But rigidity is built into the principles of libertarianism in a way that’s not true of liberalism or even into most forms of conservatism.

Absolutely true. The ideology most like libertarianism in this respect is Marxism. Whenever either philosophy fails, their practitioners don’t look at their ideology—they blame it on some outside force, or say what was practice wasn’t “true” free market capitalism/communism.

If we needed further proof that libertarianism is male-supremacist and misogynist to its core, we’d note that these freedom-lovin’ dudes have no problem with forcing a human being to shelter an occupant in her body against her will, and give birth.  But forcing a motorcyclist to wear a helmet while riding on roads that other people paid to build?  Tyranny.

Unree—

Depends on the libertarian. You can ask fifty libertarians about abortion, and get fifty different answers. They will range from free abortion on demand to a complete ban. They really have no consistent position on it.

Rand and Mises, for example, were strongly pro-choice, whereas Ron Paul is pro life.

“Absolutely true. The ideology most like libertarianism in this respect is Marxism. Whenever either philosophy fails, their practitioners don’t look at their ideology—they blame it on some outside force, or say what was practice wasn’t “true” free market capitalism/communism.”

I just want to be sure I understand. I think the above quote allows that Marxism may at some point somewhere, sometime have failed. And that the failure might not have been a result of outside forces.
Perhaps there is a flaw in Marxism?

The possibility has already brightened my day!

But rigidity is built into the principles of libertarianism in a way that’s not true of liberalism or even into most forms of conservatism.

Very true.  Most people I’ve dealt with/read who subscribed totally to the libertarian view seem to be incredibly rigid.  They just lack the religious stupidity of the wacko right.  Wave your copy of Atlas Shrugged all you want; I’m not that easily fooled.

I wish more people would put down their Ayn Rand and pick up Naomi Klein before engaging in the economics of libertarianism.

I propose an alternative explanation for why men dominate the ranks of self-declared libertarians.  The fantasy of libertarianism is a masculine fantasy of a return to a prior time when it was easier to dominate women because the veneer of civilization that makes us equal despite the difference in physical power is stripped away.

No, I don’t think libertarianism as a psychological phenomenon has much to do with fantasies about women at all. It’s more sheer egotism and ignorance, which is why it shows up among teenage males so often.  It is the belief that whatever they have, they deserve through their own magnificence, and that because they cannot see it, there is therefore no reason why a government might exist. It’s bound around egotism and self-image, not a desire for a particular set of social/sexual relations.  That’s left for conservatism.

It kicks in the moment they notice with horror the tax deduction from their first paycheck.

Eh, Naomi Klein really doesn’t understand the American right very well. She gets her labels horribly confused. Ex., calling the CATO Institute “neocon” and the Iraq War “Friedmanite”, even though that’s nowhere close to being true!

My favorite libertarian leaning site is a place called right-thinking.com.  The guy who started the site Lee something used to have long posts wondering why he was alone on christmas and why he couldn’t meet a nice women.  One of the funniest posts ever was when he wondered why the people in the Valtrex commercials were all so attractive and had such good active lives.  Made me wonder if he wasn’t going to try to get herpes so he could live the Valtrex dream.

At some point a few years ago the guy actually left his apartment and got out occasionally, he lost most of his readers.  every time the guy tried to inject a little reality into their fantasies they reacted very angerily.  It seems that for most libertarians their fantasy life is far more important than the hope to create a real life.

Good God I just visited that site you mentioned. I got out as fast as possible when I saw the hammer and sickle superimposed over a pic of California. The guy looks like a real tool just from that.

I propose an alternative explanation for why men dominate the ranks of self-declared libertarians.  The fantasy of libertarianism is a masculine fantasy of a return to a prior time when it was easier to dominate women because the veneer of civilization that makes us equal despite the difference in physical power is stripped away.

I’ve always felt that libertarianism attracts (heterosexual white) men because it offers a fully reactionary ideology which speaks fluent liberal.  You get to talk all about rights and freedom and your plan for a liberated fantasy utopia, except without all that boring stuff the wimmin-folk and coloreds are liable to get interested in.    When you say “equal rights”, you mean “equal rights to smoke weed” or “equal rights to buy a gun” or “equal rights to not to help others or contribute to society in any way if you are lucky enough to find yourself immensely wealthy*”.

*with the caveat, of course, that since there are almost no obstacles to the immensely wealthy having to give up any money or face any restrictions in any way, ever, nobody who isn’t “From Money” will ever have a real shake at getting any, though libertarians don’t seem to understand this.

Ex., calling the CATO Institute “neocon” and the Iraq War “Friedmanite”, even though that’s nowhere close to being true!

When I think “neo-con” I think of the seemingly endless supply of editorialists in every American newspaper arguing that taxes are too high because of [ insert any old reason such as “peacetime dividend” or “need to spur economy” or whatever ].  And prior to 9-11 these people had opinions that seemed to mirror Cato quite well:  privatize Social Security, eliminate unions, eliminate minimum wage, eliminate capital gains tax, etc.  These days “neo-con” seems to be “Iraq War hawk”, but I always got the impression that was part going with Bush-the-great-tax-cut-man and part PNAC, i.e. they were just carrying water to get more tax cuts later.

Has Cato spent any real effort to distance itself from PNAC?

KL—

CATO published several papers objecting to the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, FISA, and Guantanamo.

One of the biggest mistakes the anti-war movement made was not trying to cooperate with the anti-war right more (and there is an anti-war faction of the right wing).

Neoconservative is a Republican that is moderate on domestic policy and extremely hawkish/interventionist in foreign policy areas. So, someone who wants to privatize Social Security is probably not “neocon”.  Klein uses it as a kind of catchall phrase for “right winger” which is almost (though not quite) as bad as when conservatives call anyone to the left of them a “socialist”.

FWIW Milton Friedman, the bogeyman of Klein’s book, was against the Iraq War as well.

You can say a lot of bad things about Friedman (God knows I could) but he didn’t
like Bush’s foreign policy.

In my youth I was a strong economic libertarian, and remain a strong social libertarian. Due to the latter fact, I don’t really buy a general anti-feminist explanation for libertarianism in general.

The sort of doctrinaire libertarians you discuss (including most large-L ones) are another matter, of course. They’re so narrowly focused on the economic aspect that they’ve either jettisonned the social aspect entirely, or incorporated it into some sort of Randian exceptionalist viewpoint, wherein only a certain group (with characteristics invariably matching their own—white and male) is allowed to partake of total social liberty.

I wish more people would put down their Ayn Rand and pick up Naomi Klein before engaging in the economics of libertarianism.

Klein is great, but I’d settle for their reading a basic history of middle and late stage capitalism as it really worked. I mean, the way some of these guys talk, you’d think Keynes, FDR and even Teddy Roosevelt were raving Marxists, when in fact they were trying to save capitalism (usually from itself).

The ideology most like libertarianism in this respect is Marxism. Whenever either philosophy fails, their practitioners don’t look at their ideology—they blame it on some outside force, or say what was practice wasn’t “true” free market capitalism/communism

Just FYI (pedant alert), but Marxism describes an analysis of economics (and culture, and history, and a few other things thrown in the pot as well) which simply exists (or does not exist).  You can’t have “not really Marxism” or “flawed Marxism”.  That’s like saying that when you tripped over your shoelace, it was “not really gravity” or “flawed gravity”. 

When people talk about the failure of the Soviet system, they usually mean socialism or communism, which are political approaches (you can say that X government “wasn’t really communist” for example

True that, Gracchus. The safety net is a safety net for the top 2% as well—a safety net standing between them and a French or Russian-style Revolution.

TO-

Fair enough. I just think the rigidity between the Marxist left and Libertarian right is strikingly similar. Neither of them can give me an example in history where their system was actually put into place (though maybe, MAYBE the Paris Commune for Communists but that was short lived).

What was deregulated that caused the financial crisis?

The second Glass-Steagall was partly repealed, but that seems to have made things a little better, not worse.  It enabled BofA to buy Merrill Lynch, which helped.

The reason libertarianism is more popular among men than women, and among women, it’s more popular with young childless women than older women or women with kids, is that its fundamental principles are at odds with human reproduction.

The fundamental principles of libertarianism are: You owe no one for your existence. The things you were gifted with by luck, such as intelligence, are things you use to acquire skill, and with your skill, you achieve financial success. People who were not gifted with the intelligence or talents you have are not as worthy of success as you are. You do work in exchange for fair compensation, or you do it as a hobby for fun. If it is for fun, no one owes you anything for doing it; if it is for compensation, you negotiate a fair wage with the person who is compensating you, and in exchange the work you do belongs to them. No one has the right to tell you what to do unless you have personally contracted with them that you will obey those rules in exchange for fair compensation.

So here’s the problem. Every single one of us is created by a woman, made from a fairly useless material that was freely gifted to her by a man. Her body took a seed that was given to her, and made from it a totally helpless human being. Then the hard labor of *some* human—probably that woman, perhaps with extensive participation from the man who donated the seed—made sure that that totally helpless human was fed, clothed, sheltered, medicated, educated, and prepared to acquire the skills that they will need in adulthood. However, if no human owes any other human anything, then there can be no recompense for this work. You cannot contract with your mother to birth you and raise you; you were given no choice in the matter, being a minor (or unborn, in fact.) So since you cannot be held liable for work done on your behalf that you did not contract to perform, you have no obligation to pay your mother for this work. it becomes hobby work, something she did for fun.

9 months of being pregnant and 18 years of raising and feeding a child is FUCKING HARD WORK. The only way it’s generally possible to pull this off is to have the assistance of other humans—a society that offers social support, or your family, or the man that fathered the kid. But this makes you dependent on those people. You *cannot* achieve the way a person who is not burdened with a child can achieve. You *cannot* be personally free. And in a society that gives lip service to “Everyone should be free!”, the majority of women will throw their child-bearing under the bus in order to be free. Only the most dedicated of mothers will continue to choose to have children under such a system. To reproduce, the libertarian men would have to bring in non-libertarian women to be the mothers of their children, but those women would transmit their own culture to their children. So either the society literally dies in two generations, or the bloodlines live on but the philosophies die.

The rules of libertarianism would work just fine if we reproduced asexually by budding, or if we were egg layers who don’t raise our kids, such as lizards. But we are mammals, who get pregnant, have an absurdly long and difficult gestation, and then have totally helpless young with a *very* long childhood on our hands when we’re done being pregnant. Because libertarianism turns the incredible effort of childrearing and pregnancy into something that people just do for fun, not a social good they should be repaid for, it dies out in a generation or two as long as women have the freedom to purchase birth control (which, in a free market, they absolutely should have the right to do.)

Women are a lot more capable of noticing that humans are not islands, that someone does the work that allows us to get the skills that lets us succeed in the workplace, because we are the ones who *do* most of that work. Any mother who is libertarian is managing to deny the reality of her own existence, which, while possible, is much harder than simply denying the reality of your mother’s existence. Non-mother women have an easier time of being libertarians, but it requires much more effort on *any* woman’s part to be wilfully blind to the role of women’s work in creating humanity than it requires on a man’s part. Men are encouraged to be blind to women’s work; women have to actively work at it.

” His concoction was Buffy the Libertarian, a pure sexual fantasy of a young woman who spends her time flitting about being a shallow, pointless female who just happened to write about libertarianism.  “

Megan McArdle, in other words.

In general, Marxist analysis is pretty incisive and useful.  Marxist solutions?  Not generally very good.

QFT.

I propose an alternative explanation for why men dominate the ranks of self-declared libertarians.  The fantasy of libertarianism is a masculine fantasy of a return to a prior time when it was easier to dominate women because the veneer of civilization that makes us equal despite the difference in physical power is stripped away.

What the original author was trying to express was that within libertarianism, there are social rewards within the community to (self-professed) “quirkiness, independence and an obsession with economics.” People are going to gravitate to communities in which they feel validated. Obviously, if your physique and personal charisma are such that you won’t attract a lot of respect and social validation from a group of, say, stock brokers, you might find others who are going to provide you with the social validation you crave…  I’m not saying that every libertarian is a socially-maladjusted ugly guy, but if you didn’t otherwise find yourself studying econometrics and becoming a disciple of Milton Friedman, a community of libertarians will give you a lot of respect, and all you have to do is mouth the party line.

Ben D,

There are a few isolated examples of communism working on a local level, very small villages and tribes.  Of course, that is in no way applicable to a post-industrialized, globalized world.

Not that it matters, because I know very few communists.  Most leftist I know like mixed-economies, just want them pulled a little bit more socialist as opposed to capitalist.

Yeah that kind of leftist seemed to die off with the USSR. I only knew a few even in college. Most of the Communists I “knew” have been online.

I just think the rigidity between the Marxist left and Libertarian right is strikingly similar. Neither of them can give me an example in history where their system was actually put into place

You’re not getting me.

Marxism is not a political system that can be put into place or not put into place.  It’s an overall approach or to or analysis of economics, history, and culture.  You can call an academic a Marxist, or say that a particular scholar uses a Marxist framework in their analysis of a particular problem (you can even say that you, or I, as people, favor a Marxist approach).  You cannot, however, say that a government is “Marxist” - the correct term is “communist” or “socialist”.

So when the media calls North Korea or Cuba a “marxist regime” that’s incorrect?

One of the biggest mistakes the anti-war movement made was not trying to cooperate with the anti-war right more (and there is an anti-war faction of the right wing).

Problem is, the anti-war right was led by Pat Buchanan. That makes the anti-war right of 2003 what the anti-war right of 1940 was: isolationist, xenophobic, often downright racist. That invasion of Iraq was as unjust a cause as America’s entry into WWII was just doesn’t change the fact that it’s very dangerous for liberals to enter into even temporary alliances with Know-Nothing RWAs

The second Glass-Steagall was partly repealed, but that seems to have made things a little better, not worse.  It enabled BofA to buy Merrill Lynch, which helped.

That’s like saying the iceberg the Titanic hit helped because it allowed the men in the lounge to enjoy their Scotch on the rocks as the ship went down.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed commercial banks to play with those sub-prime mortages in ways they weren’t previously allowed to—mainly by securitising the actual mortgages (which happened the moment they were sold to investment banks and insurance companies). You can jink and weave about the details all you want (as a doctrinaire economic libertarian did to no avail in an earlier thread), but when you boil it down that’s what happened, and what Glass-Steagall specifically prohibited. As with all regulation, there was plenty of wiggle room for debate, but if it had still been in place it would have sounded the warning bells in the Titanic‘s crows nest a lot earlier.

Other contributors: a lack of regulation on the bond-rating companies, which (prompted by the mortgage bubble) went into the business of grading different varieties of shite; and the usual lack of regulation concerning transparent accounting practises.

The result of all this: nationalised banks, massive government bailouts, and the biggest concerted international financial re-ogranistion since Bretton Woods. One of the other, more amusing, characteristics of doctrinaire libertarians is that they seem unaware of the Law of Unintended Consequences, especially when discussing the long-term outlook.

Amanda’s description of “deregulation frenzy” is not factual.

The discussions about regulating derivatives took place in 1998, when there was no real housing bubble.  It was the housing bubble popping that detonated the derivative market.  The derivative market was smaller and less understood back then.  Derivatives were not deregulated.  Brooksley Born was probably right, though.  I didn’t know this at the time.  Did you?

One might blame failure to regulate derivatives on the one hand, or government “meddling” with the CRA and Fannie & Freddie on the other.  Or both.  Amanda chooses just one half.  Why?

Of all the people involved, only Greenspan is a libertarian.  Many are Democrats.

Ben D

right-thinking is definetly a trainwreck, for some reason I like to read sites where they try to impose their reality on the world.  Sort of like talkleft.com when it comes to Hillary Clinton, she wasn’t going to win but in their world she still had a chance and the chance was stolen from her by an AA candidate.  The AA stands for Afirmative Action.

As a graduated psych major it is fun to watch magical thinking in action.

The most readable and non-crazy libertarian blog is the one from Reason magazine. The rest are nutso.

Problem is, the anti-war right was led by Pat Buchanan. That makes the anti-war right of 2003 what the anti-war right of 1940 was: isolationist, xenophobic, often downright racist. That invasion of Iraq was as unjust a cause as America’s entry into WWII was just doesn’t change the fact that it’s very dangerous for liberals to enter into even temporary alliances with Know-Nothing RWAs

To be fair, the anti-war right hasn’t made it easy. I was at an antiwar conference a coupla years ago. This one paleocon guy showed up. From the first time I saw the guy, he spent all his energy trying to convince us, quite rudely, that we should give up on trying to change the Democratic party and go to the paleocon right.

When few people were interested, he responded by getting angry. This drove people away even more. Bottom line, there’s vast differences between the antiwar left and the antiwar right. There’s ways to talk across the chasm, but its not always as easy as you’d think.

So when the media calls North Korea or Cuba a “marxist regime” that’s incorrect?

Yes.  Very, very much so in the case of North Korea, which as far as I can tell has virtually nothing in common with a Marxist approach at all—they’re just totalitarians (though I think that originally back in the day what propelled NK into the totalitarian state it is now was a communist government). 

MikeEss explains it pretty well, actually.  There are Marxist understanding of how the world works (which you can either agree with or not, but they are what they are), and there are governments which employ forms of government which were developed via a Marxist worldview, the application of which may or may not have anything to do with Marxism what so ever.

Part of the problem is that Marx predicted a certain outcome for capitalist society, and the people who developed said forms of government thought that what they were doing was bringing about those outcomes simply by creating a form of government that loosely corresponded to what Marx said would eventually happen.  It’s kind of like if Evangelicals took over the country and renamed it The Kingdom Of God.  That wouldn’t actually make it heaven, and it may or may not ultimately bear any resemblance to the actual tenets of Christianity as stated by Jesus in the bible.

I just think it COULD be possible to bridge the chasam and forget about all the other issues. My model is the anti-Imperialist movement during and after the Spanish-American war—it contained everybody from Socialists to capitalist robber barons and they worked together quite effectively on that single issue.

My model is the anti-Imperialist movement during and after the Spanish-American war—it contained everybody from Socialists to capitalist robber barons and they worked together quite effectively on that single issue.

Interesting. I’ll check it out.

Check out the Anti-Imperialist League.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Imperialist_League

Notice the diversity of people that were involved in it.

MikeEss:

I apologize for any affront to Pandagon posters. I have just returned from days at KVH’s The Nation, where John Nichols and his adoring hordes have been extolling the perfection of socialism in all of its past, present and future forms. Many of them fall back on the “it has never been implemented correctly, so no criticism of it is valid” argument. So when ever I read someone, anyone, admit that perhaps the
___ism (fill in the blank) du jour might have a flaw I get over excited. This comes from living with Marxist
roomates in the youth authority facility!

Eugene, have you by chance been hanging out at some other Pandagon, where they believe Marxism is the only way to organize humans?

I suppose this might be an example of my general unseriousness as a human being, but whenever any discussion turns to Marxism, I always picture Terry Jones wearing a fake beard, trying to answer a question about when Coventry City last won the English Cup.

I realize that this is a critique of the freakshow oxymoronic faux-libertarianism of late 20th century American politics, but every time I see the ‘l’ word I am saddened at the state of trade unionism in America.  Capitalism ruined a perfectly good word to describe workers emancipation from wage slavery and we are left with morons like Rand and Mises as the first names that pop into people’s heads when the ‘l’ word is mentioned.

I’m a useless anachronism.

Oh well, couldn’t keep this to myself:
Kimmel, or more likely his sources, referenced “Gone With the Wind” as a code for this (or all) sort of libertarianism that is lambasted in this post.  If you don’t quite believe me, simply google libertarianism and “Gone With the Wind”.
.
.
.
just dropped a comment, no warfare or offense is meant and it is *just* an unloaded comment

Now, Buffy?  That’s a pretty big insult for a character that is somewhat explicitly about the *rejection* of libertarianism.  Claire Bennet, on the other hand…that’s the empty-headed girl who goes around sloppily at her attempt to be uber and all and whining about how she doesn’t get the chance to do a job in which she supposes that she’d be naturally good at since she is “special”.

Lastly, I think we should keep in mind that people are motivated to believe what they believe.  Nobody truly wakes up in the morning and believes six impossible things before breakfast.  If you want to know why someone is rigid about their beliefs, then you have to find out *why* they are motivated to believe that.  Most people don’t bother with libertarians, because it is rather transparent to observant people that libertarians are fixated on the topic because it has to do with their self-worth.  Attempting to reason with them only threatens them.  The only thing that works is a bit of honey in the outside world that demands a compromise of that hard-earned libertarian cred.  Consequently, older libertarians are truly a sad example of the dangers of stifling narcissism.

Conservatives and Marxist (the ones that exists in a reasonably large pool of other Marxists) have some degree of flexibility because they must work together in an organization that hopes to have an effect on the world.  Inflexible conservatives and marxists are people who aren’t really interacting profitably with other conservatives and marxists.  Since there are so few marxists as a percentage of the population, it’s easy to find the whacked out example.

The discussions about regulating derivatives took place in 1998, when there was no real housing bubble

I thought we were talking about the repeal of Glass-Steagall: a 1999 piece of legislation authored by a Republican Senator on the basis of doctrinaire conservative/libertarian ideology. I’ll agree that a lot of Democrats (including Clinton) foolishly supported it—probably on the now discredited view of the DLC that it would be politically expedient. That doesn’t change the ideological and partisan source of that legislation—which is part and parcel of the 25-year deregulation frenzy Amanda references..

One might blame failure to regulate derivatives on the one hand, or government “meddling” with the CRA and Fannie & Freddie on the other.

Failure to regulate derivatives (that failure driven in large part by—again—doctrinaire conservative/libertarian ideology) didn’t help the situation, but once the bundles of securitised mortgages were being tranched and rated into unrecognisable instruments it was already too late.

Government “meddling” with Freddie and Fannie, such as it was, went to the mission statements of what were essentially public-private partnerships. In the end, though, the government did not tell Fannie and Freddie what interest rates to set for mortages issued to minorities and the ppor, and (repeal of Glass-Steagall aside) certainly didn’t encourage them to securitise those mortgages.

My model is the anti-Imperialist movement during and after the Spanish-American war—it contained everybody from Socialists to capitalist robber barons and they worked together quite effectively on that single issue.

Interesting model. It might be workable if the anti-war right was dominated by the folks who read Reason (assuming you’d place them on the right at all), or if it was led by anyone like the people on the list.

For example, I see only one robber baron on the list: Carnegie, who definitely understood the value of altruism. In fact, most of the other people on that list whose names I recognise were known to share (at least at the time) the same sort of pragmatic common sense that led to Carnegie’s philanthropy. That common characteristic is in short supply on the current anti-war right, whether we’re talking about Buchanan’s Know-Nothings or the sort of narrow-minded libertarians Amanda discusses.

It was the housing bubble popping that detonated the derivative market.  The derivative market was smaller and less understood back then.  Derivatives were not deregulated.

I think you skipped, oh, five or six steps there.  You’re forgetting the mortgage brokers who were falsifying their clients’ income (often without the client’s knowledge) and the banks that were giving the much more profitable (for the bank) subprime mortgages to people who were qualified for prime mortgages but didn’t know it, because the bank didn’t bother to tell them.  Read up a little bit on Washington Mutual’s policies and then come back to try and claim the problem was that the banks were forced—forced!—to hand out free money to poor people.

If you have any interest in finding out for yourself what actually happened instead of what the National Review fantasizes happened, listen to “The Giant Pool of Money”, which my Ronald Reagan-worshipping brother says is the best and most comprehensive explanation of what happened and how we ended up in this situation.  Or you can continue to live in ignorance and listen to comforting half-truths about what happened while the big money guys slip their hands into your pocket and take more of your tax dollars to fund their golden parachutes.  It’s up to you.

>>One of the biggest mistakes the anti-war movement made was not trying to cooperate with the anti-war right more (and there is an anti-war faction of the right wing).

Maybe that’s because I have a hard time cooperating with people screaming “We’re fighting this war for the JOOS! The JOOS I tell ya!” (see: Buchanan, Justin Raimondo)

As for libertarian blogs, I suggest http://mutualist.blogspot.com/
They coined the term “Vulgar Libertarian”, as a reference to what I guess we call here ‘glibertarians’.

The rest of these blogs is pretty much unreadable trash.

BlackBloc—

There’s anti-semitism on the anti-war left, too, to be fair. On the fringes (think ANSWER) but it’s there.

In fact, your average pedantic libertarian gets off on the fact that most people wisely hate libertarians, because it confirms to the libertarian that he is a unique snowflake that the rest of the world is too stupid to get.

This is the heart of it all, I think. Libertarianism has become a conspiracy theory, in the pathological sense of the term, reinforced rather than weakened with every 0.3% showing at the polls.

If Dubya gave a press conference tomorrow showing exactly how the U.S. Government, working with the Trilateral Commission and the reverse vampires, faked 9/11, the Truthers would move on to the radical “no it really was a bunch of Saudis commandeering planes after all” theory in a heartbeat.

Likewise, the Libertarian Party isn’t even waiting for Bob Barr to slightly improve on their usual nil showing at the polls to throw him overboard. Their convention this year was a six-ballot bloodbath, with Barr winning on the last vote with 51%—why? Because the only thing worse than Barr pulling a lot of new people into the party, thereby diluting its awesomeness, is the idea that Barr might actually have converted to libertarianism. Which, given that it’s Bob Barr, would correctly suggest that it doesn’t take a goddamned genius to understand the basic principles involved.

There’s anti-semitism on the anti-war left, too, to be fair. On the fringes (think ANSWER) but it’s there.

I’ve hung out with ANSWER folks. Haven’t heard any anti-semitism. Could you cite a link, or just describe what specifically you saw?

There’s anti-semitism on the anti-war left, too, to be fair. On the fringes (think ANSWER) but it’s there.

Definitely. And that’s the only part of the current anti-war left that seriously considers allying with the current anti-war right. Sad to say, there’s a similar commonality of interest on the fringe of the left when it comes to anti-immigrant views.

Thanks for the link re: the Anti-Imperialists, too.

Just FYI (pedant alert), but Marxism describes an analysis of economics (and culture, and history, and a few other things thrown in the pot as well) which simply exists (or does not exist).  You can’t have “not really Marxism” or “flawed Marxism”.  That’s like saying that when you tripped over your shoelace, it was “not really gravity” or “flawed gravity”.
When people talk about the failure of the Soviet system, they usually mean socialism or communism, which are political approaches (you can say that X government “wasn’t really communist” for example

As someone who has studied Marxist theory and some of its derivatives as an eligible poli-sci minor, I must strongly beg to differ. 

The use of “Socialist” and “Communist” are far more problematic than the use of Marxist to describe regimes who use Marxist derived ideologies as a basis to organize and run their societies. 

“Socialist” is far too general and could include socialists regimes who do not consider themselves to be Marxist (i.e. European social democracies and W’s efforts to effectively nationalize the financial sector).  In short, this adjective is not the exclusive preserve of Marxist-derived regimes.  As such, it is not a very useful term if your intention is to describe regimes who are organized and run along Marxist-derived lines. 

Although certainly Marxist, “Communism” is also problematic as the term was originally used by Marx to describe the final stage of his overly teleological view of socio-economic and political history where the proletariat not only managed to own the means of production, but also wiped out any remnants of bourgeois-led resistance and the ideals of “from each according to his own abilities, to each according to his needs” are actually being realized.  Once those requirements are met, the final stage of Communism is able to be realized where everyone within said society lives in Marx’s view of utopia where his ideals have been so ingrained in the populace that “the state” is no longer necessary and is allowed to “wither away”.  In short, calling such regimes “Communist”....while popular with both the regimes themselves and those outside of such would be considered by Marx and Engels to be quite self-contradictory…..and a sign of gross hypocrisy of the regimes who proclaim themselves as such. 

As such, most political scientists I’ve read preferred to use the term “Marxist-derived/based” or something more applicable to each variant of Marxist-based regimes like Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, etc.

Definitely. And that’s the only part of the current anti-war left that seriously considers allying with the current anti-war right.

May I ask, specifically what from ANSWER seemed to you anti-semitic?

Examples include Israeli flags being burned, and chants in support of Hamas and Hizbollah at ANSWER rallies.

Whatever you think of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I think that’s a bit extreme. It’s also unfair to Jews and Israelis, the majority of which support a peaceful two-state solution. The West Bank settlers are a fringe nut group.

http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2002-3/general.htm

Also, I don’t deny that Israel has committed excesses in the occupied territories, but that doesn’t mean one has to back freaking Hamas.

Neither of them can give me an example in history where their system was actually put into place (though maybe, MAYBE the Paris Commune for Communists but that was short lived).

Marx did praise the Paris Commune as coming closest to his ideal form of the first stage of his overly teleological view of socio-economic & political development: the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.  He did follow up on that by criticizing the Paris Commune for “not being harsh/tough enough” on dissenters and other uncooperative elements and being “too concerned” with democratic processes such as having elections.

The difference is that the anti-war left’s anti-war position is not *based on* that anti-semitism. It’s “No War for Oil”, not “No War for Israel”.

There is also a *conscious* strategy by certain elements of the fringe right to ape left-wing ideology as a recruitement tool. Think the International Third Position, or National Vanguard. Just because they talk the talk doesn’t mean they walk the walk. Their commitment to left-wing causes tends to last about just long enough for the Long Knives to come out.

When you say “equal rights”, you mean “equal rights FOR WHITE MEN to smoke weed” or “equal rights FOR WHITE MEN to buy a gun” or “equal rights FOR WHITE MEN to not to help others or contribute to society in any way if you are lucky enough to find yourself immensely wealthy”.

I’ve edited to bring things a bit closer to reality.

I just don’t think that Second Amendment devotees, for instance, want more guns in black hands.

Rampant imperialism gets in the way of Business as Usual. There were even Japanese industrialists who were against the push into China in the 1930s because, well, it would be easier to sell things to the Chinese if they weren’t killing so f’ing many of them. For instance, Baron Dan Takuma (chairman of the board of directors of the Mitsui combine) was assassinated by right-wing fanatics because of his lack of enthusiasm for Japan’s imperial mission.

I propose an alternative explanation for why men dominate the ranks of self-declared libertarians.

What PiaToR said. Not so much about wanting to dominate, more about not giving a fuck about anyone but themselves. This attitude is more likely to be found in the privileged, and those are more likely to be male.

Problem is, the anti-war right was led by Pat Buchanan.

And the crux of his argument is that brown people don’t deserve democracy.  It’s kind of hard to get behind that.

The most readable and non-crazy libertarian blog is the one from Reason magazine. The rest are nutso.

Yeah, for one thing, they’re actually interested in working for solutions now on everything from the drug war to the Patriot Act.  And their commenters frequently chew them out for it.  How dare they not hold out for the perfect libertarian society (that’s just around the corner).  Man, how many times did I hear that crap from socialists/communists in college?

May I ask, specifically what from ANSWER seemed to you anti-semitic?

ANSWER is a coalition of or framework for a variety of organisations. The problem is, some of those organisations (the fringe of the fringe, along with the naive Keffiyah Krowd) oddly believe the best way to stick it to Likud (the real author of the Israeli government’s repressive right-wing policies) is to cheerlead groups like Hezbollah, burn Israeli flags and (like their Buchananite counterparts) equate PNAC with “da joooos” on camera.

ANSWER, in its effort to bring out a crowd—any crowd—did nothing to point out how counterproductive and simplistic this sort of behaviour was. Meanwhile, when someone with impeccable left-wing cred like Rabbi Lerner attempted to present a more balanced view, ANSWER shut him down (and yes, out of kindness and solidarity he later claimed he never asked to be a speaker, which doesn’t change the facts).

One form of anti-semitism or racism is condoning it. And despite lip service paid to diversity, this sort of thing went on at every rally I saw broadcast (and yes, the MSM cherry-picks the nutbars, but the nutbars chose to perform as such). In addition to ANSWER’s status as an explicitly Stalinist organisation and its general fecklessness at turning those early street demonstrations into truly effective and focused instruments against the invasion, it’s a reason I chose to avoid events they sponsored.

Examples include Israeli flags being burned, and chants in support of Hamas and Hizbollah at ANSWER rallies.

The Israeli flag burning is pointless & bad for the same reasons as burning a US flag is. Hamas & Hezbollah are legitimate political parties (with ultra-shitty platforms, natch.)

ANSWER is a coalition of or framework for a variety of organisations. The problem is, some of those organisations (the fringe of the fringe, along with the naive Keffiyah Krowd) oddly believe the best way to stick it to Likud (the real author of the Israeli government’s repressive right-wing policies) is to cheerlead groups like Hezbollah, burn Israeli flags and (like their Buchananite counterparts) equate PNAC with “da joooos” on camera.

Point taken. There’s definitely the mixed nuts factor.

No one knew about the dangers of derivatives in 1998? Orange County declared bankruptcy in 1994 because it lost roughly $2 billion in the derivatives market just by betting wrong under more or less benign circumstances. Everybody knew, nobody thought it would happen to them.

One of the ironies about immature libertarians (but I repeat myself) is that only in a thoroughly liberal, non-libertarian surround will they have invisible access to all the help from others and public resources they need to imagine that they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. If they had to pay for those resources even to the extent of making a full accounting of them, they’d know how misguided they were…

Alara: One might imagine, in a libertarian society, people wanting children contracting with a clinic for creating a zygote from their chosen genetic material, contracting with a woman to carry it to term, and with a heap of wet nurses, nannies, teachers and governesses to raise it. The bill on say, 12.75 years of 24/7 work and 6 years of 12/7, even at measly 10 bucks an hour, and before expenses, would be more than 1.3 million. The cost might get brought down by sharing services, but still: Hell of an expense for a hobby.

Reminds me of “Ethan of Athos”, where the world cannot afford population growth because kids are just too much of a drain on common resources.

You’re forgetting the mortgage brokers who…

I didn’t forget them, I just abbreviated; Didn’t want to write a treatise.  I didn’t claim the bankers were forced to give money to the poor.  WaMu may have sinned, but that doesn’t explain the rash of bad mortgages nationwide.  Under the new CRA and GSE’s, the bankers were no longer the gatekeepers;  When they saw a borrower they didn’t like, they were, thanks to federal intervention, able to pass on the loan.

I didn’t think Amanda was referring to a 25-year frenzy.  I simply assumed she meant 8 years.  Silly me.

Still, I don’t see what was actually de-regulated that caused the problem.  And where’s the frenzy?  Neither Democrats nor Republicans are heroes of the fight to regulate derivatives.

We aren’t ever likely to get a better set of financial leaders than Rubin, Greenspan, Summers, Paulson and Bernanke.  If so, who?

Is there a politician who, if President, would have pushed through tougher derivatives legislation in the last 10 years?

Glass-Steagall was not libertarian legislation.  Glass and Steagall were both Democrats; The bill was signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.  The repeal was signed by Bill Clinton in 1999.  Glass-Steagall was moderate banking regulation that seemed very reasonable.  It’s repeal seemed modern; few complained.  Passing Glass-Steagal might have seemed reasonable earlier this year.  The repeal was not a “Frenzy”.

There are a few isolated examples of communism working on a local level, very small villages and tribes.

Or, like, every single American family.

Seriously though, Hezbollah and Hamas are resistance groups which arose among occupied peoples. They are ugly, belligerent and racist. They are also very real expressions of resistance against imperialism. This is why some anti-war people support them.

Not that it matters, because I know very few communists.  Most leftist I know like mixed-economies, just want them pulled a little bit more socialist as opposed to capitalist.

There were plenty of Marxists and Maoists at my undergrad….though a large part of that had to do with the radical-left progressive orientation of the student body there.  Heck, by their standards, a social-democrat would be considered a rabid right-winger when I was there.  Forget it if you’re one of the minute handful of Republicans….a Dole ‘96 poster placed on one dorm room door at night didn’t last till the following morning when the student found the poster shredded and tossed at a nearby trashbin. 

While I didn’t see as many Marxists in grad school, I was taken aback, though not too surprised there are a large number of Ron Paul libertarians who get quite ornery if you question their favorite candidate as I did.  Not surprisingly, most of them tend to be econ or poli-sci majors…......and in the latter case…..mediocre ones at that.

I believe libertarianism appeals to men, particularly to male geeks, because it rewards quirkiness, independence and an obsession with economics.

Having argued and flirted with libretarianism in the past, I can say that this is unequivically false. Libritarians have an extremely limited and over-simplified view of economics. The libritarian economic model is a closed one which necessarily rejects abstraction—this is one of the reasons so many libritarians reject modern monetary structures and favor some type of metallic currency standard. This also explains the the appeal of the libritarian philosophy: it is a simple modern extension of jungle law - one is a hunter or hunted—proporous or lazy. etc….

Answering to myself because the idea won’t let me alone: Hell of an expense for a hobby.

Of course one could make the production of people less of a hobby and more of a business if one demanded the created person to pay back the money put into creating them. Which at 5 per cent interest and 80 kilobucks a year might just be doable within a lifetime.

Still with Alara. That system wouldn’t survive—either literally or ideologically—for two generations.

Most thinking people who are libertarians can be shaken out of it by demonstrating that the world is way to complex and interesting to be crammed into the libertarian model.  This is how I and most people I knew shook libertarianism off.

I did it when I began to realize that under a truly libertarian system, I’d just be someone’s lunch.

In other words, I think the issue is myopia not rigidity.

Interesting. Though I think that many of them have a kind of willful myopia.

I think you skipped, oh, five or six steps there.  You’re forgetting the mortgage brokers who were falsifying their clients’ income (often without the client’s knowledge) and the banks that were giving the much more profitable (for the bank) subprime mortgages to people who were qualified for prime mortgages but didn’t know it, because the bank didn’t bother to tell them.  Read up a little bit on Washington Mutual’s policies and then come back to try and claim the problem was that the banks were forced—forced!—to hand out free money to poor people.

I don’t think Fred would deny that predatory lending took place.  I think what he’s getting at is that foreclosures, though bad, in a market where home prices are *rising* (aka, continuation of the bubble) are still somewhat secure:  The mortgage-lender can resell the property, allowing the expected principal and interest repayments on the home to maintain the underlying value of its part of the pool.  It was the bubble bursting, causing a swift decline in home values (largely in FL and CA) that prevented banks from being able to turn around (resell) foreclosed homes, and led to the collapse of security tranches comprised of large numbers of foreclosed assets.

There were even Japanese industrialists who were against the push into China in the 1930s because, well, it would be easier to sell things to the Chinese if they weren’t killing so f’ing many of them. For instance, Baron Dan Takuma (chairman of the board of directors of the Mitsui combine) was assassinated by right-wing fanatics because of his lack of enthusiasm for Japan’s imperial mission.

I’m not sure that view was held by more than a minute handful of Japanese industrialists during the heyday of Japanese Colonialism.  Other than Genro Aritomo Yamagata’s idea of “preemptive defense”, the other main reason for Japan’s colonialism is its need to secure natural resources and cheap/slave labor for its industralized factories…..and captive markets to sell the finished Japanese products at substantial profits. 

Unless I am mistaken from my years of studying Japanese history during its colonialist period, most of the Japanese industrialists were quite enthusiastic about Japanese imperialist expansionism as they were great beneficiaries of it. 

Moreover, the expansion into Korea and Northern China also meant there was a way to relieve discontent from poor peasants and other socio-economically marginalized groups as they were encouraged to emigrate to those colonized lands with favorable economic and legal incentives so they can have their own farm/business….displaced indigenous inhabitants be damned.  If nothing else, it was one way Imperial Japan used to defuse popular discontent and forestall possible revolution…enabling the industrialists and aristocrats to continue to enjoy their privileges until the empire came crashing around them in 1945. 

Had a Japanese-American co-worker whose grandmother grew up in northern China as a part of colonialist settler movement and became embittered when the Chinese soldiers came to take possession of her “family’s land” and forcibly eject her from the area.  Thankfully, that co-worker realized what a overprivileged putz her grandmother was being by carping about losing land that was obtained through her country’s colonialist conquests.

Marx made a hypothesis, it was falsifiable.  It has proven false.  Marx got something wrong in his theory, it failed, and we know it failed.

Not really, because Marx wasn’t necessarily proposing a that someone should go out and start a certain form of government.  He was saying that eventually capitalism would fail, and X and Y would happen, and the result would be an economic model that looked like Z.    Z was not a form of government that Marx proposed would be the best way to run a country if only somebody would try it, it was the ultimate outcome of capitalism.      Which could be very, very far down the road - he proposed communism as an eventual outcome, not as something that ought to be voted into power next week.  In fact I think that in a proper understanding of Marxism, no government that is voted into power (or even a government that results from a revolution) can really be communist in the Marxist sense, unless all the other pieces of Marx’s puzzle fall into place at the right time.  Which to my knowledge hasn’t happened yet, though I can see how the Bolsheviks could have thought that their time had come in 1917.

In fact in a lot of ways the main weakness of Marx is that it’s not really falsifiable, because I’m pretty sure there’s no logical way to predict when capitalism will fail and when exactly this communist utopia is supposed to spring up.  Somebody starting a government and saying “capitalism is dead, long live communism!” isn’t really enough.  So a particularly pie-in-the-sky Marxist could just say, “oh, well, it’s not time for communism yet, which is why X example failed.”  Which isn’t too far off from the “That wasn’t really socialism!” rationalization.

To make a long story short, Marxism is best used as a tool to understand things we already know, NOT as a blueprint for how you want your country’s new government to work.

Completely anecdotal evidence:

The only people I know who call themselves liberatrian are men.

Of those men, most of them can’t really explain what it means, and when they do explain their personal beliefs, they are pretty liberal men who don’t like being called a liberal because they think it sounds weak, or don’t like that people don’t like it.

The one guy I know who really feels like he can explain his stance, has a well respected job but is not the most succesful at it, his parents bought him a house despite his own healthy income, and he also unabashedly checks out really young women. Ego it is.

Funny you wrote this today. For some reason on my way to work this morning, I kept thinking about seeing pictures from the Libertarian convention months ago and thinking that there weren’t any women in the pictures I saw.

I didn’t think Amanda was referring to a 25-year frenzy.  I simply assumed she meant 8 years.

When the reality-based community (i.e. the one that knows its history) talks about the deregulation frenzy, it starts with Reagan. For your future reference.

Still, I don’t see what was actually de-regulated that caused the problem.

A problem’s cause and its potential cure are two separate things. The base cause is pretty obvious: the delusion that housing prices could only go up. This led to a chain of risky and ill-advised behaviours that could have been cured by stronger regulation, or at least provided early warnings.

I tried to explain it as simply as possible above regarding Glass-Steagall. I can’t simplify it much more than that. You say you don’t want treatises, and non sequitur statements like the following make me wonder if you could handle them:

Glass-Steagall was not libertarian legislation.  Glass and Steagall were both Democrats

We know that—no-one has argued otherwise. The libertarian legislation is its repeal.

It’s repeal seemed modern; few complained.

Man, that is the lamest support I’ve seen for a piece of misguided legislation, even by libertarian standards.

It “seemed modern” because supply-siders and extreme-free marketeers spent 25+ years working with MSM conglomerates to push the idea to low-information audience. To our misfortune, the Democrats in the 1990s became convinced by poor advisors that they needed to go along with “durrrr, it seems modern” perception. Some of us (including independent conservatives and reality-based libertarians) who think critically and systematically did complain, only to be met with “haven’t you heard? It’s ‘The End of History’! Yuh know, Modern!”

We aren’t ever likely to get a better set of financial leaders than Rubin, Greenspan, Summers, Paulson and Bernanke.  If so, who?

Economists like Paul Krugman (I hear he won some sorta prize in economics). And perhaps veterans like Rubin or Summers, who—unlike Paulson and Bernanke—is willing to learn some bloody lessons from this fiasco (Greenspan seems more interested in making excuses).

Of course one could make the production of people less of a hobby and more of a business if one demanded the created person to pay back the money put into creating them.

I’m writing a short story that satirizes libertarianism which takes pretty much exactly that premise. People owe their mothers work equivalent to the 16 years (they become “adults” at 16) that she put into raising and educating them, plus 3 extra years to compensate her for pregnancy. Or, if they are daughters, they can sign over one of their own children to their mother as her pregnancy compensation. If a man wants to “own” a part share in a child he has to do half the work, or he has to pay her commensurately—which is hard for a man to do, because due to the fact that children are automatically defined as *mother’s* property, given that a woman’s body creates them out of material men give away freely, it’s a matriarchal society and few women invest the kind of capital in their boys that would allow them to become rich enough that they could then afford to buy a child outright without a time investment.

They have all these complicated rules about paying back skilled time vs. unskilled time, the cost of body parts, the age you can be where the work that you do for your mom actually qualifies as similar enough to the work she does for you that it starts counting against your time, etc. It’s a dystopia. In the opening sequence, the main character, a female lawyer who is still paying back her mom, wins a court case to get a young woman emancipated from her mother early, because the mother started pimping her out for sexual abuse at the age of 5, so she has been doing “adult” work for 16 years by the time she’s 21 and that repays the mother in full. There are no penalties against the mother except that she loses her daughter’s labor early; their law gave her the right to sell her daughter’s body, because her daughter is her property until the age of 16.

basically, when taken to its logical conclusion, *either* libertarianism dies out almost immediately… or it becomes a dystopian matriarchy where old women have all the money but children have no rights whatsoever, and men and childless women basically scrape by on the sufferance of the mothers. I’m having trouble with it because I have to avoid the tendency to info-dump, which has killed many a science fiction short story in the past.

I didn’t claim the bankers were forced to give money to the poor.

No?  Then what was the point of bringing up Fannie and Freddie?  They’re actually barred by law from giving out subprime mortgages, and they have the lowest default rate.

Again, the problem is not that bad mortgages were given out.  The problem is that those bad mortgages were then bundled together and sold dozens of times over.  Now all of the banks have big bundles of mortgages that they overpaid for and they don’t even know how many of them have gone bad.

Basically, incentives were set up for banks and mortgage lenders to make bad loans that they could later resell at a profit, so they did it.  Now everyone is realizing that all of those mortgages are based on inflated home prices, so their bundles aren’t worth nearly what they bought them at.  So they’re all fucked, which is why the government is now saying they’re going to purchase assets from money market funds at a loss to help prop those up.

Please tell me again that the problem here was that there was too much regulation.

As such, most political scientists I’ve read preferred to use the term “Marxist-derived/based” or something more applicable to each variant of Marxist-based regimes like Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, etc.

I fully agree with this, BTW.  I was mainly trying to divorce Marxism-as-analytic-tool from the forms of government inspired by Marxism.  One of which can be said to have “failed”, and the other of which cannot.

If it’s true that libertarians tend to be men, then maybe it’s because women think more about taking care of kids.  If you’ve got a two-year old, you can’t wait until the business grows or the economy turns or a new job turns up;  The kid has to eat today.  Husband, community, government, whatever method works.  Mothers have a job to do and they will take care of that kid, no matter what.

Funny nobody has ever asked why that is.  Oh, wait.

I fully agree with this, BTW.  I was mainly trying to divorce Marxism-as-analytic-tool from the forms of government inspired by Marxism.  One of which can be said to have “failed”, and the other of which cannot.

Though there are academics and a few avowed Marxists who do this, this would be considered a bastardization of Marxism by the vast majority of bona fide Marxists and followers of derivative ideologies. 

In fact, one way to really get them to go on an angry tirade other than extolling the virtues of capitalism is to make that very precise argument you made above.  In their view, that emasculates Marxist ideology as it is not only a mere analytic tool, but also an ideology to bring about social change and start the process of creating a socially equitable society according to his ideals of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.  To say Marx’s analysis is only or even mainly useful as a mere analytic tool is seen as selling short his ideology and thus, effectively neutering it.  Worse, I’ve met many Marxists IRL and online who rail against this argument as a “bourgeois” attempt to undermine and corrupt Marx’s ideas to maintain the bourgeois hegemony. 

Not that I agree with them as I have serious issues with Marx.  Even as an “analytical tool”, I find his analysis problematic as his ideas tends to oversimplify history and put it into a confining box which obscures and even ignores the great complexity of historical events and its participants.

It also doesn’t help that some of his analysis of non-Western societies like China are orientalist rubbish which betrays a complete ignorance of how those societies actually worked.  If you want a good derivative example of such rubbish which illustrates the adage “garbage in, garbage out”, read Karl Wittfogel’s “Oriental Despotism”....a work which is heavily based on Marx’s dubious analysis of those non-Western societies.

It’s repeal seemed modern; few complained.

How about Arthur Levitt, who was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission?  He complained. 

Even Rubin complained, though he resigned shortly after the repeal and got a cush mega-millions job from Citigroup, one of the commercial banks that later used the repeal to buy up investment banks.

If it’s true that libertarians tend to be men, then maybe it’s because women think more about taking care of kids.

Here’s the thing: neither women nor men have much interest in libertarianism at all. Very few people are libertarian party members of fans of Ayn Rand.

One wonders first what makes libertarianism so unappealing to men and women, and then one can start wondering why, of the remaining few, why that remaining few is heavily male.

I think this is actually a strength of Marxism.  Marx made a hypothesis, it was falsifiable.  It has proven false. 

No.  Marx’s hypothesis was for “sometime” - it cannot be stated as falsified yet, because the hardcore can always point at “oh, the conditions are not right - yet”.  It’s like arguing with Christian fundies about the return of Jesus.

Ian Banks’ Culture is obviously a Communist society.  I have a lot of fun by pointing out that the Star Trek Federation is also an evolved Communist society, something that occasionally drives wingnuts ranty.

I think liberals/progressives do themselves a disservice by lumping together everyone right of center.  It’s important to distinguish the various factions and tendencies not just out of an interest in the truth, but also because the fault lines between them are ripe for exploitation.  The Cato institute, for example, cannot be called neoconservative in any meaningful sense - they are libertarians or economic conservatives at most.  Neoconservatism is essentially about interventionist foreign policy and is very little concerned about economic policy - they have adopted the small government/deregulatory policies of the Goldwater conservatives basically as a way of building their coalition.  The modern conservative mainstream is a conglomeration of three major factions, each with their own sub factions.  There’s the economic conservatives (crony capitalists, libertarian ideologues) who provide the funding for wingnut welfare and political campaigns, the religious conservatives (mostly evangelicals, but even these break down into subfactions like prosperity gospel types, end-timers, dominionists, and so on) who provide footsoldiers, and the neocons (both classic neocons of the Kristol school and national greatness conservatives like John Bolton) who provide a lot of the intellectual veneer that holds the factions together.

Graccus, quoting: “It’s repeal seemed modern; few complained”., and saying Man, that is the lamest support I’ve seen for a piece of misguided legislation,

Word. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Plus, all the cool kids were doing it.” ? Not a good reason to create legislation.

I still remember not-so-long ago several economists raving over the heaps of money the Icelanders made by having a really modern banking system, compared the the EU.

Alara: I’m writing a short story that satirizes libertarianism which takes pretty much exactly that premise.

Sounds interesting. I had thought more about feudalism instead of matriarchy, with people/businesses able to afford kids (and afford enough of them for some economics of scale to kick in) having them born and raised, and then making money back on their indentured servitude. Maybe I should write that, but, yes, exposition hell. My “short story” about a world with perfect DRM ended up at 40K words.

In the “Communist Manifesto” Marx hypothesized that the proletariat would necessarily need violence to throw off their chains, and that this violence was inevitable.  I think the new deal puts the lie to the inevitability portion of his hypothesis.

Or, alternatively, the New Deal was a reaction to the difficulties of capitalism (cf, Depression, Greatest-So-Far) and the perceived success of Communism.  It was possible to look at Russia and admire how far and fast they’d come since the Revolution, if you squinted your eyes and sorta ignored all the blood.  And, indeed, if they *hadn’t* industrialised so hard between the wars, WWII might have had an entirely different ending…

So you have a situation where capitalism is rapidly becoming discredited, and a viable alternative appears to exist.  Now, if you’re the elite of a major capitalist nation, you have to do two things:

(i) Directly address the problems of capitalism without ever admitting that you’re working from an understanding which incorporates a Marxist perspective.
(ii) Use propaganda to discredit Communism.

When people call Roosevelt a “Marxist”, IMHO there’s considerable truth in that.  He was preserving America as a capitalist nation, but he *had* to take into account the critique of capitalism which Marxism presented.

Funny nobody has ever asked why that is.  Oh, wait.

I’m missing something obvious, but I don’t know what that is.

One wonders first what makes libertarianism so unappealing to men and women, and then one can start wondering why, of the remaining few, why that remaining few is heavily male.

No-one who has ever been responsible for a two year old could talk about “the virtues of selfishness” with a straight face.  We will note that Rand never had kids.

Re:  Bankers being forced to give money to the poor . . .

Okay, the CRA kind of does require they give money to the poor.  If banks can’t expand or build branches because they got a low CRA exam score (indicating they were not adequately providing proper lending, investments or other services to low-income or moderate-income communities) then that forces banks to increase the risk of their lending operations, in order to expand their business.  Before the repeal of Glass-Steagall, this meant commercial banks also could be legally prohibited from merging with other commercial banks.  Very major governmental interference in business.  This is called regulation.

Originally, Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the repeal of Glass Steagall) couldn’t get enough support in the Senate.  The Dems, including Clinton, BLOCKED it.  In other words, they wanted to keep the regulations.  So why did the bill pass?  Because Clinton insisted that portions of Gramm-Leach-Bliley be amended to safeguard provisions in the CRA requiring that banks lend to risky candidates.  Once the GOP agreed to the amendment, a handful of Dems supported the repeal, and bye bye, regulation.

After the repeal of Glass Steagall,  so long as a bank continued to earn an adequate CRA score, it could expand its business even further, because it now, as a commercial bank, was allowed to buy or merge with investment banks.  (Think Citigroup buying Smith Barney, UBS buying PaineWeber.)

The Democratic Senate (haven’t looked at the House votes) is not responsible for Gramm-Leach-Bliley.  It’s the GOP and Clinton.  This is separate from Clinton pushing FNMA and FHLMC to increase the number of subprime loan mortgages they’d buy from thrift banks or private lenders.  Just to clarify - FNMA does NOT loan money to people who want to buy homes.  They buy mortgages from companies who’ve loaned money to people who want to buy homes, as a means of encouraging greater lending to people who would otherwise not receive loans.

Amusingly, on the Discworld, it’s a Dwarfish custom for grown children to “buy themselves” from their parents before getting married, repaying them financially for the work and resources invested in child-rearing. (They also subtract the value of labor performed for the parents, which has interesting implications when a grown child has been living at home and working for a long time before finding a spouse…)

I have a lot of fun by pointing out that the Star Trek Federation is also an evolved Communist society

But not in the Marxist sense. The state hasn’t withered away in Star Trek; they have a democracy.

We never get to see too much of Federation politics because all the stories are set in the quasi-military milieu of Starfleet, and in a democracy, the military only gets involved in politics when things are going really really bad. But when things *did* get bad and they were at war with shapechangers and declared martial law, much was made of the fact that they were supposed to be a liberal democracy (liberal in Fareed Zakaria’s sense, where the democracy is very interested in preserving the rights of the minority against the majority and ensuring people’s civil rights.)

I always picture Terry Jones wearing a fake beard, trying to answer a question about when Coventry City last won the English Cup.

And then Coventry had to go win the Cup and ruin the joke….

***

As it happens, I’ve met Lee from right-thinking once or twice (he’s an FOAF).  He’s actually OK in person, he doesn’t go spouting that stuff 24/7.

I’m in no way defending the content of that site.  Just, you know, saying.

deep6 passes on the usual shite about the CRA, large;y by conflating “poor” and “minority” with “risky”. There’s nothing that says a loan to a poor person is risky (and a lot of evidence that in the current debacle it was less risky than lending to non-poor people). It just depends on how stupid the lender is at looking at the amount of the loan and the terms compared to the borrowers resources.

Which brings me to the snark I wanted to post: sjk is wrong to call out the “obsession with economics ” just because so many libertarians’ understanding of economic is so bad. Obsession often goes hand in hand with a complete incomprehension of the object obsessed about—just look at John Hinckley jr…

Get your head out of your ass, Paul.  It’s not that I personally believe a person’s skin color makes a loan to them riskier.  The problem is that BANKS actually had computer programs that would identify race and then increase loan interest estimates, and that BANK EMPLOYEES would reject loan requests from largely minority candidates in low-income neighborhoods just because they were trying to buy a home in a low-income neighborhood.  How do we know anything about the prevalence of predatory lending?  Because of private lawsuits launched by localities and the NAACP on behalf of (largely) minority home owners.  Were it not for these lawsuits, HUD would never have gotten involved in the latest round of studies at all.

<There’s nothing that says a loan to a poor person is risky (and a lot of evidence that in the current debacle it was less risky than lending to non-poor people). It just depends on how stupid the lender is at looking at the amount of the loan and the terms compared to the borrowers resources.</blockquote>

Please, by all means, I’d love to see a study that indicates high-income earners are at higher risk for defaulting on a loan than low-income earners.

Your naivete is astounding.  You clearly must have no idea how the modern banking system works.

Doug S.: The system could work a whole lot better if a culture’s ratio of unproductive vs. productive years was different. With, say, 6 years of being cared for, and 6 years of earning one’s keep, a person could be independent by 30. I don’t remember the life expectancy of Discworld dwarfs…

Alara Rogers:

I don’t know about you, but a lot of the Dominion War series in DS9 drove me nuts because of the humanist/liberal wishful thinking. (Nothing wrong with humanism or liberalism; there is something wrong about fantasylands.)  Yes! the writers said, you can have a just war, and you can fight it without ever accidentally killing civilians, or going further and dirtier than your principles should permit… You can Win Clean!  Most of us are delighted with the liberation of Europe in 1944-45, for example, but distinctly icky about the fact that the mass bombing and nightmarish, burning deaths of countless tens thousands of German civilians played a key role in making sure that there were never enough planes and tanks and oil for the Germans to defend their positions effectively.  Rule One: War is filthy, dirty, cruel, evil and soul-destroying.  No amount of artful writing at Paramount will change that, but, lord knows, they did try.  To me the classic example of that was having a storyline where the genetic poisoning of The Founders was portrayed as the most monstrous and unforgivable of crimes, but it actually won the war and the Federation would have gone into slavery without it.  That sort of “I want to be free but I want to look down my nose at the dirty needs occasionally needed to make sure that I stay that way, and be especially contemptuous of the dirty little deniables who do these necessary things” nonsense was profoundly irritating. It’s no accident that some of the strongest, most believable episodes are ones which confront that hypocrisy directly, like the where Sisko leaves Garak free rein to do the dirty work of murder and deceit whilst still pretending that his soul is clean, and is rightly called out on it.  (Let’s face it:  Andy Robinson is probably the most underestimated character actor of the past forty years.)

Maybe that, too, is one of the things that is so infuriating about economic libertarians.  They espouse a radically individualist society where almost every person will be road kill, but evade that reality by becoming even more firmly ensconced in their belief that Everything Will Turn Out Just Fine.  We’ve had a purely libertarian, contract-driven, minimalist-government economy: it was called Victorian England*.  Business was nearly totally free and unfettered.  The cost?  The vast majority of people got the Potato Famine, child labour, slavery disguised as poor relief and vast sections of cities turned into seething nests of want, disease, fear and early death. 

I’m firmly with the libertarians on social issues (as in the state should treat everybody equally and stay the hell out of people’s private lives) and even on some economic issues (such as resisting unnecessary regulation and intervention .. governments are human entities and, like corporations and your Aunt Sadie will always go too far if not watched carefully) but as an organizing principle of a society, economic libertarianism is a dead end… literally for most of us.

Again, we need consider that “libertarian” is waaaaaaay too general a term.  Socially, most of here are libertarians, because that way lies sexual and reproductive freedom, full equality for the GLBT2S communities and freedom from the dominion of priests, ministers, imams and rabbis.  It’s just the libertarian®  vision of it, the one that only screams at government’s ability to restrict the social and fiscal predators amongst us, that we have an issue with.

* - .  People like the Holmes stories.  They don’t want to remember that there were parts of London that the middle class gentleman Holmes could only go into in disguise and heavily armed.  There was a reason for that.

I don’t know about you, but a lot of the Dominion War series in DS9 drove me nuts because of the humanist/liberal wishful thinking.

Humanist/liberal wishful thinking in Star Trek? I’m shocked, shocked!

I could never figure out whether this consistent feature of the Star Trek universe was caused by strict adherence to a model that the writers had to follow or whether it stemmed from aggressively naive wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

Humanist/liberal wishful thinking in Star Trek? I’m shocked, shocked!

You bastard.  Now I have to go wash the Pepsi out of my nose.

I could never figure out whether this consistent feature of the Star Trek universe was caused by strict adherence to a model that the writers had to follow or whether it stemmed from aggressively naive wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

A little from both columns, methinks.  Don’t forget the specific culture of SoCal, Hollywood and the entertainment industries.  Think back to Troi’s character on TNG: What could be more Hollywood than not being able to imagine exploring space without taking your therapist with you?

Alara, libertarianism is also incompatible with childrearing on the other end. Why should you bother sacrificing your economic advantage for a demanding infant who will never repay you for your expense and effort? Children are the epitome of the one-way, all-about-my-needs demanders that so horrified Rand (no, that’s not a coincidence).

To be totally fair, I *do* know many responsible libertarians whose opposition to government is not “I want to smoke weed,” but “government officials need to have checks on their power lest they grow corrupt.” These are the kind of guys who attend city council meetings and actually notice that the proposed mall plan gives a sweet contract to the city council president’s brother-in-law.

Sadly, they’re mostly drowned out by the guys who think libertarianism means Big Brother shouldn’t try to stop you from trying to fuck teenagers.

Most of the theories here are wonderful.  However, many of them stem from the premise that Libertarians are actually interested in politics, which is not a presupposition I necessarily buy.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—-libertarianism is basically an affectation, if you come right down to it: dandyism with a political slant.  Libertarian politics operate as ornament, that’s why it doesn’t matter whether they’re functionally workable or not.

That very young men, teenagers even, should be attracted to Libertarianism is scarcely a miracle.  There are gender sterotypes which consist of a grain of truth surrounded by an oyster’s worth of mucus, gender stereotypes which do not contain even that grain, and gender stereotypes which not only are not true to life but which, on the contrary, flatly contradict observable facts.  The canard which says that women are more prone to affectation than men are is one of the third and last kind.  Boys are more apt to put on airs than girls are: this is a difference which shows up early in childhood and continues throughout life.  Many reasons could be cited for it: culture, biology, radiation fluctuations or the slipperiness of neutrinos.  Whatever.  My own explanation for this difference favors nurture over nature: boys, I tell myself, are primarily valued for their accomplishments whereas girls are valued primarily in relation to their appearance: and while it’s always possible to inflate your accomplishments it’s difficult to do anything major (short of surgery) about your looks. A teenage girl can’t pose her way into alphadom, but the hair’s-breadth possibility exists that a teenage boy can do that provided pluck and luck are on his side.

Libertarianism is all about the hope that the boy or girl or man or woman who embraces it will be able to pull off that kind of stunt.  (Which is why the characterization of the heroes and heroines of Ayn Rand novels is so unrealistic—-there’s no need for these paragons to resemble real people; it’s even advisable that they don’t.)  During the past year or two I’ve “overheard” more than one moderate-to-Liberal commentator marveling over the fact that so many big-deal neocons resemble Peter Keating more than Howard Roark, but, once again, that’s no huge surprise.  Howard Roark and Peter Keating are almost the same guy (which may be why so many of the events of their lives echo and mirror one another); the difference being that Roark is the successful poser (read “aesthete”) whereas Peter Keating lacks the energy, drive, determination and talent he needs to put his act across.  Consequently Keating can get people to take him at his own valuation for a while, but not for long; consequently, also, the end of The Fountainhead is completely given over to a triumphant validation of Howard Roark’s opinion of himself.

The people (usually male) who retain their attachment to this stuff are in the same position as are the people (also usually male) who acquire some quirk or peculiarity in their youth (the better to stand apart from the crowd and the better, optimally, to command the crowd’s attention) and who rule their lives by it from that point forward.  (“But I must wear a stripy shirt on Wednesday: it is by my stripy Wednesday shirts that I am known!!”)  The real riddle is: why has Libertarianism turned out to be such an influential bit of folderol?  I’m not historically very well read but I believe it’s seldom that a whole society virtually ruins itself over a hobbyhorse.  (It’s said that the Easter Islanders wrecked their society erecting their big stone heads, but you’d have thought we’d all have learned a few things since then.)  When I puzzle my head over the works of Ayn Rand and over the osmotic growths which have emanated therefrom, that’s the one question I can’t answer.  Why this particular set of tortoiseshell hair combs, why this specific pair of rolled stockings, why this peculiar pattern of swagger stick?  If we were bound and determined to demolish ourselves, couldn’t we at least have done it over something cool, like God or the Devil or lust or ectasy?  Did we have to do it in the name of Howard Roark, of all nonsensical things?  Why couldn’t we have had better taste?

The real riddle is: why has Libertarianism turned out to be such an influential bit of folderol?  I’m not historically very well read but I believe it’s seldom that a whole society virtually ruins itself over a hobbyhorse.

Answer in a nutshell: it’s a very useful myth for the business class.

What could be more Hollywood than not being able to imagine exploring space without taking your therapist with you?

Now I have to wash the Pepsi out of my nose.

His concoction was Buffy the Libertarian, a pure sexual fantasy of a young woman who spends her time flitting about being a shallow, pointless female who just happened to write about libertarianism.

So . . . Megan McArdle, in other words

I realize I’m not really a really a qualified Trek-geek, having only watched all of DS9 3 1/2 times, but… I thought the conflict of ideals vs pragmatic warfighting was handled well because most of Our Heroes did adhere to the wonderful fluffy democratic ideals, and maintained their personal honor and lived and died exemplifying Federation values…but that wasn’t shown as necessarily the most effective thing to do.  In the Pale Moonlight is a fantastic piece of art for many reasons, and that’s one of them.  Paradise Lost in effect sidesteps the issue of whether imposing a police state is justified by simply leaving the idea that we should always be suspicious of that argument, if we want to have a prayer of preserving our values.

DS9 is also not nearly as high on the wishful thinking spectrum as several other flavors of Star Trek.  Sure, the “good guys” tend to triumph, but other points of view are shown to have merit.  And there’s a lot of It’s Ok if You’re a (Colonial-Era) Bajoran double standards related to terrorism.

Goodness, I seem to have hit a nerve with deep6, who has apparently been on Mars for the past few decades and has thus never heard of redlining; nor read the media coverage of the fact that loans originated through Fannie and Freddy (which were subject to CRA) have had lower default rates than loans originated through Countrywide and other nonbank entities (which were not). He apparently also missed coverage of the way that mortgage brokers steered minorities who qualified for conventional mortgages into higher-cost subprime mortgages while not doing the same to caucasians.

But I will relate an anecdote from the middle days of artificial intelligence, when banks and other institutions were attempting to train neural networks and similar statistical gizmos to emulate the expertise of their human analysts. One bank took its entire set of mortgage decisions for the past several years and handed it to a neural network for a training set. According to one of the people who worked on the project, it was scrapped when analysis of the final weighting set showed that much of the complex weighting of location, income, property value and so forth could be replaced by the simple question, “is the applicant white or black?” Gi, Go.

Please, by all means, I’d love to see a study that indicates high-income earners are at higher risk for defaulting on a loan than low-income earners.

I don’t have that, but I do have an article about higher-income minorities are still charged higher interest rates than white people with the same income.  In other words, the bank took a look at their skin color and decided they were inherently more risky to lend to than a white person with the same income.

Right now, you seem to be claiming that everything would have been fine if the government hadn’t forced banks to loan money to minorities.  I don’t know if that’s what you were trying to do, but it’s definitely coming across that way.  Daniel Gross at Slate has a succinct explanation of why you and the National Review are wrong about that.

Paul, still waiting for the study.  Would love to see some numbers on how high-income individuals are at higher risk of default than low-income individuals.  Really, please post.

From fanniemae.com:

“Fannie Mae does not originate loans directly to borrowers or investors. Instead, we provide multifamily financing through a nationwide network of lenders.”

You can’t compare Countrywide default rates on mortgages they service to default rates on the mortgages that you’ve somehow identified FNMA as originating, when they don’t originate loans.  You probably do have a worthy statistic to share, but please find it and link properly, or else I can’t keep guessing what numbers you’re really trying to compare.

Mnem, you made a snarky comment to Fred, essentially asserting that banks weren’t forced to loan money to risky borrowers, so when they did, it was because they were either acting greedily or unethically (which you illustrated with the Washington Mutual example above-thread).

While it’s true that no banks were forced to loan money to low-income borrowers, if the alternative is that their business expansion is curttailed, that’s certainly an powerful incentive to take on higher risk.  In fact, one of the first things the GOP tried to do in Gramm-Leach-Bliley is insulate it from CRA review. 

Most private banks were not in violation of CRA, and no one disagrees that predatory lending took place.  The problem is that you made a snarky comment that I think illustrated you didn’t know that there actually is a serious enforcement mechanism to ensure banks are lending to candidates they’d otherwise avoid. 

That being said, you could probably argue that because even failing CRA exam grades are subject to review, and banks aren’t wholly prevented from expanding or offering alternative services if a federal review panel decides to give them a pass, there are political means of avoiding providing loans to high-risk candidates, so meeting CRA requirements isn’t absolute.  So if bank X were really friendly with Republicans and bank X were at risk of failing a CRA exam, bank X could play footsie with whomever they were close with on the review board and still be allowed to expand services.  But you didn’t do that.  You just misunderstood what both Fred and I wrote and poorly argued a position I happen to agree with.  And then you accused me of not having the same position, when you probably missed what I wrote many posts above, which is that the bubble bursting is to blame, not overstatements or misrepresentations of which low-income people got loans.

This thread is dead.  Bedtime.

Yeah, I was going to bring up the primary reason for CRA, which was redlining. What Countrywide was doing in their steering of minorities into worse mortgages than they qualified for was a more insidious form of redlining - making a larger profit on a person due to the color of his skin. deep6 isn’t exactly clued into any of the history of all this, which makes him a rather poor debater on the issue.

Most private banks were not in violation of CRA, and no one disagrees that predatory lending took place.

And yet there doesn’t seem to be an enforcement mechanism to make sure that people of the same income level are given the same access to credit regardless of race.  You really seem to be missing the fact that members of minority groups were offered only sub-prime mortgages even if they qualified for a prime one.  The mortgage that would have been perfectly manageable at a fixed rate becomes an out-of-control monster when it’s an interest-only ARM.

The problem is that you made a snarky comment that I think illustrated you didn’t know that there actually is a serious enforcement mechanism to ensure banks are lending to candidates they’d otherwise avoid.

The problem is that you don’t seem to realize that it wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974 that minorities (and women) could even get credit on reasonable terms.  There was pervasive discrimination even against people who could pay that continues to this day.

I really don’t understand how you can read a story about minority applicants with exactly the same credit and income being offered worse mortgages than white people in the same (or worse) circumstances and conclude that the problem is that the banks were forced to lend to minorities.  “Candidates they would otherwise avoid” means black people at any income level.  Period.

I still recommend Bioshock for anyone wondering what could happen if libertarians are allowed to run rampant.  It has my favorite quote on the subject, and I’ll quote it again for all the losertarians out there, as well as the idiots who think that capitalism will crumble and they’ll stand on top in whatever new system pops up:

These sad saps. They come to Rapture, thinking they’re gonna be captains of industry. But they all forget that somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets.

I could never figure out whether this consistent feature of the Star Trek universe was caused by strict adherence to a model that the writers had to follow or whether it stemmed from aggressively naive wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

When you do, maybe you can turn your planetary intellect to the question of why the writers of Star Trek were so relentlessly hostile to same-sex and interracial relationships throughout 5 entire shows.

why the writers of Star Trek were so relentlessly hostile to same-sex and interracial relationships throughout 5 entire shows.

They were very hostile to same-sex relationships, but not interracial. Classic Star Trek did what it could in the milieu of its time, when interracial relationships were as shocking to the public as same-sex ones are today, but they actually featured the first interracial kiss on national television (of course, it was caused by Aliens Forcing Us To Do It.) In TNG, Geordi LaForge had three girlfriends, two of whom were white and one of whom was black. Jake Sisko had at least one Bajoran girlfriend who was played by a white woman. Benjamin Sisko’s actor, Avery Brooks, specifically demanded that his character not be paired with characters played by white actresses because he didn’t want to send the message that African-American women weren’t good enough. B’Elanna Torres, a half-alien played by a Hispanic woman, married Tom Paris, a white male human; Miles O’Brien, a white male human, married Keiko Nakagawa, an Asian female human; Harry Kim’s few girlfriends were *never* Asian; Chakotay, a Native American human male played by a Hispanic man, had relationships pretty exclusively with white women and aliens played by white women; and let’s not forget that Worf, played by a black man, dated *many* female characters played by white women. Admittedly, Worf is an alien, but then, alien/human relations *are* Star Trek code for interracial relationships.

So actually, I don’t see any bias against interracial relationships at all (except in Classic Trek, and again, given its time it did what it could do). What I do see is that black men who play humans and Asian men got very few romantic relationships at all, and of the two black men who got multiple romantic relationships, one played an alien, and one was an actor who deliberately didn’t want to be put in an interracial relationship. But the nerdification of black and Asian men is not the same thing as a lack of interracial relationships.

Amanda,
Your explanation of the gender demographics of libertarians, as stated, seems illogical. I do think you’re on to something here—I think the male-female ratio is no coincidence—but I would offer a different analysis. The nostalgia for reliance on physical strength that you imagine motivates libertarian men would be a bizarre source for their free-market zealotry, because such reliance would not in fact be reintroduced under a libertarian regime. In their ideal world, the prohibition on initiating force and its enforcement through the police power would still exist (libertarians are not anarchists, only their ideological cousins), so women wouldn’t need to seek protection from the men in their social environment any more than they already do(n’t). Industrialization and technological innovation would still exist as well, so physical strength would not provide enhanced competitiveness in the job market in most job categories, any more than it does now. So I don’t think your exact analysis makes sense.

But here’s where I agree with your core intuition, for other reasons. For one thing, insofar as pay discrimination would be given free rein, women would be more financially pressured to stay in unhappy relationships. But I think that outcome is an effect of libertarian ideology, not a cause of it (most libertarians seem relatively oblivious to, rather than gleeful about, the persistence of the glass ceiling and pay discrimination; indeed, because they think the market penalizes such discrimination, they think it will disappear).

I also think libertarianism does serve some emotional functions for many of its male advocates: (1) Identifying with the ideal of self-reliance provides many men with a way to identify with success, boosting their confidence in a certain facile way. (2) Libertarianism also allows identification with arguments in economic theory and political philosophy that are highly abstract, as well as morally charged. Together with the aforementioned practice of “identifying upward” on the status hierarchy, this way of orienting oneself in the world has a comforting bunker quality, allowing its adherents to mitigate or even superficially to transcend painful feelings of dependency and insecurity implicitly associated with the personal realm of relationships, intimacy, women, and sexuality. Living in an abstract world with a few clear rules diminishes the relevance of others’ emotional and material claims and allows one to at least anticipate feeling a sense of control that one may lack in actual, everyday relationships that are messy, unsatisfying, and sometimes unfair. When these motives drive anyone’s libertarianism, the problem, of course, is that getting lost in this fantasy orientation prevents lots of real problems, not to mention one’s own pain, from being taken seriously in the real world.

Finally, I should underscore that plenty of male and female libertarians are happy, decent, smart, and thoughtful people. Of course that doesn’t make libertarianism correct, but it’s not always best understood, or contested, in terms of psychological motives. In order to combat market fundamentalism effectively, we also need to have facts (and a few figures) at our disposal about its real-world effects, including on women as a class, not to mention on society as a whole.

I really like Alara’s analysis.  I know she’s not specifically talking about Randites, but they’re probably the most obvious example of the libertarian breed.  I’m not the first person to notice that none of Rand’s heroes or heroines has children, or, indeed, any obligation at all to anyone beyond themselves.  There are no aging parents needing attention (do any of them even have living parents?  I don’t think so, but it’s been a long time since I read any Rand), no Down Syndrome brother to take care, no best friend fallen on hard times.  Few of them are even married, and if they are, it’s to someone worthless they can discard eventually.  Life just isn’t like that.  We are a part of families, groups, and communities and we all need some support from time to time, just as at other times we are called upon to give some more support.  And bad stuff can happen to anyone, anytime, and simply can’t always be anticipated or prepared for.

Deep6, I must say you have the poorest and least complete understanding of why the mortgage bust and financial crisis occurred of anyone I’ve ever encountered.

May I ask what stock positions you have, so I can take the opposite side of that trade?

Read everything at this site and at this site to get a damn clue.

But I do want to know what stocks you own, so I can short them.