes enhancing the one thing that actually worked well on that awful day. What appears to have worked, was the initiative and resourcefulness of common men and women. This may be hard to credit, or even to perceive. Throughout the 20th Century, the trend in our culture was monotonic, toward ever-increasing reliance on protection and coddling by institutions, formally deliberated procedures and official hired guns... none of which availed us at all on September Eleventh. Rather, events that day seem to suggest a reversal, toward the older notion of a confident, self-reliant citizenry.

Of course it's too early to forecast a major counter-trend. But indications are provocative. Rather than diminishing the role of the individual, advances in technology seem to be rapidly empowering average citizens, even as professional cynics forecast freedom's demise.


I hope that people in Washington are paying attention to this. But the evidence so far isn't too encouraging.
 
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