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Also, I listened to your conversation with Bruce Caldwell and thought it was a superb introduction to the ideas of F.A. von Hayek. You two guys did a wonderful job conveying the continued relevence of much of his work, and the conversation led me to buy Dr. Caldwell's book.
What I find most telling in the way you discuss this latest episode in dimly stupid partisan warfare is the continued feature of detachment that allows libertarians to view the two mainstream monoliths honestly and without the silly attacks by one side on stereotypes and preconceived motivations of the other.
Partisan politics is like love: it makes otherwise bright people into total idiots.
The problem is that power corrupts. And what works to motivate change in politics are stupid, simple ideas with simple moral narratives.
So otherwise smart people become hacks because hackishness is almost what it means to be an effective political advocate. It's a shame.
People sometimes start out non-hacky and then when they get some power or attention they turn into hacks. The incentives just point that way.
But isn't that the walking contradiction that is libertarianism. I've been floating around libertarian blogs convinced the Republican philosophy is bankrupt, and loosing faith in the Democratic party. But I can never find a book or a plan on how libertarians would arrive at whatever it is they want. I mean don't libertarians need a book on what their team needs to do?
Libertarians seem to be anti-democratic and anti-elitist and these positions seem to have been the only two sides of the debate. You seem to have chosen not to pick a side and that seems to have left you with nothing but good philisophical rantings. From a practical basis that puts libertarianism right up there with commuism which philosphically can be made to sound good as well but doesn't work out in the real world. I'm not sure liberalism even exists in the real world.
I don't think libertarianism is necessarily anti-democratic like you said. Most (if not all) libertarians believe that democracy is the form of government most compatible with libertarianism as it allows all members of the state to have some sort of say in how it should be managed. The hostility to democracy that you probably percieve must be contextualized against our present democracy. Interest group politics is inherent to democracy; there will always be seperate groups striving to control the state and use it to enact what they deem desirable. The goal is to establish certain limits on how large the state can become, and thereby limit the power and resources that the interest groups can control once they are in charge of the state. To be sure, it's not an easy thing to achieve in that the natural incentives facing the state will always be for it to grow (in terms of power and resources that it controls) and to perpetuate itself. But the goal should be to establish a government that has as little intervention within the market economy and one that has the most limited restrictions on the use of a person's private property.
Mises' works are peppered with how liberalism would work in the real world, and his scientific contributions to economic theory and social philosophy not only indicate that liberalism is possible, but that it is more desirable than any other socio-political system because of its beneficial consequences for liberty and freedom. Read the classical liberals and read Mises. I bet much can be gained from Hayek too, though I am less familiar with his writings than I am with those of von Mises.
Happily, as near as most of us can tell, the relationship between liberalism and reasonable social welfare functions seems to be monotonic, so any measure toward liberalism is good whether we can ever establish a libertarian paradise. This is a benefit that Marxism doesn't even have in theory.
Hayes "ravings" at least presuppose that those he casts as malefactors are driven by rational, comprehensible, self-regarding impulses (maximize personal wealth; protect financial interests). Whereas the right-wing analogue presupposes only that liberals are possessed by a haphazard assortment of hatreds and resentments. Both stories may be grossly false, of course; but given standard economic assumptions, at least, Hayes' is prima facie the far likelier.
Anyway, I could go on, but I have to go meet up with my weekly "Burn the American Flag!" discussion group now...
Certainly concern for the poorest members of the society, along with concerns for social mobility and a just distribution of goods, are not always morally bogus--even if they are presented like so in GNP. Nor are these concerns morally dispensable.
I hope then that you don't take your club analogy too seriously. Deciding just economic and social policies are a lot less like currying favor and squabbling over alliances in your college fraternity that it is like it. Put differently, it's not clear whether your indignation is directed towards caring for a ginned-up and manipulated 'working-class' for the sake of electoral advantage, or caring for the working class at all.
Basically I see GNP as the slow ritual leftward shift of the Republican party and Conservative politics in general. The pragmatic left that has guided this country quite well when given the chance will continue to be right about most things, the Republicans will realize it 10-30 years after the fact, and Libertarians will squeal from the sidelines wondering why no one wants to implement their Utopian logic. Get in the partisan game already and pick a side. There's too much to bicker about within the partisan gates to stand outside of them throwing in Cato essays.
Take Me Out to the Ballgame?
I can respect KJ's point, which is that to effect change you have to step into the fray, and politics is wild enough that if you have to become a bit of a hack or a soldier, so be it.
But the criticism of those "on the sidelines" is a bit over the top. People on the sidelines serve a purpose, and people in the fray serve a purpose. We all seek out the spot that seems best for us.
I'm heartened that 10-20% of Americans are Independents. I don't know if that could really translate into a movement against pandering, dishonesty and hackishness in politics. Probably not, because even those people are probably pretty irrational.
Under McCain's proposals, the lowest quintile's income would rise .9 percent, the top .1 percent's income would rise 11.6 percent, and the 95-99th percentile's income would rise 5.3 percent.
Capital is sacred to Republicans, if you get your income in this form, they tax if more favorably than if your income takes the form of wages and salaries. As a result of this policy difference and others, as Larry Bartels has shown, under Democratic administrations the poor and rich gain income alike, under Republican administrations, only the rich gain (and the economy as a whole grows less rapidly than it does under Democrats).
If Wilkinson means to suggest that unclubble (illegal) immigrant workers are mistreated and exploited, and that this should be a matter of prime concern to us all, I take his point. But if he means to suggest that the working class--the lower half and especially lowest tenth of the income distribution--doesn't fare better under Democrats than under Republicans, I believe that the record demonstrates otherwise, and that, judging from the candidates' tax proposals, this partisan pattern will persist. Under McCain the "working class" will lack the necessary means to exercise their rights in a worthwhile way, and it will seem pointless for them to dream up some relatively long-term plans, because for good reason they will doubt whether they will be able to enact them. But the dreams of the rich, even allowing for the very good run they've had the last seven years, will be fulfilled as never before.
In the short-term, there are things libertarians can do, though most wouldn't be recognized as particularly libertarian because they'd be seen as single-issue advocacy and action. But in the long run, the libertarian goal is the end of politics as we know it. This is the confusion behind libertarianism within the US political system, it doesn't have much success because it fails to realize 1) how radical it is in principle & 2) that such radicalism is not a bad thing. The movement would be more intellectually honest -- and IMO more effective -- if rather than try to accept mainstream politics its adherents split off based on what their number one issue was, presenting (only when asked) the sum of its parts as being "pragmatic anarchism", nothing more, nothing less.