Colby Cosh reports chilling news from Venezuela. As a general rule, when the government of your country makes noises like this…

In the medium to long term, the document proposes to replace currency relations, i.e., money, with moral and material incentives.

…it’s probably time to start making plans to run.

Stephen VanDyke, who appears to be a normal voting libertarian type, says

Just in Time for 2006: Libertarian Blog Flame War

He’s referring of course to the paltry exchange of fire between NT and one Jane “Burn The Wreckers” Galt. For a real flame-war, we need to turn our attentions back to September 2004.

The affair started with a polite missive entitled Prof. Hoppe still wrong on immigration targeting perennial favorite Lewrockwell.com. This was followed by the slighty less polite Stephan Kinsella Ought To Shut His Stupid Cake Hole. Adding to the fun were Paleocreep Central Awakes!, Some musings on the effects of immigration policy, Hoppe: “The best one may hope for…”, the ironic Yet Another Problem With Hoppe’s Immigration Column (ironic because the biggest problem is that the piece in question was buried shortly after NT exposure), Lew Rockwell’s Army, Open Challenge to Rockwell, Hoppe, Kinsella, And The LRA (which fairly sealed up the matter at hand), and finally Kinsella Wants To License Breeding. The hundreds of comments that accompany the above posts are even better, perhaps, than the entries themselves. That’s a flamewar, baby!

But hey, who knows? Perhaps this is the start of yet another bit of libertarian outreach. In any case, Van Dyke gets one thing indisputably correct:

We are so easily amused.

So are we, Stephen, so are we.

Despite Jane Galt’s fundamental cluelessness about the NYC transit strike, she manages to take her Commie “to each according to his need” rhetoric to its historical conclusion:

While the strike has so far deprived me of one free lunch and drinks with some friends from grad school, even I was tempted to endorse one acquaintance’s plan to go to Seattle and Cleveland and encourage the fire departments that serve these yahoos to go on strike before engaging in a spot of selective arson.

Burn out the wreckers of the glorious People’s Transit System!

And this is what passes for libertarianism?

Libertarians enthusiastically defended oil companies that raised their prices in the wake of Katrina, but they’ve had little appetite for defending the NY transit workers who decided to raise their prices.

It was amusing to see someone who calls herself Jane Galt chiding workers for striking selfishly. Bloggers at Catallarchy were particularly vocal in defending the oil companies, but the only mention of the strike I can find on that blog just quotes Galt lamenting how strikers made victims of millions of New Yorkers. I can’t imagine them letting similar charges against oil companies pass without comment.

KipEsquire seemed pleased that strikers would be fined under the Taylor Law so I asked him a question. His surprising reply is in the comments:

Kennedy: Why aren’t libertarians commenting on the obvious injustice of outlawing strikes?

KipEsquire: Because libertarians believe in freedom of contract. If you don’t like the terms of employment, which are made clear upfront, then don’t take the job.

Now how about the injustice of requiring people to join unions, or at least to pay union dues, against their will?

Freedom of contract?

Their contract expired before they went on strike. So how can fining them for not working in the absence of a contract be squared with freedom of contract?

David Friedman argues that the first amendment effectively bans public schools:

The judge who recently held it unconstitutional for public schools to be required to teach the theory of intelligent design correctly argued that doing so would be to support a particular set of religious beliefs—those that reject evolution as an explanation for the apparent design of living creatures. His mistake was not carrying the argument far enough. A school that teaches that evolution is false is taking sides in a religious dispute—but so does a school that teaches that evolution is true.

His argument seems to be against government run schools but that doesn’t go far enough either, the same argument should all ban public financing of schools, including vouchers. After all, if I’m being compelled to pay for schools that are incompatible with my religious views why does it matter who runs them?

Ultimately of course the constitution is so riddled with contradictions that you can tease any conclusion you like out of it with enough effort. Once you’ve assumed contradictory premises you can derive any resulting proposition as both true and false.

WOODSTOCK (AP) - A Libertarian who hosts a weekly radio program called “Freedom Rings” spent more than two years and appeared in court 28 times fighting a $25 ticket for not wearing a seat belt.
After a two-hour trial, a McHenry County jury found Ken Prazak guilty Wednesday. He was ordered to pay the $25, and Judge Suzanne Mangiamele added 100 days of probation.

“This is still a victory,” Prazak, 53, said at the end of the trial. “I was able to get the word out, and educate the jury and even the judge about cases she had never heard of.”

“Still a victory” because he was “able to get the word out, and educate the jury and even the judge”. You know, the same jury that promptly convicted him and the same judge that slapped him with a fine and probation. While the definition of “victory” might well be up for debate, utter defeat probably doesn’t qualify.

Libertarian activists won’t learn a thing from this, of course, any more than the fringe-flag crowd learns anything when the latest tax-evasion scheme collapses on some unfortunate souls. And for much the same reason, namely that admitting the fundamental nature of the thing they’re up against is far too painful.

Quite simply, it’s a waste of an individual’s time and resources to attempt reforms via the government, and it’s just plain foolish to think that one’s own self-sacrifice is going to “educate” enough people to make up for self-immolation. The amount of latent outrage in the voters is minsucle at best, the incentive for trading in their superstitions nonexistent. It’s far better to work on you own plans, rather than waste your life preaching into the slack face of the Institutional Man.

Via Bryan Caplan:

My point, of course, is that whether or not you agree with Arnold [Kling’s] view that government is a good idea, he needs better arguments. I suggest the simplest: For reasons that remain poorly understood, the status quo in the Western democracies currently provides the highest standard of living in human history, and any radical change has a serious risk of ending in disaster.

I think that this statement presents consequentialist libertarians with a problem: why fix what isn’t broken? Can consequentialist libertarians guarantee that their proposed changes will in fact result in better consequences for the folks they’re seeking to persuade? At the very least, can they promise that their proposed changes won’t make folks worse off? The answer, of course, is that they can’t make any such promise. They can’t even provide probabilities.

In fact, the most persuasive consequentialist argument is that since Western democracies, despite their warts, have consistently produced the best living conditions in human histroy, no changes should be made whatsoever unless and until something better proves itself. To claim otherwise is to risk throwing away the most desireable consequences in all of human history.

This leaves consequentialist libertarians with very little to do except wait around for something better than Western democracies to emerge, and to argue against any changes to Western democracies in the meantime.

After all, welfare states are the best thing there ever was.

Because this one sucks so hard.

Escape.

SANTA CLAUS

Listen…

“Whether you’re in a cave, or behind a million mountains, Santa Claus sees you through his Master Eye, and invites you to his Magic Wonderland! See Santa Claus in his magic motion picture! Come past the doors of his towering castle, into a fantastic crystal laboratory, filled with weird and wonderful secrets; into his heavenly workshop, the most marvelous toy factory of all! Watch his battle with the mischievous demon who wants to get children into trouble! You’d better watch out! You’re gonna shout about the picture that won the Golden Gate Family Film award! Everyone, everywhere, is waiting for the K. Gordon Murray presentation, SANTA CLAUS!”

Courtesy of S. Maravillosa comes this juicy snippet of libertarian gossip:

Op-Eds for Sale
A columnist from a libertarian think tank admits accepting payments to promote an indicted lobbyist’s clients. Will more examples follow?

A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff’s clients. Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley News Service, told BusinessWeek Online that he had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid ’90s.

I judge this to be a natural consequence of being a libertarian wonk. Suppose that you’re a budding libertarian pundit with aspirations of respectability. You’ve read the arguments against government, and you, like everyone else, have exactly nothing to say contrary to them. They’re airtight. But what are you going to say the first time someone asks “What are ya, some kind of anarchist?” If you reply with a “yes”, you’re done. Virtually everyone in the mainstream thinks that “anarchist” is a synonym for “violent nutball”. So you say “No, I believe in a smaller government with limited power…”, even though you know better.

In a word, you lie.

You lie because you have your eyes on the prize. The end justifies the means, because you can’t get from here to there without appealing to the voting masses’ simple prejudices and superstitions. As time goes on, the lies come easier. Sugar-coat this, gloss over that, ignore the other. You get good at telling people what they want to hear.

And if your job consists of telling pleasant lies, why not make as much as you can from for it? What’s the difference in principle between telling lies for a salary and telling lies for a salary plus a payment on the side? Let’s see:

Bandow isn’t the only think-tanker to have received payments from Abramoff for writing articles. Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, says he, too, took money from Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist’s clients. “I do that all the time,” Ferrara says. “I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.”

Ferrara, who has been an influential conservative voice on Social Security reform, among other issues, says he doesn’t see a conflict of interest in taking undisclosed money to write op-ed pieces because his columns never violated his ideological principles.

Especially when your ideological principles are somewhat… elastic.

Bandow’s real problem is that he picked a political ideology whose adherents have to tell themselves they’re more principled than Republicans and Democrats. In reality they aren’t, they’re just more confused. The R’s and D’s are quite plainly after power. The libertarian types, on the other hand, like to pretend that they have principles. As I’ve said before, that pretense gets in the way of effective action in electoral politics. In this particular case, the conservative pundit can laugh off being paid for op-eds while the libertarian pundit gets to slink out the back door for the exact same thing. It’s yet another example of why libertarians are destined to be perennial losers in partisan politics.

Over at LRC, noted Christian totalitarian Gary North discusses the transit strike in New York. The theme is that the unions are evil and are screwing over the city. He says, “The union has New York City’s transportation system by the neck. This is because the state of New York and New York City jointly put the transportation system in this position.” And he calls the union a “coercive, state-created organization”.

But, what if we talk about Halliburton, and all the corporations lined up at the trough for government money. Are we going to talk about how business is evil? How corporations have the country’s production by the neck? Of course we won’t, because, to North and his ilk, libertarian philosophy is just an apology for the rich.

Cato launched a new blog/magazine this month and their first feature has been a discussion of three prescriptions from James Buchanan for fixing the Constitution.

Buchanan’s first proposal is a pretty tame piece of wonkery: a balanced budget amendment. His second proposal is more interesting because it’s incoherent, he advocates a generality wherein the state can make no laws which discriminate in imposing costs or providing benefits for individuals. He quickly demonstrates the incoherence of the idea by offering a flat income tax as an example of a law that doesn’t discriminate. Anthony de Jasay explains why this notion of generality makes no sense.

Buchanan’s final proposal:

“The Madisonian construction is flawed by its authorization of government regulation through the much abused Commerce Clause. The authorization should be restricted to the prevention of interferences with voluntary exchanges and should not extend to the prohibition, or the coercive dictation of the terms, of such exchanges. Nor should any differentiation be made between exchanges within the domestic economy and those made with others outside the political jurisdiction.”

Buchanan adds:

“Such a requirement is little more than explicit acknowledgment that persons possess the natural liberty to enter into and exit from agreements, without concern for collectively imposed constraints.”

Well. How will this constitution, even with Buchanan’s amendments, be anything but collectively imposed constraint?

Maybe I’ll consider my natural liberty to enter into, and exit from, agreements credibly acknowledged when Buchanan explains how I can opt out of his arrangement.