Political Spending Reminder: Statists Win.

I posted this a while back when I was talking about who actually makes up the bulk of political lobbying & political donations... But after a brief exchange on Twitter where I was told that it's always the "capitalists" who control everything, it's worth putting up again today.

Here, you will find the top political donors between the years 1989 and 2012, as compiled by www.opensecrets.org:

At least for me... Here are the major take-aways:

1. Unions dominate political spending, and have for a very long time.
2. Pretty much all unions, but particularly the public sector unions (who - in a spectacular conflict of interest  to the taxpayer - are spending members' money to elect the people on the "other side" of the apocryphal bargaining table), give almost exclusively to Democratic politicians.
3. Predictably and by contrast, when you look at the corporate political spending it is split fairly evenly between Republicans & Democrats.
4. To the extent that any organization within this list of the top 30 political donors contributes most heavily to Republicans, the split is not overwhelming in the way that union spending is.
5. It is not "capitalists" who have the most influence, but rather any well-organized special interest groups.

 Indeed, if you break down the support by political party... You find that of the top 30 groups within the last 23 years, 70.2% of that money went to Democrats, and thus just 29.8% goes to Republicans. Interesting breakdown, but aside from the mythbusting aspect of this (in that the common misconception is that Republicans get all the money, when that's absolutely not the case), I'm not interested in whining about the uneven distribution of political spending... Cause Republicans also suck.

Here's my thought on this:

We all already know Democrats are abysmal on limiting the power of government. That's more or less their raison d'etra as far as i can tell. "They" (by which I guess I mean the Democrat political class) favor expansions of state power in literally every aspect of our lives. Even when ostensibly allowing for more freedom, such as marijuana legalization (which the current crop of Democrats is pitiful on), they still favor centrally managing and taxing those things. So we're looking at more state power over education, health care, transportation, the market in general, finance/banking, etc.

But Republicans as well are generally awful on everything too (if your goal is limiting the state)!

More state power over people's relationships, over their bodies... More state power to wage wars internationally - even without declaring them or having the slightest shred of moral justification. In virtually any area in which Democrats aren't aggressively trying to expand political power over people's lives, Republicans tend to pick up the slack.

And all groups work tirelessly to dole out special benefits to favored special interests... Because, well... That's the whole point.

So what do we learn?

Statists win, and they win BIG. In fact, it might even be fair to say that the more statist your political platform, the better you do in the long run - particularly when it comes to control over the economy. The other thing we learn is that libertarian ideas don't even warrant an honorable mention.

I think Philosoraptor got it right: If big businesses love the free market so much and have so much control over politics... Why don't they support libertarian candidates?

Thing I learned today: HuffPo users are idiots

I'm not even going to go into much detail here, as I think the comments and my replies will speak for themselves. On an article which had linked video of Jon Stewart interviewing Andrew Napolitano, "Huffington Post SuperUser" ScreenName05 wrote some incredible nonsense in multiple places which I responded to. I'll present just two examples here, because he (assumption) actually replied to my response.

First, is this...

ScreenName05:"I think he also ignores that without government­s we would all be getting guns and blowing each other's heads off whenever we felt offended.

Oh yeah, that is what we used to do in the wild west. That is what people do in Afg. That is what people do in Somalia.

At what point do libertaria­ns realize that the only reason they get to spout their silly, naive and foolish ideas is the government protects them from the rest of us."

Me: “Cept... Umm....


That didn't actually happen, Super User... Even Cracked.co­m figured it out 
http://www.cracked.com/article_18487_6-ridiculous-history-myths-you-probably-think-are-true.html 

More on that: http://www­.thefreema­nonline.or­g/featured­/the-non-e­xistent-fr­ontier-ban­k-robbery/


Perhaps you shouldn't get your history from movie & TV 'Westerns'­? It's not very accurate.”

ScreenName05: "So you are dumb enough to believe that Billy the kid (the Lincoln country wars), the James brothers, the Cole brothers, Quantrell'­s raiders and a host of others did not exist, and didn't really kill people?

You might try real history instead of silly web sites."

Me: "Did I say they "didn't exist"? Nope.


What I said - or really implied in the rather short comment - was that the "wild west" you see in movies is bullshit.


There were not a huge amount of murders, and in fact the amount of murders in the so-called wild west states like Arizona (where Tombstone is), had far FEWER murders than the more "civilized­" Eastern states.


The lawlessnes­s and danger that you think existed in those parts of the country were a myth ginned up by Hollywood because Westerns are romantic and gunfights are good TV.


Nice of you to call me dumb though. Go figure."

I figured that by pointing out that even a silly site like Cracked has better information than the HuffPo "Super User", it might be enough as a rebuttal. But no... I guess I'm "dumb".

More on the "Wild West" that wasn't so wild here, and in this book.

We also have another amazing point, and subsequent response from our new friend, regarding a point by another (I'm guessing) libertarian commenter defending Napolitano. I assume the original poster was a libertarian as he referenced, and recommended reading Murray Rothbard's "Conceived in Liberty". I also recommend checking that book out... But again, Huffington Post Super User strikes back with this bit of amazing intellect...

ScreenName05: "You are confusing libertaria­ns with civil libertaria­ns. Different animals - civil libertaria­ns are staunch advocates of the constituti­on, especially the bill of rights and the 14th amendment - as they are the basis of civil rights in the United States.

Libertaria­ns on the other hand simply want the government to stop interferin­g with their property rights. They generally have no concept of the need for laws that deal with increases in population - as long as they are left alone. This worked when you had 3 million people in America - it does not work when you have 330 million. You need urban planning when you have 10 million people living in 100 square miles. You need police making sure the strong do not steal and kill the weak. You need laws that protect consumers from con men and frauds.

Ignore reality if you want, but do not try and confuse us with ignorance."

Me: “Actually, the fact that there are 307 (not 330) Million Americans is not an argument for more urban planning but - in fact - less. The more people you have, the more it becomes utterly impossible to plan out how those people should act in ways that are actually value adding.


Consider that if I have a family of 4 people, central planning isn't so tough. I could coordinate use of a car, dictate when my kids go to bed, set establishe­d rules of order for the house, dictate when and what will be for dinner, etc. And everyone can be reasonably ok with this.


Now try to do this with 400 people. Even with 100x the resources to scale everything up equally, there is simply no way for me to dictate how each and every one of those people acts in a way that encorporat­es their unique goals, values & preference­s. If you scale that up again to the level of a city, it's even less possible still.


Now, of course, I'm talking about full on central planning - but even simply planning out streets, zoning and other aspects of "urban planning" have resulted in innumerabl­e disasters in urban areas. See: Robert Moses with New York... Rampant eminent domain abuse...Di­sastrous "urban renewal" projects that often include giving giant subsidies to owners of sports teams for new arenas... Zoning that has created permanent "poor" areas devoid of trade, residentia­l communitie­s with no immediate access to stores, and countless other problems.”

ScreenName05: "It is hard to argue with indignant ignorance like yours. And pointless."

Me: "MMMMMMmmmm­m... Ad hominems are fun, aren't they?


Bad form for debate though. Thanks for letting me know that my taking the time to present you with a real argument and references to actual historical and modern events was a complete waste of my time, though."

I'd cite more on this too, but honestly, how hard is this to understand? Urban planning resulted in Robert Moses destroying a huge chunk of New York City and putting in a bunch of crappy highways, as well as resulting in low-income housing we now know as "The Projects" in most major cities around the US which did nothing except concentrate poverty & crime in certain areas that were also conveniently devoid of jobs, schools & services.

Plus, go see the Battle for Brooklyn, to check out what Urban Planning is doing to New York right now. It's not pretty.

And then, there's this... Which I wrote music for:

Honestly... Fail, buddy. Fail.

Anyway, I spent like half my day today reading other comments on HuffPo and found them all to be distressingly devoid of intelligence, historical knowledge and almost everything against libertarianism came down to "Hey guys, why don't you just go live in that number one libertarian paradise: Somalia!".

Ugh.

4Chan for Liberty

4 Chan just amused me... On a political thread on /b/ (typically NSFW) started about Ron Paul drumming up some support for liberty, some subsequent poster says, quote:

"H.L. Mencken once wrote: "There's a simple solution for all human problems: neat, plausible, and wrong."

If anyone does succeed in starting a real revolution to overthrow the government, you're absolutely fucked. Why? Because now you have to lead. Good luck trying to figure that out. It's not easy. Ron Paul and libertarians in general paint this black-and-white picture. It's simple, and plausible, and wrong."

But amusingly enough.... H.L. Mencken was a libertarian and about as anti-government as you can get ;)

In fact, Mencken is responsible for many of my favorite quotes... For instance:

"All government, of course, is against liberty."

Or...

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."

Me too.  At any rate, Mencken's point was that people, and politicians in particular, oversimplify solutions to problems because they treat people not as individuals, but as demographic groups.  Thus it's easy to whitewash millions of people's issues into a one-size-fits all solution.  THAT is precisely what libertarianism rejects, and it instead embraces the idea that we are all individuals who should be free to set our *own* values, goals and find the solutions to our problems in ways that best reflect those things.  How to provide for millions of people's individual wants & needs is an extremely complex problem.

But when the state is involved, the solution is always "neat, plausible, and wrong".  Want some examples?

Take the financial crisis: Not enough money or credit available?  Hell, that's easy... Print more money!  Take health care: Not enough people can afford insurance?  Just take money from "rich" people to pay for it!  What about college education, home ownership, eco-friendly cars, etc.: Want more people to have those things? Just subsidize all of them!

Problem is, each of these "solutions" is built on two severe flaws.  For one thing, each and everyone ignores the long-term consequences of those actions:  Printing more money results in inflation and the misallocation of resources.  Taxing the so-called "rich" (which anymore means basically upper middle class) at higher and higher levels has diminishing revenue effects (i.e. Laffer Curve) when the rich start leaving the country, shifting assets & income into other, safer, settings and taking the jobs they provide with them.  It also removes the incentives middle class people have from working harder (e.g., if you're taxed at 30% on $100k a year, you take home $70k... If you're taxed at 50% on $140k a year, you take home... $70k.  Given that most people have to work significantly harder for the $140k a year job, what's the point?) and thus the median income continually decreases.  And don't even get me started on the distortions in the market caused by subsidies... I would think that the recent housing crisis should have been enough to disillusion people of the notion that government can produce better outcomes than people interacting freely and voluntarily with each other.

What's worse though, is that every top-down "solution" inherently eliminates individual human beings the freedom to decide for themselves how best to run their lives.

Fail.

I can't link to 4Chan, cause by the time I do, the thread will have already disappeared given the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the site.

Funny thing is, that poster wasn't entirely wrong - usually when a revolution happens, someone "has to" (by which I mean, does) take charge.  But where the poster falls flat on his face with that aspect of his comment, is that in the libertarian dream-world where government encompasses only a small are of people's lives, there is a very wide berth for every individual person to plan for themselves!  When bureaucrats are in charge of controlling what millions of people do, OF COURSE it's difficult!  But the entire point of the libertarian idea - especially coming from F.A. Hayek and the like is that central planning fails precisely because it's impossible to know what other people's values, hopes & dreams are.

Politicians can't know what your goals in life are any more than they can know how soon you're going to run out of milk this week.  So the assumption that we should be looking to politicians of any kind for that kind of leadership is completely absurd - but it is the underlying assumption for most of the world's population.

The trick with any idea of "revolution", as usual, is making sure people understand all this going in and that we wind up with a repeat of George Washington (who abhorred the notion of becoming a tyrant and passionately stepped down from power when he could have been a permanent king) instead of a repeat of Napoleon.  If the "Ron Paul Revolution" were to ever actually take place the whole point of it would be that afterward, people in America get to run their own lives again, so the type of "leadership" (or more accurately; authoritarian domination) required would actually be rather minimal.

And as an added bonus, the economy and people's ability to engage in peaceful social activities that harm no one would be immensely improved.  It's always worth noting that freedom is not only a value that should be held for its own sake, it's also the source of just about everything that is good and functional within the human condition.

So... MOAR PLZ!!!