I think I need to have an argument with my fellow libertarians to explain that. It’s a complex subject, but I’ve boiled my rant down to a bunch of short points:

Not like a business. You’d think people who advocate “running the government like a business” would recognize that what Trump and Musk are doing is not how successful business leaders manage change. They don’t rush around firing people willy-nilly. Effective leaders have goals, and they have plans to reach those goals. More importantly, they communicate their plans and goals to everyone else in the organization, getting buy-in from as many people as possible and building a culture that supports the change. DOGE staffers are just swinging an axe at anything they dislike.

Twitter. Some people point to Musk’s management of Twitter as proof that he knows what he’s doing. After all, he also fired lots of people very quickly there, and “the website’s still up.” But that’s no great accomplishment: Modern cloud-based applications are engineered to keep running without human intervention. Heck, I haven’t touched my demo Spelling Bee site in almost a year, and it’s still up^[1]Not any more. After writing this, I decided it was costing me more than it’s worth, so I took it down., so it’s no surprise that Twitter/X keeps going. But people have been leaving the platform, and those who remain seem to be spending less time on it. Twitter revenue continues to decline and it’s estimated that Twitter has lost 88% of it’s brand value and 79% of its net worth since Musk took over.

Power not success. Some people defend Musk’s management of Twitter by saying his goal was to achieve power, not financial success, and therefore his current role in the Trump administration shows him to have been a super-genius. Even if we accept that framing, the fact that Twitter worked out well for Musk doesn’t change the fact that Twitter is still collapsing. It would be a disaster to let him do the same thing to the government.

Information Problem. Those of us who prefer free markets to central planning like to point out that central planners can’t possible have enough information to efficiently control the activities of an entire economy. A similar information problem affects large organizations like corporations. Or the federal government. Elon Musk and a few dozen DOGE employees can’t possibly drop in and immediately understand large government departments with complex goals, tremendous amounts of data, and thousands of people with specialized subject matter expertise. When DOGE staffers make pronouncements about waste and fraud after just a few days, they are engaging in what F.A. Hayek would call “a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

Time Problem. One way around the information problem is to distribute the decision making, as the free market does through its pricing mechanisms. The organizational equivalent requires setting a clear vision, communicating that vision down through layers of management, and identifying, listening to, and empowering knowledgeable and effective people at all levels. Given how quickly DOGE flits from agency to agency, they obviously aren’t taking the time to do any of that.

Mistakes. DOGE is making a lot of mistakes. Musk’s claim that USAID was funding Politico to the tune of $8 million turned out to be multiple government offices subscribing to Politico’s professional services since 2016. The claim USAID spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza has no basis in fact. And lately IT experts have been explaining that Musk has been making false claims about Social Security data because he doesn’t have a clue how the technology works.^[2]Musk now says he suspects there are tens of millions of dead people in the social security database. I’m confident that if 30% of social security recipients were dead, it would not have gone unnoticed this long. He’s misunderstanding his dataset.

Not the real world. Fighting fraud is hard. We’ve heard estimates that annual government fraud could amount to as much as $500 billion. But by its nature, successful fraud goes undetected, and so it’s impossible to measure. It’s also hard to detect. DOGE may uncover a few instances of fraud by trawling through databases, but most people who commit fraud are well aware of how government record keeping works, and they make sure the official numbers add up. Real fraud detection involves difficult and time-consuming investigations in the real world.^[3]E.g. If you suspect a corrupt official is paying a fake contractor for work that is never done, you’d probably have to check the contractor’s records to see if they paid employees to actually do the work and then check if the employees actually exist and if they received the payments. Then you’d have to check if the contracted deliverables exist and evaluate whether they look like the billed amount of work went into them. DOGE staffers are just cosplaying as fraud detectives, and they are unlikely to think of anything that experienced government fraud investigators wouldn’t know about.

Firing people. In pursuit of its goals, DOGE leans heavily on firing people.^[4]Probably not firing them in the legal sense, which requires showing cause, but definitely terminating their employment. Some people argue that firings are the only way to effect change, but that’s often an excuse for a lack of leadership. They clearly aren’t working to a plan. They said they were going to fire the wasteful and underperforming, but lately they are getting rid of all probationary employees, i.e. new employees with less job protection. They’ve gone from identifying inefficiencies to simply laying off those who are easiest to lay off. Avoiding the most effective action to do the easiest thing is always a sign of feckless decision making.

Sociopathy: When Musk tore down USAID, he tweeted out “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” He was putting thousands of people out of a job, and he was joking about it. Russell Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget has said “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… We want to put them in trauma.” This is not how normal people behave. Even if it is good policy to lay off thousands of people, you’re not supposed to enjoy doing it. These are sociopaths who enjoy hurting people. They are the worst people to empower.

Buyouts. Thousands of federal employees have been offered buyouts — financial incentives to resign — and so far about 77,000 of them have accepted the deal. As is typical with any Trump/Musk idea, the implementation has been chaotic. Although people accept buyout offers for a variety of reasons, the people most likely to accept are probably those most likely to easily find jobs elsewhere, i.e. high-value employees.

Return to office. Government employees who work from home have been ordered to return to office. This would make sense if there was a reason to believe employees working from home are malingering, but statements from the Trump administration have made it clear that the return-to-office order is an attempt to make employees miserable so they quit. In fact, many employees who have accepted the buyout are doing so to avoid having to return to the office. There’s no reason to believe that work-from-home employees who can’t return are actually poorer performers than those who can. It’s essentially terminating people at random.

Babies and Bathwater. The wholesale gutting of departments and agencies risks shutting down valuable government services along with the wasteful ones. Cuts to budgets have already disrupted drug trials, veterans programs, and world-wide disease prevention, not to mention the Department of Energy cuts that are disrupting the National Nuclear Security Administration’s handling of our nation’s nuclear weapons.

Too sudden. When Musk took over Twitter, one of his most outrageous acts was shutting down the Twitter API, the access points for hundreds of applications that interact with Twitter, without warning. DOGE (and Trump in general) has been doing much the same with government services, often shutting things down almost instantly, and just as developers using Twitter’s API had no time to adjust, government agencies are having difficulty find alternatives quickly.^[5]There are rumors of an NNSA team getting shut down in the middle of transporting a “physics package” — the nuclear parts of a nuclear warhead — leaving them to secure the materials as best they could while trying to find out what’s happening. None of this had to happen this way: The shutdowns could have been stretched out over a year or two, giving the affected agencies time to go through their planning process for a much smoother transition.

Destruction of capital. Employees bring more than just labor hours to a job, they bring knowledge. And quite often that knowledge is learned on the job and very specific to the job. E.g. how to administer a complex grant program or maintain a large software codebase. In economic terms, this knowledge is human capital, and like other forms of capital — machines, vehicle, factories, etc. — it increases productivity but is expensive to acquire. Terminating knowledgeable employees is therefore equivalent to destroying machines, vehicles, or entire factories. This is fine if you really don’t need the capital any more, but given the recklessness of the DOGE operation, much of this capital will likely have to be acquired again, at great expense in the form of training and practice.^[6]Unless they can re-hire the same people quickly enough.

Unkindness. Whenever Trump policies make people suffer — due to lost jobs or having grant-funded medical care cut off — it’s common to hear that “the cruelty is the point.” But while Trump does enjoy punishing people he doesn’t like, I think far more often the suffering is due to simple callousness. It’s not always the case that they want to hurt people. Sometimes they just don’t care. Either way is unkind.

Regime uncertainty. Trump and Musk are trying to change many things, all at once, without warning or time for the rest of us to prepare. Then sometimes they discover they’ve made mistakes and they walk parts of it back. And they do a terrible job of communicating any of this to the public. Even worse, they do all these things by unorthodox and possibly illegal means, and at this point there are about 80 active court cases with about 20 orders delaying, pausing, blocking, or overturning Trump administration policies. This is an unholy confusing mess, and that has consequences: People and businesses don’t know what will be happening in the future, and this uncertainty makes them cautious. It makes them hesitant to commit resources to activities with uncertain outcomes. And hesitancy spending money is how we get recessions.

Too little. In 2024, the federal government spent $1.7 trillion on Congressionally mandated healthcare, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies. Another $1.5 trillion went to legally required Social Security payments. And $892 billion went to interest on the debt, which has to be paid. After that, the largest budgeted discretionary item is the hard-to-cut defense budget at $872 billion. Various benefits for veterans, federal retirees, and a variety of anti-poverty programs^[7]The refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, unemployment insurance, supplemental security income for the elderly or disabled, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, school meals, low-income housing assistance, child care assistance, home energy assistance, aid for abused or neglected children, etc. add another $1 trillion. Education adds $345 billion. Other major components including transportation, natural resources, agriculture, science and medical research, law enforcement, and international spending, which add up to $244 billion, with another $345 billion in miscellaneous programs. That’s almost $7 trillion. On the other hand, DOGE has specified $6 billion in direct spending cuts. Between the buyouts and direct terminations, DOGE has presumptively cut 87,000 federal jobs and it looks like they will layoff 220,000 probationary workers. If we generously assume each job costs $150,000/year, that’s $46 billion. Assume for the sake of argument that they also succeed in throwing the entire $72 billion USAID budget into the wood chipper, and DOGE will currently save about $124 billion.^[8]I think all this was accurate when I wrote it, but be aware that things are happening fast. We’re going through a lot of pain and confusion to save 1.7% of the budget, an amount which taxpayers will barely feel on April 15th. Meanwhile Congress is currently putting together a spending bill with $300 billion in new funding…

Indirect inefficiency. Us libertarians talk a lot about “smaller government” but too many make the mistake of equating the size of government with the size of the government’s budget. That’s not the only burden of government. Every time the government limits us or controls us, it imposes a cost on society. Every permit you have to apply for, every impact study you have to perform, every law or regulation you have to follow, every victimless crime that you can commit^[9]Marijuana and ecstasy, gambling, sex work, high-flow showers and toilets, short-barreled rifles, certificates of need, plastic straws, zoning, rent control, sodomy, raw milk, unlicensed hair care, etc. — all of these are a burden, and for many people these burdens are far worse than paying taxes. DOGE terminating thousands of people does nothing to lift this burden: We still have to follow those laws and regulations. But where following those laws requires us to interact with the government — obtaining licenses, receiving inspections, filing reports, waiting for evaluations, getting permits, etc. — DOGE’s reduction of the government workforce could actually leave us worse off. Just as any business reducing its workforce makes customer service worse, firing government employees makes dealing with the government even more tedious and wasteful for the rest of us. Adding weeks, months, or years of delay will do nothing good for our economy. The government may be more “efficient,” but the burden will make us all less efficient.

Chains and crutches. The Cato Institute uses the following analogy: Government both puts people in chains and gives them crutches, and when you take the government apart, you should be careful to remove the chains first.^[10]Source for the crutches and chains analogy. I’ve been advocating for limited government for decades, and I can’t understand libertarians who think limiting government should start with USAID, the NIH, and the NOAA instead of CBP, ICE, HSI, DEA, and ATF. Or note that it is well within Trump’s executive power to end the scourge of federal civil forfeiture, yet neither he nor his libertarian supporters are talking about it. These people worry more about DEI than police abuse or victimless crimes.

Procedure. Some libertarians say that procedural objections to Musk and Trump’s DOGE activities ignore all the good that DOGE is doing. I’ve think I’ve offered plenty of arguments that DOGE is not, in fact, doing good, and is often quite harmful, but I would also like to defend the importance of procedure. It is the procedural aspects of government — elections, Congressional voting, passing laws, veto powers, legally required administrative procedures, open hearings, limits on police activity, independent courts, constitutional review — the whole system of checks and balances — that keeps the government in line. Basically, if libertarians want government to follow libertarian values, they will do that by enacting procedures that constrain government action. You can’t get libertopia without making the government follow the rules.

In summary, DOGE-style changes doomed Twitter and won’t help our government, but they may empower Musk even further. DOGE’s sociopathybro staff have too little information and too little time to understand what they are doing and they’re working only from government databases, so they’re missing real fraud, making mistakes, discarding the good with the bad, breaking things without warning, getting rid of experienced employees, and generally being unkind, all without doing much to relieve legal and regulatory burdens, while destroying government capabilities, creating economy-threatening uncertainty for small gains, making government less efficient, and setting us up for unconstrained authoritarian rule.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Talking to my fellow libertarians about DOGE

President Joseph Biden

The American Jobs Plan is going to create millions of good-paying jobs — jobs Americans can raise a family on — as my dad would then say, “with a little breathing room.”

— address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 28, 2021

Hey Joe, You know who doesn’t have “a little breathing room”? People in jail for victimless consensual crimes like illegal drugs or sex work. While you worry about that other stuff, your government is still locking people in cages for these bullshit crimes or funding State governments that lock people in cages for these bullshit crimes. You’ve had plenty of time to put an end to it without spending a dime, yet your government is still immiserating hundreds of thousands of people for no goddamned reason. Fuck you. Burn in hell.

Vice President Kamala Harris

Hey Kamala, You know what else can have a lifelong impact? Being in jail for victimless consensual crimes like illegal drugs or sex work. While you worry about that other stuff, your government is still locking people in cages for these bullshit crimes or funding State governments that lock people in cages for these bullshit crimes. You’ve had plenty of time to put an end to it without spending a dime, yet your government is still immiserating hundreds of thousands of people for no goddamned reason. Fuck you. Burn in hell.

Senator Mitch McConnell

Hey Mitch, You know who isn’t well-positioned for the future? People in jail for victimless consensual crimes like illegal drugs or sex work. While you worry about that other stuff, your government is still locking people in cages for these bullshit crimes or funding State governments that lock people in cages for these bullshit crimes. You’ve had plenty of time to put an end to it without spending a dime, yet your government is still immiserating hundreds of thousands of people for no goddamned reason. Fuck you. Burn in hell.

Senator Elizabeth Warren

Hey Elizabeth, You know what else makes it hard for people to work? Being in jail for victimless consensual crimes like illegal drugs or sex work. While you worry about that other stuff, your government is still locking people in cages for these bullshit crimes or funding State governments that lock people in cages for these bullshit crimes. You’ve had plenty of time to put an end to it without spending a dime, yet your government is still immiserating hundreds of thousands of people for no goddamned reason. Fuck you. Burn in hell.

Senator Ted Cruz

Hey Ted, You know what else is profoundly dangerous? Being in jail for victimless consensual crimes like illegal drugs or sex work. While you worry about that other stuff, your government is still locking people in cages for these bullshit crimes or funding State governments that lock people in cages for these bullshit crimes. You’ve had plenty of time to put an end to it without spending a dime, yet your government is still immiserating hundreds of thousands of people for no goddamned reason. Fuck you. Burn in hell.

Donald Trump

So now even our Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit, is a junky. This is emblematic of what is happening to our Country. The whole world is laughing at us as we go to hell on our Borders, our fake Presidential Election, and everywhere else!

— blog post, May 9, 2021

Hey Donald, you know where we’ve really gone to hell? Throwing people in jail for victimless consensual crimes like illegal drugs or sex work. While you worry about that other stuff, your government is still locking people in cages for these bullshit crimes or funding State governments that lock people in cages for these bullshit crimes. You had plenty of time to put an end to it without spending a dime, yet your government is still immiserating hundreds of thousands of people for no goddamned reason. Fuck you. Burn in hell.

Bernie Sanders

Speaking of the needs of the working class, you know what they don’t need? Being in jail for victimless consensual crimes like illegal drugs or sex work. While you worry about that other stuff, your government is still locking people in cages for these bullshit crimes or funding State governments that lock people in cages for these bullshit crimes. You’ve had plenty of time to put an end to it without spending a dime, yet your government is still immiserating hundreds of thousands of people for no goddamned reason. Fuck you. Burn in hell.

Yeah, I’m really getting back to my libertarian roots with this post.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Libertarian Responds to Policy Proposals

The first time I remember hearing the word “libertarian” was when I was in high school in 1980 and Ed Clark was running for President on the Libertarian ticket. I remember that he wanted to legalize all drugs, and I thought it might make sense in theory but that really doing it would be nuts.

When I got to college, I got interested in some common political issues, and I decided to make an effort to learn more about them. This was years before the first web page traversed the internet, so my approach was to scour the magazine racks for publications that covered political issues. The magazines ranged from liberal to conservative, and they were often interesting reading, but all of them took editorial stances that struck me as inconsistent and misguided. 

Except for one magazine, where I found myself nodding along with almost everything they wrote. It wasn’t so much that they agreed with my views, but that the authors thought about the issues in a way that made a lot of sense to me. I’d start reading a piece about the war on drugs or transportation policy, and at some point there’d be this mental ping and I’d realize they had found exactly the right way to think about the issue.

Unfortunately, I had read so many different magazines that next time I went looking for reading material, I couldn’t remember what it was called. I had to just continue buying a variety magazines, hoping to pick it up again. I think it was a few months before I opened up a magazine, started reading, and got that ping sensation again. This time I made a point of noting the magazine’s name.

Of course it was Reason.

This was during the years when Virginia Postrel was Editor in Chief, and I remember her editorials had a way of drawing libertarian ideas out of all kinds of topics, from contact lenses to breast implants. Every issue of Reason had articles that helped me clarify my thinking about the issues of the day. It was during this time that I really began to think about the world in libertarian terms and of myself as a libertarian. I will always be grateful to Postrel and the rest of the Reason staff for the clarity they gave me.

In the following years, four books also heavily colored and solidified my libertarian thinking:

• Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society. This is Peter McWilliams’ magnum opus. His passionate argument convinced me forever that the government has no business telling us what to do if we aren’t hurting anyone.
• The Armchair Economist This is Steven Landsburg’s easy-to-read and thought-provoking introduction to some very serious economic concepts. It helped me organize my thinking about policy analysis, and kicked off my now decades-long amateur interest in economics. (Link is to the latest edition.)
• Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-minded Economics For A Just Society. This book by liberal economist Alan Blinder argues that some public policies are so bad, and so economically ill-informed, that we can find solutions that improve on hard-headed conservative concerns about limiting spending and regulation, while also doing a better job of satisfying soft-hearted liberal goals like reducing pollution and improving the lives of the poor.
• Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. In this book, James Bovard presents hundreds of examples of how laws and regulations can get out of control when enforced by the petty and power-mad. It’s a searing and heartbreaking account of ruined lives. (Bovard turns out a ton of books like this. This is just the first one I read.)

Sorry. No Ayn Rand.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at It Sometimes Begins with Virginia Postrel

It’s exactly what you think it is.

I think my favorite Libertarian meme (so far) belongs to the John McAfee camp. Actually, this might be mocking John McAfee. It’s hard to tell, given his campaign style. Heck, for all I know, this is an official campaign press release.

That’s pretty much going to be my impression of John McAfee forever now.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Libertarian Party Memes

Lucy Steigerwald points to an annoying Vox article about libertarianism by Drew Brown with the cringe-inducing title “Why Libertarians and MRAs Sound the Same When They Talk About Feminism.”

The piece starts out with some real issues of women being harassed by assholes, and private employers firing said assholes, which doesn’t bother me a whole lot. However, once the author starts discussing libertarianism, the piece becomes a loony tune:

At first it might seem sort of surprising that a libertarian would come to the defence of a guy getting fired for saying sexist shit in public. I mean, the whole movement is essentially designed to uphold employers’ rights to do almost whatever the fuck they want to their underlings.

See what I mean? The libertarian movement’s basic philosophy rests on the foundation of the non-coercion principle: You can only do whatever you want to other people if you have their consent. I suspect Brown is confused because he disagrees with some of the things employees have consented to, such as low wages or working conditions he doesn’t like.

But it’s possible that because the guy was fired from Hydro One, Ontario’s government-owned (at least for now) electricity company, this could be seen as an act of state repression as heinous as food safety regulation or public transit.

Maybe. It’s kind of complicated, having to do with whether the guy had a duty to behave himself as a representative of his employer, and whether the limits imposed by his employer pass some tests of legitimacy for government agencies. Here in the U.S., this would be a constitutional issue related to First Amendment limits on how governments can control their employees’ speech, but this all took place in Canada, which turns out to be a whole different country.

And if you don’t think food safety regulations can be hideous form of state repression, you probably haven’t been paying attention to how those regulations are enforced. Food safety is a great thing, but it also becomes an excuse for shutting down competitors to politically powerful agricultural interests, expanding the fiefdoms of government bureaucrats, and weirdly puritanical crusades against things like raw milk.

So then why would a libertarian spring to sexism’s defence? A cursory visit to the Manosphere can show you a statistical link between libertarians and anti-feminist men’s rights activists. Even self-identified “libertarian feminists” like Jessica Flanigan note a tension between the goals and values of libertarians and those of feminists.

And she come out in favor of libertarianism whenever the feminist goal of discouraging sexism crosses over into coercive tactics. So…not the best example.

When you look at it this way, it’s not hard to see that libertarians and men’s rights activists are two sides of the same reactionary coin.

Weirdly, that link goes to a post about how libertarianism is supposedly related to the neoreactionary movement. For fuck’s sake, neoreactionaries want a return to monarchy! The author just thinks libertarians and neoreactionaries are closely related because, for completely different reasons, they both oppose his liberal ideals.

Brown then goes on to explain what MRAs are all about. It’s kind of long, but remarkably nuanced.

MRAs are the disaffected losers of a male-dominated world. They are legitimately upset that they have to put up with all the bullshit that traditionally masculine gender roles impose on men (do dangerous work; live and die by your dick; defer to “naturally” nurturing women in child-care custody battles; etc) but they don’t enjoy any of the payoffs they were promised for playing along. Patriarchy is a pyramid scheme, and for every Don Draper at the pinnacle there are a thousand Pete Campbells underneath them, whining that they can’t get their due.

At this point, Brown is on the verge of stumbling on the basic relationship between MRAs and the libertarian movement. People who used to control everything are starting to feel political power shift to other groups — from whites to people of color, from men to women — and that frightens them. And when people who frighten you are in control of the government, making the government less powerful begins to look like a good idea. And calling yourself a libertarian sounds a lot better than admitting you’re a racist or a sexist.

Unfortunately, Brown goes in a completely different direction:

You can see why these people would get along with libertarians, who are also very emotionally invested in maintaining bullshit social and economic hierarchies under the veneer of individual rights.

First of all, libertarians believe that people should be able to form whatever social and economic hierarchies they want to, which they should be free to maintain or tear down as they see fit, as long as no one forces anyone else into the hierarchy by, for example, enacting the hierarchy into law.

Second, it’s not a veneer, you jackass. It’s a guiding principle. And I guess Brown realizes that, because he then launches an attack on individualism:

One of the basic premises of libertarianism is that only individuals exist. There is no such thing as a group or a gender or a race or a nation or a community of any kind.

Not quite. Believing there’s no such thing as a group or a gender or a race or whatever would be silly. He’s misstated the principle. It’s not that only individuals exist. It’s that only individuals matter. That is, government policy should be evaluated on the basis of it’s effect on individuals, not on nebulous or questionably defined social groups.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with a policy that harms a group such as women or people of color. But the policy isn’t bad because it harms the group, it’s bad because it harms the individuals that make up the group.

Obviously, the idea that we all go through life as isolated individuals and that group identities (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc) don’t define us in any meaningful way could only seem plausible to a white man of at least moderate financial means—or anyone bound up in the aspirational fantasies of whiteness, masculinity, and economic elitism. Whiteness, and especially straight male whiteness, is treated as the de facto standard from which others deviate, to such an extent that a straight white (cis, able-bodied) man can completely forget his experience is not universal. From within that perspective, it’s easy to see freedom as consisting in, and only in, being left alone to do whatever you want with your money.

It’s the only definition of freedom that doesn’t involve oppressing others. That some straight white cis able-bodied men claim this kind of freedom for themselves while taking it from others — Thomas Jefferson is the archetype — doesn’t mean that being left alone is a poor definition of freedom. It just means that some straight white cis able-bodied men are hypocritical assholes.

Both libertarians and MRAs are dedicated to missing this point. They speak in the language of individual rights and equality because by reducing all the complexity of the social world down to a set of isolated units, they can pretend that everyone’s privileges and disadvantages are rightfully earned.

I don’t know about MRAs, but us libertarians reduce the complexity of the social world to a set of isolated people because when it comes to evaluating public policies, isolated people are easy to understand: They all matter, and they all matter equally. From where I sit, it’s people who divide us into tribes that are trying to take advantage of us, regardless of which tribes they call their own. Conservative tribalism is every bit as bad as liberal tribalism.

Even the imagery of the “Nanny State” is hilariously sexist—as if the government is a giant woman, nagging the boys to do their homework and making them go to bed before the good TV shows are on.

It has nothing to do with gender. When the government outlaws sex toys or toy guns or Big Gulps, we call it the “Nanny State” because nannies take care of children, and the government is treating adults like children.

[…] if there’s one place where libertarians and MRAs often overlap, it’s in being smug, condescending pricks on the internet.

Right back at ya, bro.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Some Random Annoying Nonsense about Libertarianism

I believe in the First Rule of Law Enforcement, but I also believe that our citizens have that same right to go home at the end of their day.

That is in agreement with the classical liberal concept of human rights: Your rights are limited only by the fact that everyone else is entitled to exactly the same rights. If someone infringes your rights (or someone else’s), then they are exceeding their rights, and you can act to stop them. But if you act against someone who is not infringing on someone else’s rights, then you are the one violating rights.

Everyone has the right to live through the day.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The First Rule of Everyone

[…] The ideas are similar.  Windy is no Greenfield, and steps back from his rhetoric and invective.  But like Greenfield, he is of the opinion that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights mean what he thinks they mean.  Civil Rights are right there, in black and white, and are meant to be applied as he has come to understand them.

Well, I certainly want the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to mean what they seem to mean to me. I place a pretty high value on individual liberty, and the Bill of Rights is written in a strong declarative tone. I like the sound of it. And I’d like to have very strong versions of all those rights it talks about.

Nevertheless, I normally try to avoid anything resembling Constitutional interpretation in my blog posts because I realize there’s an awful lot of history bound up in the interpretation of that document, and I’m far from a Constitutional scholar. In this case, however, it was hard not to mention the Constitution since I wanted to discuss why I thought the argument behind “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” is wrong.

The Constitution is a remarkable document, and like other remarkable documents, it apparently supports everyone.  What Greenfield and Windy see as being the intention of the “founders” or perhaps, if they’re thinking more accurately, the populations of the colonies/states that ratified the document, is but one view. Their view of the Constitution is one of the more attractive because it requires little thought, there simply are forbidden things and that is that.  The government can go this far and no further.  Keeping the government on its side of the line is one of our eternal duties.

It’s worse than he thinks. The hard-core libertarian view is not merely that the government is forbidden from doing certain things, but rather that the government has no lawful authority to do anything that it is not explicitly authorized to do by the constitution.

For example, some would-be censors have argued that the founders could not have envisioned such a powerful propaganda tool as television when they wrote the Bill of Rights, and surely if they had known about television, they would not given it the broad protection that the printing press receives in the First Amendment.

The libertarian response is that the Constitution describes a limited government, and since the authors could not have envisioned television, they could not possibly have intended to give the federal government power over television. Many libertarians would like to see the federal government limited only to a very narrowly defined set of enumerated powers.

I grow tired of this view.  I see it everywhere, and it is as intellectually dishonest as it is hypocritical. Of course the Constitution isn’t eternal.

[…]

What Greenfield and Windy and their ilk trumpet so blindly as the meaning of the First Amendment was a concept shaped largely by men in the beginning of the twentieth century, men like Holmes and Hand and other men who had more sense than just about anyone alive today as far as I can tell.

We are sovereign.  Not the Constitution.  We are.  The Constitution has been and will always be the plaything of the powerful.  If the best argument you can come up with is “well the Constitution said so” or “the founders thought so” then you will lose the war of ideas.

“The Constitution said so” is hardly my best argument.

More ironically, you will have attempted to thwart authoritarians by relying on authority, pure and simple.  If your ideals have as much value as you credit them with having, then take the time to learn about that value and how to express it. Otherwise, your simple, mindless repetition of this that or the other amendment and your waving of the shriveled ancient parchment you so love will not save you from the horde of children growing up today who think that document foolish and dated.

It has not escaped my attention that the Constitution is not a libertarian document. (Tolerance for slavery was the first clue.) Although it was influenced by some libertarian ideas, it does not purport to create a libertarian government that maximizes individual liberty. And if it were up to me, I would forbid the government from doing many things, regardless of whether or not the Constitution would permit them. My view of what the government should or should not be doing does not depend on the Constitution or its interpretation by any court.

But where the language of the Constitution does comport with my own preferences for government, I have a tendency to invoke it for support. Consequently, the fact that “nidefatt” thinks I was making a largely Constitutional argument is probably due to a lack of clear writing on my part.

To my mind, the main thrust of my post was to undermine Justice Jackson’s argument that sometimes liberty must be sacrificed to preserve order:

The Constitution is not a suicide pact because respecting individual civil liberties is not a suicidal act. How many countries have died because they allowed their citizens to have too much due process? How many nations have fallen because they allowed their citizens to speak up too much?

Granted, there are governments that arguably fell because of a failure to crack down hard enough on their people. Off the top of my head, there’s tsarist Russia, communist Czechoslovakia, apartheid South Africa, and the Arab Spring nations — Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Corrupt authoritarian regimes, every one. In some cases, the new governments that arose afterwards weren’t any better, but the destruction of the old governments was no great loss.

Shortly after 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft lashed out at people who objected to the Patriot Act and other expansions of the security state by accusing them of alarming people with “phantoms of lost liberty.” To my mind, Justice Jackson was alarming people with phantoms of anarchy and chaos. Free speech has never destroyed a country worth saving.

More to the point (although one I did not make explicitly) Jackson was on the losing side of the decision. The Supreme Court had rejected his views, and in the ensuing decades the United States adopted exactly the kind of broad interpretation of free speech that Jackson was worried about. And yet rabble rousers did not stir the populace to revolution or civil war. Jackson’s moral panic over agitators was proven wrong by history.

The worst it ever got was about a decade later, when African-American civil rights leaders (among others) stirred up protests that occasionally erupted into violence — often as much by the police as by the protesters — and even then American civilization was never in danger. And note how the civil rights movement ended: The rest of America realized that the civil rights leaders — the people making exactly the kind of disruptive speeches Jackson wanted to silence — had been right all along, and many of their ideas became the dominant ethos of our society.

And sixty-some years after Jackson’s dissent, we are the most powerful and influential nation in the world. There are many reasons for that, but I argued that our embrace of liberty, though tenuous at times, was no small part of the cause:

Not only is respecting individual civil liberties not a suicidal act, it’s arguably a source of considerable strength. A tradition of freedom makes a nation difficult to conquer, the economic benefits of free markets make strong defense affordable, and the practice of open debate makes a nation flexible to advantageous changes of policy.

That’s a big part of my argument right there. Freedom on the broadest possible terms is a good policy that makes our nation strong and improves all our lives.

But freedom is also valuable in itself. From time to time, I call myself a libertarian, and I mean it in the sense that Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch define it in Declaration of Independents:

At it’s root, libertarianism is about a default preference for the freedom to peaceably pursue happiness as we define it without interference from government. It’s the belief that the burden of proof should rest not on the individual who wants to sell lemonade, paint his or her house purple, hop on an airplane, ingest intoxicants, or marry someone from the same sex (though preferably not in that order) but on any government seeking to thwart or control such victimless activities. Like the magazine we write for, we agitate for the aspirational goal of “free minds and free markets,” celebrating a world of expanding choice — in lifestyles, identities, goods, work arrangements, and more — and exploring the institutions, policies, and attitudes necessary for maximizing their proliferation. We are happy warriors against busybodies, elites, and gatekeepers who insist on dictating how other people should live their lives. Like John Stuart Mill, we’re big on “experiments in living.” Within the broadest possible parameters, we believe that you should be able to think what you want, live where you want, trade for what you want, eat what you want, smoke what you want, and wed whom you want. You should also be willing to shoulder the responsibilities entailed by your actions. Those general guidelines don’t explain everything, and they certainly don’t mean that there aren’t hard choices to make, but as basic principles, they go a hell of a long way to creating a world that is tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting.

That’s what I want more than anything, for all of us to live in that kind of world, and I hope it’s what you want too. Creating that world is mostly up to us, but in order to succeed, we have to have a government that is compatible with that vision. At the risk of quoting from another “shriveled ancient parchment” I think Jefferson nails it pretty well in the original Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…

In other words, freedom is not suicidal to a nation. Freedom is the whole point of having nations. The only reason for permitting governments of any kind is to help us create a world that is “tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting.”

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Liberty Is Not Suicide

Chris suggests that these people (supposedly 29 percent of Americans) would be too busy getting ready to avoid or run from such a rebellion if they really believed it was coming soon. And I see his point. There are, after all, currently more than a million refugees fleeing Syria’s rebellion.

I’m certainly not in that 29 percent who thinks we will need (or be in) an armed rebellion any time soon (or, indeed, in my lifetime), but I would be one who would take up arms if needed rather than try to hide from the rebellion. Maybe that’s just my age talking. Rebellions tend to involve the young and the old. Those in the middle often have too much to lose.

Hmm, I guess that makes me quite selfish. I’d be pushing the rebellion along, dragging the young with me, who don’t realize the value of their own lives, while putting everyone else who doesn’t want to be involved in mortal danger. All for my high-minded ideals.

And if we win, the surviving young would build statues to assholes like me.

Yeah, that sounds nice. Just be sure to get my beard right.

Seriously, though, that’s my point. I’ve always supported the Second Amendment on the principle that, someday, citizens may need it to defend themselves from the government. I don’t own a gun, nor do I want to own a gun. In case you didn’t know, those things are dangerous!

Still, if the situation arose where I thought we needed to rebel against our government, that danger is a useful trait.

Yet in every rebellion I’ve ever studied, the vast majority of the population just wants to get away, or simply survive. It’s a small minority of the people actually fighting on either side of such a conflict. Most are just like Chris Hallquist, simply looking for a way to lay low until the conflict blows over one way or another.

Studying the American Revolution has made me realize how few people carried the population along towards war and how they used questionable morality and ethics to do so. Nelson Mandela, on the other hand, turned away from violent rebellion and successfully overthrew a well established and armed government using peaceful methods.

Is defending the Second Amendment just the selfish act of a minority of old assholes like me with grand notions of a just armed rebellion? Have I now lost so much of my libertarian ideals that I can’t even muster the strength to defend the Second Amendment anymore?

Come on. The readers on this site should be able to reason some sense back into me. Give it a shot. Or maybe I just need to dig out some of the Heinlein books I read too often as a kid. I just have to avoid picking up that copy of Forever War from the same box.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship!

Consider this story in the Wall Street Journal:

There’s no free lunch, goes the old saying. The IRS may take that literally.

The Internal Revenue Service is looking into the “free lunches” that companies like Google Yahoo Facebook , and other Silicon Valley heavyweights provide to their employees, and whether those meals should be subject to taxation.

“It appears for a lot of these companies that they’re not actually including (them) in their employees paychecks or W-2s and therefore the question is whether there’s some skirting of the tax laws,”

I think that illustrates the government mindset pretty well, which could perhaps be summarized as “Oh, you’ve got nice stuff! I’m going to take some.”

You see, what Stephen Colbert and other critics leave out is that libertarians always follow “I’ve got mine” with “and you’ve got yours.” Leaving that out makes libertarianism seem pretty selfish.

To be fair, Ayn Rand also criticized people for giving in to their altruistic impulse, as if helping the needy was some kind of weakness. Then again, even the staunchest Ayn Rand disciple wouldn’t have done this:

In 2006, the City of Las Vegas became locked in a bizarre war with homeless advocates, and decided that no one should be engaging in charity in the public parks. The City began ticketing good Samaritans who shared food with more than 24 people, under the belief that giving food to people already in the public park violated statutes requiring permits for gatherings of 25 or more people. When the ACLU of Nevada took issue with this interpretation of permit laws, the City took a more direct approach: it explicitly outlawed the sharing of food with anyone who looked poor…

Other homeless individuals were being kicked out of parks under a questionable trespass policy called “86”ing, where Park Marshals essentially took photographs of certain people – almost always homeless people – who were then kicked out of the public parks on pain of a trespass misdemeanor if they returned. The 86ing process had no paperwork, no right to appeal, and no due process whatsoever.

I’m not even sure how to summarize that mindset…maybe “How dare you help the poor yourself! You should be paying us to help them.”

(Hat tip: Reason 24/7)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at “I’ve got mine, Jack!” Is a Lie

Patrick’s own response is pretty good:

Popehat readers have stepped up in the comments and offered other suggestions, and this one from Erbo is pretty good:

(For you young kids, the bottom one is a scene from Logan’s Run.)

For my own entry, I figured why go Sci-Fi? We have some examples right here on this planet:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Libertarian Society/Socialist Society