Rand Paul, Tuesday: I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense.
Rand Paul, 2012: You need to have people within your own party that have the wherewithal to stand up to you. If a Republican does injustice, I’ll be up on the floor saying the same thing.
Tag: Glibertarians
Ryan directed the Congressional Budget Office to score his budget plans back in 2012. The score of his plan showed the non-Social Security, non-Medicare portion of the federal budget shrinking to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050 (page 16).
This number is roughly equal to current spending on the military. Ryan has indicated that he does not want to see the military budget cut to any substantial degree. That leaves no money for the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, The Justice Department, infrastructure spending or anything else. Following Ryan’s plan, in 35 years we would have nothing left over after paying for the military.
Just to be clear, this was not some offhanded gaffe where Ryan might have misspoke. He supervised the CBO analysis. CBO doesn’t write-down numbers in a dark corner and then throw them up on their website to embarrass powerful members of Congress. As the document makes clear, they consulted with Ryan in writing the analysis to make sure that they were accurately capturing his program.
Dean Baker, writing for the Center for Economic Progress. This is exactly right and cannot be repeated frequently enough. The fact that it isn’t even said, much less repeated ad infinitum is why The Democrat fails and but also is why this nonsense within the GOP led House is allowed to continue. Democrats, when people are showing up outside the doors of the House with pitchforks, torches, and large logs you’ll know you’ve repeated it frequently enough. Please start now. It’s going to take decades.
Henry David Thoreau, Hypocrite
Do yourself a favor today and read Kathryn Schulz take on Waldenghazi. Ayn Rand even comes up:
The other and more damning answer to the question of why we admire him is not that we read him incompletely and inaccurately but that we read him exactly right. Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.
Well worth your while to read the whole thing.
Yglesisas Answers it All
Matt Yglesias asks:
There’s no mystery as to why the National Republican Campaign Committee hates Nancy Pelosi, but their dislike for San Francisco is a bit puzzling.
Almost directly, and seemingly without realizing it, Matt Yglesias also provides the answer:
[San Francisco is] an enormous economic success story. The San Francisco metropolitan area has the fourth-highest median household income in the country, with its Bay Area partner San Jose coming in at number three. Metro San Francisco is in a tie for having the third-highest-pay for low-wage workers, its fourth in median wages, and third in 90th percentile wages.
GOP orthodoxy requires “government” of any kind to be an abject and self-evident failure. Few citizens of the US would dispute the sense that San Francisco is the liberal bastion of the United States. Therefore it must be an urban hellhole and not be visited by any kind of success. Where success exists, it must be ignored. Similarly, old Taxachusetts must be forever suffering under the yoke of ludicrously high taxes (and one must never acknowledge the reality: that MA’s effective tax rates and collective tax burden generally trend lower than those of old Live Free or Die itself, that glibertarian heaven called New Hampshire).
Much like the Post Office and many other examples, any functioning example of government, large or small, must be (at a minimum) denigrated. If possible, it must also be actively undermined such that it may then be pointed to as an example of the impossibility of government intervention, large or small. All evidence to the contrary must be marginalized. And that is why the GOP “hates” San Francisco and largely assumes it to be barely survivable smoking ruin.
Romney won’t have 60 votes in the Senate. But if he has 51, he can use the budget reconciliation process, which is filibuster-proof, to get rid of the law’s spending.
Ezra Klein reflects on President Romney’s potential chances and methods should he try repealing the ACA.
I’m not sure when, if ever, the DC Commentariat will get this through their heads: the next time the GOP holds the Presidency and a non-supermajority in the Senate, the filibuster will be eliminated approximately 30 seconds into the new Congress. Period, the end, carve it in stone.
Reconciliation won’t even be an issue with ACA repeal. It will be a simple majority vote, no filibusters allowed because there aren’t any allowed for any reason. Same with the functional elimination of Medicare, Social Security, and all the other Glibertarian wonders that await us under the Ryan budget plan when and if Romney wins. There’s simply no other way to get their preferred policies through, and the next time they have control of these levers of power they will get their policies through, no matter what it takes. Eliminating the filibuster will be among the more minor procedural changes and will be lost in the shuffle that heralds the end of the New Deal and basically all of the legislative 20th century.
Those are the stakes. Just when, exactly, will anyone in DC realize it? Sometime six to eight years after it all transpires, apparently. I’m assuming David Brooks already has an editorial in the can praising the end of filibusters. For Democrats, anyway.
I’m not sure when, if ever, the DC Commentariat will get this through their heads: the next time the GOP holds the Presidency and a non-supermajority in the Senate, the filibuster will be eliminated approximately 30 seconds into the new Congress. Period, the end, carve it in stone.
Reconciliation won’t even be an issue with ACA repeal. It will be a simple majority vote, no filibusters allowed because there aren’t any allowed for any reason. Same with the functional elimination of Medicare, Social Security, and all the other Glibertarian wonders that await us under the Ryan budget plan when and if Romney wins. There’s simply no other way to get their preferred policies through, and the next time they have control of these levers of power they will get their policies through, no matter what it takes. Eliminating the filibuster will be among the more minor procedural changes and will be lost in the shuffle that heralds the end of the New Deal and basically all of the legislative 20th century.
Those are the stakes. Just when, exactly, will anyone in DC realize it? Sometime six to eight years after it all transpires, apparently. I’m assuming David Brooks already has an editorial in the can praising the end of filibusters. For Democrats, anyway.
The first solution [for the Great Depression] that occurred to statesmen was to propose tightening of belts, acceptance of hardship, resort to patience. Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
[…]
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty. Yep.
Supposedly this is a compelling cartoon that shows how ‘crazy’ those public sector unions are.
Indeed, but the failure here is in getting the message into the head of Joe Private Sector that he’s the one getting the raw deal and the answer to that is most definitely not making sure that everyone has all benefits stripped from their job too.
The GOP and their media enablers have spent over two decades convincing him that, in fact, he shouldn’t be getting any benefits and neither should anybody else, regardless of whatever contracts those parties have entered into. Unless and until Unions and The Democrat figure out that it will require a similarly sustained, unyielding, and focused message to undo any of that, nothing will change. And, assuming the staus quo prevails or worsens, sooner or later, everyone will end up losing pensions, health care, weekends, limited hours, paid vacations, and anything else they can pry from a working populace all too eager to hand over anything and everything for a simulacrum of a chance at actual advancement. You know, lotteries and such.
But, man, think of the efficiencies our Galtian overlords will have achieved. That will be something to see.
First They Came for the Deer
[Embattled WI governor Scott] Walker has hired Texan Dr. James Kroll to serve as Wisconsin’s “deer czar,” a position that gives Kroll considerable power over Wisconsin’s deer management policy. Kroll is an outspoken proponent of game farms, and an opponent of public lands and public game management, which he is on record as describing as “the last bastion of communism.”
I think it’s pretty obvious that Walker’s master plan here is to first take away the hunting, then take away the guns. And he’s hired some kind of unelected Russian political figure to do the dirty work for him. It’s the only rational plan that explains this set of facts. After all, it will be easy to take your deer rifle once he’s taken your God given right to kill deer, and he’s specifically stated that he wants to take your right to kill deer. So the other is not and can not be far behind. And, once he’s got the deer rifle, he’ll be after the rest of your guns as well. Best get the word out on that point.
Reaching across the aisle, it’s clear that we can all agree that any land not in currently the rightful hands of the local Lords and/or people of High Birth is indeed one of the many examples of communism and/or creeping sharia law at work in this country. Best to turn over any land still foolishly held in the public trust to monied interests as soon as possible.
Now, obviously, if Ayn Rand has taught us anything it’s that we can’t expect them to take these lands for nothing. So, in exchange for their bonhomie and patriotism (as expressed by so generously taking the land off the state’s hands), I feel any ceded land should, at a minimum, be handed over free of charge or (better still), gifted along with an ongoing, state funded honorarium; payable in perpetuity. It’s the only reasonable and, by God: let’s face it, American solution to this issue.
A mature society is one that can distinguish between 1) times when lawbreaking requires new, more robust laws, 2) when the appropriate conclusion is that there will just always be some level of crime, and 3) when the prohibition itself is incompatible with a free society.
Conor Friedersdorf, weighing in on SOPA and other draconian “law and order” approaches to the innerwebs. Which, of course, must be destroyed such that it may better serve our Galtian Overlords.
Sadly, we’re not even close to assessing the three points he lays out, because doing so would require us to throw our lot in with a bunch of pointy headed analysts and require looking into some “data” and “numbers” and making conclusions based on empirical reality. None of this is currently allowed in public discourse or decision making at any level. In fact, recourse to analysis and empiricism is frequently pointed to as a disqualification for office. And so the Republic crumbles.
Sadly, we’re not even close to assessing the three points he lays out, because doing so would require us to throw our lot in with a bunch of pointy headed analysts and require looking into some “data” and “numbers” and making conclusions based on empirical reality. None of this is currently allowed in public discourse or decision making at any level. In fact, recourse to analysis and empiricism is frequently pointed to as a disqualification for office. And so the Republic crumbles.
If you were an evil genius determined to promote the idea that libertarianism is a morally dubious ideology of privilege poorly disguised as a doctrine of liberation, you’d be hard pressed to improve on Ron Paul.
Lemkin 